John Stossel Report: Plastic Recycling Is a Dirty Lie
John Stossel reported that recycling paper and cardboard does save trees, and recycling aluminum does save energy, but most plastic cannot be recycled. Only about 5% of used plastic in the US is recycled. Science writer John Tierney said that it costs too much to recycle plastic, so much of it is shipped overseas to countries like Malaysia where it is burned or dumped in the ocean. It is cleaner to put used plastic materials in the garbage instead of recycling. Tierney said that Greens and some politicians push recycling because they “get a charge out of telling people what to do.”
more…
https://needtoknow.news/2024/09/john-stossel-report-plastic-recycling-is-a-dirty-lie/
[In my county we paid a hefty tax to buy the trucks & containers then they quit after a year. Refund? Checks in the mail, still waiting. Everything goes in the landfill just like before. ]
The actual process of recycling plastic takes more energy and puts out far more greenhouse gasses than making virgin plastic, but you'll never hear the environmentalists admit to that.
I don’t care what they do with it after they pay me for dropping it off.
I read an artical years ago,about how they were paying the Chinese to recycle it and they just dumped it in the ocean. That's probably wear the patch in the pacific came from....
Talk to your trash guy…lol. They don’t recycle anything.
My neighbor did talk to our trash guy. Trash guy said they dump it with the trash.
My trash company doesn't even pretend - we only have trash cans and no blue recycle boxes.
Yup.
Only country that actually does some recycling is probably Japan
And Finland. Probably. Finns tend to take everything perhaps a bit too seriously. The people running the systems claim it is economical. Well, at least the fact that you can get fairly nice amounts of money back when you return the empty bottles - or just money, groups descend on festivals etc after the events to get all the bottles left there - means that there actually isn't many bottles just left lying around anywhere here.
https://finland.fi/life-society/circular-economy-success-finlands-recycling-programme-keeps-bottles-and-cans-off-the-streets/
One thing I'd say about my people is that we have a tendency towards being more than a bit naive at times.
That was interesting, thanks for posting👌
Nobody is going to convince me it is cost effective or “green” to ship millions of tons of plastic garbage overseas to do anything, actual recycling or dumping it. There is NO money or environmental savings in used dirty plastic. Period.
My parents were recycling, but stopped when the trash company a few years ago wanted to charge $3 extra for recycling collections.
I'm going outside the box here.
The onus shouldn't fall on consumers to begin with. The mega billion corpos are responsible.
I shouldn't be penalized for buying product that's legally out on the shelf.
If you've ever been in an office building when the janitorial crew comes through, they take the trash bin and the recycle bin from under each desk and empty them into the same trash bin on their cart. Nothing in the office environment is recycled.
Aluminum is the one material that should be recycled. Melting down a can takes 1/20 of the energy of producing the aluminum to make a new can.
Glass is made from sand and limestone, very cheap, so not economical to recycle. Paper isn't hard to recycle, but new paper is so cheap, so why bother. And paper can only be recycled into products with shorter fiber lengths. So kraft paper, cardboard and paper grocery bags can be recycled into paper, which can be recycled into paper towels, which can be recycled into newsprint, which can be recycled into toilet paper. Except newsprint has more ink by weight than paper, so it's not cost effective to recycle. So even paper isn't really worth recycling.
Plastics are a disaster. Only types 1, 2, and 3 are recyclable, and then it has to be clean and dry.
Tin cans can be melted down, but must be clean and dry, and cleaning and drying costs more than making new ones.
So, recycling anything other than aluminum makes little sense.
News print ink (black) is carbon black and mineral oil. CMYK inks, I don’t know.
Old news, I’ve known this for years.
Yep.
I was part of a project in my county to start a recycling project which would give adults with disabilities paying jobs to receive recyclable materials and sort for the local recycle businesses. I learned during all of this that nothing is really recycled. It's a farce. We go through the motions of sorting only for these companies to pick up the dumpsters and dump all the contents in the same damn place. It's all bullshit, just like the Green New Deal.
Still don’t understand why we don’t use more hemp products?
You can thank Rockefeller and Big Oil for that.