There is no actual oversight from the FTC or related organization for recyclability product labels.
After sorting they look for buyers of the raw materials. This varies depending on the market and quality of the material. Everything left over is sent to the landfill.
That is I suspect the total damage from new plastic is less than recycled Al. Someone needs to find numbers to verify this of course.
I've never heard of anyone using aluminum for a building (though I'm sure it has been done) - the properties in general make it a poor choice (see a real meteorologist for details - alloy matters and there are many choices). Al is commonly used for the skin of a building, but not the structural parts.
Al is commonly made where energy is cheap (generally renewable energy!) and then transported around the world. I have no idea what is in Spain or New Zealand, but I'd expect someone in Spain is making things with Al, and they in turn will be glad to recycle anything you can get to them.
https://aluminium-guide.com/aluminium-alloys-food-beverage-c...
The problem is the packaging not the recycling.
If you care about the environment, BY FAR the most important thing you can do is reducing your carbon footprint. Everything else is really a rounding error compared to that. But that requires a materially poorer existence: living in a smaller home, eating meat less frequently, foregoing air travel, bundling up in the winter instead of cranking up the heat, etc.
Most people generally feel like we need to do more for the environment, and have a vague sense of guilt if they're not contributing. However, that guilt is not strong enough for them to be willing to meaningfully decrease their standard of living. It is strong enough to make them willing to sort their trash into separate bins. Hence recycling.
Yes, if everything else were held equal, but it's not. People have a limited amount of energy to dedicate to caring about environmental issues; every minute spent talking about recycling (or other only marginally important environmental issues) is one we're not spending talking about things that matter.
Are you sure? A garbage truck direct to the landfill is less energy than a garbage truck (for what isn't recycled), and a second truck to the sort facility, all the machines to sort, and then a truck to the landfill. Now if only Al goes on the recycling truck this is a clear win since recycled Al much less energy than mining new. However for many plastics the value is already questionable if it is recycled, and clearly worse if not. (I'm not sure about paper or glass)
Not really, no. The carbon footprint associated with your consumption has little-to-nothing to do with the type of economic structure that provides it.
Lots of fossil fuels are produced by the state, some even in socialist countries. Burning oil extracted by Pemex or Petróleos de Venezuela releases just as much carbon as oil extracted by Chevron.
And high-quality grass-fed organic beef raised by your local rancher involves at least as much carbon emissions as the cheapest beef you can get from Wal-Mart. Why wouldn't it?
The issue is consumption of fossil fuels, not capitalism. Capitalism is indirectly at fault only inasmuch as it has grown the economy, enabling our consumption of fossil fuels to increase.
And by FAR the most effective way to do that for the average person is to drive less.
Most people have no idea how far they need to drive to produce 1kg of CO2 (even though it's widely advertised alongside fuel efficiency).
Insanely naive take. They react to capital.
Personal choices matter.
I'm not going to sweat recycling while our entire political economy makes a farce of caring about the future.
No, it's a scheme to stave off taxes on plastic packaging, or regulations to mandate glass. Which industry cares about how people feel about themselves, to fund and promote this scheme? On the other hand, it's very easy to point to the industry that benefits from continued use of plastic.
Interesting my municipality recycles glass, but like, why? Silica is the most common mineral in the crust, easily accessible almost everywhere, and recycling it takes as much energy if not more than just making new. It's not like aluminum or steel where there are significant energy savings to recycling vs mining and refining.
It's just melted, mixed and reused, AFAIK. We're recycling glass since forever (maybe mid 90s), and the recycling bins were put out by our national glassware company.
They even have a special line built with these, recycled glasses, which I don't remember the name. They also have a "upcycle" line where they repurpose their fine but not perfect items to other things. Both are excellent lines and are not more expensive than their usual wares.
Far, far earlier than the '90s. Glass has been regularly recycled from the early days of glassmaking itself. It's crushed up into "cullet" and mixed back in.
Glass is great for this because it doesn't degrade from being remelted and reformed, and using cullet reduces the cost of energy and new raw materials when making new glass.
You’re absolutely right. I meant recycling as ordinary citizens in my country with that date.
It saves 30% of the energy inputs to reuse slightly contaminated glass, especially when done locally.
That's ignoring the energy inputs of mining and delivering the silica.
https://learn.sustainability-directory.com/learn/what-are-th...
?? Isn't this one of the most recyclable materials there is? Even aluminum cans come with contaminants that can't be removed by the consumer.
Regardless, at least you can easily reuse glass jars for home use. I find they make excellent drinking glasses and the reusable lid is a nice perk.
Recycled aluminum is much less energy intensive than new aluminum even with contaminants.
But transport and sorting (glass is hard and sharp) eat into that margin, so presort
I know that in some places they standardize the glass beer bottles to one or two types and strongly encourage people to bring the bottles back to the same location that they get beer from.
