I’m not sure how we’re supposed to believe that disposal of nuclear waste won’t be a problem when we can’t manage systems to properly deal with the waste we are creating now.
Even basic recycling of things like plastics is not done well.
Government using contractors as part of the system is fine, but not having a system at all seems to be the problem. Government should at the very least be setting up effective frameworks for management, recycling and disposal of all types of waste. Instead they set up a few guidelines and leave it to “market forces” and wonder why we end up with dodgy systems geared towards profit for company owners at the expense of the health and safety of the general public and the workers involved in the industry.
In the past decade or so in Victoria alone there have been: warehouses full of soft plastic being stockpiled, warehouses full of contaminated “mixed recycling” being stockpiled, warehouses full of toxic chemicals stockpiled and being stored incorrectly, a massive property being used as an illegal dump for huge volumes of toxic waste being secretly buried, an old landfill site leaking dangerous levels of methane into houses in a nearby housing estate
These are just the ones that were big enough to be in the media that I can remember off the top of my head. This is what “market forces” and weak regulations get us
- Ah Plastics is such a devil of an issue isnt it. It was so dissapointing when the red cycle scheme went tits up.
Though, i can’t believe there wasn’t a massive backlash against woolworths and coles for allowing red cycle to fail, it was their wild card out of the plastic waste negative publicity they suffer.
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But there are thousands of types of plastics used by all kinds of companies with such little transparency/rationalisation that the plastic types can really only be boiled down to 7 broad buckets.
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There are no market or government incentives i know about to choose recycled plastic over virgin for all categories but to charge an ecological premium for a companies product.
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And thats only to consider some of the problems with so much plastic use. To even consider, a reasonable reducing, reusing, recycling plan for plastics we have to consider the costs this will entail to all the medical gear, electrical gear, cars, and everything else we successfully use plastic for.
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The one great thing though, is plastic is supposedly a byproduct of the oil industry. So if the economies of scale start shifting away from oil production, we might finally begin to see a true reflection of the cost of plastic, not one artificially low because oil as a fuel is the flagship product.
