this post was submitted on 08 May 2024
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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.