Only type 1 and 2 plastics are getting recycled at any significant rate at all, and that rate still falls well below the 30% rate deemed necessary to consider a substance ‘recyclable’. And even those recycled plastics are not competitive in the plastics market as their uses are so limited.
Yet it’s expected that plastics production will triple by 2050. And we’ve all seen the lovely photos of plastic products washing up on remote islands, clogging the seas in the most remote zones of the ocean, and littering the shores of just bout everywhere.
So what do we do? A return to deposit bottles? That would cover only a fraction of plastics products, but it’d be a start, and this method was used in the era before plastic bottles. Bring back glass dairy bottles and the milkperson too? I’d be all for that.
We’re using more glass products where it’s safe and feasible, but since our local recycling center has us dump glass in the same bin as we dump plastics and paper and metal food cans in, my confidence is low that it gets meaningfully recycled.
What ways are you using to cut down on plastic waste?
I do my best to buy less plastic, and do recycle and/or reuse as much as possible.
My sister-in-law has not been big on recycling anything since her local news reported that a recycling truck was observed depositing its load in the landfill; HOWEVER, chances are, the load was contaminated or COULD NOT be recycled for a reason that was not reported. HOWEVER part 2, with (at the time) two teenagers in the house, she reluctantly went along with it, and did say that if they believed in it, they could do it themselves. And they did.
The plastics industry invented the whole arrows thing to make us all “feel” like we were recycling their products (“wish-cycling”) with clever advertising, and that’s where their efforts end. They’ve been dragging their feet on supporting markets for recycled plastic, while greatly expanding production.
Very good documentary on PBS:
I avoid single-use items, as that is where I think I have the most control, but it’s crazy how much plastic I am surrounded by every day.
when I think about it I take a container to a restaurant for leftovers. I use almond milk in paper containers instead of milk. I try to use hard plastic storage containers instead of the resealable sandwich bags which get thrown out. I just bought a bunch of nylon zipper bags for storage instead of using resealable bags. they last much longer. Not everything needs to be water tight for organized storage.
This makes me wonder: is glass more eco-friendly than plastic? Because Snapple phased out their old glass bottles in favour of plastic ones a couple of years ago, so if the glass is more eco-friendly, that just seems ass-backwards.
But glass is typically more reusable. As your linked article notes,
I’ve been able to find a local dairy that bottles milk in half-gallon reusable bottles, which I can return to the store where I buy the milk. Screw-top glass jars are in demand among the hobbyist beekeeper honey producers I know, and my social circle passes around the same reused containers when transferring food etc.
I still consume more single-use plastic than I would like, but getting the lion’s share of consumption into refillable/reusable containers is doable.
Glass is heavier than plastic and probably more expensive. Plus it breaks, and broken glass is hazardous.
There are reasons for plastic’s popularity. Would it be more feasible to phase out plastic, or to work on making plastic more eco-friendly and recyclable?
I bring a liter bottle of Iced Mountain water to work every day but, rather than use and dispose of one of those bottles every day, I refill them when I get home from a large container of Iced Mountain, 2 1/2 gallons I believe. So, instead of disposing of 7 small bottles a week, I go through just one large one.
One of the large obstacles to plastic recylability is that for many uses in many jurisdictions, recycled plastic may not be used for food containers. And yet the vast majority of plastic consumed by individuals is exactly that: food containers.
Most other uses that could be mae from recycled plastics have various structural or compositional requirements that can’t easily be matched by recycled materials unless they can be sorted by type with a very low mistake rate. e.g. if you’re making a plastic gizmo that must be this strong you design it to be made of material of this specification. Ensuring the input stream is e.g. 100% PVC and 0% ABS is a tall order if you’re using recycled raw materials.
I am sure the obstacles of creating markets for recycling plastic are large, but I think a core problem is that the plastics industry has been pushing the sham of recycling their product so the consumer is blinded by the idea that no harm is being done. Per the OP and other info in the news about this, that is simply not true - major harm is being done, and the industry is looking to increase that harm, while paying lip service to doing something to mitigate the harm they are creating.
The Attorney General of California earlier this year announced an investigation of the industry (triggered by the documentary I linked above), specifically Exxon-Mobile, for their role in knowing decades ago the feasibility of recycling plastic was a long shot, but worked to convince consumers of the opposite:
Here is a deceptive ad about plastic bottle recycling, designed to make us all feel great about buying soft drink plastic bottles. Notice the operative key word at about 0:15 - “can” - can be recycled - does not mean “will” be recycled.
Landfills are great. Recycling plastic is a terrible con. If we’re going to drill for fossil fuels, turning them ito solid plastic and then safely sequestering it underground is pretty much the best thing we can do with it.
That’s the argument I read here and here and here* which seems quite persuasive:
.
Broadly: a well-made landfill does a really good job of just holding stuff and not letting it leach into the environment. But if you send plastic abroad to be recycled, there is an excellent chance it will end up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Landfill good. Swirling vortex of microplastic bad.
In the USA, we recycle about 3.1 million tons of our plastics per year, out of the 35.7 million tons we throw away. Only about 8.7%. We used to send half of this to China until they banned it because they had too much plastic to deal with (see above top ten rank) and now we ship it to other places which are already drowning in plastic. When we were shipping it to China for recycling, they dumped 55% of our plastic in open landfills or in rivers. After they banned it, we started shipping it to Indonesia and Vietnam, which proceeded to improperly dump over 80% of it.
I’m a civil engineer. Landfills get a bad rap because they seem horrible, but modern landfill technology is really pretty amazing. They are sealed on the bottom with geotechnical fabric to prevent leachate from entering the groundwater. They burn off, or sometimes even harvest, the methane produced from decomposition. Landfill cells are capped off with clay or bentonite to protect the environment. And then often they’re turned into parks or golf courses at the end. It takes about fifty years for the biodegradable material in a landfill to decompose by anaerobic means, and there are pilot projects to use aerobic processes to reduce that time to five years or less. And anything that goes into the landfill does not get into the ocean .
*Last link is paywalled but a) the previous link summarises it and b) you can read the author tweet about it here
There’s a whole lot of stuff that comes packaged in plastic bubbles. None of it needs to.
There are plastic stickers attached to lots of things that don’t need them.
We need to try to get such things banned. The individual purchaser often can’t avoid them; though we can complain. The response I’ve gotten from stores, however, is often that they agree but they can only get the product packaged in plastic bubbles.
I like fresh fruit, and strawberries and other berries come in plastic tubs as do some other fruits in stores like Trader Joe’s and Costco. I feel guilty, though I do put those tubs in the recycling bin.
I don’t know where you are; but at least at some times of year you may be able to avoid plastic containers for fresh fruit by shopping at a farmers’ market. I use the old-fashioned cardboard tills; many others do also. And if you empty whatever you bought into your own (re-usable) containers and hand whatever they were being sold in back to the vendor, most will be able to use them again (only some people will reuse containers if you take them home and then bring them back, because there’s no way of telling what they may have been in contact with while you had them in the meantime.)
I find that I need to provide a whole lot fewer bags at market than I used to, because a lot more customers are bringing their own.