Plastics producers deceived public about recycling, report reveals

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/15/recycling-plastics-producers-report

by cromulent • 2 years ago

174 222 2 years ago

theguardian.com

celias• 2 years ago

Somewhat related article in The Washington Post - "The plastics industry would like a word with your kids"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/02/13/plastics-...

noughtme2• 2 years ago

Or, "Public has head in sand about plastic recycling." In my city it's public knowledge (even if not well known) that nearly all plastics that get collected on recycling day end up in the local landfill, yet everyone dutifully washes, separates and collects plastics for recycling. This costs tax payers hundreds of millions of dollars, just so they can feel good about not putting plastic in the trash.

anigbrowl2• 2 years ago

Instead of blaming the public who are doing their best and making an effort, send the bill to the people who are lying and not making the effort. Maybe send some of them to jail too, the US has far too much tolerance for corporate fraud.

gallego2007• 2 years ago

This is really the only way to improve the situation. Hold the companies generating the plastic “trash” responsible via taxes/fines. The regulatory pressure will make a difference.

plussed_reader• 2 years ago

Maybe instead of jail we can get those convicted to have the recycle logo branded on their forehead?

throw10920• 2 years ago

Instead of blaming the public who are doing their best and making an effort, send the bill to the people who are lying and not making the effort

Evidence for this? I can point to dozens of members of the public that I know who aren't making an effort or doing their best, and people in companies who are. It seems like you just have an axe to grind.

mikestew2• 2 years ago

In my city it's public knowledge...

As in, a URL that you could post or something? Because if Redmond, WA came out and made it "public knowledge" that Waste Management was tossing our plastic straight into the landfill, someone's getting a spanking. Now, that's not to say that it doesn't happen, I'm just questioning that any municipality would be so upfront as to make public want many already suspect. But if that's actually the case, I'd love to read up.

noughtme2• 2 years ago

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/montreal-recycling-p...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/enquete-recycling-pl...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/recycling-glass-eigh...

xnx• 2 years ago

It was easy to deceive the public about recycling because it is what we wanted to hear.

mrguyorama• 2 years ago

That misses an important point: Recycling as a "solution" was easy to fund for "awareness" programs and other forms of essentially propaganda, because corps could easily see the ROI for reducing a potential cost, so there was ample money (read: force, power, or simply human resources) to tell people that "this is the way".

Who could possibly have comparably the same level of funding for a "hey this isn't doing what they say it's doing" awareness campaign? That took like twenty years to organize.

That's the central problem of any capitalist system; It by definition produces ready made organization of resources towards whatever a capital class wants, while making it inherently harder for the non-capital class to similarly put their technically significant resources towards their own goals. Capitalism inherently puts more control over large amounts of resources in the hands of those that prioritize individual rewards and have strong individual incentives against collective improvement. It inherently pressures the Capital class to be against collective improvement that has any cost on them, even extremely vague or distant costs, or hell, even just "costs" that are actually just personal subjective preferences, because they can afford that.

techgnosis• 2 years ago

My trash can is very small and expensive but my recycling can is huge and basically free. So even though plastic recycling is a scam I put my plastic in the recycling container.

bdcravens• 2 years ago

These days I only recycle numbers 1 and 2, the only ones that have a chance of being turned into something else. Everything else I just put in the trash (with an eye on avoiding plastic in the first place, opting for things in glass containers, cooking from base ingredients, etc)

zumu• 2 years ago

In my area they recycle 1, 2 and 5, so that's what I do.

PET #1 is very recyclable in general. Not so sure about 2 or 5.

My biggest frustration is all the recycling labels smeared on things that aren't recyclable leading to everyone calling it a 'scam' when in fact some recycling of plastics (namely PET) is much better than the alternative (burning or landfill).

ZeroGravitas2• 2 years ago

Quoting someone from Exxon saying that you can't recycle plastic, and so need to buy more of their inputs to make more isn't quite as conclusive as an impartial lifecycle analysis.

Most of which conclude that recycling is a good economic and environmental option once you have reduced and re-used all that you can.

Getting the corps to pay for the externalities, as Extended Producer Responsibility laws do, is a much stronger strike against fossil fuel using/producing corporations than repeating their stale propaganda out of context.

r3trohack3r2• 2 years ago

The arc of recycling bothers me.

When I was a kid, you'd be socially shamed for not recycling or questioning it as a solution.

Moving into college, people started feeling socially safe to quietly call out that the recycling program might be net-negative for the environment.

Slowly the conversation evolved in my circles to rewriting recycling's history as a "raising awareness" program. Where the goal was to bring awareness to this issue or that issue by socially pressuring a bunch of people into sorting and washing their rubbish.

Finally we are getting to the point where we can have an honest conversation about recycling.

But it's a real bummer because we've spent _decades_ misallocating capital into potentially worthless infrastructure that fails to meaningfully move the needle on the problem.

Would have been really cool if, instead of this whole social/political signaling thing we did, we instead spent that time and tax money developing processing facilities for compostable materials that are suitable for shipping/packaging and food storage.

Many current social/political ecomovements seem to be going through the same trajectory.

johnea• 2 years ago

social/political signaling? Let's just call it plasti-corps propaganda.

This really is the fault of the corps. Recycling _could_ be practical, but corps want to throw it out and make more, because that's cheaper.

And if the article wants to talk about lying, it really needs to include the lying that US waste disposal corps are doing about what can go in their recycling bins. 3/4 of what current waste disposal says is recyclable goes straight to the landfill.

marmaduke• 2 years ago

Is it really the fault of corps? I mean, is that a useful explanation? Corps exist to maximize profit don't they?

