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.
In Finland one mine had broken the law and dumped all their waste in the back of the mine and they were ordered to clean it up and they raised their hands up and said they couldn’t because it was too dangerous to work there. Govenment’s mining superviser dude turned out to be paid by the mining company, surprise!
That assumes the plastic is already being collected, so why not just make new products from it instead of dumping it into the ground and then using even more oil to make new plastic?
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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.
Well we can move cars with electricity so i guess it could do some good as some point
That said I’m in the train of let’s actually accelerate climate change it’s not like no one is going to move a finger till it gets really bad so why should we extend the suffering
We’re probably doing more harm than good.
That’s probably an extremely underrated statement that you can use to describe many topics.
I just burn it.
I want to hate your comment so much but reality is reality.
Plastics just don’t really get recycled. Despite the efforts made (the company I work for included), recycling is such a joke because it’s hard to even FIND sources that WILL recycle certain things because at the end of the day it likely doesn’t exist because it’s more expensive and sometimes has an even greater impact on the environment to recycle than to just keep buggering on.
That said, I don’t like you burning plastics. I grew up burning paper trash in barrels but we were still mindful of not releasing toxic fumes into the local environment. So, fuck you for that one.
I make sure the chimney takes it out of the environment.
How’s that then?
Oh, I’m sorry. Well, I could put the trash into a landfill where it’s going to stay for millions of years, or I could burn it up and get a nice smoky smell in here and let that smoke go into the sky where it turns into stars.
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It’s a long chimney.
I wonder if it’s anything like this lighthouse I’m showing your mum right now?
My mother just passed away last week and I’m still pretty sore about it.
You miss out on a last chance or something?
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.
We’re always trying to optimize and reduce loss/waste. Being able to have food sit on shelves for months without oxidizing or rotting has been a huge improvement in terms of food loss but it requires these biounavailable materials. If we use compostable materials for packaging then the clock starts ticking on them and storage facilities need to maintain stricter standards (i.e. keep humidity down).
The medical aspect is a big issue. You see what is consumed in an ER and surgery and then multiply that by a million/day and you wonder how much of this trash is being produced. Lawsuits over every little medical issue don’t help reduce this. Fishing industry waste is another big issue for the oceans.
We don’t need food packaging to last 1000 years
You say that but if we went back to clay pots you could up that number to 4,000 years.
No, the problem has never been us at all. We don’t run Coca Cola Co. We don’t decide how laundry detergent is packaged. We don’t manufacture excess plastic drums and lined tanks for unnecesary use cases. We don’t flood the market with cheap dinnerware, plates, cups, bowls, etc.
Big corporations do all of that. Run by dozens of people who do not care what we think.
Yeah but who’s gonna sign responsible for potential traces of dirt on your food?
The other 91% end up in the Pacific ocean.
The recycling symbol for plastics was a great bit of marketing for the plastics industry. ‘Just buy a new thing and no worries you can just recycle it.’
Future geologists are going to see a marine deposit of plastic and be able to date exactly the age of the rock layer.
Survivors of the resource wars will send their children to the plastic mines to work for bottle caps
They purposely made their symbols for non-recylable types of plastic look like the recycling symbol.
Don’t forget nuclear fallout. There’s even a term for when humans started to irrevocably fuck Earth: the Anthropocene.
And heavy metals from burning fossil fuels.
Just a thin, oily, radioactive, toxic smear in the record.
Followed by the layer of shoes, then nothing.
The committee recently pulled the plug on the Anthropocene unfortunately. It was never official and they just rejected it this year.
Yeah, I feel like this Wikipedia graphic puts it quite well why that was rejected:
You see that “Pleistocene” vertical bar? And you see that tiny sliver of “Holocene” at the top. Yeah, the Anthropocene folks were basically arguing that so many riveting things happened in the Holocene already, that we need to declare a new epoch for what’s happening now.
Besides, if we do continue to irrevocably fuck Earth and the current mass extinction event continues to wipe out a big chunk of life on Earth, then a future sentient species might declare our entire existence as just the geological event that ended the current era (Cenozoic).
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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.
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
In my area they don’t recycle glass. I was so surprised when I moved here and learned that. Glass and aluminum are the two most worth it/possible afaik.
9 percent seems high.
Almost like plastics recycling has been a scam all along perpetrated by the corporations to greenwash their business.
Reduce, then reuse, and if the other two cannot occur; recycle.
This is absolutely correct but still not the whole story. Recycling for glass and aluminum and steel can be done essentially infinitely creating a largely closed loop (though for glass in particular we really need to return to our old reuse practices). By using the same language for plastic as we do for better recycling methods we still make plastic recycling sound better than it is, even when reduction and reuse are emphasized.