This results in a circular supply chain that sees bottles sterilized and reused many times. The number I heard was an average of 8 uses on average before a bottle gets a chip in it that renders it unsuitable for reuse, and then it is recycled.
It seems to me that this tight distribution loop is a key part of successful reuse and recycling endeavours.
In the US we throw everything into a truck and we expect recyclers to sort and re-melt a bunch of broken shards of assorted glass.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container-deposit_legislation
In the NL, such 'reverse vending machines' are in every supermarket. They take PET soda bottles, soda cans (since 2023, €0.15 deposit per can), and a few (standardized) types of glass beer bottles.
The latter are often bought in crates, which (with empty bottles in them), are taken by the machine as a whole. On average, these beer bottles do ~20 roundtrips between supermarket & brewer. It simply goes in reverse direction along the same logistics chain supplying those supermarkets.
Non-deposit glass is collected in containers, seperate by color (clear/brown/green). Those have been around since early '80s or so. These days there's also containers for paper/cardboard, textiles, or even used frying oil/fat. Most supermarkets have smaller bins for batteries & small electronics.
Germany even has multi-use PET bottles.
From (extensive!) personal experience, these deposit schemes take a HUGE chunk out of beer/soda cans & bottles littered on roadsides, parks etc (some 75% reduction or so).
But it is cultural thing too. Most people in European countries care for their environment, energy use etc. Most US people, no so much. Other countries: it varies.
But the push for single-stream recycling has led many well intentioned people to believe that solution is good enough.
It is! ... if it's unbroken, sorted by type, and in a place where there's demand for it.
Unfortunately, those advantages are often compromised by the recycling pipeline itself. Bottles of different types are thrown into trucks, and become unsafe shards of glass that are unsafe to handle and difficult to sort by type. It quickly becomes more trouble than it is worth given that the alternative is sand.
Some accounts I've seen emphasized the "don't check it, don't think about it, don't look bad, don't feel bad" performative and self-delusion aspects.
I partly blame an old Discovery Channel episode I watched as a teenager (probably Dirty Jobs?), which highlighted a line of men standing in front of a conveyer belt at some kind of recycling or garbage plant, manually sorting things out of the waste by hand before the bulk of it got dumped into a huge vat of treatment water. The impression it left on me was that there's always a bunch of dudes at the conveyer belt who were going to check and make sure nothing unrecyclable went into the recycling process.
Also, some of pizzas I get have a separate circle piece they sit on and the box doesn't get any grease on it.
I agree on the misleading claims part, but they do allow you to bring in your own personal cup already as long as it's clean. I don't see how that's not an alternative.
They got paid to accept bales of recycled "HDPE" that they could mix at between 10 and 30% into their virgin materials. They get paid to accept it! Negative profit for the waste management company, pure profit for the "user".
This worked best on black, coffee, slate grey, mahogany - you get the idea - the whites and tans and bright colors were basically pure virgin material (and their own internally-recycled offcuts of dyed virgin materials of matching colors) even though their FAQ states:
> What percentage of recycled materials are used?
> The percentage of recycled materials in our lumber can vary depending on the availability of post-consumer and post-industrial plastics. We continuously strive to maximize the use of recycled content in every piece of lumber.
Personally, I don't think that the fact that you started with pure virgin material, extruded some plastic, cut it up and used most of it, but put some of what was virgin material a few hours ago back into the grinder and extruder makes the resulting plastic "recycled".
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/21/us-plastic-r...
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
https://gijn.org/stories/case-studies-investigating-where-ga...
https://www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org/blog/2022/5/16/wha...
Not saying people do it only to virtue signal, they just don't realize the net positive effect is very, very low.
Driving an electric vehicle (instead of ICE), on the other hand? Actually quite a large impact that 1 person can make.
The biggest scam is the paper straw. You still need a certain plastic liner, otherwise the straw will melt down in 3 minutes from direct contact with liquid. The amount of plastic you reduce is penny-on-the-100-bucks-note comparing to the amount of plastic waste produced by industrial activities.
The only way to fix the single-use container problem is for governments to ban it. Either the customers bring their own/rent the shops' containers for take away, or drink their beverages in the shop.
Is this doable? I guess. AFAIR the EU are experimenting with laws around this. Plastic bags ban is already visible in many country, even in non-first-world countries.
I'm assuming you are much more conscious about this issue than I am (that's fine btw, people have various levels of germophobia) , but practically my whole office block do this without any noticeable health epidemic.
Also standard coffee shops (the Starbucks kinds) always have industrial scale utensil washers that rinse boiling water/UV radiate the utensils. Assuming a government issue the appropriate law, the coffee shops will be able to ensure your container hygiene just fine.
With our current exposure, it is estimated that 40-50 years worth of oil remains, although there is likely to be new locations found and an overall reduction of oil usage in the coming years.
