I'm doing my part!
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Isn't it somewhere like only 1% of the recycling stuff actually getting recycled? The rest goes to some kind of landfill to a poor country that decides to take it. I saw this in some documentary
Like it’s been said that differs vastly by location.
Afaik here in Germany it works quite okay … and European countries tend to have a higher incineration rate than the US.
Burning the trash certainly isn’t the best solution, but at least it converts them into energy instead of just burying it somewhere.But that aside, I like these "new" cups. It replaces part of the plastic with cardboard. That allows the plastic to be thinner, focusing on sealing it up and the cardboard handle the stability or even light protection.
Though it can definitely be that there are some which are still as thick as they were, but that wouldn’t make sense for the producer. Here in Germany the plastic is often see-through and the cardboard printed on both sides. That’s usually used as advertising space, infos for waste disposal, but I’ve even seen it being used for cup noodles to mark the fill level.Afaik paper is the thing where reycling works best currently, so it should be a win to replace plastic with paper.
The recycling rate increased in 2023. 79.3% of all paper and board consumed in Europe was recycled
- https://austropapier.at/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/23-00-EPRC-Recycling-Report.pdf
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Recycling (edit: besides metal) does literally nothing, like it's actually 0% helpful, as long as we're producing more plastic than ever before every single year. We're closing in on 500 million tonnes of plastic produced—not total, produced—annually. Every single person can put every single piece of plastic in the recycling bin, and we'll still have more plastic than existed 50 years ago. There are many things that individual action can accomplish, and this is not one of them. We need legislation for this.
Plastic isnt the only material that you can recycle...
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Recycling (edit: besides metal) does literally nothing, like it's actually 0% helpful, as long as we're producing more plastic than ever before every single year. We're closing in on 500 million tonnes of plastic produced—not total, produced—annually. Every single person can put every single piece of plastic in the recycling bin, and we'll still have more plastic than existed 50 years ago. There are many things that individual action can accomplish, and this is not one of them. We need legislation for this.
IIRC plastic recycling is basically bullshit (except maybe PET bottles?) but aluminum is actually effective. Makes you wonder why we don't use more aluminum packaging in general.
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Private Jets MUST be outlawed
That won't happen when there are companies that make billions making them. They would for sure put up a fight
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Arent they still off-sourcing the actual recycling to a 3rd world country?
Especially for paper no … or rather it’s complicated. There is demand for recycled paper and we have lots of products which are made with these.
If I understand it correctly, Germany imports more waste paper than it exports. But the quality between those two differs
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I've ranted in various places over the years but it's 100% true in my city in Canada.
Decades ago we built a massive publicly-funded recycling system because the City could actually draw profit from the collection and sale of materials.
But about 15 years ago China stopped buying the waste, and it became a new shell-game of collecting the material but literally unable to do anything with it or sell it, so any that does get sold mostly ends up in the down-stream recycling economy, where the bulk of it ends up being burned. The rest goes into the regular old landfill. Even waste cardboard has no value anymore.
People who separate recycling in our city now, are just pre-sorting it for the waste management company and keeping it out of their regular waste (profit) stream.
We do have our ewaste centers but knowing people that work there, I can say anecdotally I've been informed that the metal and rare metal waste is collected and sent for processing in Ontario, the rest of the bits (all the plastic which is 90% of eWaste) goes into the regular waste stream where it's buried or burned, but never recycled.
Notice how Pepsi and Coke don't use recycled plastic? If that doesn't condemn the whole recycling "meme" as a sham, I don't know what would.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Regarding the wording. In German(y) we have two kinds of "Verwertung" (utilization). The material one (recycling) and the energetic one (incineration). Both is viewed as reusing the waste. Sometimes energetic utilization can supply the power and/or heat needed for material utilization.
Burning it doesn’t have to be as bad as burying it.
EDIT: I guess it depends on how it gets burned. The company, my dad worked for, used it to produce steam, for the chemical companies located there, among other things.
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Don't be that smart ass that thinks he's cool and guarding some super secret information, and he only speaks in riddles and leading questions.
