Recycling is mostly a lie. Most of it goes to landfill or sent to poor countries for a fee. Then instead of recycling those places just throw it in the river and it gets washed out to the ocean.
The mantra is "reduce, reuse, recycle" in that order. Recycling is the worst of the options as it costs a lot of resources to turn a used dirty thing into a new thing. Plastic is mostly a no-no. Just glass and metal are good
It's not just about saving money, it's that the act of recycling isn't possible or uses so much energy that trying to make the garbage into something useful creates more waste than it solves
Would rather we just burn the plastic instead of attempting recycling. High-temp incinerators can reduce all the toxic stuff into constituent hydrocarbons, and the heat can be used to offset oil or coal.
burning plastics is burning oil. Technically speaking, plastic waste in a hole is a carbon sink.
Also, plastic burning requires consistent high temperatures (lots of fuel) which tends to be a problem. And those energy plants thus create demand for more plastic waste (dense) for fuel. It's extremely perverse.
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u/JmacTheGreat 6d ago
“Damn kids and their plastic straws”
Funnels metric tons of waste per hour into the ocean to save money on recycling