I spoke with an employee at my local recycling centre earlier in the year, when dropping off a car load of waste. I asked him how they recycle the plastic and his response was "Don't worry lad, we burn it all to recycle it into nice clean energy".
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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Zero Waste
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Being "zero waste" means that we adopt steps towards reducing personal waste and minimizing our environmental impact.
Our community places a major focus on the 5 R's: refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle, and rot. We practice this by reducing consumption, choosing reusable goods, recycling, composting, and helping each other improve.
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Ohhhh that’s how recycling is done.
Ah yes that old chestnut, we will make it look like we are protecting one thing but actually destroying another thing.
I'm shocked it's taken this long for an article like this to show up. This has been an open secret since the beginning.
One big issue is using single-stream recycling where everything goes into the same bin and it's the responsibility of the recycler to separate them all back to individual types. That is simply way too complicated and expensive for most of the materials so they just don't do it, and most of it simply goes into a landfill.
When the sorting is done by the consumer as it's done for example here in Finland where we recycle more than 90% of bottles and separate everything else into their own bins, you end up with much higher recycling rates. We do still lack enough processing capacity to deal with it all so a lot of it is burned for energy, but at least essentially nothing is going to a landfill any more.
I remember bringing the old glasses bottles to the store for a deposit. That system worked pretty well and provided incentive to not just toss them.
I don't think that tasking people to sort waste makes long-run sense. Not an efficient use of human time -- you cannot just treat that labor as zero cost.
If recycling becomes important enough, we can develop waste sorting machines and they can harvest the landfills. If we aren't to the point where that makes economic sense, then we aren't to the point where recycling a given item is sufficiently warranted.
the only material that is really useful for recylcing is copper and alu. esp alu since it's refining process is very energy intensive and recycling it is actually cheaper.
recycling paper and plastic is mostly energy/cost negative compared to making it new.
If I remember right, glass is extremely efficient in recycling.
If it is recycled. But the profit motive isn't there, so in a lot of places it simply isn't. In Canada's second largest city, it all goes to landfill, and they don't even have a bottle return system yet.
Yep you can use 100% of it
Conversely, many places have stopped accepting glass for recycling because they have huge backlogs and broken glass presents a significant danger to recycling staff.
I remember when the whole thing started and I called it out as a scam, that was over 10 years ago. Unless there's government regulation involvement, they will just throw it in the same trash bin.
That's not true, though. Plenty of places actually recycle. The problem is, not all countries or cities have the machines to recycle everything, so they either ship it to a place that does, or they decide it's too expensive and they don't recycle it.
You can find plenty of accounts on TikTok where people who work at recycling facilities actually show it being done. It's cool, because they are super transparent about it.
I've decided that I'm going to keep recycling. It's not hard, and unless I go talk to my city recycling manager myself, I personally don't know what gets recycled and what doesn't. So I'll take the extra 5 seconds to rinse out a can and throw it in the bin beside the garbage can.
I agree but man the folks in my condo do not pay attention to what can be recycled. Not only do they not clean it but they think dirty cake and pizza containers can go right in. Combine that with the lack of seperation and I can't believe the paper can come in shape to be recycled if its from our place.
Just to provide a hopeful, positive spin on this... Think that there is %10 less waste out there because of this "recycling effort" Very tiny small silver lining.
Ah, but we spent decades not discussing the plastic issue in the public discourse because of the recycling lie. We've been much more tolerant of plastics than we might otherwise have been, and so produced much more of it in that time.
Rmemeber, the promise of plastic packaging was that it would "save trees" and be endlessly recyclable.
Haven’t watched. Does it lay out how to address the issue?
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