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'Recyclable' just means that you - theoretically - CAN recycle something. Doesn't mean that it's actually done - and never has.
That word has always been the most blatant dogwhistle of greenwashing.
factoid: those recycling symbols on various shit? none of that is regulated and packagers can put any symbol on anything, recyclable or not.
90% of it ends up in landfills anyway.
TIL: it IS regulated in 36/50 US states.
What is your source for that? According to the law, they have to use the correct symbol for the type of material. Are ou saying it isn't enforced enough?
Recycling in America is a scam 🎶
Always has been. Make the manufacturers/retailers of the product be responsible for the cleanup.
Yeah. I am 'fuckable' in the sense that I can have sex. Still does not mean I have any or much of it.
and then research came out, that recycling is too intensive of a process to be feasible, unless they make biodegradble kinds.
Plastic recycling basically everywhere is a scam. It requires direct government subsidization to be cost competitive with new plastic. Companies actually advertising that they do it or could do it are missing the forest for the trees or just greenwashing.
Because plastic is a byproduct of oil production. It is a way to get rid of fractions of oil that are not used as fuel. No matter how efficient plastic recycling gets, it will never be cost competitive with new plastic. Refineries will just drop the price of the new plastic to ensure all of it gets sold, since if they couldn’t sell it, they would have to pay to dispose of it.
The real value of plastics isn’t that they’re good materials for things, it’s that they’re a way for oil companies to push the responsibility of disposing of their waste products on to public waste management by laundering it through packaging and cheap junk.
Because plastic is a byproduct of oil production.
I learned this from playing Satisfactory. I mean, I probably actually learned it in school at some point, but Satisfactory really drove it home. One of the first things you learn after unlocking oil is how to process all the excess oil by-product into plastic... And then straight into the shredder for those sweet sweet Ficsit coupons
And in real life, the shredder is plastic packaging and junk that everyone else has to dispose of when they’re done with it. Not the oil companies problem, now it’s the responsibility of local municipal governments. Your tax dollars subsidizing the disposal of oil company byproducts.
Another side of the issue is that recycling is not government mandated - companies can choose on their own to recycle, and this is costly. When we as a society expect companies to maximize profit, it can come as no surprise that they do not voluntarily pay to be ecologically responsible.
Not exactly true. There are many companies making profit off of recycling. The collecting costs here are by property taxes. Recycling plastic is still less cost than manufacturing virgin material. The sorting is effort, but the repelletinzing is not highly complex. As with anything for sale, for a company to stay in business their product has to cover costs and make profit. Recycled plastic is cheaper than new, sometimes not by a huge %/but enough that when oil prices rise the plastic part manufacturers reach out and order a lot more recycled material.
The plastic that is not easily converted back into consumer materials, is repelletized into fuel pellets. These are used in heating and incinerator systems in place of oil, coal and gas fuels. Its still just hydrocarbons at the end.
Not saying every country is doing this, and often not every city. But where I'm at 96% of collected material is recycled.
This sounds like cardboard propaganda. When everyone knows cardboard is just a way for lumber companies to dispose of their unused tree parts from 2x4 production.
Yah, but hear me out, growing trees doesn’t make the planet get hotter.
It in fact has the opposite effect.
Yeah that just sounds like you'd like humans to live in caves again
The recycling movement really ruined any attempt at the federal government regulating/limiting plastic production. Which I have to assume was the purpose.
the recycling movement is, ultimately, a big giant scam designed to shove the burden off onto consumers instead of on the producers.
and most everything but easy and valuable metals still end up more in dumps than being reprocessed in any way, because processing/sorting waste plastic is hard and no one wants to pay the money to do it.. So if they suspect one wrong plastic in an entire truckload of plastic recyclables, the entire truck goes to the dump.
I am curious how much petroleum products actually go into making the plastics vs how much energy it costs to recycle it. Is it possible we will see a boon in the recycle market if Oil prices get high enough?
its not about the energy.
its about the cost.
Lets preface this by saying that "plastics" is just a universal word that describes like half a dozen or more types of commonly used polymer materials.
