The truth about soft plastic recycling points at supermarkets

https://www.everydayplastic.org/softplastic

by Kaibeezy • 1 year ago

127 163 1 year ago

everydayplastic.org

biofox• 1 year ago

How is turning it into fuel pellets not recycling? It's giving it a second life, rather than going into a landfill.

XorNot• 1 year ago

Sending it to landfill would produce a lot less CO2.

actionfromafar• 1 year ago

If we are going to phase out fossils, we might just as well as phase out plastics last. (By burning it.) It the meantime, figure out how to make plastic less toxic and also how to use less of it.

mike-the-mikado• 1 year ago

That assumes that it does not decay in the landfill. Even if that is true today, I don't think we can rule out the evolution of bacteria etc. (possibly bio-engineered) to feed on plastics.

sparsely2• 1 year ago

The energy produced from burning it would come from somewhere else, which on average won't be 0 CO2 either.

aloha2436• 1 year ago

It's barely one step removed from just being burned in an incinerator, it's maybe recycling in a very strict sense but it's definitely misleading to say that.

throw310822• 1 year ago

Well, plastic came from the underground (as oil) and to the underground should return, as much as possible. You could argue that when plastic waste is not burned, a corresponding amount of fossil fuels are extracted from the underground to make up the difference, but I think the existence of renewable energy sources makes the replacement ratio (waste plastic to new fossil fuels) much less than 1 to 1.

meindnoch4• 1 year ago

I'm OK with burning it in power plants. Polyethylene has 4-5x higher energy content than lignite.

Instead of digging up lignite to burn, and putting plastic in the ground as landfill, just burn the plastic and leave the lignite in the ground. Easy peasy.

voidUpdate2• 1 year ago

Sure, you just need to make sure that wherever it's being burned isn't just sending the byproducts into the air, because when you burn plastic, you get a lot of crap coming off it from incomplete combustion which isn't particularly healthy

meindnoch4• 1 year ago

That's not true when burning in a power plant. Incomplete combustion is caused by insufficient airflow.

tokai• 1 year ago

Thats a solved issue.

GeoAtreides3• 1 year ago

Surely the choice is not only between digging up lignite and putting plastic in the ground. We can also leave the lignite alone, put the plastic in the landfill, and not increase the concentration of CO2 in the air.

IAmBroom4• 1 year ago

Yes, we could stop using fossil fuels.

But that isn't going to happen.

Edit: Well, not voluntarily.

seanalltogether• 1 year ago

Didn't Penn and Teller do a video about this 20 years ago showing that glass and metal cans are the only real recyclable products? I'm guessing not much has changed since then.

ekianjo2• 1 year ago

Metal cans also contain a plastic layer inside.

sevensor• 1 year ago

I imagine they burn it off along with the food residues when they go to melt the can.

cassianoleal4• 1 year ago

There's no escape, is there? I'm not even talking about recycling at this point. If metal cans are plastic-lined inside, is there any way to avoid microplastics in drinks? I guess glass, but that's exceedingly rare and some drinks don't have a glass option where I live. Mostly it's sugary soda that does, or alcoholic beverages.

PaulDavisThe1st• 1 year ago

And in the USA, at least, glass containers that could be re-used are instead crushed and then either (a) used to create new glass, significantly more energetically costly than re-use OR (b) used for applications like asphalt.

sroussey2• 1 year ago

Erewhon is a grocery store in LA and makes its own sauces. You return the bottles back to the store and they reuse them.

Reminds me of my childhood when a milkman delivered milk to your home in bottles and you washed and left the old bottles for him to pick up. (Plus, as a kid, you would tease your friends that the milkman was your real father).

SoftTalker• 1 year ago

Cardboard and paper are also recyclable.

IAmBroom4• 1 year ago

Theoretically, but not in practice.

wkat424210• 1 year ago

And even glass is a problem because people don't just throw bottles in it but also broken windows, vases etc. Those things are made of different types of glass than the bottles and too much mix means the batch needs to be discarded.

comrade1234• 1 year ago

Only PET can be recycled. Here in Zurich all other plastic is incinerated to produce power and the CO2 captured and sent to greenhouses and also sold to soda bottlers.

tonyedgecombe• 1 year ago

They do say that 30% of it is "downcycled" into lower grade products. That sounds like a win to me (although obviously not completely circular).

scotty792• 1 year ago

If you don't to cram it back underground and it has no other use then burning it (cleanly I hope) is the next best thing.

