Texas resident used Apple AirTags to discover plastics taken to Houston recycling centers aren't being recycled
Recyclable trash is just being dumped in a private open lot.
Recycling is mostly a scam. Most recycled trash is just dumped on third world countries.
Metal and paper recycling is super useful.
But yes, plastic recycling is a massive lie that probably does quite a bit more harm/waste than it would be just to throw it in the landfill
Metal and glass are recycleable. And if they do get into the environment, they are really just purified rocks and will gradually become sand in the weather. (Not that it’s great to have soda cans and broken glass in the sea, but to some extent it’s not as bad as microplastics).
Paper is recycleable.
Paper, wood, and other plant products (e.g. cotton) are biodegradable and come from plants that can be farmed.
In terms of sustainability it’s something like:
But also even more important than that, it’s far better to reuse something many times than to use single use products, regardless of the material they are made of.
This is wrong, please stop spreading this misinformation.
It probably differs from country to country, but in Germany, for example, between 38-48% of plastic is recycled (source). Sure, that‘s far from all of it, but still far, far better than nothing. Falsely claiming that recycling is mostly a scam and, by that, implying that it doesn‘t make sense to try to recycle you trash, is a horrible idea and only makes the situation worse.
Germany is the best at recycling plastics in the world, yet they recycle less than half of all plastics... I won't call that misinformation based on this. Also please don't twist our words, we aren't saying recycling is a scam in general, just plastic recycling is a scam,
When we call plastic recycling a scam, we are advocating for not using plastics. Reduce, reuse, recycle, remember that.
Plastic recycling specifically in the US has previously used empty ships going back to Asia to ship 'recycling' there. Nominally, they would sort it to be recycled. But since it's only economical to recycle a few sorts of plastic, most of it is burned. This has terrible health effects for the country, hence why several countries blocked the US from shipping it to them.
More info from climate town https://youtu.be/PJnJ8mK3Q3g
Less than half of your plastic is recycled. I don't see how anything OP said was misinfo.
You took the implication you wanted. Plastic recycling, as-is, is very much a scam, green-washing, or whatever, in all but a select few exceptions.
52-62% being not recycled still qualifies as "most".
Are you sure that's still the case? I know china stopped accepting it ages ago - that's why most recycling just goes to domestic landfill now.
It's still the case. India was a destination, too.
Even back then it just immediately started going other placed, eg Malaysia.
My area has recycling presort. So we have two bins that get picked up by the trucks. One garbage, one recycling. They dump them into the same hole on the truck. They drive the truck into the same building. The only thing the comes out of the building are loaded train cars. They all look the same. So all the neighbors presort their trash. And the trash company mixes them back together. Thanks trash company!
Basic economics dictates that recycling plastic isn't profitable otherwise industry would be doing it, itself. –That doesn't make it a scam. It's more like bad marketing.
Some of it will be truly recycled like with hdpe. Some will be used more conscientiously by being sent for plasma gasification. Lots of it will still get sent to the landfill, but that's better then sending all of it. Something rarely mentioned is that most plastics become less stable each time they're melted down, making them increasingly difficult to recycle.
It's believed that ~75% of all Aluminium that has ever been produced is still in use because it's economically more viable to recycle old aluminum than refine new. Alumium refinement is a highly energy intensive process.
Does this include aluminum used in chip bags?
Single stream recycling is a scam. Multi stream is much better. I recycle my paper and metals separately from glass and plastics for this reason. Wish there was an easy way to recycle glass too, but the collection networks aren't as widespread as the other two.
The cost to dispose or recycle should be paid by the companies that produce the product. Products would waste less material and recycling would be profitable for recycling companies doing a public service.
Yes, companies will want to make customers eat that cost. I don't know if there is a legislative solution for that or what.
People are like "but the plastic bottle is free and easy", and I'm like that's because all those costs are paid for later, by everyone. It's really frustrating but common short sightedness.
