Plastic producers have known for more than 30 years that recycling is not an economically or technically feasible plastic waste management solution. That has not stopped them from promoting it, according to a new report.
“The companies lied,” said Richard Wiles, president of fossil-fuel accountability advocacy group the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), which published the report. “It’s time to hold them accountable for the damage they’ve caused.”
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I worked in packaging for 20 years. A bottle CAN be recycled indefinitely… if it’s made from GLASS.
Source: I worked 8 years for a glass bottle manufacturer.The real key is local bottling where local production isn’t possible.
Ship vats of Coca-Cola syrup to the 200 largest cities (more or less) in North America and create local bottle circulation.
Spice it up with local bottle designs or recycling marks. Now you’ve got novelty sales, collector sales, eco-conscious sales, ‘support local’ sales…
I am so confused. Isn’t that the coca cola model? Each area has some coca cola bottling franchise that services them, and they already have regional differences.
As far as I know local bottlers have been a thing for a long time yes. I remember TV ads for soda with a tack on slogan at the end from the bottling company. “Bottled by the good guys at Kalil”
Or aluminum
Aluminum has a plastic liner
Which is effectively not there, by weight or area. Also, aluminium is the most efficiently recycleable material we know of.
Too bad most of those bottles got replaced with plastic completely disregarding the impact of the environment they are causing. Not to mention that glass also comes from abundant resources like sand and we don’t risk running out of it anytime soon, the same can’t be said for oil.
Not to mention that glass also comes from abundant resources like sand and we don’t risk running out of it anytime soon
Is now a bad time to point out that not only is sand not as an abundant resource as you think, but we’re actually running short of it?
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a39880899/earth-is-running-out-of-sand/
https://theweek.com/news/science-health/960931/why-is-the-world-running-out-of-sand
Isn’t this specifically about sand for construction which needs to be coarse enough? For glass packaging you melt that stuff anyway, SiO₂ is SiO₂. Also I imagine the amount of sand needed for glass bottles would be way smaller than what construction industry uses, even less so if you recycle.
Specifically sand for construction and glass making. Not saying that glass bottles aren’t a better solution than plastic, just that the main resource needed is rarer than initially implied.
Those glass bottles used to cause an awful lot of horrific deaths and injuries during handling, so from a safety perspective, there is no desire at all to return to glass. Glass bottles are also much heavier than plastic, so have a commensurate environmental impact due to the increased consumption of fossil fuels for shipping as well. Fixing the problems with plastic was a big PR win and saved companies millions in law suits and shipping costs. They won’t go back to glass. The answer is probably re-usable plastic containers purchased by the customer and refilled at stores for the same price (or more) than when sold in disposable plastic packaging. Another PR win in the offing, no doubt.
IT would be awesome if you walked into a convenience store and they just had everything on tap. You bring in your own bottle and lunch container fill em up and walk out.
I want a 100% tariff on virgin plastics
IIRC, plastic is byproduct of oil being refined into gas. As long as there are gas vehicles and engines in general, we ain’t gonna get rid of plastic. It’s so cheap because is has to be produced.
I believe it’s more a case of most plastics being produced using a by-product of the oil refining process.
So the use of plastic is subsidising the oil and gas industry.
Flexible packaging for 10 years here … we recycle and reuse 100% of the scrap we make in house, even our nylon, PP, and EVOH.
The sad thing is that we don’t even need 99.9% of this plastic in the first place. People were making disposable packaging, clothing, building materials etc out of non-toxic and biodegradable materials for most of history and it was fine. I seriously detest plastic and wish it was banned/not made unless for exceptional uses e.g replacement heart valves.
It feels inevitable that our descendents will eventually say “holy shit, you stored your FOOD in it?!”, after we discover we’ve been literally killing ourselves the whole time
This is our version of ancient Romans using lead based makeup
Or them using asbestos for napkins and tablecloths, or lead pipes, or mercury in household paint. The Romans loved to use toxic stuff.
I mean we pretty much know that micro and nanoplastic cause all sorts of various cancers, and especially leech into water, so like, those disposable spring water bottles are all just a helping gulp of liquid plastic into bodies who are desperately repairing cellular damage and inflammation caused by said plastic shards lodging themselves deep into every membrane.
