Yves here. This article describes how the good intentions of the push for more recycling have gone awry. The causes are many, but particularly prominent are lack of clear guidance to consumers on what is worth recycling and poor consumer and trash hauler compliance. People in my old building would regularly put general garbage in the recycling bins. Of course, they may have heard the probably accurate rumor that the contents of the recycling containers were tossed in with the garbage when the Sanitation Department trucks arrived.
This piece shows how the recycling push has encouraged consumers to accept wasteful packaging, particularly plastics, when forcing the use of more biodegradable material would have been a less damaging course of action.
By Kate Yoder. Originally published at Grist; cross posted from Yale Climate Connections
t’s Earth Day 1990, and Meryl Streep walks into a bar. She’s distraught about the state of the environment. “It’s crazy what we’re doing. It’s very, very, very bad,” she says in ABC’s prime-time Earth Day special, letting out heavy sighs and listing jumbled statistics about deforestation and the hole in the ozone layer.
The bartender, Kevin Costner, says he used to be scared, too — until he started doing something about it. “These?” he says, holding up a soda can. “I recycle these.” As Streep prepares to launch her beer can into the recycling bin, Costner cautions her, “This could change your life.”
Recycling, once considered the domain of people with “long hair, granny glasses, and tie-dyed Ts,” as the Chicago Tribune described it at the time, was about to go mainstream. The iconic chasing-arrows recycling symbol, invented 20 years earlier, was everywhere in the early 1990s. Its tight spiral of folded arrows seemed to promise that discarded glass bottles and yellowing newspapers had a bright future, where they could be reborn in a cycle that stretched to infinity. As curbside pickup programs spread across the United States, the practice of sorting your trash would become, for many, as routine as brushing your teeth — an everyday habit that made you feel a little more responsible.
What no one anticipated was just how emotionally attached people would become to recycling as the solution to America’s ugly trash problem. When the chasing arrows’ promise of rebirth was broken, they could get angry. One cold winter day in 1991, people in Holyoke, Massachusetts, chased after garbage trucks, yelling for them to stop, after the drivers had nabbed their sorted glass, cans, and cardboard from the curb. Strained by an influx of holiday-related trash, the city had instructed workers to forgo recycling and just throw everything away.
Today, the recycling icon is omnipresent — found on plastic bottles, cereal boxes, and bins loitering alongside curbs across the country. The chasing arrows, though, are often plastered on products that aren’t recyclable at all, particularly products made of plastic, like dog chew toys and inflatable swim rings. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency said that the symbol’s use on many plastic products was “deceptive.”
Recycling rules can be downright mystifying. For years, people were told pizza boxes were too greasy to be recycled, but now many recycling centers accept them. Some cities accept juice boxes lined with invisible layers of aluminum and plastic; others don’t. And do the screw-on caps stay on plastic bottles or not? Recycling experts ask people to do a “little bit of homework” to figure out what their local recycling system can handle, but since households have hundreds of items with different packaging to keep track of, that’s asking a lot.
The resulting confusion has made a mess of recycling efforts. Plastic wrap tangles around sorting equipment at recycling facilities, shutting down operations as employees try to cut it out of the equipment. Huge bales of paper shipped overseas can contain as much as 30 percent plastic waste. “Contamination is one of the biggest challenges facing the recycling industry,” the EPA said in a statement to Grist. It takes time and money to haul, sort through, and dispose of all this unwanted refuse, which makes recycling more of a burden for city budgets. Many cities have ended up cutting costs by working with private waste companies; some don’t even bother trying at all. About a quarter of Americans lack access to any recycling services.
The difficulty of recycling plastic can make the chasing-arrows symbol near meaningless, with environmental groups calling plastic recycling a “false solution.” Only around 5 percent of plastic waste in the United States gets shredded or melted down so that it can be used again. Much of the rest flows into landfills or gets incinerated, breaking down into tiny particles that can travel for thousands of miles and lodge themselves in your lungs. Plastics threaten “near-permanent contamination of the natural environment,” according to one study, and pose a global health crisis, with plastic chemicals linked to preterm births, heart attacks, and cancer.