It will become more expensive when we have to pay for the energy embedded in it, but the difference is not significative on almost any end-product.
Single use plastics are a carbon sequestration technology.
We take oil out of the ground, and instead of burning it we turn it into a solid and bury it again.
Something like 30% of the oil we consume never ends up getting burned. While that's probably not a 30% reduction in CO2 gasses, the price pressure plastics put on fossil fuels is not negligible.
when oil prices were negative, why didn't environmental enthusiasts figure out how to buy (that is, be paid to receive) a ton of oil, take delivery, and simply not use it? they could bury it right back into the ground, no?
look, there are unlimited stupid fucking ideas.
At the end of the night, all three bins go into the same dumpster, they recycle nothing there.
Just because the city offers a recycling pickup, doesn't mean most of it actually gets recycled.
Also some material like aluminum are very valuable to recycle even if we're throwing plastic in the trash.
This is an obvious methodology problem, no? Bluetooth-enabled trackers are not recyclable, so they ended up in the correct place.
These trackers probably had CR2032 batteries that could damage a shredder, would pollute the resulting pulp, and could easily be pulled out of the mixed recyclables stream by a magnet.
Whether or not the cup itself made it to a recycling facility is not something this experiment actually tested for. All they know is the tracker didn't make it. The system appears to be working as expected.
Some they can arguably prove were probably on the way to a landfill. But "none pinged from a recycling facility" is doing a LOT of heavy lifting.
From their raw data, the 36 tests came from a much smaller handful of stores in urban locations - in reality it's a much smaller sample size. 8 alone came from urban New York. 6 came from a single Starbucks location in Olympia, WA.
They jump to the conclusion that a transfer center means it's bound for landfill or incinerator. But I have literally been to one of the transfer centers they have listed here and they absolutely process recycling there.
They admit 3 were sent to specific recycling baling facilities... and they just didn't count them because they didn't feel like it?
Then there's this weird statement:
> "PureCycle's Ironton, Ohio, plant claims to recycle polypropylene through so-called "chemical recycling,” but Beyond Plastics does not consider chemical recycling to be recycling given that most of the plastic these facilities accept is not actually recycled but turned into fossil fuels or feedstocks using high heat or chemicals. It's a distraction that has failed for decades and is allowing companies to exponentially increase plastic production while polluting low-income communities and communities of color with hazardous waste and toxic air pollution."
Ignoring the white-knighting, it's weird to make the claim that recycling a petroleum-based product into it's obvious petroleum use case doesn't count.
The biggest problem though is that the outcomes for a paper cup are probably worse. All paper cups will be incinerated or sent to a landfill.
This is such a great claim.
Is that surprising? Or "bad" somehow? Paper cups cannot realistically be recycled in any meaningful way. Paper is famously not waterproof, so cups are lined with either plastic or wax. This saturates the fibers in a way that cannot realistically be reversed. Such contaminated fibers can't be used as feedstock, the polymers mess up downstream processes.
The best possible outcome is biodegrading in compost or landfill. Which realistically releases almost as much CO2 as burning.
Wax lined paper cups will fully biodegrade on short timescales. That's literally the best possible outcome for any single-use item. It's not a flaw or a drawback, it's the goal.
Now it's a nice little ritual and I am used to the advantages of bringing my own insulated container with a lid - I can carry it back with groceries or do other errands without worrying about my drink spilling or getting cold.
FWIW I do occasionally see other people at my local coffee shop show up with their own mugs, but I agree that it's quite rare.
Personally, when I get a coffee to-go, I want a disposable cup so that I don't have to carry it around for the rest of the day.
The habitual part is what makes a difference for me with my local coffee shop. I usually walk over around midday when I WFH, mostly to move around and re-energize for the second half of the day. Since I know I will be coming right home after, it is easy for me to adjust my ritual to include the cup.
My rule is: 1) keep hot stuff away from plastic, and 2) assume everything is/has plastic unless you know for certain.
World except America: I'm going to legally mandate what they do.
Americans: I'm going to get mad at the abstract concept of recycling.
Europe has great rates of recycling collection, but processing remains just as much of a problem there as it does anywhere in the global market for recycled plastic. Quite a bit of recycling that is collected does not actually end up being recycled.
Furthermore, Europe's recycling rate has declined over the past decade? Why? Probably the same difficulties that the entire globe faces -- China stopped allowing "recycling" imports because much of it ended up in the Yangtze. Now, a lot of the "recycling exports" are sent to countries in Africa with the same issues. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2018/06/90-of-plastic-pollut...
The reality is that the promises made by recycling companies in developing nations that accept the western world's recycling are not very rigorous to say the least. Much of your recycling sent to Africa is picked through for the most valuable stuff and the rest is burned or dumped.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
Also, Starbucks apparently introduced a different compostible cup in the EU just as new rules took effect after promising for 20 years to introduce them
https://packagingeurope.com/news/starbucks-to-roll-out-home-...
