Honestly, the whole concept of “recycling” plastic feels more like a PR strategy than an environmental solution. If it were genuinely effective, we’d see investment, innovation, and accountability—like we do with metals. Instead, we’re handed the guilt while corporations keep pumping out garbage.
Much like the concept of a carbon footprint, it exists solely to make consumers think they can make an individual difference so they won’t push for regulations
Yeah I especially love that one everytime I fly. I get to choose the environmentally friendly option with lower carbon footprint for more money. Who the fuck they think they are kidding? We are all in the same plane burning fuel at 10000 m.
Dont forget the goal of disrupting actual leftist movements into confusion
Honestly if it was up to me I’d just ban plastic flat out unless you got some kind of “this is actually really important and NEEDS to be made of plastic” cert
There are tons of single-use plastic medical supplies - syringes, wrappers, etc.
Would you say that those things are actually really important and NEED to be made of plastic? I wonder if Aeri would account for that possibility
I’m not the ultimate authority on all things, but I’d question if these things need to be made of plastic.
Syringes are made out of things like Borosilicate glass, Stainless steel, autoclaves and cases exist.
It would also be way less big a deal if we just didn’t have as much plastic in general.
It would be a lot more costly to make syringes out of glass/steel for single-use types.
Counterpoint, how much is cancer treatment for (research sounds, papers rustling)… Seven thousand people†?
Multiply that by… some studies show costs of cancer treatment as high as $173,831 annually. 1,216,817,000? Would it cost more than 1.2 billion dollars a year to stop making everything out of plastic? This is just like, napkin ass math I’m not pretending to be a huge know it all or anything by the way. Personally I think that yes, we should stop making things out of poison, even if it costs more money.
†A recent study estimated that PFAS contamination in drinking water contributes to more than 6,800 cancer cases each year in the United States.
I don’t disagree with you at all, but I just don’t see a way for it to happen in the current corpo-controlled climate.
Its basically impossible to avoid too. Anything you buy comes packaged in plastic for the most part.
Being an old man this really gets me. I love the internet and the way computers today but there is a whole lot that worked fine before plastics were so common. Almost nothing in the grocery store had plastic and everything was pretty much as convenient as nowadays. Sure you had to pay a deposit on the glass bottles but you got it back when you returned them.
If I had to choose glass or plastic, I am always choosing glass. Glass is such a good material. It is infinitely recyclable, the bottles can be reused for several years, and if they are buried they don’t release microplastics.
I jump for situations where the glass is taken back for wash and reuse. Its the most sensible thing. I swear I had heard about restaurants doing this with containers but I never actually encountered one. So they had perm togo containers they took back and washed.
That’s what we have here in Czechia, it is called Rekrabička.
It depends on which aspects of the environmental impact you’re looking at, as melting glass to recycle it can be much more damaging than landfilling several plastic bottles if the glass furnace is heated by fossil fuels. If glass bottles are washed and reused, they’re much better than plastic, but that’s rarely what happens.
Gas is used to heat up glass furnaces most of the time. But it is possible to use elctricity aswell, which is more and more sources from either solar or nuclear.
Not saying it is greener than plastic when it comes to electricity and shipping.
The cleaning was common back then. Every store took back the tall glass bottles of soda and in modern times oberweiss brought that back with milk. The glass melting is nice just as a final option really.
That’s reuse, not recycling. Glass is much more suitable for reuse than plastics as it’s longer-lasting and can withstand temperatures hot enough and cleaning agents strong enough to ensure it’s food-safe after being collected, but you need quite a bit of infrastructure to get the bottles back to the company whose products they’re for. At least for the parts of a bottle’s life that the manufacturer’s responsible for, it can be much cheaper to make fresh plastic, and if they can externalise the environmental cost of disposing of a plastic bottle (i.e. blame the consumer), it can look better for their carbon footprint etc., too.
yeah I was not limiting my comment to recycling just about how we don’t really need to be using plastic everywhere and how things were pretty fine in the 70’s where you only saw plastic in a few use cases.
The sad thing is, only types 1 & 2 plastics are recyclable in any real fashion, and sometimes not even then.
That means types 3 through 7 are better disposed of in the trash, where at least they’ll be sealed into a landfill instead of being shipped overseas to end up somewhere far less environmentally secure.
These types are the numbers inside the recycling symbol. Many things are mixed and matched - a plastic bottle might be a type 1 (recyclable), yet its screw-on cap is typically a type 5 (largely non-recyclable). Always try to find the recycling symbol and dispose of anything not a type 1 or 2 in the trash.
It depends. My municipality recycling bins take type 5.
I can absolutely guarantee that it is either
- Burned for power generation
- Disposed of in a landfill
- Exported to a foreign country
Only about 0.5-2% of all “recycled” polypropylene is actually recycled in North America, in places where it is accepted for recycling.
True, fair enough.
Interesting to compare aluminium recycling with plastic recycling
When the true aim is to recycle material, industry comes to the party and you get a refund scheme, even purpose built deposit facilities that can be set up locally
When the aim is to misdirect public attention toward a non solution you get government mandated plastics recycling bins and penalties for “contamination” plus never ending messaging (gotta keep the lie alive with constant repetition lmaooo). Coercion is just a lowkey admission that the material isn’t worth recycling
The real question isn’t how to get the plastics industry to change, it’s how to make the ruse no longer a tenable position for governments
The price stuff can change through taxation that makes new plastic more expensive than recycled plastic.
