Mildly Infuriating

Printing “this shit is milk” on a bottle is dirt cheap. It’s practically free. They probably already do it with the expiration date.

Problem is, some bright-eyed fuckfuck at PepsiCo realized they could sell more shit using labels with no visible dot matrix and a color palette with vomit-inducing vibrancy and 69 million shades. Approximately 90 seconds later, everyone else decided that they need to wrap their plastic in some plastic to “stay competitive”. The industry collectively stuffed some lunch money in Ronald H. W. Gore’s titty pocket, and here we are, decades later, with a mountain of unrecyclable garbage that no one even knew couldn’t be recycled. And it’s not even their fault, for the same exact reason we don’t expect people to know not to lick the lead paint off their mid-20th century coffee mugs.

You forgot about polymer shortening. During the first synthesis process from petroleum to the usual type of plastic, long polymer bonds are formed which give the plastic its malleable-yet-durable characteristics. During shredding to get the plastic into a more feedable shape (as in feedable through a hopper into an extruder to be melted) those polymers are shortened. This polymer shortening ends up leading to a more brittle plastic, and because of this new plastic beads are added to rejuvinate.

Because of this, recycling plastic inherently requires new plastic in its process, and old plastic is only recyclable for a few cycles until its essentially garbage being mixed into the process.

We are essentially just pushing out the inevitable, which will be that we'll need to dispose of massive amounts of plastic waste that is unusable after a few cycles. I imagine we'll eventually just have to compress this waste into blocks and bury those blocks deep underground like nuclear waste.