Plus the whole system was created with the idea of getting people used to recycling so when better, more efficient forms of recycling came into use, people would already be recycling.
Too bad that whole “better, more efficient” part never really happened.
I imagine that goes the other way, too: by conflating the scam of plastics recycling with recycling in general, some people are probably discouraged from recycling anything at all, including aluminum.
not to mention it doesn’t matter where it goes, most plastic can’t be recycled or is not efficient to recycle it. Really need to just not use plastic as a whole
Easy in principle, tough in practice. Plastics are extremely useful in a huge range of applications.
sure, but do we really need plastic wrapped apples
My testicles agree 👍
Yeah plastic is great for a lot of stuff. Car parts, backpack clips, buttons, trash cans etc. But one time use plastic is EVERYWHERE.
Right? Why do gatorade and pedialyte bottles have to be in crazy over engineered compared to cheap crinkly water bottles? Both one time use which isn’t ideal but thinner bottles would save the company money right?
I wonder if it’s a psychology thing, like having a high quality bottle means people thing whatever is inside is equally higher quality?
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%?
custodian checking in: if your university is anything like the school i work in, custodians are dumping it in the trash because nobody seems to know what can be recycled and the staff fill their recycle cans with trash. it’s not worth the time picking through it to salvage what you can.
most of the stuff in the recycle bins in the rooms i clean cannot be recycled. food wrappers, Kleenex, etc. it’s a sham meant to make people feel better about themselves
I always figured it was just because it was a sham as a whole and they didn’t really give a puck and nobody ever seemingly was watching them. Thank you for your input though, this is good stuff =)
it’s possible they also didn’t care, but we do recycle the best we can in our district :)
Oh yeah, I feel that too. Also feel your nickname ;D!
I think a lot of people who are just trying to survive never really cared that much about a lot of things - recycling included.
*Mind you, I know you can also get paid some solid $$$ for being a custodian cause I dated one and she made bank ass bucks.
more people should consider being a school district custodian imo. i get health benefits, all federal holidays and weekends off, a union and a pension (yes, a pension. not 401k)… it’s hard work if you do it right, but can’t beat it for the benefits as an entry level job
Y, I had an adopted papi (rip) by the by (as in found family) and he was a custodian too before he retired. And he worked at a hospital and did very well for himself. I guess one more is that I knew a guy who once was attending university, dropped out and now sweeps floors for a living and he’s WAY happier doing that than keeping up with the joneses like you have to do at a private university. I myself have worked all sorts of gigs, and enjoy a solid sweeping or three =)!
One last one, little sneak in here - in that I have always been good at flitting too and fro and some of my favorite people to talk to growing up were custodians, because they were like the invisible folks of the school but depending on if I was “in hiding” or “visible” I could always find comfort and fun stories with the custodians =)!
My buddy is a TA, and does well for themselves even though they struggled for years to find a place to fit in. People always talk about what a nightmare it is to be in the school system but I know a handful of people who really love it. I think you’ve got to just be a realist in this department. Either way, high-five =)!
I feel like the bulk of the plastic that gets recycled is done in other developed countries that spend significant money on doing it. Like when I lived in Japan they were very stringent about separating your trash, same thing in Germany, and not for nothing those economies that do recycling at scale generally prefer glass over plastic because recycling glass is more efficient.
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.
More than I assumed, tbh. We need to start taxing plastic bottles.
How the hell are plastic bottles going to pay taxes? Let’s not even think about giving them jobs when unemployment is already high.
If you make a plastic bottle you get taxed. If you put something in a plastic bottle to resell, you get taxed. If you import a plastic bottle for any reason, believe it or not, taxed.
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The way we do it here in Germany is that all bottles make you pay a deposit, which you get back, if you return them to a collection point (e.g. at a supermarket).
According to this article it’s working really well, with return rates of 98%.
So at least for most bottles there is a proven solution.
Arguably, it just needs to be taxed to offset the costs of cleaning up the plastic waste in the environment which could potentially make it much more expensive than glass.
Citizens being able to afford food and drink is already a bare minimum policy that the cost of disposable bottles shouldn’t affect in any way, shape, or form. If the average costs rise then so should EBT/SNAP benefits, for example.
“Killing Capitalism” eh? I’ll bite, whats your idea?
The market would open wide for filling aeevices, where you bring your own reusable bottle. Also, water should be free and not put in bottles at all.
It’s unfair to blame capitalism when the state obviously failed (even if through lobbying) to deliver clean water. Other countries have no such problems. Water is basically free where I live.
We have huge taxes on single use bags, and more taxes are coming.
I mean, we can’t even tax billionaires properly!
