• TerkErJerbs@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    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.

    • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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.

      • TerkErJerbs@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        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.

    • ch00f@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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?

    • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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      4 months ago

      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.

      • littlewonder@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Aluminum water bottles are an option. I was at an airport recently where they only sold water in aluminum bottles and it was awesome.

      • brbposting
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        3 months ago

        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.

        • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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          3 months ago

          The European carbon tax is doing pretty doing good at making the European energy system greener by making fossil fuels less competitive. Renewables are now very competitive.

          If the taxes are redistributed to help the poor buy more sustainable product it may work.

    • cashmaggot@piefed.social
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      4 months ago

      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.

        • cashmaggot@piefed.social
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          3 months ago

          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.

  • Ellia Plissken@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    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

    • piecat@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      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.

      • exanime@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        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

        • piecat@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          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.

            • piecat@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              I read the snippets and abstract. I’m not seeing how these micro plastics are getting out of the landfills.

              Environmental risks of microplastics in landfills

              In landfills, microplastics are not standalone pollutants. Generally, such tiny particles can adsorb various harmful chemicals due to its large specific surface area [54].

              Never knew that!

              In this case, microplastics generally served as the vector for migrating adsorbed pollutants including heavy metals, antibiotics and other pharmaceutical and personal care products [55].

              That’s scary, microplastics can absorb and spread pollutants!

              But I’m not seeing anything about how they’re getting out from a landfill. I even read a few of the referenced articles. But nothing about if or how they’re getting out.

      • yamanii@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        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?

        • sus@programming.dev
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          3 months ago

          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.

    • Rhaedas@fedia.io
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      4 months ago

      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!

      • mkwt@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Incinerated plastic releases green house gases and some amount of micro plastics in the uncombusted ash.

        Landfill plastic seemingly just erodes into micro plastics over long time scales.

      • can
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        And I just realized, this wikipedia page linked is almost 10 years out of date!

        You know what must be done.

  • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    I’ll be honest, that’s actually more than I would have guessed (ballpark would have been 5% or under), sad as that is.

    • RubberDuck@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      I’ll bet the term recycled is actually open for interpretation, and the official use differs from our (pleb) expectations.

  • b161@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    4 months ago

    I read somewhere that because recycling plastic isn’t profitable, under the capitalist system there’s no incentive to do so.

    Most plastics due for recycling just gets shipped off to poor countries for “reclycing” but isn’t at all, and a lot of it just ends up in the ocean.

    So you’re better off just throwing plastics in the garbage where it will at least end up in landfill and not in the ocean.

    • Maalus@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      It’s because you can’t recycle plastic really. Each time you heat it up to melt it it loses its properties. A recyclable material is for instance aluminium, which keeps on being awesome. I tried various recycled plastics for a business I run, none of it was strong enough. Recycled lego, recycled car bumpers, nada. And then the question is - why would I buy the recycled plastic that doesn’t work when it’s like 30 cents cheaper. Pellets are so cheap in fact, that I could buy a tonne, use up 100kgs, throw the rest away and still be fine.

      • PrimeMinisterKeyes@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Once they touch the factory floor’s floor, plastics become filthy and cannot be used for high-quality applications - food wrappers, anything with body contact. Oils and heavy metals are the biggest contaminants, a plastics-producing company I used to work for concluded. They either sent it all to a recycling factory or used it for very low-quality stuff like trash bags.
        Now with post-consumer plastics, not only are they extremely heterogeneous, they will also have even worse contaminants like mold which proved to be very resistant to cleaning, a EU study concluded. So you might want to pyrolyze them like you do with crude oil, but there’s just too much O, N, S and halogens, so the output will be too corrosive, but also too heterogeneous for it to make economic sense.

        • Classy
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          4 months ago

          What was it like working in plastics production? I imagine you were breathing in vapors all the time?

      • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
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        4 months ago

        Maybe with some additives? Or removing them, in the first place? But expensive i guess.

        • Maalus@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Maybe there is something, but tbh why bother when virgin pellets are better. The best plastic recycling strategy is to not make it in the first place. Or just use other types of packaging - alu cans, glass bottles, paper containers, whatever.

