8 ms·

Don't waste your time recycling plastic

64 points by jgwil2 2y ago

SEXMCNIGGA34559 2y ago
[dead]
SEXMCNIGGA10317 2y ago
[dead]
SEXMCNIGGA32546 2y ago
[dead]
krunck 2y ago
https://archive.is/Y0kqm https://archive.is/Y0kqm
h2odragon 2y ago
yet another "crazy uncle conspiracy theory" proves out, another popular gospel shown false. many plastics are good fuel; but it's been difficult to say so for years because the "science was settled" that recycling was The Way.
- bell-cot 2y ago
  "Recycling" plastics, or at least pretending to, maximizes the feel-good. And when it comes to recycling, marketing, and consumer behavior - for the 99%, feel-good is by far the most important metric.
  - blueflow 2y ago
    This is some dystopian shit.
    - bell-cot 2y ago
      Yeah..."dystopian sh*t" is an all-too-accurate description of our world.
- sosodev 2y ago
  Hasn't there been critical discussion of the efficacy of single source recycling for a long time?
  - yashap 2y ago
    By “single source” do you mean “single stream”? With “single stream recycling” meaning consumers put all recyclable products into a single bin, vs. multi stream, where consumers are expected to separate recycled goods into multiple categories. If so, then yeah, multi stream is generally considered more efficient. Obviously some central sorting/filtering is still needed, but much less. As for recycling in general, it’s considered a decent win for plenty of materials. Making cans from recycled aluminum takes only a tiny fraction of the energy of producing new aluminum cans, paper recycling does reduce the need for forestry, most recycling reduces the need for landfills, etc. It’s mostly plastic recycling that is useless, and just there to make ppl feel better about their plastic consumption.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- 0xfeba 2y ago
  It wasn't so much "science was settled" as much as the plastic industry lobbying to improve their image and put the burden on consumers to "recycle" plastics, despite knowing it wasn't going to help things. And unlike conspiracy theories -- we have evidence. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/15/recycling-plastics-producers-report https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/15/recycling-pl...
SEXMCNIGGA3649 2y ago
[flagged]
SEXMCNIGGA15932 2y ago
[dead]
SEXMCNIGGA2584 2y ago
[flagged]
SEXMCNIGGA6078 2y ago
[flagged]
SEXMCNIGGA31236 2y ago
[flagged]
SEXMCNIGGA38528 2y ago
[dead]
SEXMCNIGGA49448 2y ago
[dead]
itronitron 2y ago
Everyone should be using glass deposit bottles.
- nytesky 2y ago
  But the much greater weight increases fuel and green house gas emissions, they must be washed with energy intensive hot water, and are more prone to breakage and thus waste. It maybe the answer but not obvious.
  - gruez 2y ago
    That's why I reject policy prescriptions in the form of "we should replace x with y" and favor taxing negative externalities (eg. litter or carbon emissions) and letting the market figure out what's the most efficient solution.
  - kardos 2y ago
    > the much greater weight increases fuel This may be technically correct, but is it significant? The difference in weight from glass bottles vs plastic bottles is surely nonzero but how does it compare to the weight of the truck moving it? > energy intensive hot water You can recover a lot of that heat with a heat exchanger
    - elric 2y ago
      I've long wondered about this myself. Making plastic is pretty energy intensive, but so is making glass. The former mostly comes from new fossil fuels (sometimes with some recycled content), while the latter is mostly sand and is very often recycled. Discarded plastic, while hard to recycle, can be burnt for energy, while discarded glass bottles can either be washed & reused, or melted down a recycled. Glass bottles are more than an order of magnitude heavier than plastic bottles. This does seem pretty significant. It would be interesting to see a full lifecycle analysis of both options.
  - WithinReason 2y ago
    washing replaces making the bottle from scratch, surely it's still less energy
eduction 2y ago
Washington Post: "Don’t waste your time recycling plastic" New York City Administrative Code: "Any person who violates this chapter... shall be liable for a civil penalty.. in an amount of twenty-five dollars for the first violation, fifty dollars for the second violation and one hundred dollars for the third and each subsequent violation... A person committing a fourth and any subsequent violation within a period of six months shall be classified as a persistent violator and shall be liable for a civil penalty of five hundred dollars for each violation" https://law.justia.com/codes/new-york/2006/new-york-city-administrative-code-new/adc016-324_16-324.html https://law.justia.com/codes/new-york/2006/new-york-city-adm... (Title 16 sanitation, chapter 3 solid waste recycling, subchapter 6 REGULATIONS SUBMITTED TO COUNCIL AND ENFORCEMENT) Not an idle threat, either, my apartment building has been fined in the past.
- gruez 2y ago
  That spells out the penalty if you don't follow the law, but where does it say you must recycle?
  - atherton33 2y ago
    Title 16, chapter 1, section 8 outlines materials that are required to be recycled and that they must be separated.
    - gruez 2y ago
      Link? The navigation on that site is absolutely dreadful and I can't turn up anything on google either.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - atherton33 2y ago
        https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYCrules/0-0-0-31083 https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYC... It's... not concise.
mathattack 2y ago
I recall seeing the super of my building mixing the trash and recycling. Really turned me off to the impact of separating our refuse.
- plufz 2y ago
  Why did it do that? It would make me annoyed at the super, not annoyed at the environment. ;)
  - mathattack 2y ago
    It told me that things were going to the same place no matter what. :-)
a2dam 2y ago
The aluminum collected from aluminum drives in WW2 wasn't really used all that much, but it did make everyone feel like the war was important and that they were contributing. Similar thing with blood drives after 9/11, most of which was thrown out. Even if recycling plastic doesn't do much (a claim I'm not certain about), it makes you think about the planet every time you throw something away. This can carry over into other behaviors, i.e. making people more adherent to recycling metal (or anything at all!), composting, reusing items, or whatever. It's important to be right about these things and not just correct.