worldsayshi2• 1 year ago

I can only assume that burning fossil fuel represent an order of magnitude bigger problem than burning soft plastic. So until we have phased out fossil fuels it seems relatively unproblematic to burn plastic?

preinheimer• 1 year ago

I think it’s a problem to lie to people about what’s happening with their “recycled” goods.

worldsayshi2• 1 year ago

Sure it's a lie which is bad, but collecting soft plastic separately may still be a net win for society so how do we give a simple enough explanation for the nuance?

sparsely2• 1 year ago

Yeah, this seems fine to me. I believe my general waste is also incinerated though so I wish they'd encourage adding the soft plastics to that to simplify recycling - it might lead to more hard plastics being recycled!

PlunderBunny7• 1 year ago

I think the results of soft plastic recycling are highly dependant on the country doing it. In New Zealand, soft plastics are mostly recycled into fence posts, which last 50+ years and are every bit as good (or better) than treated timber [0].

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t reduce our soft plastic use, but - like all recycling - you need to do a bit of research and think about it, instead of adopting a “recycling is good”/“recycling is a myth” mentality.

0. https://www.futurepost.co.nz/

jemmyw• 1 year ago

Just a clarification: in NZ most soft plastics are sent to landfill, regardless of what happens to most of the plastic that is actually recycled. We're pretty bad for general recycling and really bad for plastic recycling. Most soft plastics here are from agriculture so it's probably a more solvable problem than if it was weighted towards domestic waste, but farming often manages to lobby their way out of regulation.

PlunderBunny7• 1 year ago

Sorry - yes. What I meant to say was "most soft plastics that are recycled, are recycled into fence posts".

meindnoch4• 1 year ago

which last 50+ years

So it takes 50+ years for UV, rain and wind to turn it into microplastic mush? Sounds like a great product!

PlunderBunny7• 1 year ago

No one (including the manufacturer) knows how long it will last - 50 years is as far as accelerated aging can test to. You're assuming they split or break apart. The posts themselves are recyclable, so maybe in 50 years someone can pull them out of the ground and recycle them?

idoubtit• 1 year ago

Plastic recycling is a drop of water in an ocean of plastic.

In New Zealand, soft plastics are mostly recycled into fence posts

The latest (2025-01) official report[^1] I could found states that the recycling of plastics in NZ is poorly known. On page 135, it mentions the report "OPMCSA plastics research (2019)" as the reference in the domain.

According to that 2019 study[^2], the plastics used each year weight more than 700k t. Much more, because this ignores packaged imports, construction and agriculture. 31% of plastics imported are LDPE (so around 170k t), which is mainly used for producing soft plastics.

Out of those 600+k t/year, 380k t go to landfill waste, and 45k t are collected for recycling. Assuming generously that 50% of those intended for recycling are actually recycled, I'd estimate that 1.7 to 3% of the yearly NZ plastics are recycled.

Here's a quote about soft plastics:

    In 2017, 365 tonnes of soft plastics were recycled – but a lack of recycling market for these plastics meant that in the following year, plastic was stockpiled whilst new onshore markets were developed and a percentage of non-conforming plastic was landfilled.

365 t of soft plastics recycled out of 170k t of LDPE!

[^1]: https://environment.govt.nz/assets/publications/New-Zealand-...

[^2]: https://www.pmcsa.ac.nz/topics/rethinking-plastics/quantifyi...

PlunderBunny7• 1 year ago

My wording was poor - I meant to write "most soft plastics that were recycled, were recycled into fence posts". Not that most soft plastic was recycled.

I'm not disagreeing with any of what you have posted.

For reference, the 52 posts that I have on my property are constructed from more milk bottles and soft plastic than I will ever consume in my lifetime. It's a drop in the bucket, but it's significant to me.

ewheeler• 1 year ago

Yes, very dependent on the market. In some East African markets that don't have much history of recycling, Kubik [0] has a neat model of employing folks to recover plastic waste from landfills which are then used to creating building materials

0. https://www.buildkubik.com/

kristjank• 1 year ago

If it's burnt properly, it provides useful energy and is removed from the environment to a degree that's better than the landfill. The rest is NGO bikeshedding drivel I don't really care about.

barbazoo10• 1 year ago

If you capture the emissions sure. I doubt that’s done though.

chimprich• 1 year ago

From the article: "70% of the soft plastic that reached a known destination was burnt, not recycled".

That doesn't seem too bad. That means 30% got recycled, which is more than I expected given the general cynicism around plastic recycling. 30% definitely seems worthwhile.

