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
Quite honestly, going to a landfill seems so so so much better than the alternative: going into the environment and oceans, turning into microplastics and getting into food chains.
At least landfills are contained. Bury the shit until we have the tech to deal with it.
Some day, between the plastics, nutrients from organics, e-waste, landfills are going to be a goldmine.
Quite honestly, going to a landfill seems so so so much better than the alternative: going into the environment and oceans, turning into microplastics and getting into food chains.
Eh, it pretty much does all that bad stuff from the landfills
How does buried plastic cause microplastics to leech everywhere?
Weathering (sun, exposure, abrasion caused by plastic being moved by wind and sea) is a significant part of microplastic formation.
Here you go:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2468584422001088
You may have a misinformed concept of what landfills are; most garbage is not buried and covered, it is mostly exposed in open pits and just plain old mountains of garbage everywhere. However, even buried, it still decomposes into microplastics as explained in the paper linked
I read the snippets and abstract. I’m not seeing how these micro plastics are getting out of the landfills.
Environmental risks of microplastics in landfills
In landfills, microplastics are not standalone pollutants. Generally, such tiny particles can adsorb various harmful chemicals due to its large specific surface area [54].
Never knew that!
In this case, microplastics generally served as the vector for migrating adsorbed pollutants including heavy metals, antibiotics and other pharmaceutical and personal care products [55].
That’s scary, microplastics can absorb and spread pollutants!
But I’m not seeing anything about how they’re getting out from a landfill. I even read a few of the referenced articles. But nothing about if or how they’re getting out.
Landfills leak all the time. There is no actually contain all the toxic pollutants in there, specially not the microscopic stuff
https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/2021/04/15/hidden-damage-landfills
Fair enough, there’s potential for landfills to leak.
But if its between that, dumping it in the ocean, or exporting it, the landfill wins.
Quite honestly, going to a landfill seems so so so much better than the alternative: going into the environment and oceans, turning into microplastics and getting into food chains.
Why are we full of microplastics then?
Most microplastics come from car tires and washing of clothing with plastic in them. (both abrade the plastic causing uncountable tiny pieces of microplastics to enter the water or the air)
Then there are a lot of places that dump plastic into rivers or the ocean instead of into landfills.
I recall a episode of penn and teller that goes over this in detail. Even talks about how landfills are engineer to gather the gasses that are released to reuse as fuel.
Do you have a source for that?
sorry, it’s 50% to the landfill, 22% illegally dumped or burned, and 19% incinerated.
Yep. I don’t even bother recycling plastic anymore. It’s fucking pointless. I just recycle glass and tin cans.
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.
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.
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.
Aluminum water bottles are an option. I was at an airport recently where they only sold water in aluminum bottles and it was awesome.
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.
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.
Use glass, wood, and metal. The actual recyclable materials.
I think all of those (well outside of tin) are pretty expensive and that’s why they’re not being used as often as they were in the past. I’ve been thinking of some kind of paper material, but I guess that’s bad for the environment too. So idk…I just figured there could be something simpler, lighter and if it found its way to the ground wouldn’t be as much as a detriment as a piece of plastic. Is all.
Paper products are better than plastic at least.
O&G?
Oil and Gas?
Oh wow duh, thanks lol
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.
My testicles agree 👍
sure, but do we really need plastic wrapped apples
Yeah plastic is great for a lot of stuff. Car parts, backpack clips, buttons, trash cans etc. But one time use plastic is EVERYWHERE.
Right? Why do gatorade and pedialyte bottles have to be in crazy over engineered compared to cheap crinkly water bottles? Both one time use which isn’t ideal but thinner bottles would save the company money right?
I wonder if it’s a psychology thing, like having a high quality bottle means people thing whatever is inside is equally higher quality?
That’s significantly more than I was expecting.
More than I assumed, tbh. We need to start taxing plastic bottles.
How the hell are plastic bottles going to pay taxes? Let’s not even think about giving them jobs when unemployment is already high.
If you make a plastic bottle you get taxed. If you put something in a plastic bottle to resell, you get taxed. If you import a plastic bottle for any reason, believe it or not, taxed.
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The market would open wide for filling aeevices, where you bring your own reusable bottle. Also, water should be free and not put in bottles at all.
It’s unfair to blame capitalism when the state obviously failed (even if through lobbying) to deliver clean water. Other countries have no such problems. Water is basically free where I live.