          Also additives soak water like crazy. Moisture is a huge problem when making parts - you need to dry some types of plastic pellets in industrial dryers, which eats up a ton of electricity - since they are often running off of compressed air out of a compressor. Most plastic comes in natural colors to which you add additives to change to the color you want. Simply doing that (2% by weight) is a difference between not having to dry at all (since some plastics just don’t absorb water - i.e. polyolefins - which high density variant is what bottles for shower gel, shampoos are made of) and having to dry it for like 6 hours before use.

    • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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      4 months ago

      It’s just a bad material that’s cheap to make things out of.

      Once used, to my knowledge, it can’t be reused as the same thing, so they “recycle” it into road surfacing etc, which I’m sure doesn’t end up fragmenting into tiny bits over the years and ending up in water sources…

      And I’m not sure there’s a good way to get away from it completely. Even drink cans have a small layer of plastic inside to stop it reacting with the metal. Glass is probably the most environmentally friendly (if you just wash and reuse), but a bitch to get it back in one piece.

      Time to tax the ever loving shit out of plastic tbh. And yes, prices will go up, but you know what? They go up anyway. They can only take as much as we have, and they’re already taking it.

      • roofuskit@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Most glass is recycled into asphalt. Until fairly recently that was the only way to recycle glass.

    • Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      That’s a bit cynical take. In many countries, including mine, there are dedicate bins for plastic waste which is the majority of waste from your typical household. It’s all being recycled into new products, not being shipped anywhere. Also, when it comes to plastic bottles for example, close to 100% of them are returned and recycled into new bottles. I’ve got a tiny-ass bin for the stuff that ends up in landfill because I separate and recycle it all as does most other people.

      EDIT: Nevermind then. It’s all apparently dumped into the ocean. Sorry about the attempt in some positivity.

        • Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee
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          4 months ago

          Seems far more likely that the recycling rate is low because not every piece of plastic waste is put into recycling. Not that they simply don’t recycle it.

          • Tiptopit@feddit.org
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            4 months ago

            The problem is that there are quite some different sorts of plastics and that plastic containers are not standardized. If you mix different kinds of plastics or plastics with other materials you can’t use it anymore in an automated processing and it usually gets burned. Also mostly recycling is a downgrade, so usually if you recycle some packaging, it is not made into packaging again but into things like pallets or construction fence bases.

      • frazorth@feddit.uk
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        4 months ago

        It’s all being recycled into new products

        I’m afraid its not. There are many plastics that don’t have any method of recycling, and plently more that require specific machinery for their “one time” recycling that just isn’t being used.commercially.

        when it comes to plastic bottles for example, close to 100% of them are returned and recycled into new bottles

        Even the PET bottles can only go through the process once or twice before becoming too degraded. That’s not even taking into account that most manufacturers want white or clear plastic, and recycled does not work that way.

        The separation and recycling that you do is mostly gaslighting and green washing.

      • RubberDuck@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Haha… yeah I live in the Netherlands. And my city started separately collecting plastics.

        Here’s the kicker: because there is no more plastic in our waste, the energy value of the waste went down. The city sold these waste “rights” to an incineration plant that reclaims heat and energy who now cannot use the waste. So to avoid contractual fines, our city now imports plastic waste from elsewhere in Europe to be mixed in with the waste and then incinerated.

        Well fuck me!

        • This is more expensive for the city (separate bins, separate collection, separate processing, buying plastics from elsewhere and getting it here)
        • All the extra transport and shipping movements is worse for the environment.
        • I’m stuck with an extra fucking bin, and with both a greens bin and the rest bin that are collected once every 3 weeks instead of 2… stinking up the place even worse.

        But I’m sure they meant well.

      • Deceptichum@quokk.au
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        4 months ago

        In my country (Aus), last I heard our recycling was mostly shipped off to Indo or somewhere else in SEA (previously China before China banned it).

        I suspect very little ever sees recycling, but the neoliberal model means privatised companies paid by government, so they’re out to cut expenses to maximise profits and shipping it off to someone else to do the illegal thing where it’s not illegal isn’t illegal.

    • vga@sopuli.xyz
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      4 months ago

      I read somewhere that because recycling plastic isn’t profitable, under the capitalist system there’s no incentive to do so.

      Not just unprofitable in a capitalist sense, but inefficient. A typical plastic beverage container can be recycled two or three times before the plastic degrades too much to be usable.

      Socialism won’t save you here. Unless said socialism bans plastic products.

