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.”
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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. ]
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.