But yes have you heard of our friend leaded gasoline, yet? C:
I grew up with our friend leaded gasoline. Please pardon my ever increasing dementia.
Descendants? On this planet?
In this economy?
Yup. Plastic contamination is absolutely insane already. A recent study found that each person ingests about a credit card sized amount of plastic every day. And it’s been fucking with our metabolism and fertility, and causing other long-term health issues for decades now.
We rightly talk about the long-term impact of tobacco and lead on the human body. But somehow the impact of plastic (and, unrelated, sugar) has been flying under the cultural radar for many years. Good to see it’s finally getting the long-overdue attention it deserves.
Last week I decided to count every time my body touched plastic or ingested something that had touched plastic. I gave up within a couple of hours because my internal monologue was constantly saying “touching plastic!”
That shit is everywhere. Sometimes it makes sense (e.g. technology). But it’s also in our clothing, stores our food, etc.
I wish there were better options for storing food and drinks in containers made from materials other than plastic (like, for example tin cans - but even they are often lined with some plastic). But there aren’t. At least not ones that wouldn’t cause the economy to get hit hard You go to a grocery store and almost everything is housed or carried in plastic to some degree. Would be nice to have a database that promoted products that don’t use plastic.
I would say that we as a society need to decide which path to take: the hard path of getting rid of most plastic products and packaging from our lives, or continuing down the current path. But realistically, it’s outside our control, at least for right now.
Credit card sized amount every week, not day. And the data that went into that claim isn’t great:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666911022000247
Any amount of mp we consume is still terrible of course
Yup I want corn and oil subsidies just gone… HFCS, polyester and microplastics are terrible for health.
That last part is driving me crazy with frustration. If I identify a health hazard in my life, I take reasonable precautions against it, but when the whole system is inundated with that same issue, its hard to feel like you’re aligned with “society”. Like you said, it’s literally in everything we eat, drink and do. I’ll continue to support the plastics industry as little as possible, but it still has a stranglehold on industry. I’ve heard some promising reports from India about new developments in more sustainable packaging, but nothing’s hit the mainstream yet.
Really. For the vast majority of packaging, what the fuck was wrong with just using cardboard? Even if 99.99999999% of the stuff winds up in a landfill, at least cardboard is theoretically renewable and will biodegrade in less than a thousand lifetimes.
Cardboard and paper bags went out of style because of the “save the rainforest” narrative. Even though most paper products are made from trees specifically grown to be harvested for their wood.
That’s why we started using plastic bags at grocery stores, remember?
That was what they told us. The reason they actually did it was because they were giving us the bags and they cost a nickel. where plastic bags cost them 5 for a penny.
Hemp is very versatile and can be used to make similar paper products while growing at a much faster rate, which potentially makes it a good replacement. The association with marijuana is part of what prevented it from catching on though.
Their green washing BS lists that it has to be harvested more as a negative.
…like lumber doesnt take far more effort per harvest, as well as take longer to grow?
Mostly it was the paper and textile industries lobbying against cannabis so that the superior products that can be made with hemp were illegal and didn’t stand in the way of their infrastructure and market segment.
That alone probably fueled the drug war against it as much as the government using it to crack down on any minority they could illustrate as using it more often.
Besides timber the no.1 reason is agricultural land
So what about samples (amongst other parts of the entire process) for food-grade products from the manufacturer? I work at a corn syrup manufacturing plant, and there’s no way you can ship corn syrup in cardboard. You would get mold, easily.
I think it’d be very easy to use plastic when we actually need it, and other materials for everything else.
Unfortunately businesses and stockholders disagree.
Pretty much nothing biodegrades in a landfill though.
Then why do they have to deal with so much methane?
I want a 100% tariff on virgin plastics, and a shift of corn and oil subsidies to hemp.
And like, when I bring it up people call me crazy.
as with anything that challenges the crappy status quo.
so frustrating
Wouldn’t be so bad if people would just stop reminding us how shitty they are. We get it, you’re here to nut and die angry, good job.
It woudn’t be so bad if instead of hiding from our problems we actually accepted and faced them.
Ignoring stuff like this will just make things keep getting so much worse than they already are.