We have huge taxes on single use bags, and more taxes are coming.
The way we do it here in Germany is that all bottles make you pay a deposit, which you get back, if you return them to a collection point (e.g. at a supermarket).
According to this article it’s working really well, with return rates of 98%.
So at least for most bottles there is a proven solution.
Arguably, it just needs to be taxed to offset the costs of cleaning up the plastic waste in the environment which could potentially make it much more expensive than glass.
Citizens being able to afford food and drink is already a bare minimum policy that the cost of disposable bottles shouldn’t affect in any way, shape, or form. If the average costs rise then so should EBT/SNAP benefits, for example.
“Killing Capitalism” eh? I’ll bite, whats your idea?
I mean, we can’t even tax billionaires properly!
9% sounds a lot higher than I’d previously heard
thats globally, though, in America its only about half that.
Yea I was about to mention. Japan is probably propping up that number since they recycle pretty much everything.
Noooooo, noooooo. Where’d you hear that?
Japan packages EVERY.THING. in plastic. They have a plastic problem, actually.
Edit: downvote all you want, but: https://www.iges.or.jp/en/publication_documents/pub/reportchapter/en/12341/PlasticAtlasAsia2022_en_WEB_1.pdf
Yea I’m aware they use plastic for everything, but they also recycle everything possible.
https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/focus/en/features/z1304_00252.html
It’s amazing we stopped using the “plastic” from plant matter, which is renewable vs petroleum plastic.
Petro-plastics got (and continue to recieve) massive government subsidies in order to be “competetive” against bio-plastics.
… well, in its defense, if it weren’t subsidized, renewable plastics would indeed be cheaper, but only at the expense of huge areas of farmable land and the rainforest. So it’s either “consume 300% of the planet’s fertile land to produce plastics” or “subsidize oil”.
Well yeah, “renewable” in itself is only good in certain contexts, such as solar and wind energy.
When it comes to renewable biomass, which by definition is renewable too, it’s not so friendly to the environment anymore. It consumes huge areas and destroys the rainforest to plant even more economically usable plants. Such as soy, cotton, …
So i’d rather see huge amounts of underground oil being consumed, than the same amount of biomass out of the rainforest being consumed.
It’s because plastic is do durable that 91% of the plastic ever produced is still in use, right ?
Right ???
That is a way higher number than I expected.
People to me after I say how many people I’ve had sex with.
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!
Incinerated plastic releases green house gases and some amount of micro plastics in the uncombusted ash.
Landfill plastic seemingly just erodes into micro plastics over long time scales.
And I just realized, this wikipedia page linked is almost 10 years out of date!
You know what must be done.
Plug for Climate Town’s great video about plastic recycling
Bonus: if you’ve never used Nebula before (or you’re already a subscriber), here it is ad-free from Nebula: https://nebula.tv/videos/climatetown-plastic-recycling-is-an-actual-scam-climate-town
I was looking for this post. If someone hadn’t already posted his video I was going to. This is information that people really fucking need to know. The plastics industry is full of lies and those lies are stuffing our landfills with toxic waste.
Like, I can’t deal with these videos. They are literal populism. They tell the people what they want to hear, put forward some “bad guy” to blame everything on, and then move on.
Reality is much more complicated, and especially, much less one-sided and much more interesting than that. For example, the common narrative among “climate studies” graduates seems to be that oil = bad, and the oil industry is a bunch of greedy old guys who exploit the planet for profit. Thing is, that is a very narrow-sighted thing to say. There’s so much more truth and beauty in it than just that. Plastics is literally one of the best inventions humans have ever come up with. It’s formable into every imaginable shape and literally has the potential to transform our material world in any way that we can imagine, in any way that we want to. That people put so much blame on plastics today sickens me. It’s wrong to blame plastics, just as it’s one-sided to say “well yeah oil companies are just plainly bad entities who only brought harm onto our society and planet”. Truth is that the oil production has been widely supported by both politics and society for the most part of the 20th century because oil is just an incredible substance with incredible value and brings a lot of improvement, benefits and progress to the society. We should be glad that we had it, and we should be thankful for the oil companies for producing it in mass quantities. It is only now that we start seeing the downsides to it, and it has to stop. Still, I can’t stand videos that just simplify things down to saying “oil is bad, plastics is a scam, …”. It is not, it’s just outdated.