So where did the three arrows go wrong? The trouble is that their loop has ensnared us. If some recycling is good, the thinking goes, then more recycling is better. That creates enormous pressure for packaging to be made recyclable and stamped with the arrows — regardless of whether trying to recycle a glass bottle or plastic yogurt container made much sense in the first place. David Allaway, a senior policy analyst at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, says that the facts just don’t support the recycling symbol’s reputation as a badge of environmental goodness. “The magnetic, gravitational power of recycling,” he said, has led “policymakers and the public to just talk more and more and more about recycling, and less and less and less about anything else.”
In the spring of 1970, an estimated 20 million Americans — 10 percent of the population — showed up for the first Earth Day, taking part in rallies, marches, and teach-ins, calling for clean air and clean water. Pollution had pushed its way into the national conversation. The year before, oil-soaked debris had caught fire in the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, sending flames towering five stories high, and a drilling accident in Santa Barbara had spread an oil slick over more than 800 square miles of water. Smog regularly clouded skies from Birmingham, Alabama, to Los Angeles, dimming cities in the middle of the day.
The idea of recycling seemingly burst onto the scene in 1970. Earth Day organizers educated people about the value of sorting through their trash and advocated for community recycling programs. People would gather up their bottles and cans in plastic crates and bags and drive to designated sites to drop them off, sometimes earning a few bucks in return. “The environmental crisis has come into the public consciousness so recently that the word ‘recycle’ doesn’t even appear in most dictionaries,” the environmentalist Garrett De Bell wrote a couple weeks before the Earth Day event. He pitted recycling as “the only ecologically sensible long-term solution” for a country “knee-deep in garbage.”
It wasn’t long before the concept acquired its signature symbol. At the time, Gary Anderson was finishing up his master’s degree in architecture at the University of Southern California. He came across a poster advertising a contest to design a symbol for recycling, sponsored by the Container Corporation of America, a maker of cardboard boxes. Inspired by M.C. Escher’s Möbius strip, Anderson spent just a couple of days coming up with designs using the now-famous trio of folded, rotating arrows. The simplest of his designs won, and Anderson was awarded a $2,500 scholarship in 1970. The Container Corporation quickly put the logo in the public domain, hoping it would be adopted on all recycled or recyclable products in order to “spread awareness among concerned citizens.”
The Möbius loop he created soon passed from his mind. “I just didn’t really think of the symbol that much,” he recalls. “It wasn’t used very much in the first couple of years.” One day several years later, however, Anderson was wandering through the streets of Amsterdam in the haze of jet lag when he came across a row of oversized bins emblazoned with a beach ball-sized version of his logo. The Netherlands, purportedly, was the first country to launch a nationwide recycling program in 1972. “It just really shocked me into a realization that there must be something about this symbol,” he said.
An early draft of the recycling symbol, sent in a letter designer Gary Anderson wrote to his mother. “This is the closest thing I have to a preliminary sketch,” Anderson said. The original sketch, made used only drafting instruments, was destroyed in a fire in Anderson’s garage. Courtesy of Gary Anderson
Refashioning old materials into new things is a longstanding American tradition. Paul Revere, folk hero of the American Revolution, collected scrap metal and turned it into horseshoes. In the 19th century, used rags were turned into paper, and families stitched together scraps of fabric to create quilts. The desperation of the Great Depression taught people to make underwear out of cotton flour sacks, and the propaganda posters of World War II positioned recycling as a patriotic duty: “Prepare your tin cans for war.”
“It was not in our DNA to be this wasteful,” said Jackie Nuñez, the advocacy program manager at the Plastic Pollution Coalition, a communications nonprofit. “We had to be trained, we had to be marketed to, to be wasteful like this.”
One of the first lessons of “throwaway society” came in the 1920s, when White Castle became the first fast-food restaurant to sell its burgers in single-use bags, advertising them as clean and convenient. “Buy ’em by the sack,” the slogan went. In 1935, the big breweries that survived the Prohibition era started shipping beer in lighter, cheaper-to-transport steel cans instead of returnable glass bottles. Coca-Cola and other soda companies eventually followed suit.
