Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic
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Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic
#2I'm in Chicago. Literally every time I see a garbage truck, it's dumping the recyclables in with the trash. This doesn't surprise me at all.
Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic
#3Not just touted, but actively pushed legislative requirements that lied to consumers.
> Industry documents from this time show that just a couple of years earlier, starting in 1989, oil and plastics executives began a quiet campaign to lobby almost 40 states to mandate that the symbol appear on all plastic — even if there was no way to economically recycle it.
Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic
#4Reduce, reuse, recycle - meaning recycling is the last option.
It's better to not consume plastic in the first place, but if you must, find additional uses for it.
It takes more of a lifestyle change though than to simply put your cans in a different barrel. Which is probably why few people are willing to try it.
Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic
#5I wonder what the world would look like now if there never was any oil. We’d have missed out on a lot of industrialising. Would we have had as many wars? I guess we could still have got into space using methane. Will all the positive stuff oil’s given us be undone by just how bad the climate gets? Interesting thought experiment!
Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic
#6Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24441979
Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic
#7Reduce, reuse, recycle - meaning recycling is the last option. It's better to not consume plastic in the first place, but if you must, find additional uses for it. It takes more of a lifestyle change though than to simply put your cans in a different barrel. Which is probably why few people are willing to try it.
This is not an individual choice. I can try to recycle plastic, but if there is no government programs to handle this issue, it will not work.
Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic
#8I wonder what the world would look like now if there never was any oil. We’d have missed out on a lot of industrialising. Would we have had as many wars? I guess we could still have got into space using methane. Will all the positive stuff oil’s given us be undone by just how bad the climate gets? Interesting thought experiment!
Just realised it would probably just be a world filled with coal smoke, but at least less plastic pollution!
Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic
#9Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24441979
It was on the frontpage since yesterday. And the minute it drops off the frontpage, it gets spammed to the frontpage again. Unbelievable. Not only that another NPR story got spammed to the frontpage at the same time. Now that's interesting.
Edit: Looks like I touched a nerve.
Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic
#10It is always a little surprising how naive people are when it comes to recycling.
The majority of the cost and difficulty comes in sorting. Back in the good old days most US municipalities used to require people to sort their recycling by type, but over the years we have switched to a more wasteful system.
For aluminum cans the material is valuable and relatively easy to sort. For plastic the material is cheap and sorting is hard (if you can't tell what the plastic container you threw in the bin is made out of (HDPE?) in a second then it is trash).
FWIW this is also a relatively easy problem to fix. We could look to the brief but successful history of recycling in Taiwan as a good example to copy. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_in_Taiwan)