17 Comments

I recall living in California and on Saturday taking all our recyclables to the recycling center. Glass, aluminum and plastic drink bottles. I only did that to recoup some of the money spent when purchasing via deposits. Aluminum was the only thing worthwhile, plastic wasn’t worth the time. You pay 2 cents a bottle at purchase and might get 2 cents a pound at recycle. Where I live now there are no deposits on containers and only recently started recycling plastic. I don’t bother; everything goes in the garbage except paper/cardboard. My personal feeling is that manufacturers of the containers should bear a greater responsibility for the lifecycle of their products.

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Going back to glass bottles makes more sense.

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It would be helpful to know the details of what specific cities do with their houshold recycling streams. For example, what happens in NYC?

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Great article. Plastics are insane. Somehow we need to reduce and even imagine no Plastic. How many years did humans manage to live without Plastics ? Neither of our Federal Monopoly Parties seems anywhere near interested enough to begin to do something. In the 1930s the milkman brought the milk in a glass bottle and picked it up too. Dodobbird.pixels.com (art)

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Plastic recycling isn’t the cure—it’s the con. The industry sold us a fairy tale, a neat little loop of redemption where our waste is reborn, but in truth, it's just a slow-motion disaster. Every cycle shreds plastic into smaller, more insidious ghosts—microplastics infiltrating our blood, our bones, our unborn children.

"Recycling is not a solution to the plastic pollution crisis; it is a distraction that allows the industry to continue its harmful practices unchecked."

Damn right. The machine runs on illusion, feeding us moral pacifiers while it cranks out more waste, more poison, more profit. If we want out, we don’t recycle—we reject. >lesscleardotcom

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Single stream recycling of paper and plastic by Waste Management is sold as fuel to generate electricity in India.

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In Japan, the recycling is done very well. In most other East Asia countries, recycling is also good but not as good as in Japan because they are not as paranoid as the Japanese in mostly every aspect of life. Countries in Southeast Asia rank a notch lower because they don't have enough money. Japan is short of flat lands, and I believe a large percentage of the recycling collections are burned off. It is not exactly green but the urgency is higher. In comparison, the USA has lots of place to dump garbage to stay out of sight. Port cities like NYC directly export garbage to dump overseas. Things will get resolved faster if all garbage stays inside national, state, county, and city boundaries.

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Why not incinerate it, generate electricity, clean up the exhaust gas and landfill the ash?

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A friend of mine used to work in the sanitation department of a city that had two recyclable sort trailers in town. He told me that when they would go out and get them, everything in them would go to the landfill.

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You neglect the tremendous value recycling has in virtue signaling. During a recent election in Portland, ME, candidates were interviewed for profiles. One of the questions was, “How many recycling bins do you fill each week?” The higher the number, the greater virtue value!

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Excellent work!

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The environmentalist are complaining? They're the mentally handy capped bunch that started it back in the 60's. Crying that the use of paper products was leading to the total destruction of the rain forest on a planetary scale.

Now we have everything/one swimming in plastic, micro and nano. But, blame it all on corporations. Well, some of it anyway.

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Like so much of America, “recycling” is fake and gay — finding patsies to take the crap — and then surreptitiously tossing it into landfill, bodies of water, or incineration.

Meanwhile, dubious municipal water supplies (likely fluoridated) requires that we haul around “recyclable” plastic water bottles which are secreted into fake “recyclable” bins.

Like “healthcare”, “education” and “public transportation”, it’s grotesque feel good onanism.

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Feb 7Edited

Our household is getting more and more breakdown of plastic into stickiness. Not sure if this is because some recycled plastic is added to the remaining plastic or what. It used to be older (ca 2000s) plastic was what was getting sticky years later. Now it's even relatively newer plastic like our Direct TV remotes. Yet our 1970s-1980s Tupperware has no stickiness at all.

I wonder if this seeming breaking down process is what's causing so much microplastic in the body now. I do know the result is waste as nothing resolves this issue so the plastic has to be put into the garbage.

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There's what is known as "return for deposit ". Glass can be reused many times after washing

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That's why I don't do it. As with all things liberal, it makes no sense and the laws of unintended consequences are always ignored in favor of some silly agenda.

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Cardboards recycling does happen, even in the fake-and-gay-America. Most of such controversial issues and flawed public policies have a spectrum of truth versus narratives.

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