They also have stronger regulations about making claims like "widely recyclable" without evidence.
https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/circular-economy-top...
Maybe the magical technology is the regulations we made along the way.
https://www.ban.org/plastic-waste-project-hub/trade-data/eu-...
Don't get me wrong, the EU does a great job at reducing waste. But plastics recycling is primarily false propoganda created by petroleum and plastics industries in the 1970s. Most plastics are not meaningfully recyclable.
Those recycling symbols you see on the bottom of your bottle was invented by a US plastics industry lobbying group as propaganda to make you think all of the plastic you put in your recycling bin is being recycled.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/plastic-wars/
Are you regulating the companies that did all this propaganda to make them either do it or shut up?
Or are you getting angry at the abstract concept of recycling?
You keep talking about plastic recycling, but the EU rules made Starbucks stop using plastic for these cups! In America they use a hard to recycle plastic and lie about it to their customers.
Make the corporations pay for it with Extended Producer Responsibility laws and they'll use less plastic. They'll make what they do use easier to recycle. Because it will cost them money if they don't.
If the companies ship stuff abroad and that's bad then ban it. Like the EU has done.
https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/waste-and-recycling/...
> The new Regulation on waste shipments entered into force on 20 May 2024. It aims to:
> Ensure that the EU does not export its waste challenges to third countries and contributes to environmentally sound management of waste.
> Strengthen enforcement to prevent illegal shipments of waste occurring within the EU, as well as from the EU to third countries.
> Increase traceability of waste shipments within the EU and facilitate recycling and reuse.
The issue with "plastics recycling" is that it mostly doesn't exist. The plastics industry wants people to think it exists so that they don't realize the only real solution to plastic waste is to ban single-use plastics.
> If the companies ship stuff abroad and that's bad then ban it. Like the EU has done.
> Regulation on waste shipments entered into force on 20 May 2024.
First of all, as that page says, they didn't ban it, they implemented new regulations on it. And the impetus for those new regulations was, as I said above, the realization that foreign "recyclers" are not recycling, they are dumping/burning/etc.
Unfortunately, those new regulations will probably make no difference, because guess what? The EU is allowing the exporters themselves to commission their own audits.
Now, they could have banned exports entirely, but they didn't. And the reason they didn't is because they can't do it domestically. And they can't do it domestically because the technology to recycle them at industrial scale doesn't exist.. The entire concept is built on fraud.
There is only one type of plastic that can be recycled closed-loop at industrial scale: PET. Literally every other plastic mathematically is guaranteed to create waste. Even other plastics deemed "highly recyclable" at best require 80-90% virgin feedstock, and so the total possible amount you can recycle is only 10-20% of what is produced.
There are multiple solutions to "plastics recycling" and all of the answer are "do something else", e.g.: switch to a different material, incinerate, sequester in a landfill, ban their use, etc.
Plastics? You're fucked. There's no money in it. Takes too much efffort. Contamination with food.
Highly recommend this podcast for those who still spend time sorting plastic into their recycling bin:
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/12/741283641/episode-926-so-shou...
And that’s only the plastic that isn’t shipped to third world countries to be piled up in their countryside
At family gatherings here it's a typical argument for why there's allegedly no point separating out plastics: the recycling bin allegedly also ends up there. Nobody ever has a source for me though so take that for what it's worth, but it seems to generally be a thing
These things have to be fixed at the incentive layer. Self-regulation is the best form of regulation, by far.
Any discarded plastic found outside of a landfill should be tallied and result in a fine for the company which produced the plastic.
If a person is caught discarding a plastic bottle (littering), they should receive a fine as normal but the company should also be fined a portion of the liability.
The company knows very well that some percentage of the plastic they sell will end up in nature. They know this for a fact... And yet they choose to keep producing plastic packaging when cleaner alternatives exist; I.e. tin cans and glass bottles.
We've been completely brainwashed by the cult of 'limited liability'. It's a horrible idea. The words themselves tell you everything. Right there in front of your face. The liability is limited... It means the liability is externalized. This construct should never have been allowed.
Now with AI and the externalized harms which will result from it, this construct is more important than ever. Lives are at stake.
Once we start assigning partial liability to every harm. Eventually, we'll be able to collectively identify all of them; they will become so rare that they will stand out like a sore thumb.
Imagine; all the people who are currently messing up the political system with useless bureaucracy and toxic ideologies could actually be useful to society. Instead of identifying each other's genders, orientations and emotional triggers, they could be identifying social and environmental harms and holding companies accountable.
The merchant (who produces the product and fills the boxes from the same country as where I live) ended up finding an answer: the manufacturer does not yet do this in europe
How is this legal to print on your product if you don't offer the service anywhere on the continent...