All those paper sacks and cans soon littered the sides of American roadways, and people started calling on the companies that created the waste to clean it up. Corporations responded by creating the first anti-litter organization, Keep America Beautiful, founded in 1953 by the American Can Company and the Owens-Illinois Glass Company. Keep America Beautiful’s advertisements in the 1960s looked like public service announcements, but they subtly shifted the blame for all the garbage to individuals. Some featured “Susan Spotless,” a girl in a white dress who would wag her finger at anyone who soiled public spaces with their litter.
The pressure on American businesses didn’t go away, though. On the Sunday after Earth Day in April 1970, some 1,500 protesters showed up at Coca-Cola’s headquarters in Atlanta to dump hundreds of cans and glass bottles at its entrance. Two years later, Oregon passed the country’s first “bottle bill” requiring a 5-cent deposit on bottles and cans sold in the state, incentivizing people to return them, while Congress was considering banning single-use beverage containers altogether. Manufacturers successfully lobbied against a federal ban, arguing that jobs would be lost, as the historian Bartow J. Elmore recounts in the book Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism. But corporations still wanted to relieve the public pressure on them and outsource the costs of dealing with the waste they were creating. Luckily for them, recycling was in vogue.
In New York City, the war on waste was spearheaded by the Environmental Action Coalition, an organization raising funds for its “Trash Is Cash” community recycling program, with the long-term goal of getting recyclables picked up by city workers outside homes. Curbside recycling seemed to serve everyone’s interest: Environmentalists wanted to waste less, and companies could use it as an opportunity to shift the cost of dealing with waste onto city governments. Businessmen who volunteered with the Environmental Action Coalition solicited millions in donations from their colleagues in the 1970s, writing that recycling had “substantial promise” to fend off any legislation to ban or tax single-use containers.
The campaign was a deliberate attempt to divert attention from more meaningful solutions like bottle bills, yet environmental groups embraced it, according to Recycling Reconsidered, a 2012 book bySamantha MacBride, who worked in New York City’s sanitation department for two decades. The New York City Council started its mandatory curbside pickup program in the late 1980s, several years after the first one began in Woodbury, New Jersey, requiring residents to set out their paper, metal, glass, and some types of plastic in bins at the curb. The idea picked up in cities across the country, with the number of curbside programs growing from 1,000 to 5,000 between 1988 and 1992, spreading the chasing arrows along with them.
“It was in the late ’80s and early ’90s that this thing just becomes everywhere,” said Finis Dunaway, a professor of history at Trent University in Canada. America was running out of places to put its trash, a dilemma captured by the story of a nomadic garbage barge in 1987. In March of that year, a barge teeming with 6 million pounds of trash left Long Island, New York, looking to unload its freight where the landfills weren’t already full. States from North Carolina to Louisiana turned it away, and the barge spent months traveling around the Atlantic coast — all the way to Mexico, Belize, and the Bahamas — looking for a place to dispose of the garbage.
In October, the barge made its way back to Brooklyn, where a court ordered that its contents be incinerated — but not before Greenpeace activists hung a giant banner on the boat: “NEXT TIME … TRY RECYCLING.” Annie Leonard, the former executive director of Greenpeace, told PBS Frontline in 2020 that she wonders whether that banner was a mistake. “I think we were overly optimistic about the potential of recycling,” she said, “and perpetuating that narrative led us astray.”
There’s an iconic scene in the 1967 movie The Graduate, in which Dustin Hoffman’s character, Benjamin Braddock, gets cornered at his college graduation party by one of his parents’ friends. “I just want to say one word to you, just one word: plastics,” the older man says. “There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it.” One generation’s earnest advice for a successful career clashed with a new, skeptical attitude toward plastic, which had already become a byword for “fake.”
By the early 1970s, scientists had learned that whales, turtles, and other marine life were getting tangled up in plastic debris, a problem that was killing 40,000 seals a year. They knew, too, that small plastic fragments were making their way into the ocean, and that plastic residues had entered people’s bloodstreams, presenting what an official from President Richard Nixon’s Council of Environmental Quality deemed a significant health threat, “potentially our next bad one.” The more people learned, the more plastic’s reputation transformed from all-purpose, indestructible wonder into something that maybe shouldn’t be trusted in your new microwave. Between 1988 and 1989, the percentage of Americans who believed plastic was damaging the environment rose from 56 to 72 percent. Larry Thomas, the president of the Society of Plastics Industry, warned in an internal memo that companies were starting to lose business, writing, “We are approaching a point of no return.”