For the plastic that got incinerated, it is presumably more efficient to burn products for energy reclamation that are already separated by type.

Having these recycling pathways set up is a necessary step towards improving recycling rates. We should be able to improve on that 30% over time.

BlackFly• 1 year ago

What fraction of all total soft plastic is collected by supermarket take back schemes compared to road side curb collection (where only 10% of municipalities "support" its recycling)?

I have a strong prior that they can achieve such high numbers only because they only capture a small amount of the total amount of soft plastic waste. If they had to deal with it all there wouldn't be enough demand to burn or recycle and it would end up buried. This is somewhat supported by the fact that by official definitions supermarket take back schemes are not counted in official recyclability numbers:

Soft plastic collected via supermarket collection points does not satisfy this definition [of working at scale] and therefore was not counted towards WRAP’s UK Plastics Pact recyclability target.

masfuerte• 1 year ago

Supermarkets collect carrier bags and bread bags. Road side collection doesn't, at least not anywhere I've lived. I'd guess that close to 100% of the soft plastic collected is collected by supermarkets.

ars4• 1 year ago

That's even better than you describe, it means that 70% is burned which is even better than recycled, and more than I expected.

IAmBroom4• 1 year ago

How better? It contributes to global warming and air pollution directly.

GeoAtreides3• 1 year ago

In a world of climate change, best bet is too keep the carbon out of the air. That's why the landfill is the best place for plastic, where it won't bother anyone and definitely won't contribute to increasing the global average temperature.

alwa2• 1 year ago

In fuel pellet form, isn’t it a more-or-less direct substitute for oil or coal that would have been burned anyway? So until the grid fully eliminates other petroleum products from the mix, isn’t this more or less a similar carbon cost, with the added benefit of less landfill impact?

What’s wrong with recycling the plastic into energy?

blacksmith_tb• 1 year ago

I generally agree - unless you have access to recycling that will actually reclaim the plastic to make other plastic things (like LDPE/HDPE tubs into plastic lumber, or better yet actually circular recycling like PETE clamshells chipped up to be made into more clamshells). That also keeps the carbon locked up, and doesn't require more oil to make virgin plastic for the same jobs.

absurdo• 1 year ago

This is more or less what SimCity tried to teach us all along, wasn’t it?

lm28469• 1 year ago

I mean if you frame it like that sure. I'd frame it like: we extract dino juice that's hundred millions of years in the making, process the shit out of it to make an item that will be used once, and which we probably could get by without, then burn it

kevin_thibedeau• 1 year ago

It's tree fern juice that exists today because fungi weren't around to turn it into CO2 back then.

bagacrap• 1 year ago

No, the other 30% was "down cycled". 0% were recycled into something that had as much value as the original material.

advisedwang• 1 year ago

Yes, but it's not reasonable to expect these bags to be recycled in the same value level - the bags are dyed, contaminated with additives and other recyclables etc. Plus, if they are recycled into fabrics that prevent the use of virgin plastics of fabrics, it still has reduce eco footprint vs landfill or incineration.

All of which to say is "downcycled" is still better than nothing. Although, in a sense the real nothing - not having a wasted bag in the first place - would be the real solution.

James_K• 1 year ago

I was expecting it to end up in landfill, so it getting burned was a pleasant surprise.

lotophage• 1 year ago

In Australia a company called REDcycle supposedly recycled soft plastics from all the major supermarkets. After a decade or so operating the business collapsed and it was discovered that they had about 11,000 tonnes of the stuff stockpiled in 40+ warehouses across the country because they hadn't figured out how to recycle it.

mariusor3• 1 year ago

And how is that a bad thing?

Instead of being in a landfill and leaching microplastics it's all bundled up and contained. I don't really understand this defeatist attitude where if something is not perfect we should drop it all together. From my point of view any effort at sorting trash is beneficial to the ecosystem because even if we don't have a method to deal with the problem now, we can wait a generation or two for technology to improve.

BobaFloutist• 1 year ago

It's bad because they were committing fraud.

GuB-42• 1 year ago

The costs of storing more and more plastics will only increase, storage is cheap at first, and that's why they did that, and when it starts getting expensive, they abandon ship. It is either classic fraud or incompetence.

These plastics will have to be dealt with eventually, recycling, burning or burying them. Waiting is just a waste of money. If we wait "a generation of two", we will be drowning in warehouses full of plastics like over-ground, inadequate and expensive landfills.