Perhaps we have to consider why single use plastic is appealing in the first place. The culture of use once and throw away might have started with plastic but didn't stop there.

r3trohack3r2• 2 years ago

A lot of people want you to believe a lot of things for a lot of reasons.

I do not believe any of the people that I saw generating social pressure around recycling in my childhood worked for plati-corps... But they did have their personal identity and social/political in-group signaling tightly coupled to being _perceived_ as caring about the environment.

No need for a historical lens though. The same dynamics are at play now.

The more frequently someone uses in-group and out-group signaling language to short-cut critical thinking in discourse, the more likely it is that they're perpetuating some form of "propaganda."

WorldMaker• 2 years ago

Something that I remember from when I was a kid and the first big recycling awareness programs kicked off was how much they emphasized all "Three Rs" at first, how much all three were required hand in hand, and also how quickly that tapered off (both accidentally and presumably some cases intentionally) until people mostly forgot the other two Rs. The original campaign goals to focus on Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. Recycle was always meant to be the fallback after you've worked to Reduce and Reuse. Recycle is easier to claim action on, you've got the right bins and they are marked and you sort some of your junk stream, so you are doing your part. Reduce and Reuse are so much harder. It's certainly hard to pat yourself on the back individually for reduce/reuse goals: those are the system goals, the big collective behavior problems.

I do sometimes wonder what some of the educators would change in hindsight based on the overall failure of Reduce and Reuse to be the stronger messages over Recycle in the long term. I bet there is some frustration there because they tried.

mikrotikker• 2 years ago

I try hard not to throw things out and give them a second life. Upcycle. Unfortunately it makes me a bit of a hoarder... I need more sheds... or to do 10x more and more diverse, projects.

sandworm101• 2 years ago

My thinking on plastics recycling has evolved several times over the years. One concept that influenced me is the idea that plastics contain carbon. To bury plastic somewhere where it will never decompose is, essentially, a form of carbon sequestration. There is some tipping point where the energy necessary to transport and recycle plastic might be outweighed by the net removal of carbon through simple burial.

Another thing that radically changed my mind about ocean plastics is that most all of it comes from a handful of rivers. The solution to ocean plastics isn't to eliminate or recycle all plastics, or even to filter it out of the oceans. Rather, we just have to to stop a small handful of countries from dumping garbage into their own rivers.

https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics

turtles3• 2 years ago

Another thing that radically changed my mind about ocean plastics is that most all of it comes from a handful of rivers.

The article you linked specifically states that this was previously thought to be true, but is not.

It does however point out that per-capita ocean plastic polluters are not evenly geographically distributed.

krunck• 2 years ago

Carbon sequestration for carbon that should never have been pumped out of the ground in the first place? Maybe just don't make plastics from petroleum. Leave it in the ground. Better yet, make plastics from 100% bio-sourced polymers(carbon from CO2 in the atmosphere) and bury those. That would be effective sequestration.

brikym5• 2 years ago

That's simplistic thinking narrowing it down to a few countries. In reality there are a bunch of western countries that send their 'recycling' to 'recycling specialists' in poorer countries. An in reality the western countries are just dumping all their waste over the fence and pretending that it's being recycled. Also you seem to ignore all the health problems that come from plastics like disrupting the endocrine systems in animals. I wouldn't be surprised if a petrochemical company is behind that article because they tend to push PR (propaganda) that shifts the blame away from the source of the problem which is them.

throwway1203853• 2 years ago

I think a lot of things would get fixed if we simply required the originators of the material or item to pay for its recycling or disposal. If it's not economical to recycle an item, the cost would be borne by the organization that made the item.

nickff2• 2 years ago

The big problems (which I know of) are that defining 'originator' is actually a bit tricky, and that the 'originator' is often somewhere very far from the end-user, and has very little ability to take any part in recycling or disposal.

brikym5• 2 years ago

100%! You see a lot of reusing of resources when it suits the businesses. Shipping containers, pallets, kegs & gas bottles are all standardized and get recycled for many years. By recycled I mean the literal meaning before it got molested by corporate propaganda campaigns. I suspect if the manufacturers were forced to pay for the externalized costs of plastic junk they might start:

* making their own durable packaging to buy back.

* figure out how to standardize package shapes and centralize collection/washing.

* Stop overpackaging and over marketing the food. A lot of foods don't need to come in a shiny colorful plastic packet.

darepublic• 2 years ago

There was reduce and reuse.. but then those snakes in the garden conspired to add a third R.. an evil R.

rookderby• 2 years ago

I agree we should have started decades ago and not gone down with path, but it was cheap at the time. We now know some of the externalities, the impacts to society at large, and we should demand that the cost to our future be included. Maybe then glass use, reuse, and other materials can compete with the currently under-priced plastics. I think some sort of carbon tax is going to be required.

brikym5• 2 years ago

Also contributing to the problem is the marketing departments in every company wanting their package to be a unique color and shape. Before 'recycling' glass milk bottles and beer bottles would be a standard size and be bought back by the shop. This is what we need to return to but the corporations are always peddling greenwash nonsense about how eco-friendly their (PFAS coated) cardboard packaging is or how you don't need to feel bad because 5% of the bottle is from recycled sources.

wkat42422• 2 years ago

We used to have a pretty great system in the Netherlands with reusable PET bottles for soft drinks. These were much thicker than the current types (so thick you couldn't crush them), and they'd be returned for a fee, washed and refilled.