As we all know, taxation is super popular and has never been controversial, ever.
At the very least flaskepant has worked great for like a century here in Norway. Always kind of surprising when other countries don’t have it.
Most plastic can’t be recycled into something usable. Plastic degrades quite a bit with each recycling, leaving a bunch of microplastics behind (same thing with “biodegradable” plastic). It would be better to tax it enough (or ban it) to make it not used in certain applications.
Should’ve made the producers responsible for collecting and processing all plastics they produce. It that makes certain products economically non viable, than that’s on them to innovate better processes.
there have been several articles exposing plastic recycling as green washing. unfortunately they never make it to mainstream media
i saw a chart somewhere showing less than 1% of plastic in use today is recycled but I can’t find it now
Sad that NPR is not considered “mainstream” these days. Maybe Joe Rogan will post something to Facebook about it?
NPR is definitely mainstream
I think the word you’re looking for is “corporate” or “for-profit”. Thats what they’re not.
fwiw I agree, but it doesn’t appear to be considered mainstream by the guy I was replying to.
ha. i was wrong. NPR has 44 million weekly listeners. that probably qualifies as mainstream media.
I thought npr had 10 times fewer listeners than that. (fyi NPR is the only radioi listen to)
https://blog.marketenginuity.com/by-the-numbers-who-is-actually-listening-to-public-radio
I thought npr had 10 times fewer listeners
If you want to be depressed, Joe Rogan has 10 times that for single episodes.
Right now it looks like paper and metal recycling is still good as far as I can read in two minutes. If someone has a correction let me know.
Yup! Those things are easy (comparatively) to recycle because they’re single material items, so the process is:
- clean
- break down / melt
- rebuild
“Plastic” is thought of as a single material, but even vegetable packaging will be made of around 5-10 different polymers, so for it to be valuable, you need to break it down back to those original polymers.
It’s not a issue with recycling as a whole, its specific to plastic as a material.
That’s just not true. I make flexible packaging and we use thousands of pounds of post industrial resin (made from scrap material produced in house) and post consumer resin (made from used packaging.) They’re all coextruded; frequently made up of 10+ different types of polyethylenes, polyamides, and ethylene-vinyl alcohol.
I don’t think “not true” is fair- I have a soure if you’d like to hear it from someone more authorative than some random internet person (unfortunately I think it might be behind a paywall)[0]
Either way, that’s cool! I’m surprised you can build flexible packaging from that, but I’d be really, really surprised if you can use something that crude to fit the other niches of plastic like building technology, clothing, etc.
[0] https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2025/04/23/are-microplastics-harming-your-health
Yeah same and I hate when people just say well might as “well not recycle at all then” :/ that kind of defeatism doesn’t help either
That is the point at which you remind them they are focusing on the worst R and remind them of the other two which are much more ppwerful
Maybe i should recommend DDD instead of RRR 🤫 lotta assholes running around still doubling down on dooming everybody
And this is how capitalism eats itself. Nothing can be done without a market incentive, including not suffocating our planet to death.
Not to absolve capitalism, but it’s pretty easy to add market incentives to at least slightly address climate change. The concept of “externalities” has been around for a while, where something has a net social impact outside of its sale. It’s normally solved with taxes and levies.
The real issue seems to be nobody havong the appetite to even attempt the most basic solutions to the problem, mainly thanks to lobbying.
“Slightly” addressing climate change doesn’t cut it. That’s like slightly addressing a raging fire. Incrementalism is climate denial.
It ain’t capitalism, it’s the stupid fucking consumers. If a product, already plastic wrapped 3 times before they touch it, has a tiny hole, “Oh no, that one has a hole. I want another one.” Hell, anything imperfect gets tossed. My dumpster at work is packed full of plastic because assholes won’t take anything even slightly unperfect.
It’s the idiots buying single, shrink wrapped potatoes. It’s the idiots who think a Keurig cup is an ecological disaster, while every other drink they buy wastes 4-5x as much. How about the idiots buying kitchen containers while they toss the, often better, container their food came in?
When I was young, it was the idiot hippies whining about paper bags, like we were chopping down old-growth forests instead of making them from lumber waste (which is sustainable). Congrats assholes, you won, now we’re buried in plastic bags and choking turtles to death.
Until people stop buying so much new shit, reject plastic containers (as much as feasible) and start paying a premium for biodegradable packaging, we’re sunk. Or, better yet, we could force less waste via legislation.
Or, better yet, we could force less waste via legislation
it’s amazing you recognise the better solution is legislation yet endlessly rant for consumers (dupped by the industry in this very post) to fix the problem
It is capitalism tho. Yes, us dummies enable it, but it is capitalism that currently gives the power to misinform the public and suppress the spread of truth/accurate research to a few rich humans.
I also want those Karens to be ok buying a piece of fruit that isnt in 7 layers of plastic, but to pretend that most of the environmental diaster we face isnt caused by corprate need for profit at any cost is wild.
I just wanted to buy some kiwis at the store yesterday. The only option they had was 4 packs inside of a plastic shell container. They have their own natural container- fucking skin. What the fuck?
Japan can be really weird about this as well. They have fish markets with fish sitting in the open on ice, where they sometimes put a label directly on the fish. And then you sometimes see stores with single bananas in a plastic bag