Beverage companies and the oil industry hoped to advertise their way out of the PR problem, laying out plans to spend $50 million a year to tout the polymer’s virtues with slogans like “plastics make it possible.” They also turned to recycling. Lewis Freeman, the former vice president of government affairs at the Society of the Plastics Industry, an industry group, told Grist that he has a vivid memory of a colleague coming into his office, saying, “We’ve got to do something to help the recyclers.”
Freeman tasked the Plastic Bottle Institute — made up of oil giants like BP and Exxon, chemical companies, and can manufacturers — with figuring out how to clarify to recycling sorters what kind of plastic was what. In 1988, they came up with the plastic resin code, the numbering system from 1 to 7 that’s still in place.
Polyethylene terephthalate, or PET (1), is used to make soft drink bottles; high-density polyethylene (2) is used for milk jugs; polyvinyl chloride (3) is used for PVC pipes in plumbing, and so on all through 7, the catch-all category for acrylic, polycarbonate, fiberglass, and other plastics. The Plastic Bottle Institute surrounded these numbers with the chasing arrows logo, giving the public the impression that they could throw all kinds of plastics into recycling bins, whether there was infrastructure to process them or not. The Connecticut Department of Environmental Conservation warned that the confusion it would cause “will have a severe impact on the already marginal economic feasibility of recycling plastics as well as on recycling programs as a whole.”
Once the symbol was operational, Freeman said, “then everybody started putting it on everything.” Companies worked to make it official: Starting in 1989, the Plastic Bottle Institute lobbied for state laws mandating that the code numbers appear on plastic products. Their express purpose was to fend off anti-plastic legislation, according to documents uncovered by the Center for Climate Integrity. The laws eventually passed in 39 states.
By the mid-1990s, the campaign to “educate” the public about plastic recycling had succeeded: Americans had a more favorable opinion of plastic, and efforts to ban or restrict production had died down. But recycling rates — the share of materials that actually get reprocessed — had barely improved. Instead, the United States started exporting plastic waste to China, where turning old plastic into new materials helped meet growing demand from manufacturers. Polling conducted for the American Plastics Council in 1997 showed that people who worked in waste management were losing hope that plastics could be recycled, while the public, journalists, and government officials believed they could be recycled at unrealistically high rates.
The problem was, fulfilling what companies called the “the urgent need to recycle” wasn’t as easy as the advertisements made it look. For decades, industry insiders expressed serious doubts that recycling plastic would ever be profitable, with one calling the economic case “virtually hopeless” in 1969. There are thousands of plastic products, and they all need to be sorted and put through different processes to be turned into something new. The way packaging is molded — blown, extruded, or stamped — means that even the same types of plastic can have their own melting points. A PET bottle can’t be recycled with the clear PET packaging that encases berries. A clear PET bottle can’t be recycled with a green one.
The plastics that do happen to get sorted and processed can only be “downcycled,” since melting them degrades their quality. Recycled plastic, it turns out, is more toxic than virgin plastic, liable to leach dangerous chemicals, so it can’t safely be turned into food-grade packaging. It’s also more expensive to produce. The result of this morass is that there is virtually no market for recycled plastics beyond those marked with 1s and 2s; the rest are incinerated or sent to landfills. Only 9 percent of the plastics ever produced have gone on to be recycled.
As plastic waste piled up and public frustration mounted, the Sustainable Packaging Coalition — backed by corporate giants including Procter and Gamble, Coca-Cola, and Exxon Mobil — launched a bigger, more specific recycling initiative in 2008 called “How2Recycle.” It came with new labels that appeared to provide clarity about which elements of a product could be recycled, distinguishing between plastic wrap and coated trays, sometimes qualifying the recycling logo with “store drop-off” labels for plastic bags and film.
But environmental advocates say that the How2Recycle labels, used by more than a third of the companies that package consumer goods, may be even more misleading than the resin code. For example, plastic yogurt containers made of polypropylene, number 5s, are considered “widely recyclable” under the system, yet only 3 percent of all the polypropylene containers produced actually get recycled.
