41–50 of 324 posts
I 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.
The ironic part is that recycling bins are almost always made of plastic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> It was amazing what a cultural force this habit seems to have for many Germans. I'm not asking maliciously, but I wonder how Germans reconcile their seemingly environmental awareness with their high CO2 emissions and big cars culture.
Like most environmental issues, the focus should've been on producers not consumers. Tax plastic usage and producers will use less of it.
What problem was recycling supposed to be solving? Understanding just what the negative of plastic is supposed to be would inform how it is to be dealt with.
So not a lot has changed, it's the same problem but instead of overflowing landfills of plastic, we are seeing it in the ocean instead.
Highly recommend Netflix's Broken episode on this topic ("Recycling Sham").
What problem was recycling supposed to be solving? Understanding just what the negative of plastic is supposed to be would inform how it is to be dealt with.
Anecdotally, when I was younger (80s) the concern was biodegradability. There were a lot of fears of plastics never really being re-absorbed into the environment. So the idea that your yogurt cup would live on unhindered for centuries was a common fear. This lead to movements to reconsider plastics as large food industry providers were switching away from more expensive glass (which was incentivized to be reused back…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also had a recycling scandal when it was exposed all the tidy sorting at home hit all dumped at the refuse center and either dumped or shipped off but mostly not recycled.
I got suspicious when Portland moved from sorted recycling (four bins, I think) to 'combined recycling'. How could it make economic sense to then sort it back out?
Whether that is true or not is left as an exercise for the reader.
I am hopeful that the initiative which uses waste stream plastics as a component of asphalt will allow us to finally get some decent alternative to landfill for plastics. The best part about it was that the plastics didn't need to be sorted or clean; it is just going to be melted, pelletized and then mixed with hot tar to make asphalt. Since asphalt is now nearly infinitely recycled the plastics will be kept in use f…