CBC Radio is usually a good source, but that article and the following one are both extremely misleading in claiming that “only 9% of plastic gets recycled”. It’s one of those classic “how to lie with statistics” examples.
The reality is that almost all eligible plastics that are put into recycle bins are, in fact, recycled.
So how do you square that with the “9%” claim"? First of all, that percentage is based on all plastics produced, which include things like plastic bags, plastic films, and other plastics that can’t be recycled either because of the nature of the plastic itself or because of their physical form that interferes with the sorting machinery. And it includes plastics that are contaminated by food waste or other things.
But most importantly of all, it also includes a huge, huge proportion of recyclable plastics that are not properly set out for recycling but instead just thrown in the garbage. If you look at my first link above, the biggest problem by far in plastic recycling is not plastics, it’s people, and specifically, people who are morons. Like our intrepid anti-environment love-song-loving crusader above who refuses to recycle. If you throw your plastic in the garbage, it is 100% guaranteed to not get recycled and to pollute landfill for centuries. If you put clean recyclable plastic in the recycle bin, experience here shows that almost all of it will get recycled, and save a lot of energy, too.
There’s a reason that ‘recycle’ is the third term used in the slogan ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’. The first two terms are far more important for really making a difference, frankly. Recycle is more of a last resort when reduce and reuse aren’t enough.
We still do try to recycle all our stuff properly, even when the rules change for us with our local recycling center. And even when we learn that a lot of the stuff we’re putting in the recycle pile appropriately ends up in a landfill. But it’s frustrating.
So we also rinse out lightly used plastic bags for another go-around, store more things in glassware than in tupperware-style products, and reduce our overall purchasing of a lot of convenience products.
But honestly it’s not enough to make a difference. We need a real paradigm shift in how we deal with recyclable products, from top to bottom of the supply chain. That’s not something I see coming at the moment; it seems that most such efforts are cosmetic rather than making fundamental impact.
This, exactly. I had an argument with the local post office manager about it. He was complaining that I reused an odd-sized box, saying that I should use their official sizes instead as the cost was low and it was easier from them to stack the boxes in the trucks and I should recycle the odd-sized boxes. So I explained why it was important to me, and should be to him, that we reuse existing boxes if we can, rather than recycle them. He argued for a bit but ultimately agreed that I was right. I understand his point, but he’ll have to take that up with the box manufacturers.
My wife and I do a lot of canning. I’ve said to her, how great it would be if products that usually come in plastic jars, like peanut butter, pickles, mayonnaise, etc., came in standard canning jars.
There are several brands of spaghetti sauce that do indeed come in pressure-safe glass, and if you can find lids that fit, can indeed be used by home canners.
I agree about the value of “reduce”, absolutely. The problem with “reuse” is that although it’s obviously very effective where possible, its effectiveness is limited unless a great many products are purpose-built to be reusable instead of disposable. Do we have enough instances of the latter right now to really make a difference?
That sounds like it might be more of a political/social problem than a technological one. If people aren’t really on-board with recycling, they may unknowingly throw a lot of inappropriate material into the bin, potentially contaminating the whole lot, while others may not bother to recycle at all. And if this happens a lot, you’re not going to have incentives for building large and versatile recycling centers.
You were right. And the next time you have this argument with the post office manager, you can tell him that the LCBO (the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, the largest liquor retailer in the world) has exactly this problem when loading liquor and wine cartons into trucks for shipment to the stores. They solved the problem with robots using artificial intelligence to figure out how to most efficiently load all the odd-sized boxes for any given shipments into their trucks. Kinda like solving a puzzle with blocks. If they can do it, surely the USPS can do it!
Separately, unless there is an industry that can consume the output of the recycling stream, the only thing to do with it after expensively collecting it, sorting it, and cleaning it, is to landfill it.
In the USA, only virgin plastics may go into food packaging. So while the water bottle factory can re-use its own cuttings from today’s water bottle making in tomorrow’s production run, they cannot accept plastic that has been out to the consumer and back again. The problem is that food packaging represents the vast bulk of production of those kinds of plastic. There simply aren’t nearly enough non-food uses for that substance to absorb the return of all those food packages even if the consumers were willing to go to the trouble and the municipalities were willing to go to the expense.
Another large part is that because the refuse & recycle collection efforts are government run, they must be inexpensive. If landfilling costs $10/ton, and recycling costs $25/ton, there’s no political will to spend the extra $15. If somebody was willing to pay $50/ton for cast off PET or HDPE water bottles it’d be great. Municipalities would be lined up to supply them.
Steel, copper, and aluminum have cost effective recycling that captures most of the waste stream because they have robust markets for the used material at a price that makes collecting and sorting it cost-effective and in fact profitable.
The same is simply not true now for plastics, nor paper. If somebody can figure out a way to convert paper or plastic to powerplant fuel without creating ghastly air pollution, we could “recycle” it into energy.
That’s self-evidently true. But the assumption that this is what actually happens is a cynical one that may or may not be true depending on what jurisdiction you’re talking about. If this is what happens in a particular area, the appropriate response is to fix the problem, not give up on recycling.
This is what the City of Toronto says:
Where does Toronto’s recycling go?
The City is fortunate to have access to a lot of domestic recycling markets and is still able to sell its material to be made into something new. The majority of the material from the City’s Blue Bins (approximately 86% in 2021) goes to markets in Canada and the U.S. Only a small portion of the City’s recycling (about 14% in 2021) goes overseas and when it does, it is done through reputable brokers to ensure it is being recycled. What Goes in the Blue Bin (Recycling)? – City of Toronto
My name is Civil Guy and I am slightly addicted to techno-woo, but at least I recognize that I may have a problem. Anyhow, improved plastic recycling using table salt:
What’s produced is oil of some kind or other, at least a candidate for storage somewhere. No, not a complete solution by any means, but at least it would be a few grams of plastic that aren’t floating around anywhere.