The plastic resin code with the chasing arrows certainly confused people — 68 percent of Americans surveyed in 2019said they thought anything labeled with the code could be recycled. But the How2Recycle labels “put the lies on steroids,” said Jan Dell, the founder of the nonprofit The Last Beach Cleanup. It’s not just a tiny triangular indent on the bottom of a container anymore, but a large, high-contrast recycling logo that “stares you in the face.”
Given the dismal state of plastic recycling, it might seem like the best thing to do is throw the chasing arrows in the garbage. But not all recycling is a failure. “Metals are the true success story,” said Carl Zimring, a waste historian at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. As much as three-quarters of all the aluminum that’s ever been produced is still in use, he said. Paper is also relatively easy to process, with more than two-thirds making its way into new products in the U.S. Even for a recycling standby like glass, though, less than a third gets broken down into fragments for new jars and bottles.
The recycling logo still gives anything it touches — whether feasible to recycle or not — a green aura. Surveys show that a majority of Americans believe recycling is one of the most effective ways they can fight climate change, when experts say it’s unlikely to make much of a difference in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That’s a credit to the iconic triangle, which has had 50 years to entrench itself in our culture. “It’s easy to bash on the image, or bash on corporations, without seeing this as something that is very powerful,” said Dunaway, the environmental historian. So is there a way to give the recycling symbol meaning again?
When recycling started taking off in the early 1990s, there was no definitive, agreed-upon definition of what it meant. “Anything is recyclable, at least theoretically,” one lawyer pointed out in a legal journal in 1991. The effort to impose some sort of order came from California, often the national laboratory for environmental protection. The state passed the country’s first restrictions on green claims in 1990, prohibiting advertisers from using terms like “ozone-friendly” and “recyclable” on items that didn’t meet its standards (though that stipulation didn’t survive a challenge in court).
Wider efforts to restrict the symbol, however, lacked strength and enforcement. In 1992, the Federal Trade Commission told advertisers they could call a product “recyclable” even if only 1 percent of their product was recycled. Not much else happened on that front until 2013, when the group that administers the plastic resin code, ASTM International, announced that it was replacing the chasing arrows with a solid triangle to reduce public confusion. It didn’t require manufacturers to rework their labels, though.
Today, that might finally be changing. When China banned the import of most plastics in 2018, it revealed problems that had long remained hidden. The United States had been shipping 70 percent of its plastic waste to China — 1.2 billion pounds in 2017 alone. States set about finding ways to fix the recycling system, with some focusing on the confusion generated by the symbol itself. In 2021, California — the world’s fifth-largest economy — passed a “truth in labeling” law prohibiting the use of the chasing arrows on items that are rarely recycled. To pass the test, 60 percent of Californians need to have access to a processing center that sorts a given material; on top of that, 60 percent of processors have to have access to a facility that will remanufacture the material into something else.
Though the bill faced opposition from companies right until it passed, the idea resonated with legislators, said Nick Lapis, the director of advocacy at Californians Against Waste. “It was pretty easy to understand that putting the chasing arrows symbol on a product that is not ever going to get recycled is not fair to consumers. Like, it just made so much intuitive sense that I think it kind of went beyond the lobbyist politics of Sacramento.”
Across the country, public officials in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, Minnesota, and Washington state are considering similar legislation. This spring, Maine passed a law to incentivize companies to use accurate recycling labels on their packaging. New rules around the recycling logo are also brewing at the national level. Last April, Jennie Romer, the EPA’s deputy assistant administrator for pollution prevention, called for the FTC to put an end to the “deceptive” use of the iconic chasing arrows on plastics in its upcoming revisions to the Green Guides for environmental marketing claims. “There’s a big opportunity for the Federal Trade Commission to make those updates to really set a high bar for what can be marketed as recyclable,” Romer told Grist. “Because that symbol, or marketing something as recyclable, is very valuable.”
Once California’s law goes into effect next year, state laws will clash with each other, since many states still require the resin numbers on plastic packaging. “The question on everyone’s mind is, who’s going to win out?” said Allaway, the Oregon official.
Talk of truth-in-labeling legislation has coincided with another trend — states trying to turn the costs for dealing with waste back on the manufacturers that produced it. Laws requiring “extended producer responsibility,” or EPR, for packaging have already been approved in Maine, Oregon, California, and Colorado. It’s already led to problems in California, since the EPR bill refers to the state’s truth-in-labeling law to determine which materials can be recycled, creating incentives for everything to be labeled as recyclable, Dell said.
