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.”
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.
There’s still thousands if not millions of products out there marketed as microwave safe plastic. There’s no such thing. Get this toxic shit out of contact with your food. Feel free to mark my words for later when the science finally catches up and shows that it’s a major carcinogen.
Do you have more information about this because I’d like to know more, I microwave a lot of stuff in plastic containers.
Here’s one for starters: https://www.wired.com/story/for-the-love-of-god-stop-microwaving-plastic/
I don’t think it’s so much that anyone lied about anything, it’s that people have ignored two really huge contributing factors to the entire recycling cycle. Remember the three R’s?
Reduce consumption. Reuse things that aren’t damaged. Recycle when it becomes unusable.
Plastic containers don’t need to be melted down and remade into anything; they can be cleaned and reused. But we just throw them away, or send them to be recycled immediately, and still consume more; completely ignoring the first two R’s.
All these containers could be, and maybe should be, going back to the manufacturer they came from to be washed and reused. And we consumers could try and consume less things that come in such packaging or containers since that’s the only way they will make fewer things in them, though that’s easier said than done.
Plastic, which is made from oil and gas, is notoriously difficult to recycle. Doing so requires meticulous sorting, since most of the thousands of chemically distinct varieties of plastic cannot be recycled together. That renders an already pricey process even more expensive. Another challenge: the material degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can generally only be reused once or twice.
The industry has known for decades about these existential challenges, but obscured that information in its marketing campaigns, the report shows.
Nope, they just lied. It wasn’t just that people weren’t re-using, people ARE reusing plastic products. But industry lied about the viability and cost to recycle the material.
At a 1956 industry conference, the Society of the Plastics Industry, a trade group, told producers to focus on “low cost, big volume” and “expendability” and to aim for materials to end up “in the garbage wagon”.
Then they pushed non-reusability.
An internal 1986 report from the trade association the Vinyl Institute noted that “recycling cannot be considered a permanent solid waste solution [to plastics], as it merely prolongs the time until an item is disposed of”.
Despite this knowledge, the Society of the Plastics Industry established the Plastics Recycling Foundation in 1984, bringing together petrochemical companies and bottlers, and launched a campaign focused on the sector’s commitment to recycling.
They’ve always known recycling to be a short term solution but hid that to get around the inevitable legislation against plastics.
Problem is that reducing on an individual level is difficult to impossible because I don’t control how things are given to me, i.e. takeout or how produce is packaged.
Agreed. Individual conservation will never have the impact legislation can. For an example look at reusable grocery bags. Only a small minority of people used them when it was optional. But when localities banned disposable bags everyone had to.
Recently though faux reported that banning plastic bags increased plastic waste because people are too lazy to keep track of these reusable bags. I’ve kept on top of things, but I seriously doubt others have.
While I’m happy this is always getting more attention so we can soon ban more unnecessary plastics such as bottles and jars, it also seems slightly convenient for corporations that worsening trade relations with China is correlating with the decline in plastics popularity.
Eh, I’m just overthinking it.
I mean we were shipping a large portion of our “recyclables” to China until they recently stopped taking them.
And to many developing countries. A growing number of them are refusing now.
And nothing happened…
And nothing happened…
Have you called your house representative to speak with them about this?
Lol
Lol
Have more of a chance of affecting change than just bitching and moaning about it on Lemmy. /shrug
Edit:
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism. Source
So don’t even try?
You know how ridiculous it looks to try to justify inaction, since nothing will ever affect change (per that stupid link of yours), so why bother?
You’re so busy to try to win an Internet argument, and save face for being called out on something, that you post some kind of really dumb link on something so abstract that no one gives a crap about, instead of just taking a moment and thinking about “hey maybe if I made that phone call my local rep will see that their constituents are interested in the subject and will actually bring it up when they’re in Washington”.
You are part of the problem that you’re bitching and moaning about here on Lemmy.
No. You’re part of the problem. Liberals think they can create radical change in the capitalist system through voting and reforms, when that is empirically not the case.
All of Marx’s economic works, mainly The Capital, seek to show that it is not possible to solve the problems of capitalism through reforms, as Proudhon wanted. Source.
We are under threat from fascism because of liberalism.
The immediate point: those looking for salvation in electoral politics are unlikely to find it. Source.
