Recycling was always a lie anyway. There's no true circular economy with plastic and a large portion of the recycled plastic is "recycled" into energy by burning it. It's always been a tool for manufacturing consent from the masses by making them feel like it's okay to use this much of a limited, non-renewable resource frivolously.
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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Plastics recycling absolutely could work better, but you'd actually need some firm regulation around it: Only monomaterials, standardized types of plastic for per use case, labels that are either laser-etched or that fall off on their own, caps made of same material as the body, and no random surprises that ruin recycling.
Yes, and many plastics are proprietary and can't be recycled. Truly, we need to just ditch plastic
And yet stores are still full to the brim with single use plastic packaging and idiots in developed countries carry tonnes of water yearly instead of just using the tap.
I remember seeing "green" crap back in the 90s and early aughts that were always going, "See, we take this plastic bottle, and grind it up into bits, then we combine it with some other stuff, mix in some asphalt, and presto, new road surface! New playground turf! Transform plasic into new plastic for all this other stuff!" It was so amazing we could take plastic and recycle it!
Then to find out years later that none of this ever happens. My state was sending bales of plastic to China to be ~~recycled~~ burned in incinerators until it became too expensive in 2018 or so.
It's fun having been lied to for decades, only to find out it was all bullshit the whole time and we weren't even trying to slow the use of plastic.
Go to a refillery to cut plastic where you can. We're cutting as much plastic as we can from our kitchen and personal care/washrooms, which both generate or used a significant amount of plastic.
Ugh, don't get me started on how shitty my local plastic recycling is. I would probably use it more if I didn't have to purchase a bin for it each time. At first I was like, okay whatever I just have to buy one bin, but no they throw the whole thing in the back of the truck, which is why we can't use a cardboard box.
Who comes up with this shit??
Wtf? We get city provided bins that get picked up bi-weekly. Is this not the norm?
Having to buy a new bin for each load is absolutely wild.
They provide three bins, one for glass, one for paper, and one for aluminum. I reuse glass, compost paper, and aluminum gets sold for scrap value, so I get very little use out of my recycling service. I cannot use one of the unused bins for plastic recycling either, I tried.
I hate it so much. It's an absolute mockery of environmentalism.