Even if the Federal Trade Commission updates the Green Guides to prohibit the deceptive use of the recycling symbol, it doesn’t change the fact that the guides are just suggestions. They don’t carry the weight of law. “The FTC itself has never enforced a false recyclable label, ever, ever, on plastics, not once,” Dell said. One of Dell’s favorite metaphors: “It’s the wild, wild West of product claims and labeling, with no sheriff in town.”
So Dell has appointed herself de facto sheriff, suing companies over their false claims. In 2021, her organization reached a settlement with TerraCycle, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, and six other companies that agreed to change labels on their products. Dell recently filed a shareholder proposal with Kraft Heinz in an attempt to force it to remove recyclability claims from marshmallow bags and mac-and-cheese bowls destined for the landfill.
Another promising legal push is coming from California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who has been investigating fossil fuel and chemical companies for what he called “an aggressive campaign to deceive the public, perpetuating a myth that recycling can solve the plastics crisis.” Despite mounting awareness of plastic’s threat to public health, oil and chemical companies around the world make 400 million metric tons of the polymer every year, and production is on track to triple by 2060. It’s the oil industry’s backup business plan in the expectation that wealthy countries will shift away from gasoline in an effort to tackle climate change, since petroleum is the basic building block of plastics. Exxon Mobil, the world’s third-largest oil producer, ranks as the top plastic polymer producer.
Stricter enforcement around the use of the chasing arrows could lead to more accurate labels, less public confusion, and better outcomes for recycling centers. But it’s worth asking whether more recycling should even be the goal, rather than solutions that are much better for the environment, like reducing, reusing, refilling, and repairing. As Anderson, the symbol’s inventor, says, “I don’t think it’s really fair to blame a graphic symbol for all of our lack of initiative in trying to do better.”
Let’s remember that plastic packaging is so prevalent and cheap because it disposes of by-products of petroleum processing–so it starts out as garbage and stays that way. Which drives home that the only solution to pollution is at its source. Containers should not be garbage chutes in the first place. Processing plants shouldn’t dump their garbage into public air. All downstream solutions are inventions of the greenwashing mills. They are more garbage.
Precisely why recycled plastic will never be a viable solution, the feedstock for new plastics cost less than nothing! (They would have to pay to dispose of it otherwise)
I don’t think they would have to pay for it. Because of the Bevill and Bentsen “rules” or “laws”, oil and gas waste is classified as “non-hazardous”. They could dump it in a landfill (and do) and don’t have to pay an extra fee. It is notoriously radioactive, which has been known for many decades. I get a lot of this information from the new book Petroleum 238 by Justin Nobel.
I watched this past Tuesday as the trash truck picked up the contents of our green, blue and brown bins on the curb and it all goes to the dump, recycling being very much a chimera ruse around these parts.
This happens every week, I just happened to be there when it was occurring.
The main effort heretofore before China said no more, seemed to be sorting centers in cities that would determine where everything should go.
Probably the hardest part for the couple friends who had bought into doing the right thing and had 10 boxes in which to put each recyclable, were completely hoodwinked by the idea it was all going to China on ships that had brought shiny new consumer goods for us on the way in, and were leaving with well, pretty much garbage on the return voyage.
One (me) might retitle this Why my cellar is full of glass bottles. I’m a multi-generational northern new englander. We cannot abide throwing away things that are still obviously useful. It’s a bloody curse.
Ha. In Russia that’s considered a Soviet thing. But I can’t stand throwing away theoretically useful things like containers either. Would that I had a cellar.
Cellars fill up really fast.
It is the same situation on the West Coast in Canada, and the problem here, at least in part, is that there are no recycling facilities this side of Ontario, which means that it is more environmentally harmful to transport recyclables for recycling, than to actually recycle. The powers that be who mandate blue bins and recycling and so on, know this, but pretend otherwise. It’s purely performative. Do I go along with the theatre? Yes, but only because participating in the fraud feels slightly better than throwing recyclables in with the garbage. It could be a Canadian thing, or Nordic, or protestant, or something…
We pretend recycling works, and they pretend it’s important.
