I’ve randomly heard various iterations of the claim recycling is a scam but never received a fleshed-out explanation or anything

  • Lodespawn@aussie.zone
    471·
    4 days ago

    There’s been a few scandals where waste planned for recycling just gets shipped to the third world countries and dumped.

    But also, recycling is a scam because its been pushed onto the consumer by industry where industry should be dealing with the full life cycle of their product design choices.

    Industry bribeslobbies federal government against regulations that would require them to either make better material choices in design or clean up their mess. Instead they push for policies that require the consumer to foot the bill and local government to attempt to clean up the mess.

    Consumers aren’t in a position to bribelobby federal government. Local government isn’t equipped to clean up the mess properly so they ultimately rely on industry who gets to charge the local government to clean up the mess created by industry and then only pretend to clean it up rather than actually clean it up.

      • Lodespawn@aussie.zone
        51·
        3 days ago

        Basic materials like glass and metal sure, but is also true for complex things like E-Waste and machines, for chemicals or oils, or for things made from toxic or dangerous substances like asbestos.

        The scam remains though, glass and aluminium are particularly recyclable, but a lot of the time it is still pushed to the consumer and local government to deal with cleaning it up.

        • Sirius006@sh.itjust.works
          2·
          3 days ago

          Yeah, that is also true. In the end it’s way easier to list the recyclable things that are not a scam than the opposite. In term of volume though I guess glass and metal are still significant.

          • Lodespawn@aussie.zoneEnglish
            2·
            2 days ago

            Yeah and at the end of the day the cost to make things more recyclable will still likely be born by the consumer in higher prices instead of higher local government rates, but we could at least be forcing more recyclable packaging and better product choices with circular lifecycles.

            Unbridled capitalism sucks. The drive for ever increasing profits is a race to find the most loopholes. We as consumers have mechanisms to protect the things we care about in government and regulation and it should be working for us collectively, not to just help a few sociopathic arseholes consume harder than anyone with another private yacht. Sadly government tends to be easily captured by private industry.

            The solution is simple, have government regulate effectively. Sadly the steps to get there are complex and a lot of them seem almost insurmountable.