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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.

Its basically impossible to avoid too. Anything you buy comes packaged in plastic for the most part.

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.

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.

Really annoyed to have believed in plastic recycling even into my thirties. Being an idiot is such a burden sometimes.

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.

there have been several articles exposing plastic recycling as green washing. unfortunately they never make it to mainstream media

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1131131088/recycling-plastic-is-practically-impossible-and-the-problem-is-getting-worse

i saw a chart somewhere showing less than 1% of plastic in use today is recycled but I can't find it now

And this is how capitalism eats itself. Nothing can be done without a market incentive, including not suffocating our planet to death.

How to get politicians to change views:

Plastic causes ed and shrinkage

I wonder how much the oil industry subsidies are responsible for making recycled plastic more expensive than the new one...

Recycling rates are low, but I wouldn't quite call it a myth. There's a lot of materials that get lumped together as 'plastic', that each have to be handled differently.

Some are relatively non-toxic and easily recycled. More can be, but aren't profitable without incentives. Some are very toxic, and recycling those are difficult. Then there's a lot of rarer types that make it hard to collect and sort. There's also mixed materials, where it's hard to separate the plastic to recycle.

Generally everyone should be minimizing plastics, but check how they're handled locally so you know what's recylable.

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.

The biggest issue seems to be around a lake of thinking. Recycling used plastics into more plastic is certainly energetically infeasible, and letting plastics escape to contaminate the environment is also unacceptable. However plastic can be recycled, or perhaps reused, into other things, notably as a partial replacement for aggregate in concrete. This process is low energy, doesn't require sorting the plastic, and actually enhances the thermal and noise insulation properties of the concrete, whilst also reducing it's overall weight. There are undoubtedly other things a stable, non-biodegradable, waterproof and hardwearing substance could be used for given some though.

The good news is that global warming (I prefer to call it Anthropogenic Runaway Global Heating because of the acronym) is going to completely fuck us all anyway, to the extent that plastic in the environment isn't going to matter by comparison. At least oil turned into plastic and buried isn't oil turned into CO2.