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Interesting to compare aluminium recycling with plastic recycling

When the true aim is to recycle material, industry comes to the party and you get a refund scheme, even purpose built deposit facilities that can be set up locally

When the aim is to misdirect public attention toward a non solution you get government mandated plastics recycling bins and penalties or "contamination" plus never ending messaging (gotta keep the lie alive with constant repetition lmaooo). Coercion is just a lowkey admission that the material isn't worth recycling

The real question isn't how to get the plastics industry to change, it's how to make the ruse no longer a tenable position for governments

Dont forget the goal of disrupting actual leftist movements into confusion

Honestly if it was up to me I'd just ban plastic flat out unless you got some kind of "this is actually really important and NEEDS to be made of plastic" cert

The sad thing is, only types 1 & 2 plastics are recyclable in any real fashion, and sometimes not even then.

That means types 3 through 7 are better disposed of in the trash, where at least they’ll be sealed into a landfill instead of being shipped overseas to end up somewhere far less environmentally secure.

These types are the numbers inside the recycling symbol. Many things are mixed and matched - a plastic bottle might be a type 1 (recyclable), yet its screw-on cap is typically a type 5 (largely non-recyclable). Always try to find the recycling symbol and dispose of anything not a type 1 or 2 in the trash.

Treating waste water? Water treatment plants cost so much that they will never compete with dumping raw sewage into the river!

Being an old man this really gets me. I love the internet and the way computers today but there is a whole lot that worked fine before plastics were so common. Almost nothing in the grocery store had plastic and everything was pretty much as convenient as nowadays. Sure you had to pay a deposit on the glass bottles but you got it back when you returned them.

The good news is that global warming (I prefer to call it Anthropogenic Runaway Global Heating because of the acronym) is going to completely fuck us all anyway, to the extent that plastic in the environment isn't going to matter by comparison. At least oil turned into plastic and buried isn't oil turned into CO2.

I wonder how much the oil industry subsidies are responsible for making recycled plastic more expensive than the new one...

And this is how capitalism eats itself. Nothing can be done without a market incentive, including not suffocating our planet to death.

The price stuff can change through taxation that makes new plastic more expensive than recycled plastic.

As we all know, taxation is super popular and has never been controversial, ever.

At the very least flaskepant has worked great for like a century here in Norway. Always kind of surprising when other countries don't have it.

How to get politicians to change views:

Plastic causes ed and shrinkage

there have been several articles exposing plastic recycling as green washing. unfortunately they never make it to mainstream media

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1131131088/recycling-plastic-is-practically-impossible-and-the-problem-is-getting-worse

i saw a chart somewhere showing less than 1% of plastic in use today is recycled but I can't find it now

Really annoyed to have believed in plastic recycling even into my thirties. Being an idiot is such a burden sometimes.

Right now it looks like paper and metal recycling is still good as far as I can read in two minutes. If someone has a correction let me know.

The Fraud of Plastic Recycling Report