TIL Only about 9% of plastic ever produced has been recycled.
TIL Only about 9% of plastic ever produced has been recycled.
The other 91% end up in the Pacific ocean.
It's because plastic is do durable that 91% of the plastic ever produced is still in use, right ?
Right !????
That's significantly more than I was expecting.
Think of all the energy used in collecting the plastic (gas, oil, and emissions from dump trucks that pick it up, for example), sorting it, disposing of what isnt recyclable, and actually recycling the stuff.
Im no expert but I believe that overall recycling as we do it is actually a net negative on the environment. We're probably doing more harm than good.
I find it strange that more people haven't put it together yet. The stuff plastics are made of is literally toxic byproduct from the O&G industry. Yes some of the products have extremely functional uses, but for the rest of it, they're literally selling us their toxic waste and trying to make us responsible for disposing of it.
They might as well be standing outside the grocery stores with a barrel of goo and offering you a portion of it (for a price of course!) on your way out. So then you take it home and try to figure out what to do with it, and feel bad when you realize there is no way to dispose of it in an ethical way which is why they're shoving the responsibility onto you.
I read somewhere that because recycling plastic isn’t profitable, under the capitalist system there’s no incentive to do so.
Most plastics due for recycling just gets shipped off to poor countries for “reclycing” but isn’t at all, and a lot of it just ends up in the ocean.
So you’re better off just throwing plastics in the garbage where it will at least end up in landfill and not in the ocean.
9 percent seems high.
NGL that's more than I thought, but nevertheless: don't use plastic if you can avoid it. It's not easy to recycle.
For instance, for beverages, prefer cans or your own glass / metal water bottles.
That said, 9% is a huge lot better than 0%. edit or considering the amount of plastics we use, a huge lot better than 8% too.
Plug for Climate Town's great video about plastic recycling
Bonus: if you've never used Nebula before (or you're already a subscriber), here it is ad-free from Nebula: https://nebula.tv/videos/climatetown-plastic-recycling-is-an-actual-scam-climate-town
I have gradually wondered if the issue has not been in our obsession with plastic specifically, but our need for sanitation of every object. "We need a material that will preserve its shape in transit and operation; but we then want it to gently break down into nature when we're done with it." No matter what materials of what strength we invent, that's always going to be an oxymoron. There's a reason people criticize biodegradable materials as often falling apart.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure medicine has made tremendous advances through the preservation of sealed instruments and drugs, especially for those with sensitive immune systems. But the 3000% thorough sanitization we keep of every single object we interact with has had a very gradual impact on our planet. I kind of want to envision just how fatal of a health risk it would carry if so much of our food wasn't triple-secure-wrapped, and whether that's comparable to the current impact of widespread plastic.
That could be fixed with “virgin nondegradable plastic” taxes, deposit/return fees, and regulations on single use plastics.
But unfortunately the fossil fuel industry calls the shots in most places.
Can't find for total glass but just current rates for glass: "US’s roughly 33% glass-recycling rate" "90% recycling rate in Switzerland, Germany, and other European countries"
https://cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/glass-recycling-US-broken/97/i6
I worked at a university at one point in my life, and they were quite proud about their recycling plan. The janitors though, would just take the trash and the recycling and put the two bags together and throw them both away. I never really lived anywhere that recycled outside of the West Coast. But is it actually being recycled here? Is this the 9%?
In my area you have to pay a lot extra for a recycling bin, and they only accept two kinds of plastic.
Then it came out they were just shipping it overseas to be recycled but sometimes it was ending up in landfills anyway. There are only a few houses on our street with a recycling bin out each week.
The situation looks better in EU according to this article
Probably a terrible idea, but melting the plastic and extruding the plastic in underground abandoned mines, filling up the empty spaces like icing on a cake from floor to ceiling. There are abandoned lead mines in Oklahoma, where the town was vacated because of the toxicity and the ground collapsing underneath. A place like that seems ideal.
For anyone interested in increasing that number in any way they can, check out earth911.com for hundreds of ideas and ways to help recycle, reduce, and reuse things in your everyday life.
Here's a link to learn about how to properly recycle or dispose of things. Categorized into nine kinds of materials.
And here's a link to their Recycling Solution Search, where you can select the thing you desire to recycle and then enter a zip code.
This is why I pretty much ignore whatever my recycle pickup says is "not recyclable". They say for example not to put used pizza boxes into recycling, even though pretty much every pizza box says "please recycle". Fuck that, If something has that arrow label on it, I don't care what number it is it's going in "recycling" and they can deal with it.
Recycling was the last in the list of what to do.
The problem is we forgot about Reduce and Reuse... The two most important things.
We use way too much instead.
That's a lot of plastic.
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