These materials are generally made from waste byproducts from the oil and gas industry, so the oil and gas industry could literally give these byproducts away and it would still be cheaper for them than having to incur disposal costs. fresh plastic will always win on price, as long as petroleum exists (Which may not be as long as some people hope..but thats another discussion)
meanwhile recycling all these plastics require massive complicated machines (if such machines even exist), or hordes of human workers manually sorting the various types. Which already makes recycled plastic too expensive to be anything but a propaganda tool for companies to slap "MADE WITH RECYCLED MATERIALS!" on their label, usually with an asterisk somewhere that says they only used like 10% recycled materials, because again, the sorting, cleaning, processing is so expensive as to make the final pelletized product magnitudes more expensive than fresh raw plastic could ever hope to be.. so they only use enough recycled plastic to be able to slap that on their label in hopes of appealing to the environmentalist types.
Which is also why most plastic in the recycle bins ends up at the dump regardless, because if one person on the route is suspected of putting something they shouldnt in their bin, then the truck is sent to the dump where all the plastic is buried with the rest of the trash, because they dont want to deal with any sorting or processing. they just want to dump the truck into pelletizer and be done with it.
If you care about the environment, recycling isnt whats going to save it. getting rid of plastic and replacing it with something sustainable like glass and wood is what will save it.
I am mostly just interested in clean, baled strapless shrink wrap industry.
Actually it was a response to local governments attempting to ban plastic packaging. You know, because they were the ones who had to pay for disposing of it.
Glass bottles of milk or soda got picked up and re-used by the companies that sold stuff in them, metal cans got bought up for use as scrap metal. Municipal garbage only had to deal with stuff like wood, paper, cardboard, and food scraps; stuff that rotted and broke down over time. Plastic though, well, it didn’t break down, it filled up the dumps, and suddenly towns had to constantly be digging new dumps. This was expensive and a bunch of local governments started banning the use of single use plastic packaging. Oil/plastic lobbyists went to state governments and got them to ban the local bans.
Of course this was going to be unpopular, so they also spent a bunch of money funding PR blitz’s to convince everyone plastic recycling was viable, and that it was actually the responsibility of average consumers and municipalities to implement it. And now local governments are burdened with the cost of dealing with all the waste generated by oil and plastic companies.
Starbucks is a shit company and people need to stop drinking their slop.
If there's a local coffee house nearby (there almost always is) then go there instead.
That means they aren't very valuable even in recycling. Starbucks would not ignore a potentially reliable revenue stream.
Recycling used to be shipped to China. A couple of years ago China made that illegal.
That’s fair. It’s more than a little disgusting to imagine one country exporting its literal waste to an entirely separate group of people… Countries should have to manage their own trash. But there’s a lot that countries should have to do that will never be done, so ¯_(ツ)_/¯
They still export garbage, just not to China. To poorer countries now.
even some of the SE asian ones are refusing now.
Valuable to say they are recyclable
giant corporation lies it's ass off and pollutes and destroys the world so the CEO and shareholders get a few extra dollars, all without consequences
You don't say!
Wait until you find out about recycling in general!
This is why glass, metal, and paper recycling will always be superior lol.
Random fun fact: the most recycled material in the world is asphalt, where way over 99% of it goes directly back into the new product. Neat stuff.
More specifically plastic recycling, but yeah.
Allow me to rephrase Starbucks' claim: "the plastic we said was recyclable decades ago but then found to be prohibitively expensive to recycle, information that didn't change our practice at all, is now considered recyclable again and wevre taking credit and celebrating but still pawning the task off on whoever takes our garbage"
Polypropylene is #5, which nearly all takeout containers are made form in my experience. My town hasn't taken any plastic besides 1/2/3 for at least a decade.
1: polyethylene, such as soda bottles
2: high density polyethylene, such as milk jugs (and a pretty good material for flat bearings)
3: pvc, such as medicine bottles
4: low density polyethylene, such as bags
5: polypropylene, such as most food takeout containers
In my opinion, companies should be required to recycle and penalized if they don’t. This word salad of talking about how things are possible is meaningless if it isn’t done.
Some plastic water cups and takeaway containers are 1, but most of them are 5 or 6, in my recent experience.
Evil corporation is evil.
I'm surprised that this surprises anyone.
Too be fair, why would you even go to Starbucks in the first place? Kinda on yourself to get scammed there, that whole place is a scam. So they are just doing as people ought to expect from them.
But they could recycle, they just don't. But they could. They just don't.
But they could.
Like how Apple could repair their products, but they choose to grind them up? But they could reduce e waste, but they don't.
This is the company that, for a while, was using paper straws "for the evironment" while still using plastic fucking cups. It would have been friendlier to the environment to keep the plastic straws and use paper cups since there's a lot less plastic in the straw than a whole cup.