No one should be allowed to product something without a plan for disposing of it safely and without environmental cost. I'm willing to suffer the inconvenience of carrying a reusable bag if it means less environmental destruction.
IIRC, that's actually how it was set up to begin with, way back when we used glass bottles for Coke. Big companies manipulated us consumers into thinking we were being lazy for not taking care of recycling ourselves and that's how we got to this mess today.
If the companies try and make the consumer eat the cost, then the companies who sell their products in cardboard packaging instead of plastic will be able to sell it for cheaper and potentially steal business from the others. There are plenty of products sold in plastic which do not need to be.
You can literally just put a tax on new plastic bottles vs recycled plastic bottles and the issue solves itself, the issue with recycling is that it's not economically viable.
Customers will indeed eat the cost. The idea is that a competitor uses something else and makes a cheaper product. Unfortunately the taxes are never really enough, so you just end up with the same plastic use and a token amount going to a third world farmer to scatter some tree seeds in a field.
If a product cost more, you won't buy as much or waste as much or you will end up using something cheaper.
If the rule is that using plastic is now higher cost, we will start looking for cheaper alternatives. That's how it will work. So yes, for a while, consumer goods will cost more.
Update: AG Ken Paxton sues Texas resident for exposing lack of actual recycling at a Houston Center.
Razor sharp post.
I fully support throwing AirTags, and really all Apple products, directly in the trash.
I’m actually not too sure about that. I am currently using an older iPhone (and I really dislike Apple, it’s just that the stupid device just does not stop working) and from an environmental perspective, throwing that away would surely be worse than continuing to use it, right?
I have devices with Android 4.4 still working smoothly. All these apple anecdotes that think Android just blows up after a few years is a shitty cope at best. There are also probably more old Android phones surviving in the wild considering how affordable they are and usually more repairable.
And guess what? without the OEM updates and playstore not having compatible apps usable anymore, there's still troves of opensource apps and development going on that make it still viable as an alternative usage like media consumption, storage, security camera, and more.
Unlike Apple, where you're just bound to a single store and no sideloading.
Android OEMs do suck at supporting their devices, is bloated but that doesn't mean they all commit mass suicide after few years as sheeples think.
I fully accept that what might be environmentally good today is not wholly obtainable. This things like this are what I must do as a part of the society that doesn’t have better means for whatever reason.
This was already discovered some years back. The estimate of recyclables not being recycled was way beyond high. I can't remember the number so I'm not quoting it.
Demand corporations reconfigure their packaging operations instead of letting them gaslight into thinking we're the problem.
This is the answer. The best way to deal with the plastic problem is to stop producing it. The three R's are in the order they are for a reason. Recycling is the last thing to try.
One of the big issues with recycling plastics is that plastic has a very specific chemical makeup that gives it the properties it requires, and one major way to mess up that composition is heat. So, even if you can perfectly sort plastics into their respective types, simply heating them up to re-cast into pellets or something else can affect their properties to a state that they're not usable anymore. Add on top the fact that you will not be able to perfectly sort plastics by composition so you will always end up with a significant amount of impurity makes recycling very difficult.
Almost NO plastics are recyclable. That little recycling icon means absolutely nothing. Plastic producing companies should be paying to clean this planet up for their catastrophic deception.
Fuck yes.
A company that massively produce plastic consumer goods should at the very least, have some kind of way to recycle what they produce. Leaving that in the hands of the everyday people won't cut it.
Plastic companies created the 'recycling' efforts to get the public to believe their use of plastics wasn't as bad as it is. In reality, it is horrible for the environment.
I read the article, this is different from the other airtag exposes done on other recycling agencies: the plastic is still sitting on their property with a promise to be recycled later. They may break that promise at some point, but they haven’t yet, so the jury is still out IMO. Unlike other experiments like this where they find the airtags end up in a trash landfill or an incinerator.
Yeah, usually these companies just end up storing it all in a warehouse or a field until they go bankrupt, then the people behind that company start another company doing the same. And yeah, they promise they're working on technology to do the actual future recycling, but it never pans out.