I think about this sort of thing from time to time, and every time I come to the same conclusion that manufacturers of bulk goods need to take more responsibility for the entire life cycle of their products. They’re getting a free ride with municipalities stuck footing the bill for recycling plastics, and have zero incentive to solve the problem.
Let’s say the city sent all the recyclables to some regional warehousing facility where they would get sorted by barcode according to manufacturer. Then the companies would be charged for storage and would have strong incentive to come collect their property before it really starts to pile up.
Initially, they will no doubt gripe about it, but in the long term, it may be a win-win in that if say Coca-Cola realizes it can get all its bottles back, it could switch to a more reusable design that could reduce bottling costs?
But that’s a planned economy and socialism /s
Yeah. Every time I try to envision some small change that would bring us closer to a utopian ideal, it invariably smacks of socialism. I just can’t help myself! lol
I’m old now. I was confused most of my life wondering why the world was the way it was, then I actually read Marx, and now it all makes sense.
I mean, in a lot of places outside the US, there are small pallets of bottles that, when emptied, get sent back to the bottler to be refilled.
I do remember a time before widespread recycling when you’d pay a small deposit on a drink and get it back when you returned the bottle to the store. Where I live, alcohol sales still follow that model to some extent.
That was the old school approach and I have no problem with it. But it largely disappeared as municipalities started up recycling programs. I guess it was reasoned that when you do it at a city-wide scale, you cast a broader net and divert more material from the landfill. But as this article mentions, recycling has proven to be a sketchy prospect. It loses money for most cities with exception to aluminum cans where the metal still has some resale value.
One way or another, it would be better if we can get back to more of a reuse approach as opposed to breaking everything down to recycle the raw materials. That just doesn’t seem to be working.
This used to be the case with glass bottles in England back in the 80s. Seemed to work well, certainly I and a lot of other kids used to return as many of those bottles as we could to supplement pocket money. These days all the bottles are plastic and there’s no returns policy.
I’m pretty sure coke and pepsi successfully lobbied to have the bottle/can deposit on pop/soda eliminated
Not everywhere. I have it on plastic coke bottles and also aluminium cans.
Right on! I’d guess you’re in Europe. I just meant to describe how the elimination of the deposit in Canada and the US happened. It was corporate motivated, not municipally motivated. Sorry, I should have been more specific
Indeed. I lived in Canada in the past, they were doing it for cans, but for bottles it was only glass bottles used in restaurants and bars.
Ugh. They need to be part of the solution and not the problem. But you’re probably right…
A better system is to require all grocery/food/packaging, customer facing retailers to record all sales and from which suppliers those products were bought.
Then charge the retailer the average cost of ‘recycling’ or ‘to the planet’, or another measure of cost.
This will increase costs on all products, but by design more on the costs of hard to recycle goods and packaging.
Charge retailers that daily, watch end to end, from supplier/producer to consumer, behaviour change and iterate accordingly.
Start off with an industry sector though, like grocery stores, most are bricks and mortar, and have high brand acknowledgement so can’t easily escape regulation. The key is to charge the location of sale, not the companies ‘HQ’.
It would be relatively easy to implement, as retailers already collect this info for inventory management.
But I fear it wouldn’t go far enough? What we really need to do is close the loop so that product packaging winds up back at the manufacturer for reuse. And everyone needs to be at the table to discuss how that’s going to work, as it is a significant technological and logistical challenge for both the private and public sectors.
Penn and Teller did an episode of Bullshit on this in 2004. They also concluded that paper and glass recycling were similarly worse that throwing it away. Glass because the energy required to grind, melt, and separate the raw material, and paper because the process uses toxic solvents and produces just as much waste as throwing it away.
Also don’t be fooled by people claiming plastics can be burnt cleanly. That’s another myth that plastic producers push to prevent people reducing their plastic use.
I worked for a glass bottle manufacturer and using cullet (broken glass) lowers the melting point and saves a significant percentage of costs to heat the furnace. Before the lightweight single use bottles became the standard in the 80-90’s, bottles were thicker and heavier, made to be returned, washed and reused.
Yep. I’ve told people about that Bullshit episode so many times. I’ve even shown it to people. They don’t believe anyone would lie about it and since the episode is so old new tech has to have fixed the issue!