These are plastics, not nuclear waste. The "wait and see" strategy works for nuclear waste works because such waste is compact, hazardous and potentially very valuable. It also decays naturally, so the simple act of waiting makes it less hazardous. Plastic waste is the opposite of that: bulky, relatively harmless, mostly worthless, and it becomes worse as it degrades.

michaelt2• 1 year ago

Some cynics think the plastic industry supports sham “recycling” efforts that don’t actually work, in order to alleviate customer guilt and forestall a ban or mandatory reformulation.

The bad thing, in this line of thought, is that we’re being lied to and taken for fools. Tricked into buying things we’re promised are recyclable when they’re not.

andrewstuart2• 1 year ago

> Instead of being in a landfill and leaching microplastics

I want plastic to be in landfill leaching microplastics.

The idea of storing all waste plastic in warehouses is impractical, it has to go somewhere.

Where do you want it leached to, if not into the contained area of a landfill? Do you want it somewhere in the environment?

And I’m pretty sure landfills are toxic anyway.

wkat424210• 1 year ago

I don't really understand this defeatist attitude where if something is not perfect we should drop it all together.

No it shouldn't be dropped. But it certainly should be fixed. It's a bit disrespectful to the consumer to make them drag their plastic back to the store only for them to end up in the same place as their trash bin. That's the kind of thing that creates environmental apathy. Which makes it harder to drive change. People don't like being lied to.

guidedlight• 1 year ago

It’s a shame about Redcycle.

However since then many small cycle plastic to oil (Pyrolysis) plants have popped up, which are set to scale up. This reclaimed oil will be used to create new plastic.

Australia is targeting 50% recycled content in its packaging by this year.

ninalanyon2• 1 year ago

I think that the focus on technological solutions is beside the point. What would accelerate reduction in use and an increase in recycling would be a total ban on exports of used plastic and a ban on packaging plastic from non-renewable sources. This should also cover clothing.

The technology required can be left to the industry once it becomes impossible for them to hand off the responsibility to foreign and unregulated third parties.

barbazoo10• 1 year ago

But won’t that make all the things more expensive that our lifestyle depends on? /s

Molitor5901• 1 year ago

Around 2015 China stopped buying much of the worlds' plastic refuse which caused most municipal waste recycling programs in America to shut down. Since then it's sort of just been thrown away because plastic is really hard to recycle into something equally useful, in a way that does not just add more pollution. Even LEGO won't use recycled plastic.

The solution is to move away as much as possible from disposable, and most forms of consumer and retail plastic. It has invaluable uses, but there is simply too much and it's polluting faster than we can clean it.

c22• 1 year ago

LEGO is well known for using high quality extremely durable and long lasting plastic in their products so saying even LEGO doesn't use recycled plastics seems painfully apparent. There are other children's toy brands that do use recycled plastics.

thefz• 1 year ago

Just stop producing it.

cynicalsecurity• 1 year ago

How. People oppose even paper straws. Most of the food can be and should be stripped of usage of plastic, but then there also is medical usage.

tehjoker• 1 year ago

Medical usage is often necessary. Why not just start with things that are completely extraneous, like packaging, bottles, etc.

wkat424210• 1 year ago

Yes I oppose paper straws because they get soggy quickly, still contain plastic and of a much more dangerous type (PFAS).

The old plastic straws hardly shed while drinking. The new ones the paper gets soggy and it disintegrates and leaves the pfas coating mixed into your drink. Nice... :X

Caelus9• 1 year ago

As an ordinary person, what we can do is try to reduce our use of single use plastics as much as possible, but single use plastics are everywhere in daily life, which can indeed be frustrating.

pfdietz2• 1 year ago

An intermediate step between recycling and combustion would be disassembling the plastics back to useful feedstocks, potentially including monomers of the plastics involved.

This (and combustion) would be easier if the plastics were not chlorinated, I think. So maybe focus on elimination of PVC and the like from the waste stream?

ninalanyon2• 1 year ago

This article is mostly about soft plastics used for food packaging, surely little to none of that is PVC. It least here in Norway most such plastic is low density polythene and PET, neither of which are chlorinated. Most PET bottles are separated from general waste because bottles have a deposit on them here.

pfdietz2• 1 year ago

I was going to point to Saran Wrap, but it was changed from polyvinylidene chloride to polyethylene in 2004.

olejorgenb• 1 year ago

This is pyrolysis based recycling (also called chemical recycling I think). My impression is that it's fairly energy intensive and can still be hard to purify. Some companies claim to be able to to it relatively effective. https://www.quantafuel.com/ claims to have a catalyst which improves the efficiency for instance. They are now privately owned and the amount of news they publish has become limited. This makes me believe they still struggle to make optimize the process.