Unfortunately this system was dumped in favour of the usual single use "recyclable" bottles. I still lament their disappearance :( the current bottles (the same as everywhere else) are a huge step back for reuse.

XorNot6• 2 years ago

I am somewhat suspicious as to whether this works out as being environmentally friendlier - i.e. the dishwasher paradox (in short: a dishwasher makes things easier, and uses less power and water and detergent to wash dishes then doing it by hand - people mistake struggle for effectiveness).

Because at a large scale, you've got a couple of parameters I can think of:

1. the mean lifetime before a bottle fails / is removed from service

2. the failure mode of the bottle (i.e. if it shatters, does it go to landfill or do you end up with pieces in the environment?)

3. the amount of water and detergents needed to wash them properly, given the uncontrolled nature of the environment they come from, and the amount of power.

4. revalidating that the bottle is in fact clean - again - due to the uncontrolled nature of the environment they come from

5. the extra shipping involved in moving the bottles around for reuse.

It's easily possible they reusable bottles don't actually work out being lower resource use then single-use disposables with controlled disposal (i.e. stabilized landfill). Cleaning things when you don't know where they've been is fraught and difficult.

Basically it can easily be possible that reusing bottles you already have in your possession and wash yourself is better, it's not necessarily true that it works at a larger scale.

Areading314• 2 years ago

This is specifically about plastic recycling. Metal, glass, organic waste recycling are very much economical and good for the environment.

res0nat0r• 2 years ago

Frontline did a whole episode about this about four years ago. Sure the plastic container holding your strawberries has a recycling symbol on it with a number 3 in the middle, but there may be only one facility in the entire state or region who can process that type of material. Since most can’t, it goes in the trash.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/plastic-wars/

elzbardico• 2 years ago

Oh no, the press can't get away that easily with putting all the blame on the industry as if they never jumped on this wagon never caring about doing their due diligence.

Neither can the government.

notfed• 2 years ago

The free market works great most of the time, but is a tragedy when it comes to externalized costs.

The earth is screaming at us to begin a steady, regulated phaseout from plastic, at least in disposable consumer products. The government will need to take action here, and it will happen faster if more consumers stop being so complacent about the problem.

justinclift2• 2 years ago

Re-cycling glass work as advertised though yeah?

So, it's not "all recycling is useless"?

pasttense01• 2 years ago

A problem with recycling glass is that it comes it several different colors.So do you want consumers to put clear glass in one container, green glass in a second container, brown glass in a third container...? And note that window glass is different from bottle glass.

justinclift2• 2 years ago

Seems like the kind of thing that would be better solved at the recycling place itself? ;)

apapapa• 2 years ago

Recycling is a joke from mass polluters. Maybe aluminum is worth recycling but not much else.

Guthur• 2 years ago

Recycle was always suppose to the last resort.

It was Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. But it doesn't take much thought to realise which one had the highest economic incentives.

gipp• 2 years ago

Pretty sure I saw an episode of Penn and Tellers "Bullshit" pointing this out like 20 years ago

RandallBrown2• 2 years ago

Looks like you're right! https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0771119/

amelius• 2 years ago

Others long suspected it.

_ink_• 2 years ago

I am shocked!

boring-alterego• 2 years ago

Hi shocked!, I'm boringalterego.

Yes I felt bad typing that.

andy_ppp• 2 years ago

I had always suspected this to be true and also wondered how it’s allowed to spray cardboard with plastic making that also impossible to recycle.

I’m willing to bet even glass is still difficult to recycle let alone plastic with hundreds of different types and colours.

So now that we know this can we start making changes now? I often wonder what happened to feeding seaweed to cows reduces their greenhouse gas impact from methane… I presume we never actually implement these findings and just carry on boiling ourselves alive.

XorNot6• 2 years ago

Glass is mostly recycled into fill, not new glass.

It's relatively worthless to recycle because it's about as energy intensive to do and sand is cheap.

adrr• 2 years ago

Paper recycling isn't much benefit either. Paper mills are carbon neutral as they power themselves with byproducts(1) of paper production. Add that you're burying carbon when you dump paper in a landfill. Recycle paper isn't carbon neutral. Then factor in the demand of paper leading to more tree farms.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_liquor

tzs2• 2 years ago

What about the sand shortage I've been reading about for several years. E.g.

"Sand shortages push up cost of jam jars and fracking" [1]. (2023)

"The problem with our dwindling sand reserves" [2]. (2023)

"Sand crisis looms as world population surges, U.N. warns" [3]. (2022)

"Why the world is running out of sand" [4]. (2019)

"The World is Running Out of Sand" [5]. (2017)

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/da751338-81a8-45c6-bf2e-acd979801...

[2] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/problem-our-dwin...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/sand-crisis-loo...

[4] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is...

[5] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/world-facing-g...

malfist• 2 years ago

Glass is awful for recycling. It takes nearly as much energy to recycle as it does to make new. And it's raw materials aren't rare

smegger0014• 2 years ago

Glass containers are great for reuse though. For years beer, soda, and milk bottles used to be returned washed and reused. You don't need to melt them down and remold them.

Reduce Reuse Recycle in that order. Big plastic really wants you to ignore the first two.

neRok• 2 years ago

There was a recent article on the seaweed: [Australian red meat industry says it doesn’t need to meet its self-imposed net zero target](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/feb/08/austr...)