We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less).
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/pdf
I don't see any of those things reducing microplastics in the environment nor plastic being dumped in the rivers and ocean. The motivation behind recycling has very little to do with climate change.
Could just stop running one cruise ship for like 15 minutes.
Am I wrong I thinking that the CO2 emission from plastics is missing the point a bit. The issue in my mind is that the plastics remain in nature for a very long time with unknown health risks to us and the ecosystem.
When comparing a plastic bag vs a paper bag for shopping I hear the argument that making the paper bag has a lot more co2 emissions tied to it. But if I throw it in the bin it will be mulch before the end of the month.
None of these are practical choices for an average anyone because the vast majority of the product of our labor is stolen from us. Yet, we're asked to sacrifice to preserve those corporate profits.
No. It'd be insane to make sacrifices for the benefit of my oppressor. Instead, I'll make larger sacrifices for revolution and my neighbors.
I mean, it's an interesting point but do keep in mind how much lower effort light bulbs are compared to a plant based diet. If you compare eating 1/8 less meat (like meatless Mondays) that's still probably harder than swapping to less shitty light bulbs.
Messaging should include both, although I'm with you that the focus is disproportionately on less efficient methods (especially plastic recycling, which is mostly a way to pass blame to consumers).
Since I'm not planning on having any children, I can eat 7 times as much meat as I do now and still net a reduction in CO2! And I don't like flying, so that brings me up to almost 10x as much meat in my diet!
Same! No kids, no air travel(hate planes and have no real reason to be flying). I try to only eat chicken and fish(health reasons) so I guess I'm doing pretty good on my environmental impact.
It's not an OR operator, doing all those actions would be better.
I'm having trouble opening the link but found it again.
Here in case anyone else also had trouble.
This one is for Americans who use cars as shoes, umbrellas and shopping bags. Normally, the need to switch to a plant-based would be higher.
This is a great video, love this one, thanks for sharing!
If everyone has another 20 minutes, John Oliver delves into the topic some more.
We should still try to recycle as member of our community (and the world populace) but it's the corporations that need to be held accountable and forced to take action. Because as it stands now they are lobbying hard to shift the blame to consumers and make it difficult to ban single use products, while also avoiding packaging innovations and laws that promote such change - 'cause, you know...profits.
Yo a climate town share! Awesome!
AirTag in the trash. Quite fitting...
That’s a lot of Funko Pops. /s
Wake me up when the supernova starts.
Plastic has multiple type that each require a different process for recycling.
Having a bunch of plastic all mixed up together needs people to manually separate them.
It's a joke.
So that’s what those things are worth for
my wife recycles all the plastics we got, because she really wants to try and I just can't break her heart and tell her how shit it all is.
Sort of a non story. Places that have regular collection don't stop collecting if a plant moves or is over capacity. It is stored. Stopping collection till plant opens gets people out of the habit of separating recyclables ar home. The quote about fuel pellets creating fumes, it is in place of oil burning for heat/energy. Oil releases same fumes, and using plastic fuel while not ideal use, reduces oil and coal mining and processingbto get a usable heat source.
Almost no plastic gets recycled. I believe the last number I read about was less than 9%
This is a non story for those who have read about the scam "recycling plastics" is
To me that is an attempt by corporations to make you forget about recycling and not care what is produced...like ah eff it whats the point. Each country and state, and city is different. I'm in Vancouver they claim 96% recycle rate of what is collected. My family member works at a recycle facility where they sort and regrind material into pellets for resale. The industries often can't get enough pellets that they desire, especially because price of plastic is tied to oil prices. So when oil goes up manufactures desire more recycced pellets because it is cheaper. Eapecially in auto industry where recycle mixed in has mandate to come from autograde material. What isn't usable becomes fuel pellets. We don't do films here, but I believe Germany had set up plastic film recycling. But a US company has developed a method of taking plastic films and old starbucks coffee grounds to make stacking pallets, instead of wood pallets.