I do not advocate inaction. I want people to educate themselves and organize. I don’t care about losing internet arguments.
Fine. You win. Now, read and learn of things that might help you better create change.
Liberals think they can create radical change in the capitalist system through voting and reforms,
You know, talking to your local house representative isn’t a “liberal” thing to do, it’s an American citizenry thing to do.
And I guarantee you, if enough of us did that, on a regular basis, so that those Representatives are fearful for their positions if they go against the will of their constituents, you would see actual change happen.
You won’t see change if we just complain about things on an Internet forum.
By the way, that Cambridge paper you quoted, is from 2014. Politics has changed since then. And, that paper doesn’t discuss at all about the issue of the citizenry being inactive and not forcing their will onto those they elect. It also mentions where citizenry through special interest groups like labor unions can affect change.
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.
Flexible packaging for 10 years here … we recycle and reuse 100% of the scrap we make in house, even our nylon, PP, and EVOH.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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)
What is plastic made of? Oh yeah. Oil.
Throwing it away puts the oil back in the ground.
Please tell me this is sarcasm…
The thing is, chemists knew it. Nobody wanted to hear it. There are only three things worth recycling: Aluminum, glass, and electronics.
That’s extremely reductionist and inaccurate. Most metals can be recycled easily, not only aluminium.
Aluminium is typically used as is though, while many other metals are used as alloys. I suspect that it makes things much easier when you don’t have to worry about composition.
Note that I don’t really know anything much about metals or recycling, so I might be completely wrong.
Waste metal is basically always going to be purer and easier to deal with than metal ore, so it’s worth recycling nearly anything that it’s worth mining the ore for. Aluminium’s particularly recyclable because it’s expensive to make it from ore, and much less expensive to melt existing aluminium.
Aluminium is typically used as is though
That would result in some shitty products. Aluminium is also mostly used as alloy, pure aluminium is pretty soft.
Well, that just shows that I shouldn’t speak of topics that I don’t know anything about. :)
Thanks for the corrections.
Had you not said anything, the guy above would not have sent a Wiki link, and I wouldn’t have read it
Best way to get good info on the Internet remains to say something wrong. ;)
The most fun you can have on the Internet is correcting people who are wrong. So, today was a good and fun day. Thanks. ;)
Well, as a american- everywhere I’ve ever worked has had a recycling bin but it’s always treated as another trash can. Just something that depresses the absolute fuck out of me.
The whole point of the article is that, in general, it was just another trash can.
If it makes it feel any better, even if it were used properly it wouldn’t get recycled
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
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.
I want a 100% tariff on virgin plastics, and a shift of corn and oil subsidies to hemp.
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
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
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.
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?
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?
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.
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?
Pretty much nothing biodegrades in a landfill though.
Everytime I buy something from a local shop or a western brand, it comes packaged with minimal plastic, and a lot of well thought out materials. Even if they use plastic, its always a very thin plastic and very “soft”. Can’t describe. But when I buy ANYTHING from aliexpress you can tell it came from china just by looking at the packaging. It has SO MANY LAYERS of plastic, and very hard and thick plastic. If you buy for example a single keychain comes with 20x the weight of it in plastic. They smell so much to plastic chemicals too, something that “western plastic” doesn’t smell like. Every time I have to drink from a paper straw I remind myself that a 10x10cm sticker I bought came with 5kg of plastic and still arrived damaged from shipping.
We don’t need to reduce even more. We need to somehow force china to reduce it. I am againt taxes for everything, but maybe tax the amount/weight of plastic that comes on stuff you get from china. And find a way to tax the sender, not the buyer. Maybe that will make chinese companies to actually think about reducing they 50 tons of useless plastic waste they make each second.
I’ve noticed that Japanese candy often has a ton of packaging. There’ll be a box of small mints and you open it to find each one individually wrapped.
“Hurr durr, China’s the problem, not my shit consumerism”
Fuck off with the astroturfing, corporate bootlicker.
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.
We are not responsible beings when money can be made. It repeats itself over and over again. We cheat the systems we make ourselves, but we’re too dumb, greedy and selfish to think about consequences. We basically don’t give s shit about the planet and life, someone else can take care of that down the line, right?