This includes feeding cows seaweed based additives, but one of the longest commercial trials failed to meet hoped-for methane cuts and led to the animals eating less food. ... “The commercial viability of those [food additives] means they are not something likely to be widely adopted by the industry.”

So yes, business as usual. Nothing has changed.

A 2022 CSIRO report commissioned by MLA found the industry emitted almost two-thirds the volume of greenhouse gases in 2020 compared with a 2005 baseline. But it said the reported reductions have been driven by a decrease in land clearing and an increase in forest regrowth, as recorded by Australia’s national carbon accounting system. An analysis by the University of Queensland said the NCAS may be grossly under-reporting land clearing rates.

para_parolu• 2 years ago

I bring my milk bottle to a farm. They wash it, fill with milk and sell again.

JohnMakin2• 2 years ago

Even single-use items like plastic forks/spoons that typically come wrapped in a ton of plastic these days, it's everywhere. In a typical delivery order they'll give you several of these even if you don't ask for them. CA tried to reduce single use plastic bag waste by mandating the 10c surcharge and "sturdy" bags, but now you just added a meaningless cost to the consumer who's going to largely use the bags in the exact same manner as before, but now they're even HEAVIER plastic.

It's just a mess.

ComputerGuru2• 2 years ago

The western concept of "dirty" has contributed a lot to waste. In certain other cultures, human hands are considered to be clean (with the onus being on the handler to make sure their hands are, in fact, clean) and it's quite OK to touch something someone else will touch with their bare skin (or even eat from).

It's not even a rational obsession with zero human contact. A (true) chef is not expected to cook with gloves on. His hands are going to be all over your food while he's in the back. Chefs probably will taste something out of the pot to see if it's coming along ok. We know this (though perhaps try to avoid thinking about it). We'll eat nasty hotdogs at the ball game that have been handed to you down the bleachers by eight pairs of hands, but insist that our plastic cutlery come wrapped in further plastic.

mattmaroon7• 2 years ago

That hot dog is wrapped in foil and probably was prepared by someone wearing gloves though. Health depts around the country are more and more insisting on glove wearing for basically everything, though that has its own problems and is debatably less sanitary in certain ways.

Health depts are particularly obsessed with utensils too. The plastic is because of all of the hands that might be reaching into wherever they are if they're self-serve, if they're dropped, etc.

someotherperson• 2 years ago

Western culture? What?

Besides some filthy cultures in the East, the majority of Eastern cultures have cleanliness even baked into their faith affecting everything from how they shower to how they pray to how they eat.

krisoft• 2 years ago

I don’t think that it is about hands being clean or not clean. The wrapper on a disposable utensil is a kind of tamper evident “seal” attesting that this particular utensil hasn’t been used yet.

dataflow• 2 years ago

I don't think it has to do with cleanliness per se... might be about legal liability? An unopened package tells you that it's there as-is from the manufacturer. It seems more like it's about ensuring the product's integrity through the chain of custody than anything else.

nonethewiser10• 2 years ago

It absolutely is not a western concept. China takes the spirit you describe, but not the gloves or food example, and ramps it up to 10. There was no such thing as a cloth mask in China, for instance. There is also no market for used goods. If its not new its dirty.

And just talking plastic waste in general, East Asia is far and away the biggest polluter.

Tagbert• 2 years ago

Being heavier plastic is good in a couple of ways. It makes them less likely to blow away from containers and get into the environment. They are less likely to float in the ocean looking like the jellyfish that turtles and other animals eat.

there may be other problems, but there are at least those two advantages.

verisimi• 2 years ago

They are less likely to float in the ocean looking like the jellyfish that turtles and other animals eat.

Everyone knows turtles eat straws. Through the nose.

bobthepanda• 2 years ago

At least in Seattle (not sure if this is WA wide) the UberEats et al are actually required to have people opt-in to utensils rather than opt-out.

sspiff• 2 years ago

With regards to the plastic bag surcharge, this is a policy that has largely worked in some parts of Europe as far as I can see.

They charge typically 10c for a single use bag, and 30c for a reusable bag[0] (which is much heavier plastic indeed). And people actually reuse the bags, or bring their own cloth bags, to the supermarket.

Additionally, single use plastics have been mostly banned and I can't recall seeing any (apart from straws, which were banned more recently) in the last 15 years. This was met with some grumbling early on, but people got used to it rather quickly.

[0] To give you an idea about how sturdy these 30c reusable bags are, I routinely use these to transport car parts (like brake disks & calipers, or suspension parts), fluids, power tools, or even lead batteries around.

thedaly• 2 years ago

Anecdotally, this seems to be much less prevalent in the US due to cultural differences. I live in Chicago and their is a 7 cent surcharge for bags. I'd say 1/3 of people actually bring their own even after this has been in place for years.

hnlmorg2• 2 years ago

The heavier plastic means those bags have a longer reusable life. Unlike the thin plastic bags which were often only good for single use yet still takes centuries to breakdown.

As for the plastic bag tax, in other counties which that has been introduced there has been a reduction in the use of new bags. Every culture is different though, so it might not work in CA. But what they’re doing is far from untested.

JohnMakin2• 2 years ago

Longer reusable life also means they stick around for longer when improperly disposed. Think about that for a second.

delfinom• 2 years ago

A chinese takeout by me recently switched from paper bags....insulated plastic bags, complete with that reflective liner...all for the same $12 takeout cost. It's insane but this is in NY.

And many more restaurants are trending torwards "flashier" packaging as part of "branding".

