this post was submitted on 08 May 2024
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The real joke is how annoying it is to clean plastic waste before recycling it, only for it to end up not getting recycled at all
We have been played for actual fools
Cleaning plastic for recycling and believing it gets recycled is important to make people accept plastic in their lives. It was never really about recycling.
its worse living in a condo. The chance everyone will put in appropriate things 100% each week to the recycling dumpster is pretty much nill and then it gets mixed up in a truck with the other area condos. I wash my stuff but am almost certain its all going to landfills.
Ugh I forgot about that after losing my job, going broke, and moving back in with the parents. I still get pissed that at least one of the coworkers can't get it right though.
Sorting at the consumer level isn't even the real problem. It's the fact that most plastic isn't even recyclable and of the kinds that are, there's no guarantee that your town has the facilities to recycle those. The whole system is broken and never actually worked.
Remember in the 90s when everyone switched to plastic bags to save the trees or some bullshit? The manufacturers / oil companies knew that plastic recycling didn’t work and they pushed it so hard anyways.
I sort my stuff only to open the mixed waste bin to put in my small mixed bag and I see bags of clearly sorted plastics and cardboard thrown in there.
The real joke is plastic recycling to begin with. It's an inferior product, one much more likely to produce harmful microplastics.
Almost as bad as biodegradable plastics.
Reduce, reuse, recycle. Recycling is supposed to be the last resort, not the first choice for profits.
Am doing work with plastics. When someone says "made with 100% recycled plastic" I automatically know it'll be brittle and it'll suck. Sadly, plastic isn't really recyclable. The bonds break down in the injection machine itself if you leave it a minute too long (heated). Now imagine getting a product that was injected properly, cutting it up, then remelting it, making pellets out of it and then melting those pellets to inject again. Plastic isn't metal, it doesn't melt and freeze without loss of strength.
I seem to remember some of the biodegradable plastics being chill and some of them just decomposing into like micro plastics way faster which doesn't matter at all and sucks, somebody reading this get me a source on that it's 12:16 and I'm tired
I'm not sure about the chill ones, but most of them just put starch in the polymer chain at various intervals. Bacteria break down the starch, which visibly breaks down the plastic, however it leaves behind tiny polymer chunks - microplastics.
I imagine a good biodegradable plastic is quite expensive, probably more so than other green alternatives.
capitalism isn't concerned with any of the Rs
There are some Rs that they like, though:
Don't forget the hard one
What really gets me is when I was young there was little to no plastic and we had plenty of convenience food with mainly paper, glass, and metal.
Personally, I think the 1982 Tylenol Murders were the flashpoint that ignited the rise of overpackaging. Everything is tamper-proof sealed, which means more plastic.
Corporations have been doing this shit for 50+ years and have never been held accountable.