Why is our fault plastic recycling does not work?
Industry has had 30+ years to fix the issue and done nothing.
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Industry doesn't just fix things voluntarily, especially when it costs money - that's what governments and regulations are for.
Unfortunately Australia has consistently voted to prop up house prices rather than to tackle these types of issues - the most recent election being somewhat of an exception.
Plastic recycling was megacorps gaslighting consumers (hate that word) and pushing the blame to us from the very beginning. They don't want to fix the issue.
TL;DR:
- Clear PET: sure!
- All other plastics: probably wont' get recycled. Maybe a few % as a downcycled product.
I believe the rates for paper and glass are much better.
And even PET only gets recycled a relatively small percentage of the time.
The industry claims that 9% - 18% of plastic put in recycling bins gets recycled but even that's probably an overstatement. Also they're including the plastic which gets shipped to SE Asia for "recycling" - but once it gets there it's actually landfilled because that's cheaper than recycling. So the amount of actual plastic recycling which actually occurs is probably negligible.
I sort my recycling knowing that it ends up in landfill.
if we stop sorting, it’s just another thing people can point to to say that the task is insurmountable… sorting helps to make a good recycling solution easier to implement in the future. i think of it like voting
Meanwhile, in the future: https://www.smh.com.au/national/redcycle-declared-insolvent-but-plastic-stockpiles-under-control-of-supermarket-giants-20230227-p5cns1.html
I'll bet you an empty can of coke that it all ends up in landfill overseas.
We need to stop using plastics, and there are perfectly fine alternatives. This is a government regulation issue - not a personal responsibility.
That said, I will recycle to my best ability if only so that I can look at my kids in the eye and ask them to care as much.
For as long as plastic is super easy and cheap to produce, manufacturers will continue to use it.
Plastic isn't evil in and of itself. It certainly has a place. Just look around you, everything is made of the stuff. It's the single use culture that needs to stop.
The buzzword campaign is right: Reduce, reuse, recycle. Recycling is the last resort - try not to use it at all if you can avoid it.
Ground up plastic waste has been shown to work well in asphalt. It’s a shame no one is doing it. It’s an easy way to dispose of it, lowers the cost of asphalt, and makes it more resilient.
And the asphalt can be torn up and reused for new roads when it’s time to repave.
As someone who has worked with asphalt, we have tried using different mixes with plastic, glass, shredded rubber and printer ink cartridges in it, hard part is organising it with the batch plants, it only tends to happen when they decide to do trials with it, otherwise it's just the normal emulsion, stone and sand mix. The laying and finish seems relatively the same across all the mixes, time will tell with the time it takes to break down and has to be replaced
This solution will worsen micro plastic pollution in the environment. We need to be moving towards a solution where we can control where the final destination of the plastic is.
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