GuB-42• 2 years ago

Single use plastic bags are not really a problem in the amount of plastic they use, these are something like 5 grams. They are actually better in that regard than most reusable bags because it takes a lot of reuses to beat that, often more than their typical lifespan.

Where they are a problem however is that they have a tendency to fly away and end up where you don't want them. In the ocean, in nature, littering the city, they are en eyesore, cause problem with some animals, and end up as microplastics everywhere.

Sturdier, paid-for bags may not result in less plastic being used, but it results in less litter, which is good. And yes, it works. Some people will continuously pay their 10 cents, grumble and throw away their bags, but most will do the smart thing and just reuse their bags.

nonethewiser10• 2 years ago

Now compare to paper bags.

And account for microplastics.

nonethewiser10• 2 years ago

I don’t disagree with you on single use plastics but I think another thing flies under the radar. There is just so much STUFF. Without plastic Id wager people would probably own about 20% of the number of items that they currently do.

al_borland4• 2 years ago

I often think about my grandparent’s house. She never seemed to be missing anything that was needed, and didn’t seem to want for anything, but it never felt like there “stuff” everywhere, like so many homes today. Everything was used and had a purpose, and many things were reused. My grandpa’s workbench was all organized with old glass jars to hold various sizes of nails and screws. These days people buy a plastic organizer and throw the glass jars away.

VagabundoP• 2 years ago

Ireland introduced this bag tax decades ago and it really made a difference, here's some of the details.:

https://ieep.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/IE-Plastic-Bag-Le...

proee• 2 years ago

Can we switch to aluminum and add in a small recycle "deposit" like they do on soda cans? If there is money to be made on the deposit, this creates a strong incentive to recycle the containers.

gs17• 2 years ago

and add in a small recycle "deposit" like they do on soda cans?

I would be happy if we started with just a deposit on every aluminum can all over. Pathetically few states in the US have them.

evrimoztamur• 2 years ago

Recently introduced in the Netherlands, alongside glass and PET bottles. At least in the Amsterdam city centre it's led to a substantial increase in trashcan scavenging. It's sort of a weird tax on beverages for many, but it does keep the stuff out of landfills!

nonethewiser10• 2 years ago

Where it makes sense to switch from plastic to aluminum, id say it makes perfect sense.

gotoeleven• 2 years ago

The plastic industry knew, but not the government or environmental activists shaming everyone into sorting their garbage like a hobo for the past decades? This is the one thing they trusted the oil companies on? Give me a break.

goatlover• 2 years ago

It’s easier to put all the blame on the producer than come up with more effective solutions and messaging. You see this with climate activism all the time.

smegger0014• 2 years ago

the oil gas and coal industries also spread fud about nuclear and funded anti nuclear environmental groups (including but not limited to; Friends of the Earth, Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Greenpeace) starting in the 50s till the present day. So its not the only BS thing environmentalist believed big oil about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement#Fossil_f...

cellularmitosis• 2 years ago

The real problem with having a sham mixed in with non-shams is that I've seen folks develop the attitude of "all recycling is a sham!".

For those not aware, recycling aluminum is absolutely not a sham. It takes about 2x the energy to make new steel than to melt down old steel. For aluminum, that energy difference is 20x!!!

This is why people will actually pay you to recycle aluminum, because running electrolysis through bauxite ore to make new aluminum is incredibly energy expensive.

mattmaroon7• 2 years ago

I think asking whether they pay you or you pay them is probably a great way to guess which is good and which isn't. The cost of recycling something is probably mostly energy (i.e. carbon emissions) as is the cost of manufacturing a replacemement (even the materials cost itself is probably largely a function of energy spent to dig them up and get them to you) so if they pay you, it is saving carbon emissions and if not it isn't. You can get paid for dropping many metals off somewhere, you have to have your city pay to do anything with the plastic. I realize there are other factors but if one needs a quick guess that would be a good way.

If people can wrap their head around the idea that landfills are not dumps and are instead very safe and borderline irrelevant, then the carbon emissions should clearly determine what one recycles.

autoexec2• 2 years ago

If people can wrap their head around the idea that landfills are not dumps and are instead very safe and borderline irrelevant

Yeah... I'm not having an easy time with that one...

https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2020/09/us/september-11-...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5005946/

https://apnews.com/article/health-cancer-st-louis-missouri-1...

https://abc7ny.com/brookhaven-landfill-frank-p-long-intermed...

tzs2• 2 years ago

I think asking whether they pay you or you pay them is probably a great way to guess which is good and which isn't.

I sort of am being paid to put my plastic in my recycling bin. My garbage company charges $47/quarter for a 35 gallon regular bin, and $22/quarter for a 64 gallon recycling bin.

It would require two regular bins to handle everything, which would be $94/quarter, which is more than the $69/quarter that one regular bin plus one recycling bin costs.

estiaan• 2 years ago

I think you’re right in general but in Australia and I think some other places as well we have a 10c refund on plastic bottles made out of PET (Also glass and aluminium) Most of our PET bottles, for stuff like soft drinks is now also made partially out of recycled plastic, many are made out of 100% recycled PET

If I understand correctly this is only economical because there is this whole system where all plastic soft drink bottles are made of PET, and so easily identifiable as PET and to get the refund you have to take it to a collection point where the only plastic entering the system are these bottles.

Dalewyn2• 2 years ago

In my locale, throwing aluminum cans in the recycle bin earns me a disparagement from my garbage/recycling company and maybe even threats to cancel my service. The only thing accepted in the bin is relatively clean paper materials.

