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Recycling is a farce. Everyone forgot about Reduce and Reuse
by cush 3y ago
Recycling is a farce. Everyone forgot about Reduce and Reuse
- downrightmike 3y agoAs was the intent of plastic producers. And we are now past the point where there is no competition. No one is going to use glass to replace plastic in mass, the cost is too high.
- galleywest200 3y agoLots of metals are very easily recyclable, not sure that portion is a farce. Plastic, sure.
- burnished 3y agoI thought it was only aluminum that was actually recycled in practice due to cost ratio of smelting vs remelting?
- ToucanLoucan 3y agoIn fairness they "forgot" because of concentrated efforts on the part of plastics producers to make them forget, and the complacency of regulators who were happy to put "you can recycle this" stamps on millions of products that were and still are largely bound for landfills and/or the pacific garbage patch. But offloading responsibility for climate disasters onto consumers instead of the companies actually making all the decisions and the regulators permitting them to is a time honored tradition for the oil industry at this point.
- barney54 3y agoConsumers can't make decisions? Somehow the consumers of lead acid batteries recycle 99% of them.
- ToucanLoucan 3y agoYes, because they're incentivized to (or depending how you look at it, penalized if they don't) by way of the core charge you pay that is refunded when you return the old battery. It seems we have a solution to this problem but we're not using it. Imagine if you had to pay a "plastics charge" when you bought a 6-pack of soda, that would be refunded upon turning in the bottles? I have to figure that would prompt a lot more recycling. However even beyond that, the cost to recycle plastic is also higher than that of just producing virgin plastic, partially because of the substantial subsidies given to the oil and gas industry. As such, it's pretty understandable why even the best recycling outfits in the United States don't see a ton of business, when recycle-ready plastic is more expensive than virgin plastic and takes more energy and effort to convert into new plastic products[1], you'd be stupid to do that. Hence we really only see it in niche industries where they can market their products as being "made from recycled bottles" or something and charge higher prices to Eco-conscious consumers. And to be clear, that's a good thing, unambiguously. But instead of relying on people who are willing to spend more to do a good thing, it seems to be to be far more effective to for starters, mandate businesses that make plastic products to at the very least, pay what oil is actually worth, especially given that we still rely on it for energy for tons of applications to which EV alternatives aren't yet ready for. 1: This is of course presuming your plastic product can be made from recycled plastic at all which is not a given. Many "recyclable" plastics cannot be used to make certain plastic products. Still other plastics are indeed single use unless your secondary use is MUCH DIFFERENT to the first, in which case even calling it recyclable seems dubious at best. Car bodies can technically be recycled to produce coral reefs, but few people would call that recycling. And hell, we still have areas of the country where recycling service isn't even a given. I have a friend in Indiana who doesn't recycle because the city he lives in charges a non-insubstantial fee for recycling pickup, and while he would like to, he just can't afford it. So he drops his bottles and things in public recycling bins when able, but the majority of his goes in the trash because the city doesn't provide the service with regular garbage pickup.
- vardump 3y agoUltimately we will need to recycle practically everything. Even if not in this century.
- vanderZwan 3y agoSure, but the original slogan was "reduce, reuse, recycle". In that order. Recycling is a farce in that for decades companies have focused on it to ensure we don't reduce how much we consume. For example, I just heard an obvious greenwashing advertisement on the radio for some product the other day that said we should all "recycle, reduce, reuse", i.e. "consume the same amount, consume maybe a bit less, and if you really have to don't consume".
- agumonkey 3y agoI mostly agree but I believe there's a lack of science in material design taking recycling/degradation into account. Be it plastic or other materials and tricks.
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoHaving worked in a plastics factory (it's where I learned how to properly troubleshoot things, injection molding is fun) we recycled the runners or bad parts in house. Toss them in the grinder, blend them with a certain amount of virgin material, and it doesn't really affect the parts until you start getting past the 80/20 blends (if I remember correctly and this was about 11 years ago so some things may have changed). But this is all relatively clean, fresh from the mold plastic. It didn't sit in a shipping container in the heat for months, degrading. It didn't absorb any number of oils or contaminants. I imagine a dirtier recycled plastic would require more virgin material to maintain the intended strength/material properties, so where the recycled plastic comes from is likely just as important as what you are trying to use it for.
- badtension 3y agoDon't forget "refuse". A ton of stuff is not worth the materials from which they were made in the first place. A nice thing to keep in mind is that complex products are essentially non-recyclable. A lot of the elements that went into making the 2010s state of the art electronics are now lost in landfills, never to be recovered or reused again.
- fsflover 3y ago> Don't forget "refuse". I don't see how it's different from "reduce": you have to refuse to reduce.
- ASalazarMX 3y agoI think the intention was pointing out that reduce implies you consume only the things you need, while refuse means you'll deliberately refuse wasteful things even if you need them. For example, smarthome lighting. The lightbulbs could be dumb, and all the smarts could live in the lightswitches, that would reduce waste. Conversely, the traditional smarthome lighting approach is very wasteful, every lightbulb is a small computer, and who knows what percent of the discarded lightbulbs gets recycled.
- nebula8804 3y ago>A lot of the elements that went into making the 2010s state of the art electronics are now lost in landfills, never to be recovered or reused again. Can you name some examples?
- rob74 3y agoAbout "reusing": using less plastic is great, but as far as I'm concerned, the main problem is not plastic products that are used for a long time (and that includes Lego), but single-use plastic. It can even be counter-productive: salt and pepper mills made out of plastic are practically indestructible, but no longer "fashionable", so we recently got some made of glass, and promptly ended up breaking one of them and having to replace it, which is also not that good for the environment (glass production needs a lot of energy).
- vanderZwan 3y ago> which is also not that good for the environment (glass production needs a lot of energy) Not saying you're wrong, but how many glass bottles do you use on a monthly basis? The embodied energy of a salt/pepper mill does not compare there I think.
- cush 3y agowhataboutism doesn’t help an argument about needless waste
- vanderZwan 3y agoIt's not a whataboutism, it's an "optimize the right problem first" remark.
- cush 3y agoSame thing. Why not both? What makes jars the right problem to optimize? People don’t consume jars, they consume jarred things. One’s consumption of jarred mustard is unrelated to jarred pepper. You’re assuming they haven’t thought about other jarred things. They want to avoid wasteful packaging
- cush 3y agoDon’t get me started on salt mills. Whoever convinced consumers that salt needs to be freshly ground is a marketing genius. So wasteful