nearly everything we acquire ends up in a landfill eventually, plastic or not. Plastic unlike metals can never be restored as good as new. The recycled plastic will always be inferior. Metals do not have that problem.
Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
31–40 of 219 posts
Re: Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
#32The truth is that plastic generally can't be recycled, and we should stop pretending as such. Consequently it would make sense to tax it and generally discourage its use as much as possible.
Polluters get away with overusing plastic packaging precisely because consumers stop caring when they think it can be recycled.
Re: Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now you've got to ship everything back to the seller, and then the seller has to ship the waste to their actual processor. Plus the added cost/waste of the RFID tag.
> Now you’ve got to ship everything back to the seller, and then the seller has to ship the waste to their actual processor That’s actually an interesting idea. If it actually worked that way, there would be an amazingly high incentive for sellers to minimize packaging waste. It would also have a side effect of making high-waste packaged goods much more expensive than low-waste packaged food, promoting the purchase o…
>If it actually worked that way, there would be an amazingly high incentive for sellers to minimize packaging waste.
But why? Adding a nonsense convoluted disincentive is inane. Landfills are cheap and plentiful and filling them with plastic doesn't hurt anything (and can be billed to either supplier or consumer) If something is worth recycling the market will sort it.
Re: Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
#34I was wondering if we should put "seller unique rfids" on everything so the trash can be sorted and returned to the seller. Then we just add the cost of recycling to the cost of the product. Alternatively, add a "recycler unique rfid" and every seller has to partner with a recycler in order to sell a product.
Now you've got to ship everything back to the seller, and then the seller has to ship the waste to their actual processor. Plus the added cost/waste of the RFID tag.
Bill the manufacturer for the waste it creates, as it gets scanned and sorted.
Re: Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
#35I toured the Recology recycling facility a few months ago. The sorting technology is impressive, but the amount of material that they remove and send to the landfill had me questioning the efficacy of the program. It sucks to push the packaging crimes of businesses onto consumers, but I think improving the public's understanding of what can and cannot be recycled can still have a massive impact on the effectiveness o…
Public awareness at the unrecyle-ability of the majority of products should hopefully upstream business packaging change.
Re: Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
#36I live in New Haven and saw on our handy recycling flyer [0] that pizza boxes are listed, with no caveat, as being a single stream curbside recyclable item. Which is great, because pizza is a whole thing in this town. We eat a lot of it. So I was surprised to learn, if you go poking around and find the RecycleCT website [1] and hover your mouse over the pizza box, up pops this note. "No food residue. No liner." Never…
Shouldn't a pizza box be compostable anyway? It's mostly cardboard?
Re: Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
#37This is LUDICROUS. Recycling is harder than doing your taxes. We desperately need uniformity on this. " BEVERAGE BOTTLES Recyclable. Be sure to remove the plastic film label, which isn’t recyclable. " FFS. Have you ever tried to remove one of those labels? It's impossible. " A bottle with a cap or an opening the same size or smaller than the base of the bottle is probably going to be recyclable. " -- WTF does the siz…
Yes it's pretty bad. What it comes down to is: follow the local rules. If you don't know the local rules or are unsure, err on the side of keeping the recycling clean and throw it out.
(Landfills are quite good at keeping plastic out of the environment. It's the stuff that doesn't make it into the landfill that you have to worry about.)
Re: Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
#38This is LUDICROUS. Recycling is harder than doing your taxes. We desperately need uniformity on this. " BEVERAGE BOTTLES Recyclable. Be sure to remove the plastic film label, which isn’t recyclable. " FFS. Have you ever tried to remove one of those labels? It's impossible. " A bottle with a cap or an opening the same size or smaller than the base of the bottle is probably going to be recyclable. " -- WTF does the siz…
Yes it's pretty bad. What it comes down to is: follow the local rules. If you don't know the local rules or are unsure, err on the side of keeping the recycling clean and throw it out. (Landfills are quite good at keeping plastic out of the environment. It's the stuff that doesn't make it into the landfill that you have to worry about.)
Then keep checking, as local rules keep evolving so that products they used to consider acceptable stop being so. Sometimes new items become acceptable, but our experience is mostly of things being removed from recycling over the years.
It's insane.
Re: Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
#39This is LUDICROUS. Recycling is harder than doing your taxes. We desperately need uniformity on this. " BEVERAGE BOTTLES Recyclable. Be sure to remove the plastic film label, which isn’t recyclable. " FFS. Have you ever tried to remove one of those labels? It's impossible. " A bottle with a cap or an opening the same size or smaller than the base of the bottle is probably going to be recyclable. " -- WTF does the siz…
I found a simple 80% solution for home plastic: I avoid packaged food in favor of fresh, unwrapped fruits, vegetables, and foods from bulk bins. Now I have a load of garbage to empty a little less than once a year and a load of metal and plastic recycling once or twice a year. Plus my food tastes better and costs less. Everyone is free to do what they want, and experience shows someone will have to tell me the soluti…
I mean c'mon, individually plastic-wrapped apples? It's crazy how much unnecessary packaging there is at the grocery store.
But yeah, it is possible to avoid a lot of it. And if you're really dedicated, you can essentially get to zero waste. Here's someone that was able to fit 5 years of their trash into mason jar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT0uqEPzbd0
Re: Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
#40Worth noting for anyone who thinks "why bother recycling", this is specifically about plastics. If you have metal, aluminum especially is a very valuable recyclable, so definitely keep recycling that.
Even then, your curbside recycling probably can't deal with random scrap metal. The one at our house only wants aluminum and tin containers. Anything else, you should probably give to a scrap metal recycler.
It doesn't matter what is theoretically recyclable. All that matters is what the recycler can handle.
So the rule of thumb is: there is no rule of thumb. Follow the local rules.