  • reddig33@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    That could be fixed with “virgin nondegradable plastic” taxes, deposit/return fees, and regulations on single use plastics.

    But unfortunately the fossil fuel industry calls the shots in most places.

  • randompasta@lemmy.today
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    4 months ago

    The recycling symbol for plastics was a great bit of marketing for the plastics industry. ‘Just buy a new thing and no worries you can just recycle it.’

    Future geologists are going to see a marine deposit of plastic and be able to date exactly the age of the rock layer.

    • echolalia@lemmy.ml
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      4 months ago

      Survivors of the resource wars will send their children to the plastic mines to work for bottle caps

    • makingrain@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      Don’t forget nuclear fallout. There’s even a term for when humans started to irrevocably fuck Earth: the Anthropocene.

      • weariedfae@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        The committee recently pulled the plug on the Anthropocene unfortunately. It was never official and they just rejected it this year.

        • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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          Yeah, I feel like this Wikipedia graphic puts it quite well why that was rejected:

          You see that “Pleistocene” vertical bar? And you see that tiny sliver of “Holocene” at the top. Yeah, the Anthropocene folks were basically arguing that so many riveting things happened in the Holocene already, that we need to declare a new epoch for what’s happening now.

          Besides, if we do continue to irrevocably fuck Earth and the current mass extinction event continues to wipe out a big chunk of life on Earth, then a future sentient species might declare our entire existence as just the geological event that ended the current era (Cenozoic).

  • Huckledebuck
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    4 months ago

    Reduce, reuse, recycle in that order. Recycling should be the final option to dealing with our trash.

    I believe the focus for most people should be reduce (including myself).

    • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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      4 months ago

      Could you tell that to all the companies out there who use plastic?

      Remember when Snapple tried to spin moving to plastic bottles like it was a good thing, like 5 years ago?

      • Huckledebuck
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        Agreed, but there is also far too much consumer push back. Sunchips tried to make a more biodegradable bag, but people complained that they were too loud.

        • boomzilla@programming.dev
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          3 months ago

          They were louder than the aluminium/plastic bags? What material did they use? Also what a lazy argument by the producer for giving up environmental actions. Bet it just cost them more.

          • turmacar@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            ~2010

            I remember them being noticeably louder. Unless you were in a library or a movie theater I don’t know why people cared all that much though.

            • boomzilla@programming.dev
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              3 months ago

              Thanks for the source. So yeah “Potato Chip Technology That Destroys Your Hearing” doesn’t sound reassuring. Nonetheless I’d take those packaging everyday over conventional knowing I did my thing while getting fat.

              Eating out of conventional chips packaging in cinemas or libraries should be punishable either way. I think in reality those customers problem was the “open the bag at night without waking up everyone” problem which should be preventable with a bit of planning.

    • Katana314@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      I’m saddened that Reuse has fallen by the wayside. I brought some cleaned liquor bottles back to my store for deposit, and the clerk admitted to me they’ll just end up in the recycling chain - it’s too much effort to locate transport/handling for the bottles.

      Theoretically, there should be a lot of inward transit for cities and civic centers with not much going out. There’s a very efficient mental image of dropping off 80 bottles, and picking up 80 empty bottles to bring back, but it would just take more logistics than people care for to do it that way.

      • Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        It’s all propaganda. They do that in japan and for those that are gonna say japan is a first world advanced small country, they do that shit in Mexico too. I’ve lived in a number of states across Mexico for nearly a decade and from big cities to tiny towns you can bring back your glass bottles to the shops and they forward it to the delivery people to be returned to be sanitized and reused. All the big companies do this, you pay a smidge extra on that first bottle and from then it’s cheaper if you return the empty when buying a new one.

        If the US based companies don’t do it it’s because they don’t want to, not because they can’t. I know for a fact coke does it in Mexico.

      • gandalf_der_12te@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        3 months ago

        The problem with recycling/reusing plastics has been notoriously difficult in the past. That is why it’s so often incinerated/dumped instead of reused/recycled.

        I want to explain my view of this:

        Reusing plastics is difficult because the bottles are often produced in a way that makes them as thin (and lightweight) as possible. That has the advantage of saving oil, but has the disadvantage that they are in turn so brittle that if you tried to reuse them, chances are high that the bottles would either break, or - more dangerously - abrasive effects would cause the bottle to get tiny cracks, which would set free microplastics and potentially additives, which could be really toxic; and nobody wants to be responsible for this, so they are dumped.