Reduce, reuse, recycle in that order. Recycling should be the final option to dealing with our trash.
I believe the focus for most people should be reduce (including myself).
Could you tell that to all the companies out there who use plastic?
Remember when Snapple tried to spin moving to plastic bottles like it was a good thing, like 5 years ago?
Agreed, but there is also far too much consumer push back. Sunchips tried to make a more biodegradable bag, but people complained that they were too loud.
They were louder than the aluminium/plastic bags? What material did they use? Also what a lazy argument by the producer for giving up environmental actions. Bet it just cost them more.
I remember them being noticeably louder. Unless you were in a library or a movie theater I don’t know why people cared all that much though.
Thanks for the source. So yeah “Potato Chip Technology That Destroys Your Hearing” doesn’t sound reassuring. Nonetheless I’d take those packaging everyday over conventional knowing I did my thing while getting fat.
Eating out of conventional chips packaging in cinemas or libraries should be punishable either way. I think in reality those customers problem was the “open the bag at night without waking up everyone” problem which should be preventable with a bit of planning.
I’m saddened that Reuse has fallen by the wayside. I brought some cleaned liquor bottles back to my store for deposit, and the clerk admitted to me they’ll just end up in the recycling chain - it’s too much effort to locate transport/handling for the bottles.
Theoretically, there should be a lot of inward transit for cities and civic centers with not much going out. There’s a very efficient mental image of dropping off 80 bottles, and picking up 80 empty bottles to bring back, but it would just take more logistics than people care for to do it that way.
It’s all propaganda. They do that in japan and for those that are gonna say japan is a first world advanced small country, they do that shit in Mexico too. I’ve lived in a number of states across Mexico for nearly a decade and from big cities to tiny towns you can bring back your glass bottles to the shops and they forward it to the delivery people to be returned to be sanitized and reused. All the big companies do this, you pay a smidge extra on that first bottle and from then it’s cheaper if you return the empty when buying a new one.
If the US based companies don’t do it it’s because they don’t want to, not because they can’t. I know for a fact coke does it in Mexico.
The problem with recycling/reusing plastics has been notoriously difficult in the past. That is why it’s so often incinerated/dumped instead of reused/recycled.
I want to explain my view of this:
Reusing plastics is difficult because the bottles are often produced in a way that makes them as thin (and lightweight) as possible. That has the advantage of saving oil, but has the disadvantage that they are in turn so brittle that if you tried to reuse them, chances are high that the bottles would either break, or - more dangerously - abrasive effects would cause the bottle to get tiny cracks, which would set free microplastics and potentially additives, which could be really toxic; and nobody wants to be responsible for this, so they are dumped.
Then there is the problem with washing the bottles. A lot of the plastics is not made to be brought into contact with soap, as I understand it, because the soap severely impacts the plastics. So washing them thoroughly is difficult.
Recycling has a different problem. Recycling consumes more energy than simply producing new ones. In the past, that was the reason to dump them. With cheap solar energy, the game could change. Recycling still takes a lot of energy, but as energy is getting cheaper, industry could reuse the carbon atoms in the bottle; in other words: reuse the material that’s in the bottle, not the energy that’s in the bottle. This will require even cheaper energy prices though to be economical.
A lot of the issue there is everyone has to have their own unique glass bottle because marketing. A coke bottle has to go back to the coca-cola bottling plant. A Johnny Walker bottle has to go back to Scotland, etc.
Reduce needs to be the focus of manufacturers.
Even if we - the end user, reduce our usage enough that manufacturers ‘take note’ and provide us non plastic versions they will still use so much plastic behind the scenes that it wouldn’t make much of a difference.
Unfortunately, most plastics are useless to recycle - they either get incinerated or dumped straight into the landfill by the companies who collect and filter them.
Which is why my wife and I only bother with plastic bags, styrofoam, and the hard plastics marked types 1 & 2. These are the plastics which are easily recyclable, and therefore, have a non-trivial chance of actually being recycled.
We put types 3 through 7 straight into the trash, as they have about a 97% chance of not actually getting recycled.
Except when you reuse you’re subjecting yourself to micro plastics
Refuse, reuse, riot.
