Companies pretending plastic is recyclable is 100% a huge scam. Recycling metal and glass is great - but we’ve known that for a long time now and it isn’t really something people argue about
Plenty of plastics are also recyclable!
Looks like 9% of plastics are recycled globally, less in the US. source
The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.
That 9% isn’t a matter of laziness. Plastics degrade in a way that takes a huge amount of energy to repair, so once they’ve degraded beyond a certain point they’re just a pile of microplastics.
Burning degraded plastics is the most environmentally friendly way of handling it - they’re worth neither the mining industry for solar panels and wind turbines to undo the damage nor the infrastructure to prevent a landfill from leaking into the environment.
Cutting plastic consumption is the most sustainable solution this side of technological utopia. We can probably squeeze a couple percent of recycling more out of it, but chemistry won’t change.
Bioplastics run into the same fundamental chemical truth, so they are an extensive crop that gets some of that energy from the sun, in exchange for land use and water and pollution from farm runoff. So bioplastics are at odds with food and water security and with the local envrionment of where they’re grown, on top of still costing energy by way of fertilizer and processing costs.
Plastics and oil are cheap because they’re 500,000,000 years worth of stored solar and geothermal energy that we’re burning through a million times faster. If we have to do the work ourselves, there is no way around it being costly.
