I find it strange that more people haven’t put it together yet. The stuff plastics are made of is literally toxic byproduct from the O&G industry. Yes some of the products have extremely functional uses, but for the rest of it, they’re literally selling us their toxic waste and trying to make us responsible for disposing of it.
They might as well be standing outside the grocery stores with a barrel of goo and offering you a portion of it (for a price of course!) on your way out. So then you take it home and try to figure out what to do with it, and feel bad when you realize there is no way to dispose of it in an ethical way which is why they’re shoving the responsibility onto you.
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.
They won’t even clean up their own oil well sites. Look up how many oil companies hide all their profits and then declare bankruptcy so that they can get the taxpayers to clean up after a given oilfield runs dry.
I don’t have a lot of hope in them taking care of the other end of the process either, unless it’s by force.
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?
Yes some of the products have extremely functional uses, but for the rest of it
Don’t you think most plastic products are used because it’s convenient?
I fight against it, but it is hard to not recognize how a plastic bottle is much lighter than any other bottle material, how convenient it is to get a plastic bag at the shop when you forgot yours, how convenient it is to get a ready meal in a cheap plastic box instead of an expensive and/or heavy washable container that you may have to bring back etc. Even compared to paper bags, plastic bags are more resistant, lighter and more compact.
There are probably much more similar convenience uses in the industry.
Plastic is mostly used because it’s convenient, not because of a big plastic conspiracy.
So to solve the issue, we need states to make it expensive enough that people will overcome the inconvenience. Making people pay for plastic bags at shops works very well, for example.
I speak as someone horrified by the over-abundance of plastics in Japan. Some fruits have 3 layers of plastic around, even bananas come in plastic bags, because modern Japan is all about looking clean and being convenient, zero fucks given to ecology.
Yeah it stinks.
And I know plastic hurts all of us… but can’t we hear it now, any plan to fix this is going to:
hurt the poor the most
Any tax whose cost it passed on, any system to use reusables (unless it decreases costs)…
Cannot think of a single easy answer to this enormous planet-wrecking problem.
Toxic waste in the soil, toxic waste in the products. Whee! I actually constantly do wonder what we could do to pump the breaks as a people. It’s a difficult thing to think about, because I think the first step is getting people used to two things (at least here in America)
a) Things will not always be available when you go to the store
b) Things will not last as long as they typically have due to exposure
I’m not really sure how to get people on board because most are reactive not proactive and they tend to not react to things that can’t directly correlate themselves or witness with their own eyes. I mean, also a lot of people are like me shrugging at what they cannot actively change.
I just try to buy intelligently, ride my things to their grave, and recycle and repurpose what I can. Shrugs.
I think all of those (well outside of tin) are pretty expensive and that’s why they’re not being used as often as they were in the past. I’ve been thinking of some kind of paper material, but I guess that’s bad for the environment too. So idk…I just figured there could be something simpler, lighter and if it found its way to the ground wouldn’t be as much as a detriment as a piece of plastic. Is all.
And they have know about it for a long time… https://climateintegrity.org/plastics-fraud
80% of the shit you put in your recycling bin goes straight into a landfill. plastic recycling was a giant greenwashing scam by the oil industry
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.
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.
Eh, it pretty much does all that bad stuff from the landfills
How does buried plastic cause microplastics to leech everywhere?
Weathering (sun, exposure, abrasion caused by plastic being moved by wind and sea) is a significant part of microplastic formation.
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.
Why are we full of microplastics then?
Most microplastics come from car tires and washing of clothing with plastic in them. (both abrade the plastic causing uncountable tiny pieces of microplastics to enter the water or the air)
Then there are a lot of places that dump plastic into rivers or the ocean instead of into landfills.
I recall a episode of penn and teller that goes over this in detail. Even talks about how landfills are engineer to gather the gasses that are released to reuse as fuel.
sorry, it’s 50% to the landfill, 22% illegally dumped or burned, and 19% incinerated.
that 8% more than i thought
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!
I’ll be honest, that’s actually more than I would have guessed (ballpark would have been 5% or under), sad as that is.
9 percent seems high.
