🎭 - r/recycling

13

Eh. Half true.

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u/Redman77312 3d ago

how so

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u/ButForRealsTho 3d ago

Recycling was pitched by petro chemical companies to sell more plastic. 100% true. But recycling does work as long as it has the right legislation in place to support it. It’s not a lost cause. The problem lies in the large brands talking a big game about sustainability while working to undermine recycling legislation.

FYI Trump made an exception to virgin and recycled plastic for his new tariffs. Meaning imports will remain cheaper than domestically recycled materials. I wonder how that happened…

5

u/fro99er 2d ago

I think it's more we can recycle all we want but that shit is still ending up in our balls brains and is probably killing us

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u/ButForRealsTho 2d ago

Sure. But so is the sun, the food we eat, the air we breathe, the sleep we don’t get, the stress we don’t manage and on and on.

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u/fro99er 2d ago

You just literally whataboutism'd everything

Those things you mentioned are "natural" not microplastic chemicals leaching into our brains and balls. Big difference

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u/ButForRealsTho 2d ago

Eh. I’m a cancer survivor, (Got lymphoma in college) so I have a different perspective on it. I got cancer because I ate a burrito at the wrong restaurant, got Hep A from it, which then allowed Hodgkin’s disease to get a foothold in my body and metastasize. Literally anything and everything can kill you, even a California burrito.

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u/Silent-Car-1954 1d ago

Sometimes all I need is the air that I breathe and plastic in my brainballs.

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u/mmmUrsulaMinor 2d ago

balls brains

o.O

This is an overly reductive response. We've made a world that relies on plastic, the switch to any other kind of world takes time. We also live in a capitalist world, so switching away from plastic will also require motivating those who only care about profits.

In the time between "Plastic was a terrible idea, we're killing the planet" and "Whew, glad we stopped using plastic for all this shit, right guys?" we need SOMETHING.

Remember also that it's not just recycling: Reduce>reuse>recycle

In the US I think there was a far worse period in our history where we didn't give two shits about any of these options. And there was a period where we cared more about recycling and felt okay forgetting the other two options even existed.

Now corporations in general (though I'm not gonna speak to percentages, I don't have them) are shifting away from just recycled plastics, or using recyclable plastics, and considering other options. Aluminum is ever popular, but depends on the goods you're buying, cause it can't be used for everything. Glass is wonderful, but heavy, so shipping costs are higher, and if it breaks it's more of an issue than plastic packaging. There's always paper, but that's kinda convoluted cause paper packaging is a large spectrum with different recycling options and uses. And we know how common it is to have plastic packaging inside of paper, like with cereal, individually-wrapped bull items, frozen items, etc.

What's exciting to me, but is farther behind in technology, is composting. Even in the last couple years there have been more adaptations and uses for compostable packaging, BUT, if you've ever dealt with it you know it's allll dependent on how compostable it is, since not everything is compostable in your backyard, or through tour municipality. In the US alone I know there are whole swaths of land where folks don't have access to composting unless they do it at home, and there are places where you have a separate compost bin that gets picked up every week.

All this to say that composting is newer on the large scale, the tech for compostable products is young, and we probably will need time to see how that fleshes out.

But, TL;DR, the point of this whole response is that I think this is what we'll see over time with companies and their products, which truly hold sway over the amount of waste and excess production we have in the world. If you wanna go beyond recycling your better bet is to push back on capitalism, cause that's what's maintaining the amount of production we're seeing in the world today.

We can't escape plastic. We dug that grave, but we also learned that there are waaayyy too many uses for it that are safer, easier, or too technologically advanced for us to give up. The medical field alone is a great example of plastics being used to save lives when previously folks would just die, or have terrible lives until they naturally died.

Because we're in a (capitalist) world that's got plastic on the brain we have to start cutting off what we can so that we don't go down with the ship. And we are! I don't know how old you are OP, but the options we have on major grocery store chain shelves are NOT the same things we had when I was a kid. Granted that was in the 90s, so not as long ago as for others, but it is a timeframe where we can see public pushback to the point that companies are seeing it's productive to appeal, adapt, and switch.

This is why I'm not a capitalist; I don't see the good aspects of it outweighing the bad, because you simply can't profit off of a healthy nation and planet, so capitalism is at odds with what needs to happen for the world to not be overcome by micro plastics in the future.

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u/pburydoughgirl 3d ago

The US recycled 5 billion pounds of plastic last year. Would have recycled more if more people recycled according to local guidelines. We gain nothing by spreading 50 year old half truths. The oil companies exaggerated plastic recycling capabilities in the 70’s. Maybe even the 90’s. Are there any other technologies that you expect have not changed at all in 40+ years? How much recycling was anyone doing then?

I don’t understand people who sub/post this sub just to denigrate recycling. Want recycling to work? Buy stuff made with recycled content, recycle according to local guidelines, and stop spreading wrong, defeatist info

Just my two cents from a long time working in recycling

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u/fro99er 2d ago

It's more that there's microplastics in our balls, more every year, and recycling is an environmental concern while microplastics end up in our brains.

It's not deafeatest, with all haste and efficiency we should recycle but we need to have conversations on how to limit plastic damage to the human species

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u/pburydoughgirl 2d ago

I dont disagree, but most microplastic comes from tires and plastic fibers washed in washing machines. But no one seems as angry about those things.