Maybe it’s energy intensive, but energy can be clean, especially now that renewable energy is starting to become the cheapest form of energy. You could even make up for the variance by only processing when there is an energy surplus.
If we use more nuclear to create electricity recycling becomes cleaner and cleaner
I just buy glass bottles and then re-use them for kambutcha
Also don’t be fooled by people claiming plastics can be burnt cleanly.
Not seeing why not. I did help work on a place that did that. Could you explain what you mean?
best case, you’re releasing extra CO2 into the atmosphere that would have at least been locked up in the landfills/seas of microplastics. worst case, you’re also releasing unstudied and most likely carcinogenic incomplete combustion products.
Yeah but that CO2 is already up here. Why is it better to pull up more oil instead?
As for the incomplete combustion products we had scrubbers.
I’m in favor of not using plastics at all (or at least only used in medical and scientific applications in which it is absolutely necessary). My point was that burning it is trading one set of problems for another.
Ok well that isn’t happening.
I have been in waste of all sorts for the bulk of my career. Deal with the world as it is not as I want it to be. So given that we do use plastic the question is what do we do with it. Recycling or burning it for fuel are possible answers. If/when it is pretty much banned then it won’t be a big deal.
Got to say I felt really good working on that project. I built the scrubber system, keeping all the nasty stuff out of the exhaust.
I certainly wasn’t intending to imply your work is not worthwhile, and I apologize if i came off as combative or dismissive. Plastic recycling is such a scam, I do think burning it makes sense in the short term (especially with the scrubbers you talked about, those sound cool and will at least help with the microplastic problem). I guess it’s just that the marketing push to conflate “clean” with “green” has been bothering me recently, and, while perfect should not be the enemy of the good, we’re running out of time (or possible have already run out of time, depending on how depressed i am when you ask me) for incremental change to be sufficient. But, you are right. We can only do what we can to make the world we’re currently in better, not simply will it into perfection overnight (despite how much I hate not being able to do that…).
No worries. I would like to point out that plastic broken down still has uses. Example we have been using it in sewage plants for the past few years with polishing ponds. Basically increases the surface area and gives the bacteria a place to hide out when there is a die off. The rough texture of shredded plastic pieces has a high surface to volume ratio. Decreasing the time it takes to process more poop. Part of the many reasons why modern wastewater treatment plants don’t smell as bad as they used to.
Yeah if you want to know about wet scrubbers just ask. Basically imagine a smokestack with nozzles. A liquid rains down as the gas goes up. The liquid picks up stuff from the gas. Then the liquid is processed. Devil is with the details with this stuff but the concept is over a century old.
For that plant I worked on the plastic was heated up with waste heat from another plant (cogeneration) in a low oxygen environment producing syngas. The syngas is scrubbed and then burned for fuel. Long term the plan for places like that is to convert the gas into liquid fuel.
Now I agree we use way too much plastic I would however like to point out that the same process we used to burn it could be used for pretty much all C-H stuff. Paper, wood, food waste, etc. the vast majority of household waste. According to the EPA IF garbage plants are run well they have the least environmental impact. It is is a big if granted.
Basically give me a trillion dollars and garbage will be solved. You do have a trillion dollars right?
I’m definitely game for this I have been looking for hemp based clothing, but it is always so pricey.
I was thinking about the plastic problem the other day and how humans could go about simply banning plastics cold turkey. I was curious what that would look like.
As a “fun” experiment, go through your place of residence and identify every item made with plastic. Now imagine each item eradicated or reinvented to eliminate plastic.
The alternative is many of those products would just never be made. Which, for a good many of them, is overall a good thing.
I don’t disagree. I just found it interesting to consider how much crap we’ve made with plastic. It’s kind of horrifying.
I think the takeaway is: everything is hopeless so our species should either go back to hunting and gathering or go extinct.
Nah, hunting and gathering is how we got ourselves into this mess. It’s a mentality that leads to fascism and hoarding of resources.
We need to try some things we haven’t before, like meeting the basic needs of every human, and being OK with being OK. Nobody needs a billionaire, and anyone seeking to consolidate that much wealth and power should be stripped of their lands and titles.
