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Reduce, reuse, recycle in that order. Recycling should be the final option to dealing with our trash.
I believe the focus for most people should be reduce (including myself).
Refuse, reuse, riot.
Reduce needs to be the focus of manufacturers.
Even if we - the end user, reduce our usage enough that manufacturers 'take note' and provide us non plastic versions they will still use so much plastic behind the scenes that it wouldn't make much of a difference.
Except when you reuse you're subjecting yourself to micro plastics
Unfortunately, most plastics are useless to recycle - they either get incinerated or dumped straight into the landfill by the companies who collect and filter them.
Which is why my wife and I only bother with plastic bags, styrofoam, and the hard plastics marked types 1 & 2. These are the plastics which are easily recyclable, and therefore, have a non-trivial chance of actually being recycled.
We put types 3 through 7 straight into the trash, as they have about a 97% chance of not actually getting recycled.
I'm saddened that Reuse has fallen by the wayside. I brought some cleaned liquor bottles back to my store for deposit, and the clerk admitted to me they'll just end up in the recycling chain - it's too much effort to locate transport/handling for the bottles.
Theoretically, there should be a lot of inward transit for cities and civic centers with not much going out. There's a very efficient mental image of dropping off 80 bottles, and picking up 80 empty bottles to bring back, but it would just take more logistics than people care for to do it that way.
The problem with recycling/reusing plastics has been notoriously difficult in the past. That is why it's so often incinerated/dumped instead of reused/recycled.
I want to explain my view of this:
Reusing plastics is difficult because the bottles are often produced in a way that makes them as thin (and lightweight) as possible. That has the advantage of saving oil, but has the disadvantage that they are in turn so brittle that if you tried to reuse them, chances are high that the bottles would either break, or - more dangerously - abrasive effects would cause the bottle to get tiny cracks, which would set free microplastics and potentially additives, which could be really toxic; and nobody wants to be responsible for this, so they are dumped.
Then there is the problem with washing the bottles. A lot of the plastics is not made to be brought into contact with soap, as I understand it, because the soap severely impacts the plastics. So washing them thoroughly is difficult.
Recycling has a different problem. Recycling consumes more energy than simply producing new ones. In the past, that was the reason to dump them. With cheap solar energy, the game could change. Recycling still takes a lot of energy, but as energy is getting cheaper, industry could reuse the carbon atoms in the bottle; in other words: reuse the material that's in the bottle, not the energy that's in the bottle. This will require even cheaper energy prices though to be economical.
A lot of the issue there is everyone has to have their own unique glass bottle because marketing. A coke bottle has to go back to the coca-cola bottling plant. A Johnny Walker bottle has to go back to Scotland, etc.
It's all propaganda. They do that in japan and for those that are gonna say japan is a first world advanced small country, they do that shit in Mexico too. I've lived in a number of states across Mexico for nearly a decade and from big cities to tiny towns you can bring back your glass bottles to the shops and they forward it to the delivery people to be returned to be sanitized and reused. All the big companies do this, you pay a smidge extra on that first bottle and from then it's cheaper if you return the empty when buying a new one.
If the US based companies don't do it it's because they don't want to, not because they can't. I know for a fact coke does it in Mexico.
Could you tell that to all the companies out there who use plastic?
Remember when Snapple tried to spin moving to plastic bottles like it was a good thing, like 5 years ago?
Agreed, but there is also far too much consumer push back. Sunchips tried to make a more biodegradable bag, but people complained that they were too loud.
They were louder than the aluminium/plastic bags? What material did they use? Also what a lazy argument by the producer for giving up environmental actions. Bet it just cost them more.
~2010
I remember them being noticeably louder. Unless you were in a library or a movie theater I don't know why people cared all that much though.
Thanks for the source. So yeah "Potato Chip Technology That Destroys Your Hearing" doesn't sound reassuring. Nonetheless I'd take those packaging everyday over conventional knowing I did my thing while getting fat.
Eating out of conventional chips packaging in cinemas or libraries should be punishable either way. I think in reality those customers problem was the "open the bag at night without waking up everyone" problem which should be preventable with a bit of planning.