- kungreke 2y ago
  I don't need to do meaningless tasks to remind myself thst we should find better ways to treat our habitat and the resources in it. Less consumption and more robust and reusable packaging is the solution, not doing pointless tasks for awareness.
  - a2dam 2y ago
    Again, it’s not meaningless; it likely changes your behaviors in ways you aren’t conscious of, and the plastic is actually reused. Also, I’d suggest you aren’t the median person. Even if it had zero effect on your behavior, that likely isn’t true for others.
    - jjj123 2y ago
      Sure, but I can craft an equally plausible opposite effect: by recycling plastic, the average person is tricking themselves into thinking they’re not actually creating more trash, that what they just put in the bin is going to be reused. This feeling lowers the barrier to use more single use plastic. We don’t know which is the more powerful effect, so you can’t really say if recycling plastic is meaningfully good or bad on the whole.
- DataDive 2y ago
  But if it is all ineffectual, then maybe it has the opposite effect. If people think they are already doing something, they might see less need to make the hard choices.
riedel 2y ago
This seems to be true for many plastics but PET seems to prove to be valuable as recycling material. The Lidl Schwarz group actually went into recycling recently and I doubt that they do it for feel good [0] . I also doubt that most of mixed packaging but also tons of coated card board has any chance of recycling. [0] https://gruppe.schwarz/en/press/archive/2021/lidl-and-kaufland-100-percent-recycled-pet https://gruppe.schwarz/en/press/archive/2021/lidl-and-kaufla...
- Iulioh 2y ago
  There are 3 tier of plastic Plastic bottles Some kinds of food containers Everything else Plastic bottles are the only profitable-ish plastic to recycle. Often the only possible. The "food containers" are profitable to recycle only where the labor is VERY cheap. Everything else is better off burned than doing anything else with it. Personally i say burn it all, everything else is too carbon intensive and the filtration systems on good burner plants provide better air than the environment surrounding them
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    Releasing all the CO2 from plastic would be an incredibly dumb move. Just shred it and pack it in old mines deep underground.
    - Iulioh 2y ago
      Energy is energy, we need that anyway. And the amount of trash we produce is mind blowingly big, no mines are big enough for 1 day of trash collecting.
- Wowfunhappy 2y ago
  The article mentions this. The author is arguing that even for PET, the recycling process is toxic to human health. > Trying to recycle plastic makes the microplastics problem even worse. A study of just one plastics recycling facility discovered that it might be washing 3 million pounds of microplastics into its wastewater every year — all of which ends up being deposited in our city water systems or dumped into the environment. > At this very moment, we all have microplastics coursing through our bodies. This is not the fault of not enough recycling. This is the fault of too much plastic. So I say: Let’s treat plastic like the toxic waste it is and send it where it can hurt people the least. Right now, that place is the landfill.
vladms 2y ago
I wonder if 20 years ago same guy was suggestion to give up electric cars because they are too expensive. The discussion of what is the best way to deal with plastics should be done with data, formulas and graphs not with opinions. And on top of that, there is not even one material "plastic" it's a class of materials, and for which probably the solution is different, like some should be forbidden, others recycled, etc.
- sshine 2y ago
  > on top of that, there is not even one material "plastic" it's a class of materials The article addresses that.
INTPenis 2y ago
Unfortunately it's true that a lot of plastic is just burnt. In Sweden we consider ourselves as very advanced in recycling but there was just a story in the news today where they said that old snow toys were just NOW, sometimes, being recycled. Even though it costs more to recycle them than to burn them, some companies are making the effort to recycle them just to be more environmental. But I've been recycling plastics in my home for a decade. So wtf...
- yunohn 2y ago
  Same story in the Netherlands. They mix and burn most waste, despite segregation. Last year, they introduced a plastic packaging surcharge - which turned out to be a fee directly given to companies, not a tax nor earmarked for green activities. This resulted in widespread outrage since companies started wrapping every single item in plastic just to charge consumers that fee. There was no mandate to provide plastic-free alternatives either. Absolutely bonkers!
- kristianp 2y ago
  It's true that a lot of your waste is burnt in Sweden, but in most of the rest of the world trash goes to landfill.
swarnie 2y ago
You could sort your yogurt pots in to separate boxes from now until the end of days... It still wont offset the carbon cost of one jet taken to an eco-awareness conference. We as a species aren't going to solve the macro issue unfortunately. The best thing you can do is think local and minimise the direct impact on yourself. I'd suggest starting by buying a house on a hill.
- gruez 2y ago
  > You could sort your yogurt pots in to separate boxes from now until the end of days... It still wont offset the carbon cost of one jet taken to an eco-awareness conference. I find this type of attitude baffling. Of course the actions of an individual wouldn't be able to offset the emissions of a private jet or whatever, but that's not a reason to not take individual action. Your individual actions can't solve global warming because global warming isn't caused by one person driving their car to work, or even one jet taken to an eco-awareness conference. It's caused because there's hundreds of million of people driving their car to work. "You can [insert some sort of lifestyle change to reduce carbon emissions] but it still wont offset the carbon cost of one jet taken to an eco-awareness conference" is a great way to ensure hundreds of Americans continue to drive SUVs to work, buy meat at the grocery store, and take their annual trans-US/atlantic flight, all of which adds up to 5 billion tons of co2 produced per year.