I have to take the cans down to the recycling center and throw them one by one into some machine and maybe they'll get recycled. Any compensation I might get is from the state, which is basically a dime for a can.

At that point I'm just going to throw them all in the trash, not worth my time nor fuel to drive down.

uxp100• 2 years ago

A dime a can is more than they’re worth. Of course, you already paid that dime when you bought em, but it’s not as if scrap value instead of deposit would make your payout go up.

babblefrog• 2 years ago

Can and bottle deposits are older than the general recycling push, at least where I live. It was more about keeping trash off the road sides than re-use.

nerdbert3• 2 years ago

In my locale the waste management company encourages us to toss aluminum cans in the bin with everything else except for glass and paper. They use powerful magnets and eddy current sorters to separate them from the rest of the stream.

iszomer• 2 years ago

iirc. NurdRage had a video showing soda cans aren't made completely of aluminum and that there is still a plastic coating lining the interior.

zx80804• 2 years ago

which is basically a dime for a can.

It's your dime, that you've paid. Included in the price. Same thing exists in Sweden for plastic, for example.

Usually such schemes are basically incentives for homeless (or poor) people to clean up streets paid from the can buyers pockets.

andirk• 2 years ago

Because plastic isn't very recyclable, recycling is therefore a government scam to control the masses, according to John Stossel https://youtu.be/NLkfpjJoNkA?si=C-PEyGnk4M109WuP&t=333 . He clowns the idea of reusing a plastic container as making people "do things they don't want to do"? What??

The whole segment is so pro Capitalism that it is anti caring about the Earth at all. The message could have more easily been "We were fooled by Big Plastic for corporate profits".

skidd03• 2 years ago

Pro capitalism is not inherently anti environmentalism. See PERC for some info on free market environmentalism: https://www.perc.org/about/free-market-environmentalism/

dboreham• 2 years ago

Surely it's a petrochemical industry scam not a government scam? The government only administers it (and hence are also being scammed).

nonethewiser10• 2 years ago

I dont know what all he says, but recycling plastic absolutely is not cost effective and it cant be reused for most purposes. And to top it off, we’re now finding all sorts of bad news about microplastics which are exacerbated by recycling them (heating, shredding, etc.)

jltsiren• 2 years ago

I think this problem mostly exists in places where people have a single recycling bin. If each type of material is collected separately, it's easy to establish when recycling makes sense. And then you can also create incentives for using packaging materials that can be recycled.

xp846• 2 years ago

Agreed, the single stream is the biggest joke ever. Like, what kind of recycling can you really do with paper covered in food drippings from yogurt containers, food and beverage cans, etc. And what's the exact process for washing those plastic containers just caked in food? And given that they're commingled on the scale of entire buildings or residential blocks, do people really believe that 100% of such large numbers of people meticulously wash their garbage? Personally I would just recycle aluminum and that's it. Everything else is just a roundabout trip to the landfill in the current setup.

jacquesm3• 2 years ago

When I was a kid almost everything was recycled. People took your metals, glass, paper, peelings, wood and so on off your hands and frequently paid for it. Now you have to do the sorting yourself and you have to pay for the privilege. The large conglomerates that then take your pre-sorted scrap sell this for the market rate. And they're sitting pretty on decades long contracts with municipalities.

zx80804• 2 years ago

Is it because of a total municipalities corruption and the monopoly of those conglomerates?

hn_throwaway_99• 2 years ago

This is the opposite of my experience. When I was a kid (80s and 90s) every place I lived made you separate your recyclables. It's only been relatively recently (maybe 10ish years or so?) that I've seen single-stream recycling become the norm. I'd also point out that a ton of plastics recycling and e-waste was never really recycled - we just shipped it to China to sort-of-recycle it, but they stopped being the world's dumping ground a few years ago.

nonethewiser10• 2 years ago

I think its less anti-competitive corporations and more that recycling most things just isnt cost effective. I find it hard to believe someone in the supply chain is making a killing by amassing large quantities of cheap plastic or lithium batteries.

calvinmorrison2• 2 years ago

It its a 20x differential surely there would be demand to purchase it from the end user instead of fining them for not sorting properly?

its-summertime• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container-deposit_legislation

gizmo6862• 2 years ago

There is. A quick Google search found several companies near me who will by scrap metal off of me.

The problem is that a pound of aluminum goes for about $0.45.

That does not come close for paying for a weekly curbside pickup service, which is what most individuals use for recycling.

Heck, they probably wouldn't even take an unsorted collection of "recyclables". The company I am looking at drops the price for unspecified "dirty" aluminum to $0.25 per pound.

dghlsakjg4• 2 years ago

I’ve never lived anywhere in North America where scrap merchants wouldn’t buy aluminum by the pound or steel by the ton.

aardvarkr• 2 years ago

Aluminum can also be recycled an infinite number of times, unlike other materials.

mattmaroon7• 2 years ago

It wasn't a secret. Penn and Teller did an episode of Bullshit on it in 2004 which itself was based on an older study showing that recycling almost everthing is bad for the environment. It's been public knowledge for just as long that most of it was going on a boat to China.

ericmcer• 2 years ago

This gave me a flashback to a public speaking class in college back in... 2006ish. I gave a speech about how recycling was bullshit and a waste of time. It was very poorly received haha.

GolfPopper2• 2 years ago

Plastic recycling was marketed with the goal of getting consumers to keep using plastic. In that respect, it worked perfectly.