I have gradually wondered if the issue has not been in our obsession with plastic specifically, but our need for sanitation of every object. “We need a material that will preserve its shape in transit and operation; but we then want it to gently break down into nature when we’re done with it.” No matter what materials of what strength we invent, that’s always going to be an oxymoron. There’s a reason people criticize biodegradable materials as often falling apart.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure medicine has made tremendous advances through the preservation of sealed instruments and drugs, especially for those with sensitive immune systems. But the 3000% thorough sanitization we keep of every single object we interact with has had a very gradual impact on our planet. I kind of want to envision just how fatal of a health risk it would carry if so much of our food wasn’t triple-secure-wrapped, and whether that’s comparable to the current impact of widespread plastic.
No, the problem has never been us at all. We don’t run Coca Cola Co. We don’t decide how laundry detergent is packaged. We don’t manufacture excess plastic drums and lined tanks for unnecesary use cases. We don’t flood the market with cheap dinnerware, plates, cups, bowls, etc.
Big corporations do all of that. Run by dozens of people who do not care what we think.
We’re always trying to optimize and reduce loss/waste. Being able to have food sit on shelves for months without oxidizing or rotting has been a huge improvement in terms of food loss but it requires these biounavailable materials. If we use compostable materials for packaging then the clock starts ticking on them and storage facilities need to maintain stricter standards (i.e. keep humidity down).
The medical aspect is a big issue. You see what is consumed in an ER and surgery and then multiply that by a million/day and you wonder how much of this trash is being produced. Lawsuits over every little medical issue don’t help reduce this. Fishing industry waste is another big issue for the oceans.
We don’t need food packaging to last 1000 years
You say that but if we went back to clay pots you could up that number to 4,000 years.
Yeah but who’s gonna sign responsible for potential traces of dirt on your food?
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.
Most glass is recycled into asphalt. Until fairly recently that was the only way to recycle glass.
It’s because you can’t recycle plastic really. Each time you heat it up to melt it it loses its properties. A recyclable material is for instance aluminium, which keeps on being awesome. I tried various recycled plastics for a business I run, none of it was strong enough. Recycled lego, recycled car bumpers, nada. And then the question is - why would I buy the recycled plastic that doesn’t work when it’s like 30 cents cheaper. Pellets are so cheap in fact, that I could buy a tonne, use up 100kgs, throw the rest away and still be fine.
Once they touch the factory floor’s floor, plastics become filthy and cannot be used for high-quality applications - food wrappers, anything with body contact. Oils and heavy metals are the biggest contaminants, a plastics-producing company I used to work for concluded. They either sent it all to a recycling factory or used it for very low-quality stuff like trash bags.
Now with post-consumer plastics, not only are they extremely heterogeneous, they will also have even worse contaminants like mold which proved to be very resistant to cleaning, a EU study concluded. So you might want to pyrolyze them like you do with crude oil, but there’s just too much O, N, S and halogens, so the output will be too corrosive, but also too heterogeneous for it to make economic sense.What was it like working in plastics production? I imagine you were breathing in vapors all the time?
Maybe with some additives? Or removing them, in the first place? But expensive i guess.
Maybe there is something, but tbh why bother when virgin pellets are better. The best plastic recycling strategy is to not make it in the first place. Or just use other types of packaging - alu cans, glass bottles, paper containers, whatever.
Also additives soak water like crazy. Moisture is a huge problem when making parts - you need to dry some types of plastic pellets in industrial dryers, which eats up a ton of electricity - since they are often running off of compressed air out of a compressor. Most plastic comes in natural colors to which you add additives to change to the color you want. Simply doing that (2% by weight) is a difference between not having to dry at all (since some plastics just don’t absorb water - i.e. polyolefins - which high density variant is what bottles for shower gel, shampoos are made of) and having to dry it for like 6 hours before use.
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.
EDIT: Nevermind then. It’s all apparently dumped into the ocean. Sorry about the attempt in some positivity.
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.
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/
Those countries stopped accepting it.
Think of all the energy used in collecting the plastic (gas, oil, and emissions from dump trucks that pick it up, for example), sorting it, disposing of what isnt recyclable, and actually recycling the stuff.
Im no expert but I believe that overall recycling as we do it is actually a net negative on the environment. We’re probably doing more harm than good.
Well we can move cars with electricity so i guess it could do some good as some point
That said I’m in the train of let’s actually accelerate climate change it’s not like no one is going to move a finger till it gets really bad so why should we extend the suffering
We’re probably doing more harm than good.
That’s probably an extremely underrated statement that you can use to describe many topics.
