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This is a PSA that as a whole, the plastics recycling and packaging industry isn’t well regulated, and all those plastic drink and soda bottles at the grocery store that now say “Made with recycled plastics”? You have NO idea what type of plastics are in there now or the level of decay, and neither do the manufacturers.
Do not drink out of, eat out of, or wear anything that is made from recycled plastics.
Recycled plastics encountered in the world should be assumed to be toxic unless you know for certain they aren’t, and should not be considered fit for food use, medical use, or prolonged human contact.
<citation needed>
Not saying you’re wrong but if you give it as a PSA, at least base it on something credible
There are people who live in countries that do regulate this stuff, you know
Yes I know. Part of the problem is that it’s a global industry, which is why I said “as a whole”. One company or country could make a recycled plastic bottle, another company could buy it and ship it to another country to be used in a product, and finally sent to another country to be sold to consumers.
Most people have no idea what any country’s regulations and standards are on recycled plastics quality & safety, and they aren’t going to think about it or research it before they make a purchase.
Perhaps a better Public Service Announcement might be: if your government doesn’t generally care about your health, don’t buy recycled plastics for food or clothing use in your country.
I’m old enough to have both lead and plastic in my brain, lungs, and testicles. I envy you youngins with only plastic in you.
Forever Chemicals in my non stick stuff
Everyone, I mean everyone on the planet has PFOAs in them.
On the bright side, my nuts don’t stick to the side of my leg anymore cause I sweat PTFEs.
I make the shit full time so I think I’m 50/50 ken doll/human by now.
You and me both, brother!
A lot of right-wing people use this fact as an excuse to not care about the environment at all…
A lot of right-wing people use … as an excuse to not care about … at all…
I thought your comment would be one of those rare instances where you can make a sentence more accurate by generalizing it.
They REALLY like doing it with people, and ruining the environment and/or climate is just shitting on other people (especially the poor ones) with an added level of abstraction.
MY bunker is going to be a lot nicer than YOUR bunker 🥵😤🫢
I do wonder, maybe there is similar scheme when it comes to housing affordability. There is too much of a coincidence that much of the Western countries are having the same housing crisis. Most ordinary Westerners are perplexed to find out other countries also have the same issue, or are surprised they can’t find a place to live when they move abroad. There is a deliberate manipulation of the housing market and misinformation. Here in Ireland, after all, foreign vulture funds outbid locals and then either rent or sell properties at extortionate price. And yet, the wrong kind of foreigners are getting blamed.
It’s because we allow property and the homes that sit on it to be a speculative market. We encourage it. The only way for property values to be high, well, it’s a supply and demand thing. If you glut the market with anything, you drive prices down. And people whose entire retirement is built on that won’t be having it, let alone the conglomerate owners…
China is trying to steer into the opposite with laws against it. Not sure how well that’s working, but they can acknowledge the issue at least.
In the US the whole idea of owning a house as your “nest egg” that keeps growing forever in a way that you can retire with is so toxic. And then there’s also the retirement funds demanding huge returns on real estate.
Furthermore, we then tie it all into the stock market and link our future pensions to that. So we can never really change the system otherwise everything will collapse.
It’s like a house of cards.
Yeah exactly, housing is used as a value storage for large players when they need to use a generic asset in between investments. It’s relatively safe but its value is passive, it is driven by the rest of the market. Plus it’s great for money laundering and bribing politicians or officials. So all this manipulation raises the prices for everyone, and most people don’t benefit from it. It’s just so greedy and abusive.
Same thing with “carbon footprint”, which was invented by B.P to shift the blame for climate change onto the consumer.
I’m not saying don’t try to reduce your emissions by using electric vehicles, going plant based or at least reducing animal product intake, and limiting flying, just that it’s pretty meaningless in the whole scale of things, so instead of focusing on the individual, focus on organizing protests, disrupting, and other collective action.
I’m not saying don’t try to reduce your emissions by…
I’ll say it. Don’t do these things because you think they reduce your carbon emissions. Do it when it’s the most frugal option.
Reduce and reuse are still something we should 100% being doing but trying to measure then inject carbon foot print is futile.
Every dollar spend it a better measurement of your contribution to emissions. Trying to calculate it yourself with incomplete data is pointless.
Don’t be fooled by some study you read that made you feel like a righteous person. No one knows. The methods we have for measuring and assessing our footprint are hilariously incompete.
The truth is buried in endless noise. We don’t know what we need to know because it is in the best interests of others that we not know it. Blindspots.
Buy less products because buy “better” is a personal fantasy. Where better is because some popsci idea made you feel guilty for not being better. What the fuck do these things know, they’re bullshitting. Yes people do that; not just on the internet but definitely there.