- autoexec 2y ago
  > You could sort your yogurt pots in to separate boxes from now until the end of days... It still wont offset the carbon cost of one jet taken to an eco-awareness conference. I agree, this isn't a problem that can be solved by a single person's actions. We need large scale solutions, but I'd still caution against the kind of thinking that lets you fool yourself into thinking that your own actions don't have any impact. I hear that sort of argument from people who say "who cares if I throw my trash directly into the ocean or dump my motor oil down the drain! Sure, it's bad but it's nothing compared to the carbon footprint of blah blah blah" yet we've seen how a large number of people acting selfishly in small ways leads to large problems too. I'm not saying you're doing this personally, but it's one thing to call out the unnecessary waste of others, and another to use the actions of others to justify being a smaller part of the problem.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
suprjami 2y ago
Good timing, the latest Skeptoid podcast takes a critical look at recycling: https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4932 https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4932 tl;dr - PET and LDPE are worth recycling in the US, those have 1 and 2 in the recycle symbol Other countries check your local area. Different local government can recycle different things.
- autoexec 2y ago
  > PET and LDPE are worth recycling in the US What does "worth recycling" mean? I see a lot of people make the claim that if it's ever more expensive to recycle something than it would to make something new it's not "worth it". Recycling rarely makes sense from a purely economic sense. I still think there might be value in other things like not using up/wasting new raw materials when we could recover them from old products, or most importantly limiting the amount of brand new plastics we're feeding into the environment knowing that it will never go away just break down into micro/nano plastics that will end up in our soil/air/blood/organs/newborns/food or that it's better to recycle as much as we can to keep plastics out of incinerators where they poison our air and out of landfills where they take up space without breaking down efficiently like other trash and can still leach chemicals into our ground/water. Even if recycling or reducing plastics could result in a larger carbon cost it might still be worth doing it if those negative costs could be more easily mitigated or controlled for than the harms caused by the increase in new plastics.
  - gruez 2y ago
    >or most importantly limiting the amount of brand new plastics we're feeding into the environment knowing that it will never go away just break down into micro/nano plastics that will end up in our soil/air/blood/organs/newborns/food If the plastic made it into a recycling plant, chances are it's going into a landfill or an incinerator. In that case the amount of microplastics being generated is likely negligible. All the microplastics in the environment today is either generated from plastic in use experiencing wear (eg. tires on cars or synthetic fibers being washed), or from mismanaged plastic in the environment decomposing. Properly managed plastic is a negligible source of microplastics, and recycling it or not doesn't make a difference. >incinerators where they poison our air this is a non-issue in modern incinerators because they burn hot enough to avoid generating toxic emissions and/or have pollution abatement technologies. >landfills where they take up space without breaking down efficiently like other trash and can still leach chemicals into our ground/water Can't speak for other countries but at least in the US we're not going to run out of land any time soon, so "take up space" is a moot point. Landfills are also lined so it's unlikely to affect the water supply.
dieselgate 2y ago
I don’t have a written source for this but we toured the landfill/recycling center in elementary school. Remember distinctly being shown how _only_ the thick necks and bottom portions of number 1 and 2 plastics can be recycled. Plastic bottle caps, as mentioned by the speaker, could not be recycled. It always stuck with me. Maybe (commercial?) recycling tech has improved to be able to do something with less dense plastic sections but seems diminishing returns. To be fair I’ve seen some cool maker videos of people cutting a bottle into “wire” for 3d printing etc. - but that’s not a commercial/global solution.
- Iulioh 2y ago
  1 Spool of 3d filament is 15€ more or less 1 bottle has 15-30g of plastic in it and hardly half is usable for that possible use...
_23sd 2y ago
Counterpoint to this doomerism, obviously region specific but TFA didn't bother specifying where in the world they're talking about with their broad brush statements about "downcycling" and "70% virgin plastic": https://www.startribune.com/recycling-real-twin-cities-minnesota-ad-campaign-dragon-unicorn/600336731/ https://www.startribune.com/recycling-real-twin-cities-minne... Where is the contradiction in believing both that we use too much plastic and should act on individual and governmental levels to reduce it, and that sending a PET bottle to the landfill is a child's tantrum and not some heroic defiance of the plastic industry?
keybored 2y ago
Consider this. Say completely neutral and impartial scientists have all the data that they need on how certain corporations and industries are having an impact on the environment. Those same corporations still have millions or billions of dollars to frame the narrative. That’s how you got the “carbon footprint” (BP). That’s how “actually you just need to recycle” can be astroturfed. That’s how the conversation and “discourse” can be focused around “consumer choice” and discipline. The result is that everyone knows what the problems are (see: scientists). But you’re stuck spinning your wheels on the BS busywork created by the marketing/spin departments of those corporations. And then there’s you. You’re just one gal. Okay, so maybe you’re cynical to a practical degree so you’re by-default skeptical of whatever “organic trend” that comes up on this topic. But so what? The regular people that are vocal on this issue are gonna come off as naive do-gooders. How could it hurt? Don’t you care about the environment? And what’s your retort to that? You can give them a three-paragraph lecture like this one here and feel like a mid-20th socialist intellectual giving a speech on Ideology. But you’re gonna come off as a crank. Old man/woman yelling at sky. Just some random person with an anti-social pet peeve. So you just go along with it even though it’s gonna end up in the same dump somewhere, you presume.
