A UK article with some interesting facts and info about plastic recycling.
I think this article misses a few angles. Well, first off, I think it does a great job of looking at it from a few different angles and from a reasonable perspective. I think there are more angles that could be looked at, though it would have bloated the article if they went into everything.
Their assessment that plastics are more environmentally friendly is based on fossil fuel usage and energy usage. Plastic is cheap to make and light, so it uses less energy and less fuel to transport it compared with cardboard or especially glass (one of my pet peeves of packaging is putting a plastic bag inside a cardboard box when they could have just had the plastic bag).
However, they don’t discuss other impacts such as microplastics. Glass and cardboard aren’t flooding our environment with plastic particles. Another thing to consider is those lined cardboard boxes being sent to landfill are a form of carbon capture. Does it change the balance of whether plastic is environmentally friendly? Maybe not, but it wasn’t looked at.
On another related note, I remember being a kid and hearing that the council was looking at stopping recycling because it was no longer cost effective. Up to that point I had thought we recycled because it was the right thing to do, not because people made money from it.
another thing no one seems to bring up in these discussions is that we don’t have to package things in the way we do, we could be selling things in bulk and have customers bring reusable containers that store staff will fill with the amount they want.
It’s not even optimal for customers to buy things in the way we currently do, you generally either have to buy significantly more than you actually want or you have to buy several packages and just be pissing away money paying for the packaging materials…
with per-weight bulk sales you can get precisely as much as you need and pay proportionally to that, and you get soooooo much less trash to spend energy on managing.
We started to go to Bin Inn for this, but then COVID happened and we never went back. I should try to make a special effort to get back to using them, because you’re right, a lot of the time the packaging is not necessary at all.
Companies are buying 25kg bags of flour and repackaging it into smaller bags, when we should just be taking a container to a store and scooping in what we want.
The issue with recycling in the US is it treated as a business. If recycling a material doesn’t make money or they don’t have a buyer they don’t do it. It’s bullshit it should be a utility.
It’s been debunked multiple times over the last quarter century. Every time people kinda forget because it feels like recycling should be a good thing, and everyone just goes back to pretending it is. ☹️
except here in sweden we’re verifiably recycling a significant percentage of our plastics, and have like… the world leading recycling facility.
It’s clearly doable, countries just opt not to invest in the facilities to actually do it, and rather than reaching the obvious conclusion of “just build the recycling facilities” people conclude that plastic apparently cannot be recycled (despite evidence to the contrary).
everyone just goes back to pretending
“Doing our part while fixing their part” includes “doing our part”.
Don’t mistake ‘enabling adequacy in others’ with ‘pretending [recycling] is [a good thing].’
The article makes other points, such as that using plastic is more environmentally friendly most of the time (I am not convinced they use a broad enough definition though, as they only consider transport fuel usage and energy costs of creating glass or cardboard), and that recycling plastics is possible and valid an we have the technology to do this well but we just, well, don’t do it well.
