Posted on 10/30/2022 4:22:31 PM PDT by george76
Even Greenpeace now admits the obvious: recycling doesn’t work
...
Even Greenpeace has finally acknowledged the truth: recycling plastic makes no sense.
This has been obvious for decades to anyone who crunched the numbers, but the fantasy of recycling plastic proved irresistible to generations of environmentalists and politicians. They preached it to children, mandated it for adults, and bludgeoned municipalities and virtue-signaling corporations into wasting vast sums—probably hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide—on an enterprise that has been harmful to the environment as well as to humanity.
Now Greenpeace has seen the light, or at least a glimmer of rationality. The group has issued a report accompanied by a press release headlined, “Plastic Recycling Is A Dead-End Street—Year After Year, Plastic Recycling Declines Even as Plastic Waste Increases.” The group’s overall policy remains delusional—the report proposes a far more harmful alternative to recycling—but it’s nonetheless encouraging to see environmentalists put aside their obsessions long enough to contemplate reality.
The Greenpeace report offers a wealth of statistics and an admirably succinct diagnosis: “Mechanical and chemical recycling of plastic waste has largely failed and will always fail because plastic waste is: (1) extremely difficult to collect, (2) virtually impossible to sort for recycling, (3) environmentally harmful to reprocess, (4) often made of and contaminated by toxic materials, and (5) not economical to recycle.” Greenpeace could have added a sixth reason: forcing people to sort and rinse their plastic garbage is a waste of everyone’s time. But then, making life more pleasant for humans has never been high on the green agenda.
These fatal flaws have been clear since the start of the recycling movement. When I wrote about it a quarter-century ago, experts were already warning that recycling plastic was hopelessly impractical because it was so complicated and labor-intensive, but municipal officials kept trying in the hope that somebody would eventually find it worthwhile to buy their plastic trash. Instead, they’ve had to pay dearly to get rid of it, typically by shipping it to Asian countries with cheaper labor and looser environmental rules. In New York City, recycling a ton of plastic costs at least six times more than sending it to a landfill, according to a 2020 Manhattan Institute study, which estimated that the city could save $340 million annually by sending all its trash to landfills.
The environmental price has also been high because the plastic in American recycling bins has gone to developing countries with primitive waste-handling systems. Much of it ends up illegally dumped, burned (spewing toxic fumes), or reprocessed at rudimentary facilities that leak some of the plastics into rivers. Virtually all the consumer plastics polluting the world’s oceans comes from “mismanaged waste” in developing countries. There’d be less plastic polluting the seas if Americans tossed their yogurt containers and water bottles into the trash, so that the plastic could be safely buried at the nearest landfill.
The Environmental Protection Agency has promoted recycling as a way to reduce carbon emissions, but its own figures show that the benefits are relatively small and come almost entirely from recycling paper products and metals, not plastic. I’ve calculated that to offset the greenhouse impact of one passenger’s round-trip transatlantic flight, you’d have to recycle 40,000 plastic bottles—and if you used hot water to rinse those bottles, the net effect could be more carbon in the atmosphere.
While finally admitting the futility of plastic recycling, Greenpeace is making no apologies for the long campaign to foist it on the public, and the group is unashamedly pushing a new strategy that’s even worse. It proposes finally to “end the age of plastic” by “phasing out single-use plastics” through a “Global Plastics Treaty.” This is a preposterous goal—imagine “phasing out” disposable syringes—and would be laughable except that environmentalists have already made some progress toward it. They’ve found yet another way to harm both the environment and humans, as demonstrated in the movement to ban single-use plastic bags.
Progressive activists may not care that these bans have added to the cost of groceries, inconvenienced shoppers, and caused new headaches for merchants. (After New Jersey forbade stores from offering disposable plastic or paper bags, supermarkets ran out of handheld shopping baskets because so many customers were stealing them.) But progressives also don’t seem to care about the implications for climate change and public health.
Banning single-use plastic grocery bags has added carbon to the atmosphere by forcing shoppers to use heavier paper bags and tote bags that require much more energy to manufacture and transport. The paper and cotton bags also take up more space in landfills and produce more greenhouse emissions as they decompose. The tote bags aren’t reused nearly often enough to offset their initial carbon footprint, and they’re breeding grounds for bacteria and viruses because they’re rarely washed properly. Researchers have repeatedly found these bags to be responsible for gastrointestinal infections, but the warnings got little attention until the Covid pandemic suddenly revived respect for disposable products.
As stores and coffee shops banned reusable bags and mugs during the pandemic, Americans relearned the lessons of the early twentieth century, when public-health authorities promoted Dixie cups and other disposable products to counter threats like tuberculosis and the Spanish flu. This marked the beginning of the “throwaway society,” and the term wasn’t originally used pejoratively. Americans welcomed plastic products and packages because they were so much better than the alternative. Cellophane was considered a marvel because it was both moisture-proof and transparent, keeping food fresher and enabling grocery shoppers to see what they were buying. Advertisements featured housewives rejoicing that disposable plates and glasses freed them from dishwashing chores.