Scramblejams3• 1 year ago

There’s too much toxic flame retardant in recycled plastic, apparently.[0]

So until we can guarantee that recycled plastics don’t end up in contact with food, or the plastic that does doesn’t contain nasty chemicals, it’s probably safer to bury the stuff.

[0] https://share.upmc.com/2025/03/black-plastic-cookware/

ars4• 1 year ago

That research was partly debunked. The authors made several errors.

Some of the work is still true, but the final conclusion about black plastic is not.

Scramblejams3• 1 year ago

The link I provided mentions a correction they made (where they undercalculated the EPA's reference dose of decaBDE by a factor of ten), but the study authors maintain the overall conclusion is sound. And I'd rather have zero decaBDE in my breakfast than what the EPA says is okay, whatever my cookware's color might be.

I've searched around for other corrections or challenges but haven't found any. Got a link?

sroussey2• 1 year ago

Personally, I wish they would get rid of these recycle centers in grocery centers. They take up space, stink, and replicate recycle bins at every home.

wffurr• 1 year ago

This is about plastic bags, which no municipal curbside recycling takes.

stevep98• 1 year ago

Trex makes composite decking planks from recycled shopping bags. Seems like a perfect use for the material. Its durable. It doesn’t have to be sterile or pure. Apparently 100,000 bags will go into a typical deck.

https://nextrex.com/

Having said that I don’t see what’s wrong with incineration if it’s done correctly. It’s not open pit burning, with waste gases going into the environment. It’s high temperature, with additional gas and oxygen to promote more complete burning. And waste gases are filtered.

vosper2• 1 year ago

Seems like a perfect use for the material.

Provided they don’t get too much sun, because those dense plastic planks get much hotter than wood (I’ve measured 65C on mine). A deck is not much good if you can’t stand on it.

Also they’re expensive and don’t look very good.

teeray2• 1 year ago

Which is also why it’s critical that they be installed with a gap between the boards (Kreg makes a useful set of spacers and drill jig to hide the screws). Otherwise expansion will destroy the deck.

HelloMcFly• 1 year ago

I think some of the Trex looks pretty good, they're definitely not all the same. If you do go this route then you will need an outdoor rug on the planks if it gets direct sun though. They're just way too hot otherwise, as you've stated. But throw a nice outdoor rug down and it's problems solved.

foxglacier• 1 year ago

CO2 is a major waste gas which can't be filtered. That's one problem with incinerating plastic waste. Being buried in a landfill, that CO2 wouldn't be released. The other environmental problem is that it's not being reused so more virgin plastic has to be produced, and that production process releases CO2.

HenryBemis• 1 year ago

A long time ago (2? years back) I remember a guy on Joe Rogan speaking how 'the best case scenario' is to burn that plastic. I did some reading about the fact, spoke with a guy that I knew that owns a "recycling factory" and I was 'convinced' that realistically this is (and should be) happening.

We know that now 'they' lied to us and most plastic is NOT recyclable, and they did so only to continue the oil business.

Seeing the map (Finland, Turkey, France), and in the past having garbage shipped all over the planet, do people calculate the "carbon tax" to move X tonnes to another country? The total cost of extract the energy from (the) earth (petrol for ships, fuel for planes, etc.)? Would it be better to use modern filters (as others wrote in comments) and burn them at the place of production?

altusbrown2• 1 year ago

Landfilling is even better.

barbazoo10• 1 year ago

Well if a guy on Joe Rogan says it it must be true.

jon_adler• 1 year ago

I think the problem with exporting plastic waste is the poor environmental standards at the destination rather than the shipping. The containers usually come laden with goods from Asia and might otherwise be returned empty (aka repositioning or repatriation).

hyperman12• 1 year ago

Afaik the idea of giving plastic back to supermarkets, is to make them give less plastic to us in the first place. In this case, the point is not what percentage is recycled. The point is shrinking the total amount of plastic, i.e. the number to which the percentage is applied. Do they burn 70% of 10 tons or 70% of 1 ton.

So is this happening?

Kaibeezy• 1 year ago

The main point of the linked website seems to be that providing “recycling” collection in supermarkets is basically a fraud to make consumers more comfortable using soft plastics — if it can be recycled, then using more isn’t so worrisome.

hyperman12• 1 year ago

I've wondered about that after reading the article.