Spivak• 2 years ago

There's got to be more to this theory because it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense on the surface. There aren't that many instances where consumers are given a choice about the plastic content of the products they buy or the packaging they come in. And consumers that can afford to pay more to avoid plastic seem to do so, not for any environmental reason but because wood, metal, glass, cotton are perceived as higher quality.

It doesn't really seem that consumers as the end buyers of goods need to be convinced when we're mostly takers of goods.

garbagewoman• 2 years ago

It increases consumer acceptance of plastic goods. If plastic bottles were correctly labeled as garbage, consumers would feel more guilt buying them

brikym5• 2 years ago

It makes a lot of sense. Corporations make more money the more junk they produce. If you have 10 minutes I recommend watching this video about how the lobby groups invented the whole idea of recycling plastic with the little numbered resin identification code that looks like a recycling symbol. https://youtu.be/PJnJ8mK3Q3g

GolfPopper2• 2 years ago

In the mid-1970s, the growing environmental movement tried hard to tax or ban plastics, especially plastic packaging. The plastics industry responded by promoting recycling purely for its public-relations value. It was never economical, and often isn't even practical, even today.

I.e. An Exxon VP in 1994: "We are committed to the activities, but not committed to the results." [1]

1. https://www.opb.org/article/2024/02/16/plastic-recycling-was...

Also see: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...

uSoldering• 2 years ago

If anyone is feeling doom and gloom, the field of plastic pyrolysis looks promising. It will require processing similar in scale to manufacturing hydrocarbons, but there is still hope.

kazinator3• 2 years ago

However, it is still better to recycle plastic at home than throw it away.

After acknowledging that recycling is a scam, you cannot introduce a statement like this without a lot of careful justification.

If everything previously in the article is true (which it is) it is not better to recycle plastic at home than to throw it away: it is approximately equivalent.

Your recycle bin ends up shipped somewhere halfway around the world, where most of goes into a landfill.

hbosch• 2 years ago

It's not that recycling plastic is 100% a "sham". Recycled plastic is real, and products made from recycled plastic are real. The "sham" is that recycling plastic is not efficient. Still marginally better than straight into a landfill.

kazinator3• 2 years ago

Yes; recycling is really downcycling.

Firstly, there are too many plastics mixed together (and the article touches on that).

There is also the issue that even if you have waste that is made exactly of one kind of plastic, and it's the right one for some application, recycling works by chopping plastic into pieces. This chopping shortens the long-chain molecules that give the plastic some of its important qualities like impact strength. The resulting plastic is inferior to the original, even if pure and homogeneous.

PaulDavisThe1st• 2 years ago

The 100% is doing a lot of work there.

If 85% of the plastic I deliver into my county's recycling program ends up in a landfill, I would consider that basically a sham.

If 15% of that plastic ends up in a landfill, that's not a sham (though there should be some openness about what is really going on).

berniedurfee• 2 years ago

I was thinking the same thing. The article didn’t go into what percent is actually recycled vs landfilled.

I’d hate for this movement to push people to simply skip the recycling step.

The narrative that recycling plastics is never effective isn’t accurate and drives demand for more plastic manufacturing as stocks of recyclable plastics diminish.

Huh, wonder who started this rumor anyway?

al_borland4• 2 years ago

And landfill if it’s lucky. For a long time US “recycled” plastics went to China where they were burned. When they had to clean up the air pollution for the Olympics they stopped doing this, so the plastic was just shipped somewhere else, Malaysia if I remember correctly. (There is an Netflix documentary about it)

A local landfill is dramatically better than shipping it on a giant freighter halfway around the world to be set on fire.

The best option seems to be to reject single use plastics as much as possible. Force companies to make changes if they want to make sales.

Knowing that this whole thing was a scam (which has been known for quite a while) should push governments to take action. Not only against a the plastics industry, but also to push companies to move way from single use plastics.

Aeolun• 2 years ago

If the plastic stays in use in your house, then you are presumably not buying new plastic products to replace it. How is that equivalent?

kazinator3• 2 years ago

Here is a thought: you never see PET bottles labeled "I used to be a sweater". :)

dougmwne• 2 years ago

I think the real scam is the way recycling shifts the blame and responsibility for sustainability from government and corporations where it rightly rests and onto consumers. Shifting that blame does nothing to improve sustainability, but is great at keeping the issue out of politics and boycotts.

It’s a classic tragedy of the commons situation and our best tool is government regulation of producers.

fwlr• 2 years ago

If recycling was profitable in the main, someone would be auctioning off old landfill sites to mining companies. If it was predicted to be profitable with new technology, someone would be operating landfills while developing that technology. And so on. The fact that it needs consumers to sort recycling for them (in aggregate, this is a large amount of unpaid labor) hints to me that the fundamentals of a profitable enterprise simply don’t exist to be found.

jhaenchen• 2 years ago

That is because this waste is the natural excrement of an exploitative economy that lives in disharmony with its own natural ecosystem.

nonethewiser10• 2 years ago

That’s right. Im not sure how this is controversial. Its a sad reality of plastic.

maxerickson• 2 years ago

Such facilities do exist, dirty and/or wet material recovery facility is the search term you'd want. Most material recovery facilities want a clean input stream though.

It's not particularly lucrative, but it often makes sense for a landfill operator to do material separation, because the combination of selling the separated material and not using the landfill space makes financial sense.

Given that my county landfill is the beneficiary and will either need more tax money or close down and increase my disposal costs, separating the saleable stuff into a clean stream doesn't bother me too much.

_heimdall• 2 years ago

I assume we'll have similar articles a decade or two from now calling out another obvious one, that everyone knew corn ethanol fuel is a farce as well.

