https://climatejustice.social/@breadandcircuses/112303357717712825 Scroll down inside that link for a slightly more extreme version (NSFW).
https://climatejustice.social/@breadandcircuses/112303357717712825 Scroll down inside that link for a slightly more extreme version (NSFW).
80s: corporations send hundreds of tonnes of trash to landfills while people are told to reduce the trash they generate
90s: corporations make everything plastic and disposable while people are told to recycle
00s: corporations cover the atmosphere in greenhouse gasses while people are told to reduce their carbon footprint.
10s: corporations buy politicians while people are told to vote.
It’s worse than that: the plastics industry tells us to recycle – even going so far as to plagiarize the recycling symbol into the resin identification codes – despite knowing from the beginning that recycling plastic was mostly never going to be a viable thing. They did this purely to shift blame to consumers because the only way their business model worked was to not be held accountable for their waste.
I’m fond of saying that recycling is almost exclusively bad for the planet. It’s true and people don’t like hearing it.
The rhetoric causing people to put their guard down is what’s bad, or actually recycling is a bad thing?
Recycling was actively brought forward as a solution by the oil companies to push the blame of plastic use onto consumers.
So while recycling rare metals is always valuable, plastic is definitely not. Almost all plastic gets buried in landfills, and the only way to make this not happen is to not make products with plastics.
By creating and marketing plastic recycling as a solution that the consumers must take onto themselves, it allowed them to rake in profits by moving everything to cheap plastic alternatives.
We are now literally made of microplastics as a result.
Right. So the former.
Sort of. It’s less a guard down thing as a fraudulent hoax thing.
What I don’t understand is why burning plastic waste and using the generated heat (for example for district heating) is not discussed more often. I think recycling offers very little benefit over simple burning of plastics due to the amount of oil still being burned everywhere compared to the amount of oil used for plastic production.
I guess I’m surprised we don’t do it but we all know that burning plastic is gonna end up directly in the lungs of some poor people who have to live by the pollution factory