There is “buy better”, it is not but a fantasy.
Buy more local / regional produced food and products, less km travelled and support local people. Buy products made from longer lasting materials if there are different versions. Buy fairtrade when it’s available for coffee, cacao, bananas, pineapple, etc. Buy bio if available. None of it is perfect, but you are still voting with your wallet and not perfect is often still better than the cheapest there is.
If you can afford it.
Buying better definitely does exist and, for non-consumable goods, definitely can result in buying less. My washing machine is from the early nineties. I expect my steamdeck to last for 2 decades at least, because it seems repairable and software won’t ever be the bottleneck. I have sweaters I wear that are over 25 years old. Endless noise just makes it hard to identify which product is the better one, you’ll often only be sure long after the purchase… And the at first sight most frugal option will often not be the better buy.
Individuals are essentially useless on a global scale but companies like BP aren’t drilling for oil to accomplish their sinister goal of warming the earth they are producing a product that all of us as individuals are purchasing.
It’s like you are in a dog park that’s covered in dog shit, just because there’s shit everywhere doesn’t mean you shouldn’t clean up after your dog. Telling other people they don’t need to worry about cleaning up their shit because the guy with the dog training school doesn’t clean up any of the shit from the dogs still makes you bad.
You cleaning up after your dog isn’t going to clean the whole park but doing nothing until a petition is done that enforces cleaning up your dog isn’t the way. I’m not asking you to spend all day trying to clean the park but you should at least do your best to not make it worse
I’m not asking you to spend all day trying to clean the park but you should at least do your best to not make it worse
that is a useful mindset for those who fear a systemic solution.
the people who would have to organise instead spend their effort on other things, like cleaning up dog shit; Or arguing how much shit you need to clean up, before you are morally allowed to advokate for a systemic solution.
the more the anti-dogshitters are splintered, the easier it is for the pro-dogshitters to keep the status quo
Wait until OP hears about the evils of cardboard recycling, I drive by daily and see the towering eternal flame of methane. Sadly methane is sneaky and not all of it gets burned.
wait what!?!!
fuck.
Cardboard is recyclable so long as you don’t print on it and it’s the brown corrugated stuff. Which is a big ask.
Most of it doesn’t get recycled into more boxes though. Think like those cup holders you get at a take out place.
The other thing is trees area renewable resource in theory but we use a lot of fossil fuels to harvest and process then.
sometimes I wonder what would happen if we were to send all carbon based waste (plastic, food, cardboard, paper…) to the Artic/Antarctic.
make a giant landfill where it is too cold for it to decompose into methane, and it will actively sequester carbon, as replaced carbon and other organic items sequester carbon.
We’re already shipping all our garbage halfway across the world,
You would put twice the carbon into the atmosphere by burning the fuel to get it there.
Ok, probably not twice … but you get the idea.
we send it halfway across the world, to burn/recycle to low quality, send back, use, discard, send back across the world to burn/repeat.
honestly with that system, it’s hard to think of a worse system.
imagination, life is your creation
come on barbie let’s go party
If you’d recycled more, there wouldn’t have been any plastic to end up in your blood, organs, etc… Who’s really the one shirking responsibility?
Yeah that’s not true.
This would almost make sense if there weren’t thousands of corporations, and 8 billion other humans, doing whatever the fuck they want…
Excuses, excuses. Enlist a friend to help, if you need it!
Plastic recycling is one of the primary sources of microplastics. They use jets of air to remove labels, which creates an enormous cloud of microplastic. People who live near plastic “recycling” plants have more plastic in their bodies than people who don’t.
There are articles about this out there.
does it do more harm than dumping plastic in a landfill though?
Yes, based on what I’ve read. Less than 5% of the plastic that consumers place in recycling bins actually gets recycled. The rest is shipped to other countries, who then dump it in the ocean. When you throw plastic in the garbage it ends up in a domestic landfill. Landfills certainly aren’t ideal, but at least we know where it is, and it’s better than the ocean.
Does the US keep any statistics on how much trash goes to where? I just checked the stats for my country, and here it’s way more than 5%. link if you’re interested
I’m seeing a lot of articles putting the rate at 5%. Google is just so much worse than it used to be…
That 5% figure is 3 years old, and one report from 2018 had the figure at 8.7% so it appears to be dropping. Based on the political climate in the US that number is unlikely to my rise anytime soon.
That 5% figure comes from The Guardian, a British newspaper, which I would actually trust more than a domestic source at this point. Based on what I’ve read about what the Trump administration has done to the EPA, I would imagine any new pollution reports won’t be a possibility for a while.
who then dump it in the ocean
they burn it. It has value as fuel to generate electricity.