        Then there is the problem with washing the bottles. A lot of the plastics is not made to be brought into contact with soap, as I understand it, because the soap severely impacts the plastics. So washing them thoroughly is difficult.

        Recycling has a different problem. Recycling consumes more energy than simply producing new ones. In the past, that was the reason to dump them. With cheap solar energy, the game could change. Recycling still takes a lot of energy, but as energy is getting cheaper, industry could reuse the carbon atoms in the bottle; in other words: reuse the material that’s in the bottle, not the energy that’s in the bottle. This will require even cheaper energy prices though to be economical.

      • Captain Aggravated
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        3 months ago

        A lot of the issue there is everyone has to have their own unique glass bottle because marketing. A coke bottle has to go back to the coca-cola bottling plant. A Johnny Walker bottle has to go back to Scotland, etc.

    • rekabis@lemmy.ca
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      4 months ago

      Unfortunately, most plastics are useless to recycle - they either get incinerated or dumped straight into the landfill by the companies who collect and filter them.

      Which is why my wife and I only bother with plastic bags, styrofoam, and the hard plastics marked types 1 & 2. These are the plastics which are easily recyclable, and therefore, have a non-trivial chance of actually being recycled.

      We put types 3 through 7 straight into the trash, as they have about a 97% chance of not actually getting recycled.

    • paraphrand@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      In my area they don’t recycle glass. I was so surprised when I moved here and learned that. Glass and aluminum are the two most worth it/possible afaik.

  • vga@sopuli.xyz
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    NGL that’s more than I thought, but nevertheless: don’t use plastic if you can avoid it. It’s not easy to recycle.

    For instance, for beverages, prefer cans or your own glass / metal water bottles.

    That said, 9% is a huge lot better than 0%. edit or considering the amount of plastics we use, a huge lot better than 8% too.

    • BruceTwarzen@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      The older i get the more disgusting i find plastic. I would never buy plastic tupperware ever again, drinking out of plastic bottles just feels wrong.

    • rekabis@lemmy.ca
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      4 months ago

      don’t use plastic if you can avoid it. It’s not easy to recycle.

      Plastic bags, styrofoam, and those hard plastics marked types 1 & 2 are the ones most likely to be recycled into new products. They are easy to break down and recycle into new containers.

      Hard plastics marked types 3 through 7 are most likely to be filtered out and either incinerated or dumped straight into the landfill, as it costs more to recycle them than to just create new straight from oil.

    • TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      How is it difficult to recycle? The temperatures requires to do so are less than metal, the 3D printing communities has people that recycle them into filaments all the time. I don’t think the problem is the plastic so much as it is how it is still treated as a disposable container and that neither companies nor governments pay for or provide reclamation means like recycling machines that pay for each bottle collected. In other words, the problem is more cultural than material.

      • Eranziel@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Others have pointed out the degradation issue, but you’re also assuming that all plastics are thermoplastics. They are not. There’s huge variation in chemical composition and material properties between different plastics, and most of them can’t be melted and reformed.

        • TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee
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          4 months ago

          But then the problem isn’t with all plastics, it’s with certain plastics, and around 70% of global plastic production are concentrated around commodity plastics, all of which are thermoplastic. The greatest degradation issue occurs with biodegradable plastics, which is perceived as a good thing for them, though even biodegradable PLA has toxicity concerns.

      • HereIAm@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        And how many times do they recycle the filament until it’s too degraded to use?

        • TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee
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          4 months ago

          Depends on what you consider degraded, the only reason it would stop being recyclable is if it became too contaminated with foreign substances or exposure, which applies to anything.

          • cynar@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            Repeating plastics tends to damage them on a chemical level. The polymer chains break and shorten. This ends with the plastic being more brittle. Since 3d printed parts have already been remelted once, they have even more degradation than injection moulded parts.

            I believe the recommended amount of recycled plastic is around 30% for PLA. Any more and the parts lose significant strength.

            I personally would prefer us to accept that plastics aren’t really recyclable. It’s better to move towards renewable plastics like PLA, and treat the waste as biomass (either composted or burnt for energy.

            • TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee
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              4 months ago

              I personally would prefer us to accept that plastics aren’t really recyclable. It’s better to move towards renewable plastics

              Err … getting mixed signals …

              What you are describing is exposure. There are plenty of build with 100% recycled plastic, so not sure where you are getting that 30%. I think you are perhaps thinking of the marketing material of PLA filaments that sell themselves as particularly ecofriendly because they include recycled materials, while I’m talking about builds made entirely out of things like recycled water bottles, which are made out of PET. PLA is more susceptible to exposure to sunlight, heat, and moisture, so rather than using it to hold beverages at that point you might want to skip plastic entirely. PLA itself is not recycled that much, but it is more biodegradable.

              • cynar@lemmy.world
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                3 months ago

                Exposure can cause similar effects. However, the act of heating the plastic to the temperatures needed to melt it and defirming it also damages the structure. It’s particularly obvious with pla, but all plastics suffer from it, to an extent.

  • cashmaggot@piefed.social
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    4 months ago

    I worked at a university at one point in my life, and they were quite proud about their recycling plan. The janitors though, would just take the trash and the recycling and put the two bags together and throw them both away. I never really lived anywhere that recycled outside of the West Coast. But is it actually being recycled here? Is this the 9%?

    • cheers_queers@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      custodian checking in: if your university is anything like the school i work in, custodians are dumping it in the trash because nobody seems to know what can be recycled and the staff fill their recycle cans with trash. it’s not worth the time picking through it to salvage what you can.

      most of the stuff in the recycle bins in the rooms i clean cannot be recycled. food wrappers, Kleenex, etc. it’s a sham meant to make people feel better about themselves

      • cashmaggot@piefed.social
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        3 months ago

        I always figured it was just because it was a sham as a whole and they didn’t really give a puck and nobody ever seemingly was watching them. Thank you for your input though, this is good stuff =)

        • cheers_queers@lemm.ee
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          3 months ago

          it’s possible they also didn’t care, but we do recycle the best we can in our district :)

          • cashmaggot@piefed.social
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            3 months ago

            Oh yeah, I feel that too. Also feel your nickname ;D!

            I think a lot of people who are just trying to survive never really cared that much about a lot of things - recycling included.

            *Mind you, I know you can also get paid some solid $$$ for being a custodian cause I dated one and she made bank ass bucks.

            • cheers_queers@lemm.ee
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              3 months ago

              more people should consider being a school district custodian imo. i get health benefits, all federal holidays and weekends off, a union and a pension (yes, a pension. not 401k)… it’s hard work if you do it right, but can’t beat it for the benefits as an entry level job

              • cashmaggot@piefed.social
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                3 months ago

                Y, I had an adopted papi (rip) by the by (as in found family) and he was a custodian too before he retired. And he worked at a hospital and did very well for himself. I guess one more is that I knew a guy who once was attending university, dropped out and now sweeps floors for a living and he’s WAY happier doing that than keeping up with the joneses like you have to do at a private university. I myself have worked all sorts of gigs, and enjoy a solid sweeping or three =)!

                One last one, little sneak in here - in that I have always been good at flitting too and fro and some of my favorite people to talk to growing up were custodians, because they were like the invisible folks of the school but depending on if I was “in hiding” or “visible” I could always find comfort and fun stories with the custodians =)!

                My buddy is a TA, and does well for themselves even though they struggled for years to find a place to fit in. People always talk about what a nightmare it is to be in the school system but I know a handful of people who really love it. I think you’ve got to just be a realist in this department. Either way, high-five =)!

  • Pika
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    3 months ago

    not to mention it doesn’t matter where it goes, most plastic can’t be recycled or is not efficient to recycle it. Really need to just not use plastic as a whole

    • XIIIesq@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Easy in principle, tough in practice. Plastics are extremely useful in a huge range of applications.

      • SomeAmateur
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        3 months ago

        Yeah plastic is great for a lot of stuff. Car parts, backpack clips, buttons, trash cans etc. But one time use plastic is EVERYWHERE.

    • SomeAmateur
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      3 months ago

      Right? Why do gatorade and pedialyte bottles have to be in crazy over engineered compared to cheap crinkly water bottles? Both one time use which isn’t ideal but thinner bottles would save the company money right?

      I wonder if it’s a psychology thing, like having a high quality bottle means people thing whatever is inside is equally higher quality?