How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled
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Re: How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled
#2Highly recommend Netflix's Broken episode on this topic ("Recycling Sham").
Re: How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled
#3Recycling, like wearing a mask during a pandemic, is just too boring a solution for most of America.
They'd rather put the effort into coming up with a story that makes everything someone else's fault even as they pay the price for their own idiocy.
Re: How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled
#4I can't remember where I read it but there was the view that recycling allows people to think they're environmentally responsible when they aren't. eg the typical family has multiple cars, lives in a big suburban house, has heating/ac buys loads of stuff but recycles their cardboard/glass so thinks their environmental impact is small.
Re: How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled
#5I wonder if sorting could be made feasible by mandating color-coding of different types of plastic? Like PET has to be clear, HDPE white, PP green, etc.? Marketers and package designers may not like it, but whatever.
The tiny little recycling symbols seem pretty useless, unless you force consumers to hand-sort their recyclables according to them.
Re: How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled
#6This article makes it sound like the main bottleneck in the first-run recycling process is sorting.
Could anyone with knowledge around ML, robotics and the like chime in on napkin math around novel labor-reducing approaches to improving the operating economics here? From the sound of it, this is not really a solvable problem short of some leapfrog technological advance.
Even then, you don’t want to spend more energy on sorting automation than you get back from the recycling. And this would only make sense if the diminishing returns after the first or second recycle made it reasonable to be issuing so many consumer plastics in the first place.
Re: How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled
#7Yes, it’s a scam. Only aluminum actually gets recycled. It’s time to tax plastic so companies start using paper products (even if they go to landfill, they will at least sequester carbon there) or aluminum.
Re: How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled
#8I can't remember where I read it but there was the view that recycling allows people to think they're environmentally responsible when they aren't. eg the typical family has multiple cars, lives in a big suburban house, has heating/ac buys loads of stuff but recycles their cardboard/glass so thinks their environmental impact is small.
Every time I took a German course, my textbook had a section something like "was machen Sie für die Umwelt?" ('what do you do for the environment?'), and the first example answer in dialogues was always "Müll trennen" (sorting kinds of trash for recycling). It was amazing what a cultural force this habit seems to have for many Germans.
I still remember that one of the textbooks even started an answer with "natürlich trenne ich Müll" ('well, of course I sort my trash...').
(Of course, there were other things in the dialogues such as cycling and taking the train, so it's not like recycling is the only ecological measure in German society.)
Re: How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled
#9Planet Money goes into this in a 2-parts series:
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/09/739893511/episode-925-a-mob-b...
Re: How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled
#10I can't remember where I read it but there was the view that recycling allows people to think they're environmentally responsible when they aren't. eg the typical family has multiple cars, lives in a big suburban house, has heating/ac buys loads of stuff but recycles their cardboard/glass so thinks their environmental impact is small.
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