- gruez 2y ago
  >The result is that everyone knows what the problems are (see: scientists). But you’re stuck spinning your wheels on the BS busywork created by the marketing/spin departments of those corporations. Is that supposed to be surprising? Just because you know the problem doesn't mean we as a society can agree on what the solution is. During the covid pandemic we could barely agree whether we should do lockdowns or not, whether to shut down schools or not, or whether to force people to vaccinate or not. And this is arguably without "corporations still have millions or billions of dollars to frame the narrative". Going back to plastics and fossil fuels, they're used because they're cheap. Getting people to voluntarily pay more now for supposed benefits decades down the line was always going to be a tough sell. The fact solving global warming has prisoner's dilemma dynamics built into it (ie. you stand to gain economically if you don't cut emissions while everyone else tries to do so) makes it even worse. It's not as simple as just "just stop burning oil".
orev 2y ago
1. Reduce 2. Reuse 3. Recycle In that order
- Wowfunhappy 2y ago
  The article makes a strong case that for plastic, it should be 1. Reduce 2. Reuse 3. Landfill.
- bell-cot 2y ago
  But only #3 is compatible with my feeling happy while buying yet more crap every day (mostly delivered, to maximize packaging), replacing my kitchen with DoorDash & Uber Eats, and otherwise acting like a trendy member of the 0.1%.
loehnsberg 2y ago
[At this very moment, we all have microplastics coursing through our bodies. This is not the fault of not enough recycling. This is the fault of too much plastic. So I say: Let’s treat plastic like the toxic waste it is and send it where it can hurt people the least. Right now, that place is the landfill.] Wonder why the author favors this option over incineration, which to me seems as being the better approach to get rid of it.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- elric 2y ago
  No plastic waste is sent to landfill in my part of the world. Only incinerated, and occasionally used as part of road pavement.
shawnz 2y ago
There's a chicken-egg problem here, which is that if nobody sorts their waste then there's no incentive to find better usages for it. I don't mind sorting my waste even if it still ends up in a landfill, just in case maybe the sorted waste supply will make it easier to find non-landfill usages for it. Not that landfills are inherently bad - like the article implies, it's really the creation of the waste in the first place which is the problem. It benefits me to have sorted waste anyway, since the non-recyclable garbage is more prone to attracting pests and a separate recycling stream helps to make the quantity of garbage more manageable. But what's even better for that is municipal organics/food waste collection.
- TheGRS 2y ago
  Yea for most of us (I hope), sorting is like a non-thought at this point. When I have an aluminum can and I can't find a recycle bin I have a mini panic about it. There's not much of a time waste on the consumer side, its not like I'm sorting through a bag of trash every week. I *do* hope we get managing plastic waste under control though, and soon. Feels like the main problem is now on the government level figuring out what to do about this. The behavior change is largely done. If it just needs to go back into the ground great, I just don't want it near the ocean.
geor9e 2y ago
Sure, if you can get away with it. San Francisco Environment Department will fine your condo building up to $30,000 a month if a Waste Management pickup truck deems you didn't recycling enough plastic. https://www.sfenvironment.org/zerowastefacilitator-faq https://www.sfenvironment.org/zerowastefacilitator-faq My HOA has been fined and now threatens to search our trashbags to identify us. Stale regulations failing to keep up with reality.
- bell-cot 2y ago
  For $30K, I'm thinking that you should be able to buy enough recyclable plastics, fresh from the plastics "recycling" facility in $Other_City, to easily meet SF's quota for the whole year.
TheGRS 2y ago
Behavior change on this is going to be such a slog. Made worse by the "told-ya-so"s who generally weren't very helpful to begin with. Might be better to make specialized plastic landfills just to keep the current behaviors active and not ostracize people's hard work on recycling campaigns. As long as we do something that keeps the plastic out of water systems I'm good with that. And as the writer noted, the real issue is reducing the amount of it in the first place.
ZeroGravitas 2y ago
Yeah, take that experts! We're just going to throw the bottles in the trash like the plastic and fossil fuel companies always wanted us to do. That'll show them!
- shrimp_emoji 2y ago
  More like ban/heavily regulate plastic production, at the source, instead of lazily (and cynically) regulating it at the points of use, which is the widest possible fan of responsibility focused at the people least likely to follow through (like me, who, even before I knew recycling plastic was a futile crapshoot, never bothers to because the demand is ridiculous -- either make stuff I can toss in the trash, make the trash facility sort it out, or don't make it at all).
- rasz 2y ago
  This is what is happening with plastic from the Recycle bins right now in most of the places. We are all paying for the segregation and separate transport, and it all ends up in the same hole in the ground at the landfill.
bigfryo 2y ago
Don't waste your time recycling anything.. something like 95% of all recyclables that are recycled by people end up in the landfill with the rest of the garbage.. this is actually common knowledge
486sx33 2y ago
This is crazy. Recycling plastic is important. The missing piece is the in and out mechanism has failed. For example, every pound of plastic China exports, they need to be required to import a pound back for recycling. They need to be responsible for their plastic exports. Very simple.

