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‘They lied’: plastics producers deceived public about recycling, report reveals
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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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?
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.