'Horrible hybrids': the plastic products that give recyclers nightmares

Post by robbrown451 » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 5:59 AM UTC

AstralStorm wrote: post #27

robbrown451 wrote: post #16

Ok, but put things in perspective. A musical greeting card is typically a $5-10 purchase. People presumably pay this money because they expect someone to get that much enjoyment out of it. The amount of recyclable paper in a greeting card is probably worth about 1/100th of a cent, if that. Maybe these costs seem irrelevant, but still -- they seem to be expecting people to bypass the card for a more recyclable one, wh…

How about not buying the trash card and instead opting for regular paper or fully electronic? Each tiny piece of complex trash adds to a horribly polluted landfill... Recycling indeed is not cost effective or even impossible. Even cardboard can be contaminated with wax or paint enough to prevent recycling or require use of expensive and dangerous solvents. Perhaps Asian way of outright banning bad packaging and produ…

Fully electronic cards don't count as cards.

Post by MandieD » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 7:03 AM UTC

cmurf wrote: post #19

ars wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand why it's even legal to produce disposable plastic containers today that are not 100%, easily recyclable It's because it's completely harmless to landfill them. Litter is bad. Full stop. Landfill however is not. I've noticed a trend in these types of articles that conflates the two things as if they were the same. Then they tend of mix in info (plastic in the ocean) that applies to countries that…

People are lazy and selfish. If government doesn't give them a disincentive: fines for littering, high taxes for buying unrecyclable plastics or banning them outright, people flat out do not change their behavior. If everyone on earth consumed and trashed as much as the average American, the whole planet would be a toxic waste dump. And we've seen that in the early part of the industrial revolution in the U.S., toxic…

Most Germans don't bring back racks of glass beer bottles and bags full of plastic water bottles because they care about the environment so much - they do it because there's a 0.08-0.15 EUR deposit on reusable glass, 1.50 EUR on the plastic racks and 0.25 EUR on one-time use plastic drink bottles, and big stores that sell bottle drinks have developed automats for accepting the empties and tallying up the refunds because they have to accept all standard bottles, even if they don't sell that particular item.

Any other recycling that happens is mostly because trash bins are only emptied every two weeks, and more than a 60L bin for a household is punitively expensive. Even if you don't care about the 3.10 EUR you'd get back for the rack of beer, you do care about having to pay to get rid of something that large.

Re: 'Horrible hybrids': the plastic products that give recyclers nightmares

Re: 'Horrible hybrids': the plastic products that give recyclers nightmares