64 points by jgwil2 2y ago

SEXMCNIGGA34559 2y ago

[dead]

SEXMCNIGGA10317 2y ago

[dead]

SEXMCNIGGA32546 2y ago

[dead]

krunck 2y ago

https://archive.is/Y0kqm https://archive.is/Y0kqm

h2odragon 2y ago

yet another "crazy uncle conspiracy theory" proves out, another popular gospel shown false. many plastics are good fuel; but it's been difficult to say so for years because the "science was settled" that recycling was The Way.

bell-cot 2y ago
"Recycling" plastics, or at least pretending to, maximizes the feel-good. And when it comes to recycling, marketing, and consumer behavior - for the 99%, feel-good is by far the most important metric.
- blueflow 2y ago
  This is some dystopian shit.
  - bell-cot 2y ago
    Yeah..."dystopian sh*t" is an all-too-accurate description of our world.
sosodev 2y ago
Hasn't there been critical discussion of the efficacy of single source recycling for a long time?
- yashap 2y ago
  By “single source” do you mean “single stream”? With “single stream recycling” meaning consumers put all recyclable products into a single bin, vs. multi stream, where consumers are expected to separate recycled goods into multiple categories. If so, then yeah, multi stream is generally considered more efficient. Obviously some central sorting/filtering is still needed, but much less. As for recycling in general, it’s considered a decent win for plenty of materials. Making cans from recycled aluminum takes only a tiny fraction of the energy of producing new aluminum cans, paper recycling does reduce the need for forestry, most recycling reduces the need for landfills, etc. It’s mostly plastic recycling that is useless, and just there to make ppl feel better about their plastic consumption.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
0xfeba 2y ago
It wasn't so much "science was settled" as much as the plastic industry lobbying to improve their image and put the burden on consumers to "recycle" plastics, despite knowing it wasn't going to help things. And unlike conspiracy theories -- we have evidence. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/15/recycling-plastics-producers-report https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/15/recycling-pl...

SEXMCNIGGA3649 2y ago

[flagged]

SEXMCNIGGA15932 2y ago

[dead]

SEXMCNIGGA2584 2y ago

[flagged]

SEXMCNIGGA6078 2y ago

[flagged]

SEXMCNIGGA31236 2y ago

[flagged]

SEXMCNIGGA38528 2y ago

[dead]

SEXMCNIGGA49448 2y ago

[dead]

itronitron 2y ago

Everyone should be using glass deposit bottles.

nytesky 2y ago
But the much greater weight increases fuel and green house gas emissions, they must be washed with energy intensive hot water, and are more prone to breakage and thus waste. It maybe the answer but not obvious.
- gruez 2y ago
  That's why I reject policy prescriptions in the form of "we should replace x with y" and favor taxing negative externalities (eg. litter or carbon emissions) and letting the market figure out what's the most efficient solution.
- kardos 2y ago
  > the much greater weight increases fuel This may be technically correct, but is it significant? The difference in weight from glass bottles vs plastic bottles is surely nonzero but how does it compare to the weight of the truck moving it? > energy intensive hot water You can recover a lot of that heat with a heat exchanger
  - elric 2y ago
    I've long wondered about this myself. Making plastic is pretty energy intensive, but so is making glass. The former mostly comes from new fossil fuels (sometimes with some recycled content), while the latter is mostly sand and is very often recycled. Discarded plastic, while hard to recycle, can be burnt for energy, while discarded glass bottles can either be washed & reused, or melted down a recycled. Glass bottles are more than an order of magnitude heavier than plastic bottles. This does seem pretty significant. It would be interesting to see a full lifecycle analysis of both options.
- WithinReason 2y ago
  washing replaces making the bottle from scratch, surely it's still less energy

eduction 2y ago

Washington Post: "Don’t waste your time recycling plastic" New York City Administrative Code: "Any person who violates this chapter... shall be liable for a civil penalty.. in an amount of twenty-five dollars for the first violation, fifty dollars for the second violation and one hundred dollars for the third and each subsequent violation... A person committing a fourth and any subsequent violation within a period of six months shall be classified as a persistent violator and shall be liable for a civil penalty of five hundred dollars for each violation" https://law.justia.com/codes/new-york/2006/new-york-city-administrative-code-new/adc016-324_16-324.html https://law.justia.com/codes/new-york/2006/new-york-city-adm... (Title 16 sanitation, chapter 3 solid waste recycling, subchapter 6 REGULATIONS SUBMITTED TO COUNCIL AND ENFORCEMENT) Not an idle threat, either, my apartment building has been fined in the past.

gruez 2y ago
That spells out the penalty if you don't follow the law, but where does it say you must recycle?
- atherton33 2y ago
  Title 16, chapter 1, section 8 outlines materials that are required to be recycled and that they must be separated.
  - gruez 2y ago
    Link? The navigation on that site is absolutely dreadful and I can't turn up anything on google either.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - atherton33 2y ago
      https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYCrules/0-0-0-31083 https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYC... It's... not concise.

mathattack 2y ago

I recall seeing the super of my building mixing the trash and recycling. Really turned me off to the impact of separating our refuse.

