- cross-posted to:
- til@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- til@lemmy.world
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More than I assumed, tbh. We need to start taxing plastic bottles.
Meaning almost 90 percent of everything ever made of plastic is still around
The other 10% is also still around just in different shapes.
not to mention it doesn’t matter where it goes, most plastic can’t be recycled or is not efficient to recycle it. Really need to just not use plastic as a whole
Easy in principle, tough in practice. Plastics are extremely useful in a huge range of applications.
Yeah plastic is great for a lot of stuff. Car parts, backpack clips, buttons, trash cans etc. But one time use plastic is EVERYWHERE.
9% sounds a lot higher than I’d previously heard
80% of the shit you put in your recycling bin goes straight into a landfill. plastic recycling was a giant greenwashing scam by the oil industry
Yep. I don’t even bother recycling plastic anymore. It’s fucking pointless. I just recycle glass and tin cans.
Recycling was the last in the list of what to do.
The problem is we forgot about Reduce and Reuse… The two most important things.
We use way too much instead.
The recycling symbol for plastics was a great bit of marketing for the plastics industry. ‘Just buy a new thing and no worries you can just recycle it.’
Future geologists are going to see a marine deposit of plastic and be able to date exactly the age of the rock layer.
Survivors of the resource wars will send their children to the plastic mines to work for bottle caps
Don’t forget nuclear fallout. There’s even a term for when humans started to irrevocably fuck Earth: the Anthropocene.
And heavy metals from burning fossil fuels.
Just a thin, oily, radioactive, toxic smear in the record.
Followed by the layer of shoes, then nothing.
The committee recently pulled the plug on the Anthropocene unfortunately. It was never official and they just rejected it this year.
Yeah, I feel like this Wikipedia graphic puts it quite well why that was rejected:
You see that “Pleistocene” vertical bar? And you see that tiny sliver of “Holocene” at the top. Yeah, the Anthropocene folks were basically arguing that so many riveting things happened in the Holocene already, that we need to declare a new epoch for what’s happening now.
Besides, if we do continue to irrevocably fuck Earth and the current mass extinction event continues to wipe out a big chunk of life on Earth, then a future sentient species might declare our entire existence as just the geological event that ended the current era (Cenozoic).
They purposely made their symbols for non-recylable types of plastic look like the recycling symbol.
Almost like plastics recycling has been a scam all along perpetrated by the corporations to greenwash their business.
Reduce, then reuse, and if the other two cannot occur; recycle.
In my area you have to pay a lot extra for a recycling bin, and they only accept two kinds of plastic.
Then it came out they were just shipping it overseas to be recycled but sometimes it was ending up in landfills anyway. There are only a few houses on our street with a recycling bin out each week.
that 8% more than i thought
9% is only recycled once, only 1% has been truly reused multiple times, so you’re close enough.
Also:
Of the remaining waste, 12% was incinerated and 79% was either sent to landfills or lost to the environment as pollution.
They’re the same thing. Incinerated is lost as pollution, it just happened to have one more use on the way there.
And I just realized, this wikipedia page linked is almost 10 years out of date!
And I just realized, this wikipedia page linked is almost 10 years out of date!
You know what must be done.
I find it strange that more people haven’t put it together yet. The stuff plastics are made of is literally toxic byproduct from the O&G industry. Yes some of the products have extremely functional uses, but for the rest of it, they’re literally selling us their toxic waste and trying to make us responsible for disposing of it.
They might as well be standing outside the grocery stores with a barrel of goo and offering you a portion of it (for a price of course!) on your way out. So then you take it home and try to figure out what to do with it, and feel bad when you realize there is no way to dispose of it in an ethical way which is why they’re shoving the responsibility onto you.
It really is frustrating. Like we even have resin codes. Little numbers printed that should indicate what kind of plastic it is.
I’m in Seattle. We have a robust recycling system. I still can’t find anywhere what resin code plastics they accept. The website just says “plastic bottles and jugs.”
I pay to use Ridwell. They accept plastic film and, as of recently, “multi-layer plastic.”
The only way to tell these apart is just by judging the plastic for how it feels. Plastic film is stretchier while multi-layer tends to be crinkly? Half the plastic we dispose of does not fall firmly in either camp, so we just do our best.
Why does it have to be this hard?
Because recycling is not meant to be effective it’s meant to pass blame onto consumers
Toxic waste in the soil, toxic waste in the products. Whee! I actually constantly do wonder what we could do to pump the breaks as a people. It’s a difficult thing to think about, because I think the first step is getting people used to two things (at least here in America)
a) Things will not always be available when you go to the store
b) Things will not last as long as they typically have due to exposureI’m not really sure how to get people on board because most are reactive not proactive and they tend to not react to things that can’t directly correlate themselves or witness with their own eyes. I mean, also a lot of people are like me shrugging at what they cannot actively change.
I just try to buy intelligently, ride my things to their grave, and recycle and repurpose what I can. Shrugs.
That’s why they should pay a tax for every pound of plastic they produce, with an equivalent refund for every pound they certifiably dispose of properly.
When you have to clean up your own mess you get good at it.
They won’t even clean up their own oil well sites. Look up how many oil companies hide all their profits and then declare bankruptcy so that they can get the taxpayers to clean up after a given oilfield runs dry.
I don’t have a lot of hope in them taking care of the other end of the process either, unless it’s by force.
O&G?
Oil and Gas?
Oh wow duh, thanks lol
Yes some of the products have extremely functional uses, but for the rest of it
Don’t you think most plastic products are used because it’s convenient?