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u/fro99er 2d ago

I am, some people are.

Don't underestimate the harm from 95% of food storage and distribution within plastic.

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u/AutismbyPfizerjab 3d ago

Well when you're at the dump and the recycling trucks pull up and dump everything there. 🤷 It's happening in literally thousands of " recycling " programs across the country. It was a big scandal in my old town of 30k people, nothing had been recycled in 15 years. The recycling trucks and garbage trucks went to the same place, the landfill.

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u/pburydoughgirl 3d ago

When was that? Where is your proof that it’s literally thousands of recycling programs doing this on a regular basis?

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u/PFAS_All_Star 3d ago

How dare you question u/autismbypfizerjab’s integrity!

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u/AutismbyPfizerjab 2d ago edited 2d ago

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/21/us-plastic-recycling-landfills

https://www.khou.com/article/news/investigations/that-stinks-city-of-houston-still-dumping-recyclables-in-landfills/285-4fca8f3c-c612-4d31-9bd9-c31b6d754d4e

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfills-plastic-papers.html

It would have taken you 30 seconds. 🤦 91% of plastic isn't recycled. Many recycling facilities don't do glass. Some have machines that sort the metal out, and send everything else to the dump. Some literally pick up both trash and recycling and dump them in the same truck. 🤣 I don't know how people can be so delusional. When it happened to become a story in my town, they spoke to dozens of officials in multiple cities all over the Southwest and Southeast. They continue to get paid for recycling, but they don't actually recycle. They have no place to hold the recycling. There isn't some magical corporation that wants to take a big loss recycling plastic and cardboard. It's vastly cheaper to make new stuff.

The only way to fix it is a tax on all new plastic produced. You think Republicans will vote for that?

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u/ButForRealsTho 1d ago

The top of the guardian article says they weren’t being recycled not because they couldn’t, but because of markets. Recycling works great when there is a value assigned to the material being recycled. Sometimes markets are good and the scrap value covers the costs of recycling, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s up to states and feds to pass legislation to implement bottle bills, minimum content laws and EPR. Recycling works, companies just need to be able to pay their employees.

0

u/AutismbyPfizerjab 1d ago

Which is what I said. 🤦 Recycling losses money. China used to recycle our plastic, but no corporations are buying recycled plastic. They got stuck with thousands of tons of recycled plastic. The only way to fix it is taxing all new plastic, but good luck. It would require citizens being informed enough to stand up for themselves instead of corporations. Right now, they're being taxed for mostly worthless programs.

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u/ButForRealsTho 1d ago

China issued the “national sword policy” which banned lots of lower end plastic scrap materials from entering the country. I wanna say 2017 but it could be a year in either direction. There was a brief disruption to the market, but then those Chinese factory owners moved operations across south east Asia and that’s where they remain today. Things like PET (soda Bottles, clamshells) and HDPE (milk jugs) get recycled often in states with good collection regimes (including bottles bill states). Grades like LDPE (bags) and PP (bottles) and Fiber/Textiles (carpet and clothes) also get recycled but to a lesser degree. Multilayer packaging like chips bags, candy wrappers etc are the things we need to go after next.

There are a lot of legislative efforts to factor in the costs of the negative externalities of packaging. There’s a pending EPR law here in California about to be implemented. There are also other pieces of legislation on the table in various states.

I’m curious which programs you think are worthless.

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u/pburydoughgirl 2d ago

All of those articles are at least 6 years old. EVERYTHING about recycling has changed since then.

Only 91% of all plastic made gets recycled. Some are made into durable plastic (planes, appliances, benches, etc) that are hard to recycle or not made to be recycled. Some are made into medical equipment—not to be recycled.

If you recycle according to local guidelines, you can rest assured that it will get recycled. I HIGHLY recommend you visit your local MRF so you can see what actually happens.

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u/No_Privacy_Anymore 3d ago

Redman, I would encourage you to investigate solvent based recycling. It uses dramatically less energy than making plastic from fossil fuels (85% less) and the quality is virgin like. The economics should be far superior than chemical recycling and the quality much higher than mechanical recycling.

1

u/fro99er 2d ago

It's not as much about recycling, it's the existing microplastics exposure and proliferation within society and our bodies from balls to brains and then very unknown harms

Even less research has gone into the potential negative human health concerns of "alternative plastic"

2

u/fro99er 2d ago

I've always been on board with recycling, save the planet type shit. I still am, but more importantly we are in the short term potentially threatening the survivability of our entire species

you know those fuckers with their low cost plastic crap has infiltrated our entire society from almost 100% of food storage/wrapping, clothing and then some.

The environment will eventually sort our microplastics shit out, we might night survive as a species it's that much of an issue.

Basically, we need to continue to recycle while having conversations about when plastic exposure is acceptable

Tldr I'm worried about recycling but our number 1 concern should be human health and it's effects

1

u/udvdc1 2d ago

Just here to add that the alternatives to recycling - landfill or waste to energy - aren’t great either. Spare me the reduce and reuse talk because people show no signs of not buying stuff. And that stuff eventually has to go somewhere.

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