plufz 2y ago
Why did it do that? It would make me annoyed at the super, not annoyed at the environment. ;)
- mathattack 2y ago
  It told me that things were going to the same place no matter what. :-)

a2dam 2y ago

The aluminum collected from aluminum drives in WW2 wasn't really used all that much, but it did make everyone feel like the war was important and that they were contributing. Similar thing with blood drives after 9/11, most of which was thrown out. Even if recycling plastic doesn't do much (a claim I'm not certain about), it makes you think about the planet every time you throw something away. This can carry over into other behaviors, i.e. making people more adherent to recycling metal (or anything at all!), composting, reusing items, or whatever. It's important to be right about these things and not just correct.

kungreke 2y ago
I don't need to do meaningless tasks to remind myself thst we should find better ways to treat our habitat and the resources in it. Less consumption and more robust and reusable packaging is the solution, not doing pointless tasks for awareness.
- a2dam 2y ago
  Again, it’s not meaningless; it likely changes your behaviors in ways you aren’t conscious of, and the plastic is actually reused. Also, I’d suggest you aren’t the median person. Even if it had zero effect on your behavior, that likely isn’t true for others.
  - jjj123 2y ago
    Sure, but I can craft an equally plausible opposite effect: by recycling plastic, the average person is tricking themselves into thinking they’re not actually creating more trash, that what they just put in the bin is going to be reused. This feeling lowers the barrier to use more single use plastic. We don’t know which is the more powerful effect, so you can’t really say if recycling plastic is meaningfully good or bad on the whole.
DataDive 2y ago
But if it is all ineffectual, then maybe it has the opposite effect. If people think they are already doing something, they might see less need to make the hard choices.

riedel 2y ago

This seems to be true for many plastics but PET seems to prove to be valuable as recycling material. The Lidl Schwarz group actually went into recycling recently and I doubt that they do it for feel good [0] . I also doubt that most of mixed packaging but also tons of coated card board has any chance of recycling. [0] https://gruppe.schwarz/en/press/archive/2021/lidl-and-kaufland-100-percent-recycled-pet https://gruppe.schwarz/en/press/archive/2021/lidl-and-kaufla...

Iulioh 2y ago
There are 3 tier of plastic Plastic bottles Some kinds of food containers Everything else Plastic bottles are the only profitable-ish plastic to recycle. Often the only possible. The "food containers" are profitable to recycle only where the labor is VERY cheap. Everything else is better off burned than doing anything else with it. Personally i say burn it all, everything else is too carbon intensive and the filtration systems on good burner plants provide better air than the environment surrounding them
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  Releasing all the CO2 from plastic would be an incredibly dumb move. Just shred it and pack it in old mines deep underground.
  - Iulioh 2y ago
    Energy is energy, we need that anyway. And the amount of trash we produce is mind blowingly big, no mines are big enough for 1 day of trash collecting.
Wowfunhappy 2y ago
The article mentions this. The author is arguing that even for PET, the recycling process is toxic to human health. > Trying to recycle plastic makes the microplastics problem even worse. A study of just one plastics recycling facility discovered that it might be washing 3 million pounds of microplastics into its wastewater every year — all of which ends up being deposited in our city water systems or dumped into the environment. > At this very moment, we all have microplastics coursing through our bodies. This is not the fault of not enough recycling. This is the fault of too much plastic. So I say: Let’s treat plastic like the toxic waste it is and send it where it can hurt people the least. Right now, that place is the landfill.

vladms 2y ago

I wonder if 20 years ago same guy was suggestion to give up electric cars because they are too expensive. The discussion of what is the best way to deal with plastics should be done with data, formulas and graphs not with opinions. And on top of that, there is not even one material "plastic" it's a class of materials, and for which probably the solution is different, like some should be forbidden, others recycled, etc.

sshine 2y ago
> on top of that, there is not even one material "plastic" it's a class of materials The article addresses that.

INTPenis 2y ago

Unfortunately it's true that a lot of plastic is just burnt. In Sweden we consider ourselves as very advanced in recycling but there was just a story in the news today where they said that old snow toys were just NOW, sometimes, being recycled. Even though it costs more to recycle them than to burn them, some companies are making the effort to recycle them just to be more environmental. But I've been recycling plastics in my home for a decade. So wtf...

yunohn 2y ago
Same story in the Netherlands. They mix and burn most waste, despite segregation. Last year, they introduced a plastic packaging surcharge - which turned out to be a fee directly given to companies, not a tax nor earmarked for green activities. This resulted in widespread outrage since companies started wrapping every single item in plastic just to charge consumers that fee. There was no mandate to provide plastic-free alternatives either. Absolutely bonkers!
kristianp 2y ago
It's true that a lot of your waste is burnt in Sweden, but in most of the rest of the world trash goes to landfill.

swarnie 2y ago

You could sort your yogurt pots in to separate boxes from now until the end of days... It still wont offset the carbon cost of one jet taken to an eco-awareness conference. We as a species aren't going to solve the macro issue unfortunately. The best thing you can do is think local and minimise the direct impact on yourself. I'd suggest starting by buying a house on a hill.

