4 ms·
To make matters worse, recycling is a scam (with a small handful of exceptions).
by adrianN 9mo ago
To make matters worse, recycling is a scam (with a small handful of exceptions).
- stmL 9mo agoCan you elaborate on that? Edit: I'm actually curious l, i don't know how recycling supposed to work for electronics and how it can be a scam.
- mngnt 9mo agoThis youtube video explains why plastic recycling exists, how it's mostly ineffective and why is it a scam created to normalize one-use plastic. This basically applies to electronics and others. "Why would I reuse or reduce, I can buy, consume an recycle". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g
- pbhjpbhj 9mo agoTax CEOs of vape companies the percentage of their vapes that their company doesn't physically retrieve from customers to be recycled ...
- DaSHacka 9mo agoA completely ridiculous and nonsensical proposal I can only assume was said in jest.
- Dylan16807 9mo agoIt sounds like a description of most of a deposit system to me, and deposit systems are good at encouraging recycling.
- tstrimple 9mo agoSee "core charges" for many automotive parts to incentivize the return of waste for refurbishing at the higher end and bottle deposits for cans/bottles at the lower end. It's weird how things so common in one part of our society can seem so foreign in others.
- GuinansEyebrows 9mo agoHey, if your entire business plan is to produce actual garbage, maybe you should be held responsible for making sure that garbage has a pathway to proper disposal.
- DaSHacka 9mo agoThe company, sure, but selecting a fall guy to deal with arbitrary expenses will not help get anything done for the environment.
- pbhjpbhj 9mo agoYes, a jest. But essentially you have to directly impact the take home pay off CEOs as that appears to be the only thing they will change their behaviour for.
- sofixa 9mo agowildly country dependent, e.g. check the stats for the EU: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20251022-1 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
- rjh29 9mo agoVaries widely across country and the type of thing you're recycling. People are so extreme with recycling, it's either "recycle everything!" or "it's a scam, just chuck it all in the garbage"
- vasco 9mo agoIt varies very widely indeed. In some countries it isn't a scam because it gets burned like Denmark but other than that majority of recycling just means shipping it to a landfill in a poor country that they promise to recycle.
- nandomrumber 9mo ago> because it gets burned I wouldn’t really call that recycling.
- johannes1234321 9mo agoAs long as the heat is used for something (electricity, building heating etc.) there is at least some reuse of parts of it. And if exhaust ist filtered pollution is also limited. Better than just putting it on a garbage dump and forgetting about it. But yes, not proper recycling.
- eru 9mo agoWell, it depends a lot on material. Metals, especially aluminum, get widely recycled because it actually makes financial sense. Plastics, well, you are probably better off burning them for electricity.
- chpatrick 9mo agoIn Hungary it gets sorted out locally. We also recently implemented a bottle return system that (although it's annoying) produces clean stacks of PET, aluminium and glass, all of which are recyclable.
- mikkupikku 9mo ago
- setopt 9mo agoDepends, it’s hard to make a blanket statement like that. Recycled steel and aluminum for example is absolutely not a scam. But for plastics, I agree that waste incineration is mostly a better solution than recycling (which produces low-quality plastics with some risk of unhealthy contaminants in the few cases that it’s not actually a scam).