Source?
Fine, I agree with all of you, let’s stop recycling.
It’s more like “Let’s stop using plastic instead of patting ourselves on the back with a bandaid solution.” I know this can be hard for people who equate their environmental consumer habits with = “I’m a good person” and in turn make it out to be a personal attack, even though it isn’t.
Consider investing in a personality outside of environmental moral superiority and the switch to cardboard will be easy for you, barely an inconvenience.
Return plastic packaging to retailers. Dump it right on the front door.
microplastics might explain that epic rant about lobster.
We have these groups of volunteers gathering trash along the roadside. The more they collect the more they can earn for their good cause or their organisation.
They’re being cheap cleanup for the companies that sell trash and by collecting trash they keep the stats down.
They didn’t invent plastic recycling. They are, however, using it as an excuse to make more plastic. The EU had regulations against over packaging (like putting cucumbers in plastic) for a while until plastic recycling became a thing and they went ‘meh’.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_America_Beautiful#Controversies
It’s less that they invented plastic recycling and more that this is one of the first examples of corporate greenwashing and shifting the burden onto the public vs the corporations who made the problem.
What are we supposed to believe will save the world now?
Being responsible off the chop would be nice. I just recently stopped buying a very popular brand of cookies because, for some fucking reason, they switched from cardboard to plastic packaging.
We’re constantly reacting to problems that we create(corporations, in this case) and it’s just getting so tiresome. We can just not do these things in the first place and we wouldn’t have nearly the same numeous, shitty problems we have right now.
I avoid so many things lately because of packaging!
My biggest pet peeve at the moment is milk. There are so many dairy farmers nearby, all single use plastic containers :( while the same companies would have yogurt in glass jars that they ask back from the consumer and reuse. Why the difference?!
I barely shop at normal supermarkets anymore, and I’m glad I’m able to eat the cost increase (~10% overall).
Wait wait, they’re not even using cartons?! What the fuck?!
I switched to oat millk a long time ago for the vast majority of my consumption(cereal, mostly) because it keeps way longer than regular milk and, as a bonus, the packaging is at least trying to be better for the environment.
It’s assinine. Milk tastes better out of the carton too. I miss it.
The cartons are lined with plastic too
People uniting themselves against corporations, oligarchs and consumerism culture
believe it or not it’s not the 1970’s anymore and many countries have improved their waste mitigation rates significantly, especially europe
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/recycling-rates-by-country
Greenwashed bullshit. Journalist have GPS tagged trash all over Europe and found that most “recycled” plastic is burned for electricity in Poland.
Rifles.
Asteroid impact? Worked for the dinosaurs.
Even the dinosaurs were polluting the planet?
Yeah they prob had oil from the Triassic era and had their own gas guzzlers.
Now I want to watch dinosaur mad max.
They invented monster trucks
It left them all able to fly. How could that be a bad thing?
Yeah, all the humans who have evolved the capability of flight will survive… Err wait…
Well technically we can all fly. It’s the landing part that is problematic.
Bah, there’s even some convincing hypothesis that we evolved to fly https://youtu.be/94_omZ2RnfI “Infantapulting hypothesis”
Important to note that recycling some things makes sense, like metal. And recycling glass makes sense but sanitizing and reusing bottles makes alot more sense. There’s also been a push to compost as much paper product as possible since that makes way more sense than recycling paper. Our green bins now take any brown cardboard with no tape and pizza boxes.
How does composting paper make more sense than recycling? From what I can tell we have pretty well established paper recycling mechanisms, at least here in Germany.
Edit: typo.
I would guess that it’s because recycling requires energy input, while compost doesn’t require hardly any energy.
I am pretty sure recycling does not require more energy than using fresh trees. You can even use the waste pulp to produce biogas.
In most countries, recycling paper only made financial sense if they shipped it to poor countries or used prison labor so it could be inexpensively sorted thru. Traditionally it was China, but they stopped accepting it. And letting microorganisms do what they do consumes less resources like electricity and less industrial chemicals.
In Germany the recycling is sorted at the household level, rather than the mixed recycling that is practiced in other countries. The paper, plastic, glass, and compost all get their own bins and/or bag color.
When recycling first started where I live, we had multiple bins. Paper, and i want to say metal/glass and plastic. Plus garbage and yard waste. But I’m refering to the fact that paper by itself faces additional sorting prior to recycling.
recycled paper is lower quality, so you still have to add fresh paper pulp to it
Sure. It’s not a closed cycle. But if you need to cut down less trees, that is a win for me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOtrvBdRx8I
someone still need to recycle stuff that’s being used. Not that I disagree that they’re trying to shfit to blame to consumers, just practically speaking