What is plastic made of? Oh yeah. Oil.
Throwing it away puts the oil back in the ground.
Please tell me this is sarcasm…
If your municipal waste is handled responsibly, then landfill at least seals the carbon away, whereas burning the plastic or some of the more controversial varieties of recycling put an equivalent amount into the atmosphere. It’s a big if, as there are loads of ways a mismanaged landfill can contaminate the environment, but it can be one of the least bad things that happen to oil once it’s been dug up.
I don’t think this nuance is what the other poster was driving at, though.
it’s not really difficult to recycle plastics (depolymerisation) - but it’s not cheap to do it at scale and there really isnt any way to profit from it, so it’s just not done.
This is the real fucking answer right here. Follow the fucking dollar bills.
The profit is for society as a whole for creating less waste, but of course, that doesn’t translate to money earned today. It will, on the other hand, translate to money lost (and more) in the future.
And the energy used and pollution created in depolymerising and remanufacturing plastic is higher than the cost of just making new plastic. So there’s not really much environmental motivation to do so, or it’s a mixed bag at best. Less landfill, more pollution.
The invisible hand of the market ladies and gens.
A 100% tariff on virgin plastics would be amazing.
This isn’t an excuse to not recycle. The problem is not the very idea of recycling, but that things aren’t made with it in mind. Everything should be designed for reuse, repair and recycling.
Always start with reduce.
If reduce makes harder to reuse, repair or recycle, then reduce could be a false economy.
Reduction in this case is bolstering reuse, repair, and recycling. By having a lower consumption rate overall, you will, automatically, have fewer resources that need to be reused, repaired, or recycled.
I’m good with that. Done properly, the less usage should translate to lower prices. Though part of the price right here is not currently on the spreadsheet. The environmental cost of end of life is not part of the upfront cost, right now anyway…
Sounds like we should just tow life outside of the environment. Worked for that boat.
No economy involved. Reducing means reducing the amount of plastic in circulation (theoretically).
That I’m fine with. I’d like to go back to glass, wood and metal.
Hemp based materials is goat because glass and metal will be more expensive to ship.
Bottle/can locally. What would concern me about hemp is land use.
Yes, but hemp needs far fewer chemicals and it is biodegradable. Plus it needs far less land to produce fiber.
Metal-plastic is good friction pair
True, but it doesn’t count as reduce then.
Why couldn’t we switch back to glass as our primary container material? Wasn’t that always fully recyclable?
Apparently we’re running out of sand. That’s going to make the transition to glass harder. I’m not saying I don’t agree because I would definitely prefer glass than plastic.
For people that don’t want to read/don’t already know
It’s the types of sand, desert sand is useless
Sounds like someone needs to make a new glass processing method so we can use desert sand
Sorry but this comment is completely ignorant of the chemistry & manufacturing… you can make some shitty unusable glass with it, but unless you waste an unsustainable amount of resources to try to make the problems less apparent, a majority of desert sand is too low-silica to work. It’s a problem with the material, no new glass processing method will change that.
And if you do decide to use desert sand, it’s practically a logistics nightmare, especially considering you’ll likely have to be centered in one of the few deserts made of sand (most of which are in North/South-East Africa and the Middle East, but also Central Asia, Australia, some parts of the Americas). But even if you did it’s not sustainable or practical, and it most probably won’t be in the future, there’s a reason glass manufacturing plants smack dab in the middle of sandy deserts have to import their sand.
I wonder if we can “recycle” desert sand to have more of the properties that we’re looking for… It seems the biggest problem is it’s weathered in such a way that it doesn’t bond properly as an agregate like sand harvested from the water does
What if we just take all the sand in deserts and move it into the ocean?
Insert Patrick meme here
Apparently ocean sand is fine.
Good luck shipping stuff in glass packaging. Very heavy, extremely fragile, big, expensive. Glass is only worth it on reusable stuff. We need to find a good material for “throwaway” stuff. Eco plastic made from stuff like bamboo are great starting points. They feel like plastic even mcdonalds is using this material for their throwaway spoons. And it can’t be that expensive or they wouldnt be using it for free spoons
PLA is made from beet juice and degrades in a few weeks I’ve recently learned
There might be a plastic that applies to, but it’s definitely not all PLA. PLA is the main material used for hobby 3d printing and I can’t say prints tend to degrade in weeks (or smell or beets)
It degrades in a few weeks in a heated industrial composter, and it doesn’t meaningfully degrade in a sensible amount of time in natural conditions. It has the potential to be less bad than other plastics, but anything that biodegrades in a similar way to food is going to go off at a similar rate to any food it’s containing, which is obviously bad for packaging.
