Recycling is nothing but PR bull ■■■■ from the companies that do nothing but make more and more plastic every year.
“Biofuel” electrical generation plants regularly burn plastic in order to get the wet green wood they use from forest management to burn it at temps high enough to turn the machinery.
Microplastics are in the ocean. They’re most likely in our food chain by now too. I don’t care what anyone thinks, that’s ■■■■■■■ disgusting.
This thread is not about blaming China and India for being filthy pigs, or passing laws to pretend like we’re “helping”. It’s more of an open-ended question - what even can be done about it at this point?
Oh man, you are on my hobby horse. I detest the sheer amount of plastic that is now in our biosphere but no idea of the answer except to use less.
I still recycle but moved away as much as I possibly can from buying plastic. Sure it makes no difference in the grand scheme of things but i can control what I buy and when possible plastic is a no-no.
Like I said thats all we can do, make a conscious decision as consumers to use less plastic.
Not all recycling is a scam but it’s obvious we have been fed a lie by large multinational’s and government (what a surprise).
That’s kind of the problem. With glass people had the incentive to clean and reuse them. Kind of like how my grandparents told me there were actually coke bottle reclamation machines in grocery stores back when they were kids. You took in your used clean glass bottles, deposited them into the machine, and the machine paid you a nickel for each bottle.
Plastic completely shut that simple true recycling feature out of the world. From what I read about it the reclamation machines helped see that each glass coke bottle was used an average of 9 times before it was shattered or something.
Compare that to an average plastic coke bottle where it’s used once and then either ends up in a landfill or in a river.
Man I miss paper bags at the grocery store. They were actually stronger and I always found uses for them at the house so I was incentivized to keep them around instead of just throwing them away. When I got done with them I just took them out to my burn pit and burned them.
There are SO many uses for paper bags. One of my favorites is using them to line the base of a raised garden bed. Second favorite is to use them to start a fire in the fireplace or fire pit.
I am not anti-environmentalist by any means what I am anti-is blaming the west on everything if one wants to fix the problem go to where the largest pollutants are and demand change other than that nothing will be done.
Just looking at the biggest plastic polluters by country, look at the difference between number 1 India and number 10 U.S. Some countries should remain poor.
Top 10 countries with the highest amount of plastic pollution in the oceans for 2022
India (126.5 million kg).
China (70.7 million kg).
Indonesia (53.3 million kg).
Brazil (38 million kg).
Thailand (22.8 million kg).
Mexico (3.5 million kg).
Egypt 2.5 million kg).
United States (2.4 million kg).
I think at this point I am OK with burning it as fuel. There are viable ways to reduce the stench without breaking the profit margins.
I’d rather reclaim the molecular energy than let it shatter into micro shards then absorbed into the food chain.
As far as “global warming” goes, I just don’t care about that. In fact, I wish to God it were true. Our entire physiology is optimized for tropical climates. Let the Ice Age end, screw this interglacial foreplay.
I cannot imagine anyone is anti-environmentalist. We all want clean water, clean air and not to see litter everwhere.
The west is an easy target because virtue signaling is cool.
What I am against is the virtue signaling (regulate AC/gas stoves, etc.) that does nothing while pollution, something we CAN do something about that will make a difference, gets a ho-hum.
I’m going to be strongly for the use of plastics in this thread, and no recycling. I’m ok with burning for fuel for some incinerator or whatever. I like to burn plastic and drip fireballs, so that’s cool.
Plastic is just convenient. Always has been, always will be.