In my country, we collect plastics at home (PMD) and it gets picked up bi-weekly in a bag. The PMD system has similar recycling stats as in the article. It is seen as an excuse for shops to declare the plastic waste problem as 'solved' without doing anything, and making consumers responsible.

The shops are fighting tooth and nail against collecting plastics themselves or introducing reusable drink bottles.

What's the UK alternative for collecting at the shop? Collecting at home? Doing nothing?

andrewstuart2• 1 year ago

The safest place for waste plastic is in a landfill.

Landfill is not a demon.

Landfill contains the toxicity.

The obsession with recycling plastic leads to unintended consequences.

For example some countries put waste plastic in roads, where cars and trucks grind it out into microplastic that go into air water food animals dust adults and children. Parts of India require this by law.

The entire concept of recycling plastic is ridiculously false and is perpetuated by the plastic packaging companies so you won’t question the infinite firehose of plastic packaging they are blasting into every part of the earth.

What exactly is all this plastic being recycled into? I certainly hope not food containers. The real answer is “not much”, because there’s zero match between the output of the plastics packaging industry and the “recycling”. Go ahead try to make a list of what could possibly be made from the gagillion tons of new plastic packaging. It’s fiction.

Why are we so desperate to “keep things out of landfill”?

Landfill is where plastic should go.

I personally throw all my plastic waste not in the recycle bin, but in the waste bin, to ensure it goes to landfill, and because I don’t want to be part of the lie that is plastic recycling.

barbazoo10• 1 year ago

You conveniently leave out the negative effect of landfills on people and the environment.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landfill

teeray2• 1 year ago

I don’t understand why we can’t do the propane tank model at grocery stores. Reusable bags that I drop off on the way in, I get some token for N bags so I don’t have to carry them around the store, then I get cleaned bags on the way out (deducted from my credit). If I need more, I buy more immediately and more bags are on my account. Stores could even partner to share bag programs (again, like Blue Rhino).

jjtheblunt• 1 year ago

maybe "cleaned" is too expensive to implement

sokoloff• 1 year ago

We bring our reusable bags in and reuse them ourself. They sit flat in the cart and don’t bother us while shopping.

I wouldn’t want to take a bag that someone else had used and was poorly cleaned, especially given how little trouble it is to just manage and reuse my own (including cleaning them ourself if we spill meat juice or something on them).

A Blue Rhino propane tank just has to hold propane; there’s no need for it to be particularly clean; as a result, I don’t care what tank I get in exchange.

wkat424210• 1 year ago

We actually had this for soda bottles in Holland in the 80s. The bottles were not recycled, they were cleaned and refilled. They were much thicker than current PET bottles to be more durable.

The system worked great, I never understood why they dropped it.

barbazoo10• 1 year ago

That’s a nice idea. Unfortunately this would negatively affect shareholder value so it’s not allowed to be done (fiduciary duty) /s

owenversteeg3• 1 year ago

I didn’t see anyone else bring this up here, but the real issue with plastic recycling is twofold: it is a dead end and recycled plastics shed microplastics like crazy. Other materials, like aluminum, can effectively be infinitely recycled, but plastic cannot; recycled plastic is worse than virgin plastic in every way. It also destroys the environment around us, because recycled plastics are effectively really shitty plastics that shed everywhere.

In short, plastic recycling is a fraud perpetuated by greenwashing initiatives. The only proper thing to do with old plastic is to incinerate it at high temperatures that achieve complete combustion. This is rare though; most plastic is burned at low enough temperatures that it causes pollution.

Great stuff, plastic, huh?

uxjw• 1 year ago

Even if you buy aluminium cans, there's a thin layer of plastic lining to prevent reactions with the metal. I've also noticed lots of paper/cardboard packaging have a plastic coating.

wkat424210• 1 year ago

Yes and in many cases that coating is even PFAS.

andyjohnson0• 1 year ago

I thought it was common knowledge that plastic recycling (including soft plastics) was only ever a way for the plastics industries (and downstream businesses lile food packaging) to keep on pumping out the plastic. And I say this as someone who keeps putting plastics into my domestic recycling here in the UK, and taking soft plastics to the supermarket collection points.

Question: would it be better if I just put it all in the non-recyclables bin?

barbazoo10• 1 year ago

Not common knowledge because it’s not right. Totally depends on the jurisdiction. Where I live the recycling industry is doing a lot better.

The truth about soft plastic recycling points at supermarkets

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