We have known that less than 2% of plastic has been recycled for years. This isn’t new news.
I remember them talking about how little actually gets recycled in the late 90s. My guess is everybody assumed things had gotten better.
We don’t even have the capacity to recycle paper products appropriately.
We don’t even have the capacity to recycle paper products appropriately.
You burn them or put them in a landfill where they decompose, which turns them into CO2, then elsewhere you grow a tree, which turns it back into wood, to turn into pulp, etc. Paper recycling is pretty much always done. Nobody hermetically seals their paper so it doesn’t even decompose.
The bar is so low that that’s almost not tautological.
Not to excuse the inefficiency, but it’s still better than not recycling at all. I’m curious to know why recycling hasn’t been effective. One of my guesses is that the general public probably don’t care at all to segregate. I mean, how many times have we seen people throw compostable stuff into the recycling bin and vice versa? And not to mention we treat every recyclables as if they’re all the same and put them into one bin. Plastics could not be recycled with paper or cardboard! That being said, countries have different system so there is mismatch with recycling programs across the world. Where I live, we treat every recyclables the same, but in Portugal they properly segregate paper, cans and plastics into separate bins. I think the different systems only makes recycling overall inefficient.
TerraCycle dumping “recycling” items in poor countries with inadequate regulations/enforcement (article in French). Moreover, a insightful documentary available on CBC The Recycling Myth regarding all the recycling fraud many multinational companies engages in.
It is not surprising to see environmental fraud happening so overtly under our nose or in plain sight in front of our eyes when there is little to no repercussions for doing so (legal or otherwise). I would even go as far as to suggest it is currently financially extremely profitable for corporation (and people) to lie about all the greewashing they carry out.
Youtube: The Recycling Myth
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Figure out which ones lied. Then figure out the estimated cost of actually recovering and recycling plastics that weren’t recycled. Then take that number, add 20% for “processing fees” and charge it to the companies, split up by their market caps.
Those companies will then go bankrupt and with the money they tried to pay Uncle Sam, said Uncle can buyout the remainder of the companies that are actually doing something worthwhile and operate them as a public trust.
Oh, we know. NPR had a report a few years where they interviewed someone that helped spread the lies. But this country will never hold corporations accountable.
The ridiculous thing is they are doubling down on the lie, insisting that this time they will figure out a way to recycle plastic, so just keep buying it.
This is an application of ai that I don’t think people have caught onto yet… Doing the calculation. Everyone and their descendents who got rich screwing the environment and others will pay reparations and the few people who can stop the financial computer network from carrying it out won’t since everyone will want to find out what happens. Ai is capable of orchestrating this reckoning.
Can AI cite their sources and calculations? For something like this the companies and especially the people will demand hard data proving culpability. I didn’t think AI could do analysis like that.
Haven’t we always known this? I remember some CBC News station out trackers on recycling and they watched pretty well all of it wind up in land fills and China.
a lot of people still don’t know this.
i live in a small country in Asia and they love garbage here. you get a plastic cup and a plastic bag that has another plastic bag with a plastic ring so you can put it on your bike, and then you throw it in the street when you’re done. they have sex with garbage. they eat garbage and then they puke the garbage up and then they eat it again and then they fuck it. they put garbage directly into the sewer drains. it’s not just something that dick head kids are doing, it’s something that everyone is doing because it’s normal. they have no idea.
uhhhh, what is this comment?
An absolute masterpiece, IMO.
Yet another instance of companies pushing the responsibility and onus onto private citizens. We pay for all the recycling infrastructure via taxes and waste fees. Yet more money thrown down the memory hole of greenwashing.
I really want the packaging industry to fuck all the way off with the use of nonbiodegradable materials. We need a 100% tariff on virgin plastics for the health and safety of everyone
