Thread 511260391

Is recycling even real? Why do they push it on us so much? Does it really matter if I "separate my water bottles from the regular trash" while Taylor Swift flies her private jet 10 times across the country?

>>511260391 (OP)
The bulk of it is companies defusing responsibility onto consumers. Nothing the average person does will do shit. China isn't going to stop making coal plants, fishing companies aren't going to stop overfishing, and the US government isn't going to start building nuclear power plants. Those things would help. Your recycling isn't going to do much, and the people pushing it know that.

>>511260391 (OP)
An insane amount ends up in landfill

>>511260391 (OP)
It's mostly feel good bullshit. Plastic really cannot be effectively recycled and is not worth recycling anyways even if it were.
Aluminum is actually worth recycling.

>>511260391 (OP)
Recycling as it is known today was invented by the Reagan administration as a way to calm people's concerns about companies dumping loads of trash/chemicals into rivers and lakes across the US.
As schizo as that sounds, it's true, even fucking wikipedia acknowledges this.

Aluminum is the only recyclable that's actually worth recycling.
Glass should simply be reused.
Paper should be reused until it's either got rot or can be burned for fuel.

>>511260391 (OP)
90% of it just ends up in the landfill and then burned where I live. There’s even people that made a video about it curious about what happens to it.

I recycle everything because my garbage only gets picked up every two weeks and the recycling depot is close by or else I probably wouldn’t.

>>511260391 (OP)
it's real for the stores and the retailers because they have to pay a deposit for every single can of Lacroix, 20 oz Coke Zero, 2l of ginger ale they sell

>>511260391 (OP)
Coca-Cola produces ~110 billion plastic bottles a year. The world's greatest polluters (including plastic) are China, India and Indonesia, and you can be sure no one will ever snap a whip and bring them to heel. All of the CO2 the West does not produce for a year due to green energy jazz, China produces in a week. You can thank Henry Kissinger for uplifting chinks from caveman communism and your boomer grandparents for mass outsourcing of production to chinkistan and jeetland.
Plastic recycling is an extremely cumbersome and difficult process that produces shittons of harmful chemicals + very few customers buy recycled plastic bottles, since new ones are extremely cheap. Singapore and Japane simply incinerate their plastic in special power plants to produce energy, the pollution is filtered and byproduct is used to make asphalt.
Recycling of metals, however, is very useful and widely done.

>>511260824
Feel good and pay more
Also absolves "society" from any real effort to reduce the amount of plastics used or implementing a system for re-using glass and metal containers.

>>511260391 (OP)
No. Recycled plastics mostly just get burned. Theres a factory here that presses them into pucks to burn in powerplants in 3rd world countries. But we aren't burning it ourselves so its ok.

>>511260391 (OP)
Recycling can work but not in America. You need a society of people who care. The Japs sort their garbage into not two, but three categories (burnable, non-burnable, and recyclable).

>>511260391 (OP)
It's more real than municipal compost pickups which make recycling look legitimate and efficient

>>511260391 (OP)
It's a humiliation ritual. The recycling product must be clean before being recycled, and we'll, most isn't so they just toss it.

>>511260710
Most of what’s sorted into recycling bins is.

>>511260391 (OP)
>Is recycling even real?
Other than scrap metal you take in personally and get paid for, it all ends up in a landfill