Everybody knows where that plastic went.
Wow. You got it perfectly right: everybody knows where that plastic went. This is why I wrote it like that, and didn't have to explain how it got dumped in the ocean all along. I wasn't playing riddles, I assumed it was otherwise obvious and common knowledge. Jeez, sorry if it didn't come off the way I meant.
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Can I have a fucking plastic bendy straw now?
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Im calling you out for your claim that most places dump it all in the same truck. While it is true that a lot of plastic gets thrown away by the recycler, that is absolutely not true for metal, glass, and paper.
The point of the packaging shown in the original post is pretty much that it’s more paper and less plastic … where recycling tends to work better.
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if I told you jumping jacks would save the world would you do it? if what she's doing is exactly as effective as jumping jacks, should she be wasting her time, or finding a method that is effective?
Really … separating that stuff takes like 5 seconds extra.
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This is why I recycle.
But it still sucks to see so much work undone by a few greedy fucks.
I appreciate your recycling efforts. I'm in Chicago where recycling rates are horrible. I'm building a plan to improve recycling rates for next year, but I still have a lot of work to do in terms of the system regarding transparency and user-friendliness.
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I get the feeling this is somehow also criticizing this particular woman. Someone did a small good thing, while others do bad things on a very large scale. What a naive idiot! Not a very helpful sentiment. One needs to look up for moral guidance, not down.
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Private Jets MUST be outlawed
Private Jets are not the problem. The top 1% must be outlawed.
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I get the feeling this is somehow also criticizing this particular woman. Someone did a small good thing, while others do bad things on a very large scale. What a naive idiot! Not a very helpful sentiment. One needs to look up for moral guidance, not down.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]It's not the woman that's being criticized, it's the people claiming that the ones not doing that bear all the blame for damaging the environment.
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Slightly off topic, but I find it goddamn funny that someone like MrBeast made a bootleg copy of squid game on his YouTube channel, considering the entire point of the programme was to show that billionaires will do whatever evil they please and get away without any single negative consequence. Not that the premise was too subtle, considering that the villains use humans as literal footrests. How someone can be this tone deaf or uncaring is beyond my understanding.
Edit: I just remembered it's the guy selling kids highly processed food with rotten cheese on top. So, considering that, I'm not too surprised. Just slightly.
He wasn't allowed to kill them, though, so he's not quite on that level yet.
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Private Jets MUST be outlawed
And all the other things they spend billions on. Guess what? Most of it is not good for the environment. It is just that the rich can do a lot of the bad stuff.
What if the super rich had to compensate climate wise with 1:100. They can afford it. Or if they actually have to compensate for all the damage done to create their wealth. Think of all plastic going through Amazon...
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IIRC plastic recycling is basically bullshit (except maybe PET bottles?) but aluminum is actually effective. Makes you wonder why we don't use more aluminum packaging in general.
Any recycling you can't get money back for is either a scam or just not being done. Most city recycling programs just ship the trash to some other country, for instance.
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Can I have a fucking plastic bendy straw now?
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Honestly I don't give one shit about the paper straws. I wonder if the people who don't like them let their drinks sit for hours and chew on the straw till they're soggy. Every paper straw I've had has lasted the length of time it takes me to drink the drink.
Still banning those things but not fucking everything else in the supermarket that is packaged in plastic is such a massive and stupid waste of everyone's time and effort. Such an imperceptible inch forward they almost deserve no praise at all.
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Plastic isnt the only material that you can recycle...
True, that honor belongs solely to metal. Glass is mostly recyclable, though most types of it that aren't bottles will just be thrown in the trash. Paper is in theory recyclable, but putting that in recycle bins is basically just as effective as putting plastic in. Neither of those actually helps as long as we're producing more and more paper and more and more glass every year. The only thing that helps is reducing production.
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IIRC plastic recycling is basically bullshit (except maybe PET bottles?) but aluminum is actually effective. Makes you wonder why we don't use more aluminum packaging in general.
Yeah, I'm going to update my comment. Metal recycling is genuinely good, and recycling makes an enormous impact on the production of new metal
