Recycling

[Kodos]

It turns out that we are recycling wrong.

The US Recycling System Is Garbage | Sierra Club

You're Recycling Wrong | Sierra Club

As a rule:

1. As far as plastic goes, for the most part, we only really recycle plastic #1 and #2 bottles. All other plastic should really go into the garbage. (I am definitely an offender here. I routinely toss anything plastic into the recycle bin.) Plastic forks, knives, and spoons don't get recycled and jam up the sorting machines.
2. Paper that gets contaminated from foods and other stuff in the bin can't be recycled.
3. Shredded paper doesn't get recycled.
4. Paper coffee cups usually can't be recycled because of a polyurethane coating.
5. Styrofoam cups can't be recycled.

We used to ship our recycling to China, who would sort out the good stuff and discard the useless stuff. Unfortunately, much of the discarded stuff ended up in the oceans due to a lack of environmental regulations in China.

As one of the linked articles says, reducing and reusing are the first lines of defense, and recycling is the last resort. We shouldn't really count on recycling taking care of all the plastic that we use in our daily lives.

[Lathum]

If it wasn’t for my children I would be ok with humanity being wiped off the planet. We don't deserve it.

[molson]

Landfills have been kind of a visible enemy for decades but it would have been far preferable to send plastics there than to China and the Ocean.

In my town, we're told to throw away #1 bottles (usually cheap water bottles). Certain plastics, like wrappers and plastics that held food have to go into a separate orange bag. Those plastics become diesel fuel - not sure if that's a net gain for the environment v. landfill or not.

And climate change was discussed for 15 minutes out 4 hours of Dem debates. There's no way any significant political capital is going to be expended on it at the expense of sexier issues. It's still not a priority for anybody but the fringes.

[dawgfan]

Recycling is not the panacea that many of us though/hoped it was. If we want to make a real dent in this issue, we have to change our habits and go back to using stuff that isn't single-use and continue to innovate with compostable packaging for situations where re-usable isn't practical.

[Ksyrup]

On top of things mentioned here, even if we are recycling the right things, our recycling process here is (pardon the pun) garbage.

Due to some sort of changes in China a couple of years ago, recycling in central KY was stopped. Completely. Everything went in the garbage. At some point last year, it came back but on a limited basis. Now, they only pick up once every two weeks and everything has to go into the container they provide. Two weeks worth of cans, cereal boxes, etc., sometimes doesn't fit so we have to either throw it out or keep it in another container to start the next 2 week period with.

The biggest issue, though, is that they have become militant about refusing to take anything not in the bin. With as much online shopping as everyone does - not to mention the usual bulk items people buy - it's impossible to fit those types of cardboard boxes in the bin. Even if they picked up every day, some of those boxes can't be broken down enough to cram into the bin.

I bought a new grill last week and broke the boxes down as best I could, tied them up, and put them next to the bin in a nice, neat package. Nope. My wife decided to ride around the entire neighborhood, and not a single box was taken, even small stuff that just couldn't fit in the bin and was left to the side. That's effing ridiculous. We're trying to do our part to recycle, and the recycling company is basically telling us to throw it all away.

I'm not really sure what the answer is, but the current situation sucks.

[Lathum]

My town has a recycling center where we can bring large boxes, etc...as well as overflow. It is actually an amazing set up. They have dumpsters for yard waste, bulk waste ( TV's, old toys, etc...) and an area for electronics.

Does your town have similar perhaps where you can bring it to them?

[Ksyrup]

I'm guessing we have a recycling center, but it's not something I've thought about. And more importantly, if the intent of this program was for us to be responsible for boxes that had previously been picked up with no problem and for us to handle those things directly with a local recycling center, someone from the city/county should have made that clear. Otherwise, they've just pushed this off on the company they hired and that company is making the rules as to what they will and won't take. Judging by the number of boxes left on the street, we're not the only ones with a different understanding of how this program is supposed to work.

[sterlingice]

I am of the strong belief that anything that can't be recycled needs a packaging sin tax.

Sure, it's cheapest to encase stuff in a plastic blister pack. But everyone hates opening them and they go straight into a landfill. Same with a lot of the gimmicky marketing packaging that serves no purpose other than to try and get you to buy a product. The company should have to decide whether it's worth an extra 50c to put the stupid thing in plastic or just spend that 50c on each product on a marketing budget. These decisions need to be made with true societal cost considered, not just raw manufacturing cost.