gruez 2y ago
> You could sort your yogurt pots in to separate boxes from now until the end of days... It still wont offset the carbon cost of one jet taken to an eco-awareness conference. I find this type of attitude baffling. Of course the actions of an individual wouldn't be able to offset the emissions of a private jet or whatever, but that's not a reason to not take individual action. Your individual actions can't solve global warming because global warming isn't caused by one person driving their car to work, or even one jet taken to an eco-awareness conference. It's caused because there's hundreds of million of people driving their car to work. "You can [insert some sort of lifestyle change to reduce carbon emissions] but it still wont offset the carbon cost of one jet taken to an eco-awareness conference" is a great way to ensure hundreds of Americans continue to drive SUVs to work, buy meat at the grocery store, and take their annual trans-US/atlantic flight, all of which adds up to 5 billion tons of co2 produced per year.
autoexec 2y ago
> You could sort your yogurt pots in to separate boxes from now until the end of days... It still wont offset the carbon cost of one jet taken to an eco-awareness conference. I agree, this isn't a problem that can be solved by a single person's actions. We need large scale solutions, but I'd still caution against the kind of thinking that lets you fool yourself into thinking that your own actions don't have any impact. I hear that sort of argument from people who say "who cares if I throw my trash directly into the ocean or dump my motor oil down the drain! Sure, it's bad but it's nothing compared to the carbon footprint of blah blah blah" yet we've seen how a large number of people acting selfishly in small ways leads to large problems too. I'm not saying you're doing this personally, but it's one thing to call out the unnecessary waste of others, and another to use the actions of others to justify being a smaller part of the problem.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

suprjami 2y ago

Good timing, the latest Skeptoid podcast takes a critical look at recycling: https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4932 https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4932 tl;dr - PET and LDPE are worth recycling in the US, those have 1 and 2 in the recycle symbol Other countries check your local area. Different local government can recycle different things.

autoexec 2y ago
> PET and LDPE are worth recycling in the US What does "worth recycling" mean? I see a lot of people make the claim that if it's ever more expensive to recycle something than it would to make something new it's not "worth it". Recycling rarely makes sense from a purely economic sense. I still think there might be value in other things like not using up/wasting new raw materials when we could recover them from old products, or most importantly limiting the amount of brand new plastics we're feeding into the environment knowing that it will never go away just break down into micro/nano plastics that will end up in our soil/air/blood/organs/newborns/food or that it's better to recycle as much as we can to keep plastics out of incinerators where they poison our air and out of landfills where they take up space without breaking down efficiently like other trash and can still leach chemicals into our ground/water. Even if recycling or reducing plastics could result in a larger carbon cost it might still be worth doing it if those negative costs could be more easily mitigated or controlled for than the harms caused by the increase in new plastics.
- gruez 2y ago
  >or most importantly limiting the amount of brand new plastics we're feeding into the environment knowing that it will never go away just break down into micro/nano plastics that will end up in our soil/air/blood/organs/newborns/food If the plastic made it into a recycling plant, chances are it's going into a landfill or an incinerator. In that case the amount of microplastics being generated is likely negligible. All the microplastics in the environment today is either generated from plastic in use experiencing wear (eg. tires on cars or synthetic fibers being washed), or from mismanaged plastic in the environment decomposing. Properly managed plastic is a negligible source of microplastics, and recycling it or not doesn't make a difference. >incinerators where they poison our air this is a non-issue in modern incinerators because they burn hot enough to avoid generating toxic emissions and/or have pollution abatement technologies. >landfills where they take up space without breaking down efficiently like other trash and can still leach chemicals into our ground/water Can't speak for other countries but at least in the US we're not going to run out of land any time soon, so "take up space" is a moot point. Landfills are also lined so it's unlikely to affect the water supply.

dieselgate 2y ago

I don’t have a written source for this but we toured the landfill/recycling center in elementary school. Remember distinctly being shown how _only_ the thick necks and bottom portions of number 1 and 2 plastics can be recycled. Plastic bottle caps, as mentioned by the speaker, could not be recycled. It always stuck with me. Maybe (commercial?) recycling tech has improved to be able to do something with less dense plastic sections but seems diminishing returns. To be fair I’ve seen some cool maker videos of people cutting a bottle into “wire” for 3d printing etc. - but that’s not a commercial/global solution.

Iulioh 2y ago
1 Spool of 3d filament is 15€ more or less 1 bottle has 15-30g of plastic in it and hardly half is usable for that possible use...

_23sd 2y ago

Counterpoint to this doomerism, obviously region specific but TFA didn't bother specifying where in the world they're talking about with their broad brush statements about "downcycling" and "70% virgin plastic": https://www.startribune.com/recycling-real-twin-cities-minnesota-ad-campaign-dragon-unicorn/600336731/ https://www.startribune.com/recycling-real-twin-cities-minne... Where is the contradiction in believing both that we use too much plastic and should act on individual and governmental levels to reduce it, and that sending a PET bottle to the landfill is a child's tantrum and not some heroic defiance of the plastic industry?

keybored 2y ago

Consider this. Say completely neutral and impartial scientists have all the data that they need on how certain corporations and industries are having an impact on the environment. Those same corporations still have millions or billions of dollars to frame the narrative. That’s how you got the “carbon footprint” (BP). That’s how “actually you just need to recycle” can be astroturfed. That’s how the conversation and “discourse” can be focused around “consumer choice” and discipline. The result is that everyone knows what the problems are (see: scientists). But you’re stuck spinning your wheels on the BS busywork created by the marketing/spin departments of those corporations. And then there’s you. You’re just one gal. Okay, so maybe you’re cynical to a practical degree so you’re by-default skeptical of whatever “organic trend” that comes up on this topic. But so what? The regular people that are vocal on this issue are gonna come off as naive do-gooders. How could it hurt? Don’t you care about the environment? And what’s your retort to that? You can give them a three-paragraph lecture like this one here and feel like a mid-20th socialist intellectual giving a speech on Ideology. But you’re gonna come off as a crank. Old man/woman yelling at sky. Just some random person with an anti-social pet peeve. So you just go along with it even though it’s gonna end up in the same dump somewhere, you presume.