The problem with so many of these programs is that you may subsidize an industry but that won't make it more efficient than physics allows for. Politicians love putting their names on expensive programs that sound great and won't prove to be a waste for decades. By then we're all left holding the bag after they've retired or died.

zx80804• 2 years ago

Humans are professionals in misleading other humans for profit.

openrisk• 2 years ago

The "wishcycling" challenge and response of the city of Amsterdam might be relevant. A couple of years ago the dedicated plastic recycling bins were removed and the separation is done centrally.

https://www.uvagreenoffice.nl/post/against-wishcycling-amste...

knowaveragejoe2• 2 years ago

This thread is so filled with doomerism and it's depressing how common this is in seemingly any thread on this site that isn't explicitly about some specific product(and even then!)

So what are we going to do about this? Is recycling as a concept doomed to failure?

andrewstuart• 2 years ago

Plastic SHOULD go into landfill.

We need to stop demonising landfill. I love landfill - it is a focused area to put toxic waste.

There is a massive problem with society's obsession with keeping stuff out of landfill.

Tell me would you rather have waste plastic in the contained area of landfill, or would you rather than plastic was put into roads and leeched into land, air, food, water, people, ground, earth and air as cars and trucks grind it out of the roads.

nonethewiser10• 2 years ago

Its a good point tbh. We are continuing to learn about the harms of plastic and dividing and heating them are always central in this equation. Plastic roads just sound like a recipe for microplastic runoff.

brikym5• 2 years ago

That’s a fair point. I cringe when I see some dumb invention like turning plastic junk into toxic bricks. But even better would be to actually re-use the packaging like old school beer bottles and milk bottles. Industry has no problem standardizing containers when it suits them like shipping containers, kegs and pallets. Greenwashing is the worst option of all as you waste your time on things that don’t work.

irrational• 2 years ago

Now I'm wondering about those states that charge a fee when you buy a plastic bottle to encourage you to recycle it to get your nickel or dime back. Should those fees be dropped?

macNchz• 2 years ago

Those deposits are mostly about creating an incentive not to litter, or for someone else to come clean up your litter.

Isamu• 2 years ago

I guess I assumed that recycling advocacy groups did some due diligence, dug a bit deeper, took the trouble to find out how everything was going. And now we are claiming that nobody checked. The plastics industry was lying, and everybody just believed them and took it at face value. Because we all believe what industries say.

tpmoney• 2 years ago

The thing is, everybody didn't "just believe" them. What I find really weird about this moment in time is how the roles appear to have been flipped. I'm old enough to remember when it was the right wing / business / pro-capitalism side of US politics calling out recycling as big sham (e.g. the Penn and Teller BS episode on recycling was 2004, though how "right wing" you consider that depends on your view of libertarian politics). So it's sort of weird to me to watch the modern story about how recycling was a lie propagated by big business and its supporters on the innocent American people, and the predictable reactionary response from the right wing reflexively defending what they were previously decrying. We finally have something everyone agrees on and yet we're still arguing about it. Probably because like most political topics its a proxy for a different discussion entirely. Just a weird moment in time.

NoblePublius• 2 years ago

Yes the culprits are industry and not local government who giggled with piggish glee to set up meaningless and costly recycling and compliance regimes which generated them billions

AlienRobot• 2 years ago

I wish "reuse" had more focus than "recycle" since it's so much more feasible. You don't need science to do reuse. You just need logistics.

For example, if more people bought used goods instead of brand new ones, less goods would need be produced in first place, which would be great for humanity in general.

al_borland4• 2 years ago

And “reduce” should get even more focus than that. People don’t need most of the garbage they buy. Of course, that would be bad for the economy, so we don’t talk about that anymore.

Anything reused or recycled will at some point become waste, but if it isn’t produced in the first place, that’s ideal. It obviously won’t work for everything, but it can work for a significant amount of things. The entirety of Temu and Shein would be a good start.

sema4hacker• 2 years ago

Recycling saves me money because I pay monthly for my garbage service. The 64 gallon recycle can is free, but the 32 gallon garbage can has a fee. Without the free recycle can into which goes all the cans and paper waste I generate, I'd have to get a 64 gallon garbage can and pay more each month.

DarkmSparks• 2 years ago

"not an economically viable solution"

It damn well is if landfill and dumping it in the ocean was suitably charged/fined.

charge the sobs $100,000 per kilogram dumped in landfill or the ocean and recycling every gram will be economical.

romusha• 2 years ago

I wonder how many green initiatives turns out to be a farce, synthetic meat? Fuel cell? We'll probably hear the same thing for lithium-based EV and wind turbines

bondolo2• 2 years ago

Time for an excise tax on packaging material based on how long it takes on average to decay to base elements.

sircastor• 2 years ago

The same with sugar

The same with lead

The same with Tobacco

They always know, and they will always value their profit over you and your making an informed decision.

bondolo2• 2 years ago

It is pat time to impose an excise tax on all packaging based on how long it takes to decay to base elements. Time until naturally “recycled” shouldn’t be a cost you can externalize. The tax owed can be reduced when recycling actually occurs, essentially passing on the difference to the recycler.

reader_x• 2 years ago

How much plastic in the ocean gyres might be our supposedly recycled plastic?

Has anyone audited this by putting a few GPS-tracked plastic bottles into the recycling stream to see how many went to landfills or incinerators vs. being dumped in the ocean on the way to alleged recycling?

Plastics producers deceived public about recycling, report reveals

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