Today I Learned

That’s why they should pay a tax for every pound of plastic they produce, with an equivalent refund for every pound they certifiably dispose of properly.

When you have to clean up your own mess you get good at it.

It really is frustrating. Like we even have resin codes. Little numbers printed that should indicate what kind of plastic it is.

I’m in Seattle. We have a robust recycling system. I still can’t find anywhere what resin code plastics they accept. The website just says “plastic bottles and jugs.”

I pay to use Ridwell. They accept plastic film and, as of recently, “multi-layer plastic.”

The only way to tell these apart is just by judging the plastic for how it feels. Plastic film is stretchier while multi-layer tends to be crinkly? Half the plastic we dispose of does not fall firmly in either camp, so we just do our best.

Why does it have to be this hard?

Quite honestly, going to a landfill seems so so so much better than the alternative: going into the environment and oceans, turning into microplastics and getting into food chains.

At least landfills are contained. Bury the shit until we have the tech to deal with it.

Some day, between the plastics, nutrients from organics, e-waste, landfills are going to be a goldmine.

9% is only recycled once, only 1% has been truly reused multiple times, so you're close enough.

Also:

Of the remaining waste, 12% was incinerated and 79% was either sent to landfills or lost to the environment as pollution.

They're the same thing. Incinerated is lost as pollution, it just happened to have one more use on the way there.

And I just realized, this wikipedia page linked is almost 10 years out of date!

It's because you can't recycle plastic really. Each time you heat it up to melt it it loses its properties. A recyclable material is for instance aluminium, which keeps on being awesome. I tried various recycled plastics for a business I run, none of it was strong enough. Recycled lego, recycled car bumpers, nada. And then the question is - why would I buy the recycled plastic that doesn't work when it's like 30 cents cheaper. Pellets are so cheap in fact, that I could buy a tonne, use up 100kgs, throw the rest away and still be fine.

It's just a bad material that's cheap to make things out of.

Once used, to my knowledge, it can't be reused as the same thing, so they "recycle" it into road surfacing etc, which I'm sure doesn't end up fragmenting into tiny bits over the years and ending up in water sources...

And I'm not sure there's a good way to get away from it completely. Even drink cans have a small layer of plastic inside to stop it reacting with the metal. Glass is probably the most environmentally friendly (if you just wash and reuse), but a bitch to get it back in one piece.

Time to tax the ever loving shit out of plastic tbh. And yes, prices will go up, but you know what? They go up anyway. They can only take as much as we have, and they're already taking it.

That's a bit cynical take. In many countries, including mine, there are dedicate bins for plastic waste which is the majority of waste from your typical household. It's all being recycled into new products, not being shipped anywhere. Also, when it comes to plastic bottles for example, close to 100% of them are returned and recycled into new bottles. I've got a tiny-ass bin for the stuff that ends up in landfill because I separate and recycle it all as does most other people.

EDIT: Nevermind then. It's all apparently dumped into the ocean. Sorry about the attempt in some positivity.

They purposely made their symbols for non-recylable types of plastic look like the recycling symbol.

Survivors of the resource wars will send their children to the plastic mines to work for bottle caps

Don't forget nuclear fallout. There's even a term for when humans started to irrevocably fuck Earth: the Anthropocene.

Could you tell that to all the companies out there who use plastic?

Remember when Snapple tried to spin moving to plastic bottles like it was a good thing, like 5 years ago?

In my area they don’t recycle glass. I was so surprised when I moved here and learned that. Glass and aluminum are the two most worth it/possible afaik.

The older i get the more disgusting i find plastic. I would never buy plastic tupperware ever again, drinking out of plastic bottles just feels wrong.

This is absolutely correct but still not the whole story. Recycling for glass and aluminum and steel can be done essentially infinitely creating a largely closed loop (though for glass in particular we really need to return to our old reuse practices). By using the same language for plastic as we do for better recycling methods we still make plastic recycling sound better than it is, even when reduction and reuse are emphasized.

How the hell are plastic bottles going to pay taxes? Let's not even think about giving them jobs when unemployment is already high.

No, the problem has never been us at all. We don't run Coca Cola Co. We don't decide how laundry detergent is packaged. We don't manufacture excess plastic drums and lined tanks for unnecesary use cases. We don't flood the market with cheap dinnerware, plates, cups, bowls, etc.

Big corporations do all of that. Run by dozens of people who do not care what we think.