I fight against it, but it is hard to not recognize how a plastic bottle is much lighter than any other bottle material, how convenient it is to get a plastic bag at the shop when you forgot yours, how convenient it is to get a ready meal in a cheap plastic box instead of an expensive and/or heavy washable container that you may have to bring back etc. Even compared to paper bags, plastic bags are more resistant, lighter and more compact.
There are probably much more similar convenience uses in the industry.
Plastic is mostly used because it’s convenient, not because of a big plastic conspiracy.So to solve the issue, we need states to make it expensive enough that people will overcome the inconvenience. Making people pay for plastic bags at shops works very well, for example.
I speak as someone horrified by the over-abundance of plastics in Japan. Some fruits have 3 layers of plastic around, even bananas come in plastic bags, because modern Japan is all about looking clean and being convenient, zero fucks given to ecology.
Yeah it stinks.
And I know plastic hurts all of us… but can’t we hear it now, any plan to fix this is going to:
hurt the poor the most
Any tax whose cost it passed on, any system to use reusables (unless it decreases costs)…
Cannot think of a single easy answer to this enormous planet-wrecking problem.
The European carbon tax is doing pretty doing good at making the European energy system greener by making fossil fuels less competitive. Renewables are now very competitive.
If the taxes are redistributed to help the poor buy more sustainable product it may work.
The other 91% is in my balls.
No that’s where pee is stored
Mom said it’s my turn with the testicular microplastics
9 percent seems high.
I read somewhere that because recycling plastic isn’t profitable, under the capitalist system there’s no incentive to do so.
Most plastics due for recycling just gets shipped off to poor countries for “reclycing” but isn’t at all, and a lot of it just ends up in the ocean.
So you’re better off just throwing plastics in the garbage where it will at least end up in landfill and not in the ocean.
It’s just a bad material that’s cheap to make things out of.
Once used, to my knowledge, it can’t be reused as the same thing, so they “recycle” it into road surfacing etc, which I’m sure doesn’t end up fragmenting into tiny bits over the years and ending up in water sources…
And I’m not sure there’s a good way to get away from it completely. Even drink cans have a small layer of plastic inside to stop it reacting with the metal. Glass is probably the most environmentally friendly (if you just wash and reuse), but a bitch to get it back in one piece.
Time to tax the ever loving shit out of plastic tbh. And yes, prices will go up, but you know what? They go up anyway. They can only take as much as we have, and they’re already taking it.
I read somewhere that because recycling plastic isn’t profitable, under the capitalist system there’s no incentive to do so.
Not just unprofitable in a capitalist sense, but inefficient. A typical plastic beverage container can be recycled two or three times before the plastic degrades too much to be usable.
Socialism won’t save you here. Unless said socialism bans plastic products.
That’s a bit cynical take. In many countries, including mine, there are dedicate bins for plastic waste which is the majority of waste from your typical household. It’s all being recycled into new products, not being shipped anywhere. Also, when it comes to plastic bottles for example, close to 100% of them are returned and recycled into new bottles. I’ve got a tiny-ass bin for the stuff that ends up in landfill because I separate and recycle it all as does most other people.
Haha… yeah I live in the Netherlands. And my city started separately collecting plastics.
Here’s the kicker: because there is no more plastic in our waste, the energy value of the waste went down. The city sold these waste “rights” to an incineration plant that reclaims heat and energy who now cannot use the waste. So to avoid contractual fines, our city now imports plastic waste from elsewhere in Europe to be mixed in with the waste and then incinerated.
Well fuck me!
- This is more expensive for the city (separate bins, separate collection, separate processing, buying plastics from elsewhere and getting it here)
- All the extra transport and shipping movements is worse for the environment.
- I’m stuck with an extra fucking bin, and with both a greens bin and the rest bin that are collected once every 3 weeks instead of 2… stinking up the place even worse.
But I’m sure they meant well.
Germany has the highest recycling rate for plastics with 65 %. Not everything you put in the recycling bin is being recycled.
Seems far more likely that the recycling rate is low because not every piece of plastic waste is put into recycling. Not that they simply don’t recycle it.
The problem is that there are quite some different sorts of plastics and that plastic containers are not standardized. If you mix different kinds of plastics or plastics with other materials you can’t use it anymore in an automated processing and it usually gets burned. Also mostly recycling is a downgrade, so usually if you recycle some packaging, it is not made into packaging again but into things like pallets or construction fence bases.
In my country (Aus), last I heard our recycling was mostly shipped off to Indo or somewhere else in SEA (previously China before China banned it).
I suspect very little ever sees recycling, but the neoliberal model means privatised companies paid by government, so they’re out to cut expenses to maximise profits and shipping it off to someone else to do the illegal thing where it’s not illegal isn’t illegal.
It’s all being recycled into new products
I’m afraid its not. There are many plastics that don’t have any method of recycling, and plently more that require specific machinery for their “one time” recycling that just isn’t being used.commercially.
when it comes to plastic bottles for example, close to 100% of them are returned and recycled into new bottles
Even the PET bottles can only go through the process once or twice before becoming too degraded. That’s not even taking into account that most manufacturers want white or clear plastic, and recycled does not work that way.
The separation and recycling that you do is mostly gaslighting and green washing.
Even if you look the Scandinavian countries which generally does better than the rest of the world, you are looking at only a 25% recycle rate.
https://finland.fi/business-innovation/finnish-innovations-for-overcoming-plastic-waste/
I’ll be honest, that’s actually more than I would have guessed (ballpark would have been 5% or under), sad as that is.
I’ll bet the term recycled is actually open for interpretation, and the official use differs from our (pleb) expectations.
