This was a popular conspiracy theory in the 90's. Another one for the "yup that conspiracy actually happened" book. Ive been called a monster many times for trying to explain this, usually by liberal women. They just hear a bunch of numbers and then their heads explode once they realize I was saying to just put the bottle in the normal trash instead of the special one for virtue signaling.
I was dragged to a recycling plant with a bunch of curious engineers from Google a long time ago. The takeaway was that is was a giant scam- we can't recycle glass, paper is iffy, msot of the stuff is meh, but aluminum is ok. Trash trucks literally pulled up to the plant and removed the "unrecycleable" waste.
We were all so pissed we went into software, when one could literally just put trash into a different container with a green/blue color, and thus purify and bless it, and then send it to a dump.
The part we missed was the ships just taking all this trash to China and Bangladesh.
Wait, how is the glass unrecyclable? Glass should be one of the most recyclable bits, along with metals.
Just because plastic is a scam doesn't necessarily mean everything else recycled is. Scrap metal is big business. Old rubber tires get shredded and vulcanized into new products.
Glass doesn't have to be clear for most disposable uses; it's mostly useful in things such as windows, where you probably want to keep them around. For bottles, it doesn't really matter much.
Nearly all glassmaking involves adding all the glass bits you cut off or broke back into the kiln. Almost no glass is actually 100% virgin glass. So glass is absolutely recyclable.
The only caveat is colored glass can only really be used to make the same color glass (at least economically).
I mean the goal with glass isn't to recycle it anyways, it is to reuse it. And when glass does eventually get thrown away, it is completely inert. It is just sand but in large solid pieces instead of grains. Hell if we cleaned it first, we could literally throw the glass in large piles in designated areas of the coast and just let the waves smash it all back into sand with zero ill effects.
I guess it is just a US thing. I read a lot of HN so naturally had the same very skeptical disposition, until we went to see one of those plants in town. Started recycling at home the same week.
Metals, Glass and paper are profitable to be recycled, plastic a bit less so, but still doable.
But in EU there are a lot of programs to cut taxes or subsidize recycling so maybe that’s actually working?
It drove me nuts when BPA hit the radar and I switched to mostly glass while everyone around me just... bought different plastic.
If this one was 'safe' until it wasn't, why do you think a newer kind of plastic is going to be safe? Plus now you have bought twice as many containers.
Correct, however it is significantly less plastic that would be used in a plastic bottle, since it doesn't have to hold any pressure by itself. The aluminum is one of the most recyclable materials we have.
Klean Kanteen had some drama because they weren't clear on what their liners were made of before they started telling people their products were safe.
Narrator: they weren't
They had to do a big mea culpa and then scramble to change their product line later in the game than they could have.
And then there was an organic food company (Muir) that dragged their feet on switching the liners for their canned tomatoes and sauces (you may recall that acids make the leaching worse) and pissed a lot of people right off.
Silicon as well. If it’s safe enough to have in your body, it’s safe enough to drink from. Also it’s extremely heat resistant (I use it for sous-vide cooking).
This may be a dumb question, but is there really a "yup that conspiracy actually happened" book? Not literally a book with that title, but is there some resource that has a list of these?
The funny thing is, if everyone "virtue signaled" like the "liberal women" do by cleaning plastic and putting it in the right bin, recycling might be somewhat less money-losing by virtue of being better-sorted. But yeah, fuck 'em for "virtue signaling" while they sip their lattes and go to yoga, right? It's better to see the lie and do what they don't want you to do. /s
I get it, plastic can't be recycled profitably and we should be using way less. But one of the reasons its so terrible to recycle is because of how poorly it's sorted.
Did you even read the article? It isn't profitable and it will never be. The only reason why it could go on for as long as it did is because China was subsidizing us with slave labor.
Putting effort into sorting better is throwing good money after bad. Even if you sort perfectly it's still virtue signalling; far better to spend that time on something productive and donate the earnings to something effective.
Probably a couple of seconds. Maybe 5 cents for a typical HN reader. Which is significantly more than recycling that bottle is worth (I'm pretty sure GGP was talking about putting the bottle in the landfill bin rather than the paper bin).
I believe OP is affirming the actual costs of recycling, as discussed in the article. In a world where every consumer perfectly sorts there recyclables, it still doesn't make sense for the producers.