Environmentalists’ zeal to ban plastic is far more destructive than their former passion to recycle it; it’s also harder to explain. Recycling, while impractical, at least offered emotional rewards to hoarders reluctant to put anything in the trash and to the many people who perform garbage-sorting as a ritual of atonement—a sacrament of the green religion. But why demonize plastic? Why ban products that are cheaper, sturdier, lighter, cleaner, healthier, and better for the environment? One reason: the plastic scare helps Greenpeace activists raise money and keep their jobs. Environmentalists need something to replace their failed recycling campaign.
But there’s more to it than just financial self-interest. The best explanation I’ve come up with is that plastic bans are a revival of the sumptuary laws formerly imposed on the lower classes by monarchs, nobles, and clergy. Those laws forbade commoners from owning certain kinds of clothes, jewelry, furnishings, and other products. The restrictions consistently failed to achieve their ostensible purpose of reducing “unnecessary” spending, but sumptuary laws endured until the Enlightenment because they reinforced ruling-class power and status. An English countess could display her superiority by wearing a dress with silver stripes that were illegal for women of lower rank. Spanish prelates and Portuguese monarchs proclaimed their moral virtue and political authority by forbidding the masses from owning clothes, curtains, and tablecloths made of silk.
Today’s rulers and moral guardians achieve the same purposes with their petty edicts on plastic. California’s law forbidding hotels from offering disposable plastic toiletries is a gratuitous annoyance for travelers who’d like a little bottle of shampoo, but it enables the state’s politicians and environmental groups to exercise power and pretend to be saviors of the planet. The pretense is so ridiculous that even Greenpeace will eventually abandon it—but once again, that could take a few decades. The rest of us can start today.
Burn it.
Most of the plastic you recycle goes into a landfill or is burned anyway.
BURN IT!!!
The sooner your burn it the sooner the CO2 will go back and be put back into PLANTS!
Yepp - as long as it’s not contaminated with heavy-metal additives, it’s essentially petroleum in a solid phase, ready to release much-needed heat energy as it gets converted to carbon dioxide and water.
zactly!
I would think they should be able to mix it in with building materials...I install a lot of plastic tongue and groove for decking and the like...use it that way...just a thought.
Right. Like most liberal initiatives, including windmills and solar, it’s just virtue signaling Kabuki that ultimately wastes more energy than it saves. But truth is irrelevant to liberals. It’s the appearance that counts.
I don’t know if you are a fan of Warhammer 40k but, in the sci-fi world they heavily depend upon plascrete as a building material.
Why do you think like me? Are you an agitator?
My Material Science professor taught us this in 1990.
Time that states impose a bottle return cost on plastic water bottles. It worked for beer bottles and cans.....cleaned up the streets immediately.
Anyone who has ever washed their own dishes knows this.
Reusing dishes takes energy in several forms. Getting the water to your house takes energy. Heating the water up takes energy. Making the soap takes energy, and getting the soap to from the soap factory to your house takes energy. It takes your own personal time and energy to then wash the dishes. And the pots and pans. And the glasses and silverware. If you have a dishwasher, it takes much more energy than if you wash them by hand.
That's what it takes to "recycle" your kitchen ware.
I don't know how many millennials have ever washed their own dishes. Probably not very many. And even fewer have ever thought about how much energy it takes to accomplish this simple "recycling" task.
As thorium power advocate Kirk Sorensen says, anyone who is for recycling has to be for cheap, abundant energy.
He points out that with enough energy, you can recycle plutonium.
“ Burn it.”
At very high temperatures and convert it to energy.
I’m a troll. But I only troll leftists. It’s too easy.🤣
We can’t throw plastic in landfills because it will end up in the ocean and kill ocean life. have you not seen the documentaries of plastic masses in the ocean? Even the landfills of Iowa will end up in the ocean . . wait! How does that work? How could that happen??? Instead of me being the problem, China and India dumping plastic directly in the ocean are the problem. So how come that makes me be the bad guy?
I’m not going to say his name but I have a friend getting paid some serious money to manage a county recycling facility . The green conscious consumer separates it and puts it in the respective bin . Then when the truck picks it up it all goes straight to the landfill with all the other trash . It makes the people imagine that they are somehow better than those poor ignorant slobs throwing everything in the trash . For that my friend is making a very good living . We drink beer and laugh about it . He buys the beer so I laugh too , heh .
Bury it. It takes eons to decompose and thus is a massive carbon sink.
And that's after dealing with the "Italian" markup for trash disposal.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.