gruez 2y ago
>The result is that everyone knows what the problems are (see: scientists). But you’re stuck spinning your wheels on the BS busywork created by the marketing/spin departments of those corporations. Is that supposed to be surprising? Just because you know the problem doesn't mean we as a society can agree on what the solution is. During the covid pandemic we could barely agree whether we should do lockdowns or not, whether to shut down schools or not, or whether to force people to vaccinate or not. And this is arguably without "corporations still have millions or billions of dollars to frame the narrative". Going back to plastics and fossil fuels, they're used because they're cheap. Getting people to voluntarily pay more now for supposed benefits decades down the line was always going to be a tough sell. The fact solving global warming has prisoner's dilemma dynamics built into it (ie. you stand to gain economically if you don't cut emissions while everyone else tries to do so) makes it even worse. It's not as simple as just "just stop burning oil".

orev 2y ago

1. Reduce 2. Reuse 3. Recycle In that order

Wowfunhappy 2y ago
The article makes a strong case that for plastic, it should be 1. Reduce 2. Reuse 3. Landfill.
bell-cot 2y ago
But only #3 is compatible with my feeling happy while buying yet more crap every day (mostly delivered, to maximize packaging), replacing my kitchen with DoorDash & Uber Eats, and otherwise acting like a trendy member of the 0.1%.

loehnsberg 2y ago

[At this very moment, we all have microplastics coursing through our bodies. This is not the fault of not enough recycling. This is the fault of too much plastic. So I say: Let’s treat plastic like the toxic waste it is and send it where it can hurt people the least. Right now, that place is the landfill.] Wonder why the author favors this option over incineration, which to me seems as being the better approach to get rid of it.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
elric 2y ago
No plastic waste is sent to landfill in my part of the world. Only incinerated, and occasionally used as part of road pavement.

shawnz 2y ago

There's a chicken-egg problem here, which is that if nobody sorts their waste then there's no incentive to find better usages for it. I don't mind sorting my waste even if it still ends up in a landfill, just in case maybe the sorted waste supply will make it easier to find non-landfill usages for it. Not that landfills are inherently bad - like the article implies, it's really the creation of the waste in the first place which is the problem. It benefits me to have sorted waste anyway, since the non-recyclable garbage is more prone to attracting pests and a separate recycling stream helps to make the quantity of garbage more manageable. But what's even better for that is municipal organics/food waste collection.

TheGRS 2y ago
Yea for most of us (I hope), sorting is like a non-thought at this point. When I have an aluminum can and I can't find a recycle bin I have a mini panic about it. There's not much of a time waste on the consumer side, its not like I'm sorting through a bag of trash every week. I *do* hope we get managing plastic waste under control though, and soon. Feels like the main problem is now on the government level figuring out what to do about this. The behavior change is largely done. If it just needs to go back into the ground great, I just don't want it near the ocean.

geor9e 2y ago

Sure, if you can get away with it. San Francisco Environment Department will fine your condo building up to $30,000 a month if a Waste Management pickup truck deems you didn't recycling enough plastic. https://www.sfenvironment.org/zerowastefacilitator-faq https://www.sfenvironment.org/zerowastefacilitator-faq My HOA has been fined and now threatens to search our trashbags to identify us. Stale regulations failing to keep up with reality.

bell-cot 2y ago
For $30K, I'm thinking that you should be able to buy enough recyclable plastics, fresh from the plastics "recycling" facility in $Other_City, to easily meet SF's quota for the whole year.

TheGRS 2y ago

Behavior change on this is going to be such a slog. Made worse by the "told-ya-so"s who generally weren't very helpful to begin with. Might be better to make specialized plastic landfills just to keep the current behaviors active and not ostracize people's hard work on recycling campaigns. As long as we do something that keeps the plastic out of water systems I'm good with that. And as the writer noted, the real issue is reducing the amount of it in the first place.

ZeroGravitas 2y ago

Yeah, take that experts! We're just going to throw the bottles in the trash like the plastic and fossil fuel companies always wanted us to do. That'll show them!

shrimp_emoji 2y ago
More like ban/heavily regulate plastic production, at the source, instead of lazily (and cynically) regulating it at the points of use, which is the widest possible fan of responsibility focused at the people least likely to follow through (like me, who, even before I knew recycling plastic was a futile crapshoot, never bothers to because the demand is ridiculous -- either make stuff I can toss in the trash, make the trash facility sort it out, or don't make it at all).
rasz 2y ago
This is what is happening with plastic from the Recycle bins right now in most of the places. We are all paying for the segregation and separate transport, and it all ends up in the same hole in the ground at the landfill.

bigfryo 2y ago

Don't waste your time recycling anything.. something like 95% of all recyclables that are recycled by people end up in the landfill with the rest of the garbage.. this is actually common knowledge

486sx33 2y ago

This is crazy. Recycling plastic is important. The missing piece is the in and out mechanism has failed. For example, every pound of plastic China exports, they need to be required to import a pound back for recycling. They need to be responsible for their plastic exports. Very simple.