Oh, and everywhere needs an Iowa-esque tax on plastic bottles and cans. If you don't want to reuse your own bottle or use something more environmentally friendly like a paper cup, yes, you get to pay an extra 10c on every stupid ass "convenient" plastic bottle.

SI

[Kodos]

Turning Wood Into Plastic

This sounds promising.

[Kodos]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fiu9GSOmt8E

This was very informative/depressing.

[Kodos]

Your Packaging Is the Problem | Yale Insights

Unfortunately, the world still sucks at recycling.

Q: Is there a key hurdle to doing more effective recycling?

There are so many hurdles it’s hard to even know where to begin. But to be clear, it’s not that we don’t have the technological ability: it’s that the incentives, policy, and infrastructure to collect and process plastics are all broken. This is not to say recycling is unfixable; far from it—but there are many levers of change we need to pull to make recycling work.

In terms of incentives, making new virgin plastic is very cheap, artificially cheap, both because of subsidies to fossil fuel companies and because we don’t take into account the environmental externalities that come from the plastic going into landfills, incinerators, and the environment. We need to change the incentives for the fossil fuel companies and for the companies using plastics. Right now, the producer of a package, both the manufacturer of the package as well as the brand that packages their product in it, are not responsible for the end-of-life of that package once the consumer is done with it. That’s a huge externality.

Q: How do we change that?

For several decades there’s been discussion of a policy approach called extended producer responsibility (EPR). With EPR, the producer must take financial and/or operational responsibility for the end-of-life of the product; in this example, the product in question is packaging.

In practice, producers pay fees based on the amount of packaging that they sell into a given economy that has an EPR law. The fees fund the proper end-of-life management of packaging through effective collection and recycling systems. It can also mean environmental mitigation to keep packaging out of ecosystems.

An intelligent EPR law includes what we call eco-modulated fees. That is, fees are lower for easy-to-recycle materials and higher for difficult-to-recycle materials. The aim is to create upstream incentives for companies to use recyclable packaging.

EPR laws represent a pretty radical shift in who the financial and operational burden of dealing with packaging waste falls on. They say, “Hey, Proctor & Gamble. Hey, Unilever. Hey, Coke and Pepsi, your responsibility for this bottle or container doesn’t end once you sell it to a consumer. You have to deal with it once it’s disposed of, or at least pay fees to ensure it’s responsibly disposed of.”

Four states have passed packaging EPR laws in the last two years: Maine, Oregon, Colorado, and California. California is a big deal because it’s the fifth-largest—perhaps now the fourth-largest—economy in the world. Companies wanting to sell goods into that market must use packaging that is recyclable or compostable by 2032. This is going to cause massive shifts in the market for packaging.

[sterlingice]

EPR basically sounds like what I was describing a couple of posts ago and we're well past overdue that it happens

SI

[Kodos]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/07/c...smid=url-share

I'm definitely guilty of this. I put any plastic item with the recycling symbol in the recycle bin, hoping that they can actually be recycled. But, realistically, anything that isn't a 1 or 2 probably isn't going to be recycled. Mostly, the companies are at fault for creating the illusion of recyclability for items that are not easy to recycle. The only way to stop them is to refuse to buy plastics that aren't #1 or #2.

But when it comes to plastics that can be “deceptive and misleading,” Ms. Romer wrote. Manufacturers often pair the iconic logo with a resin identification code, with numbers from 1 to 7 that indicate the type of plastic in the product.

“Not all resin codes can be recycled currently in the United States,” she wrote. Many plastics, especially those numbered from 3 to 7, “are not financially viable to recycle.”

Mr. Anderson agreed that the symbol he created was not meant to be used that way. But he also hoped the logo could retain its status as a ubiquitous symbol of recycling for other purposes.

“I do see their point,” Mr. Anderson said. “It was meant to be an overarching symbol to say, ‘Hey, this is recycled, this has been recycled or it’s something you can recycle.’ That’s what it was supposed to be.”

More than a thousand environmental groups and individuals, along with the E.P.A., sent comments to the Federal Trade Commission from December to April, arguing, among other points, that the misuse of the recycling logo in plastic products may be contributing to a growing plastic-waste crisis.

Roughly 5 to 6 percent of plastic in the United States was recycled in 2021, a drop from 9.5 percent in 2014, according to a 2022 study of recycling facilities by Greenpeace, an environmental advocacy organization. Most types of plastic packaging were “economically impossible to recycle,” partly because of the costs associated with collecting and sorting them, and could remain so in the future, researchers found.