I hope you don’t mind if I quote this one. It’s nicely distilled and covers a lot of ground.
We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us. Soviet humor, comrade. No copyright.
P.S. Speaking of Soviet Union and copyright, on Youtube multiple companies claim rights on Soviet Union anthem.
We need a century of deconstruction-recycling Just to learn how to collect recyclables effectively. Think buttons. And then maybe some mega-project like a global sea wall initiative. That would establish massive demand for big blocks of construction grade plastic. And be so ugly you could see the ugly from space. Maybe in the meantime we will be able to understand the process that causes plastic to degrade into micro plastic and how to harvest it all over again. Even if we decide to ban new plastic production, we’ve got enough used plastic on the planet to require a century to recycle. This isn’t a solution that free enterprise can achieve. This might be perfectly suited for the military.
Ah, a method of “greenwashing” a draft. Most of the ‘inductees’ would be sent out to deconstruction battalions. I knew those FEMA Camps were going up for a “good” reason.
Fyodorov, the 19th century transhumanist, did propose transforming “armies of war” into “armies of peace” that would take care of various crucial public works and thereby turn into the backbone of a utopian society. Of course he also proposed bringing everyone who ever died back to life and making Earth independent from the Sun by flying away…
Civilian Conservation Corps was sort of the best real life incarnation of that idea, at least in US history, I think. TBH, I always thought it would be a great idea to bring back, in any country. It would fo a lot more good at a fraction of the cost compared to the military.
CCC is interesting; if I understand correctly, it was voluntary and not overly militarised, though organised along military-like lines and with assistance from the military. (The short-lived Soviet work armies, by contrast, were pretty much just Red Army units assigned to peace duties.) It does seem like a good idea. It won’t do away with militarism, but you can have militarism with better public works and gainful employment or militarism without those things.
In stark contrast was Canada’s version of the CCC, was what were called Relief Camps.
They received 20 Cents a day, or $6 a month, versus $30 a month in the CCC.
CCC really wanted young men (there was 1 woman’s CCC camp)
to learn how to work with its hands, Relief Camps were more of a way to get rid of young men and stick them in the boonies, away from cities where a Regina Riot might happen.
I’ve seen some of the construction projects built by the CCC in the mountains of north carolina. They made beautiful, durable additions to some of the states natural beauty.
Quality improves life.
I worked Y (youth)CC for a summer between high school and university in Baxter State Park. That was the best job I’ve ever had.
Absolutely. CCC makes so much sense, on so many levels.
If we ever decide to really build our people’s skills and make high-quality training more accessible, I’d like to see a menu of “public service” options all citizens are required (or at least highly-incentivized) to invest 1-2 years into.
CCC-type focus/interest area menu offering might include making modest-complexity park facilities, like the CCC did in the 1930s, or maybe update the targets to reflect the times, and build one of these items:
a. Civil engineering and heavy-machine operations to build small-scale (5-100-acre) water reservoirs for pumped-storage power
b. Year-round farmers market facilities, incl. warehouse, cold storage, food processing, CSA pickup, retail and recreation facilities all-in-one
c Software devel of local-production production-scheduling, retail, CSA, and warehouse-inventory application, used to operate item b) above
d. Public greenhouse space so people can grow their own food. Get a plot in a public greenhouse, enough to feed your family. Stop in once a week to cultivate and harvest; irrigation and pest management done by shared-staff
e. Shared manufacturing space. A step-up from Maker Spaces (hobbyists), this place has good complement of light manufacturing equipment. Locate adjacent to high-school or collegiate vocational school facilities
When you get done with your 1-2 year public service, you’ve built some really valuable Commons (public stuff we all can use) elements, and you got a great head-start in developing professional skills that can make a good living for you.
And you had an excellent opportunity to make new friends, maybe even find a mate.
First trip to Thailand 5 years ago, at a small beach not far from Bangkok – a team of people smiling walking up and down the beach, wasting their efforts picking up trash/plastic, as more constantly washes in from the water.
That futile/’seen-to-be-doing-something’ effort always comes to my mind now, when I think of the trash/recycling industry.
Where I live you can’t even recycle glass unless you drive, as the council removed the only nearby/reachable bottle bank.
The garbage trucks will drive by and collect faux-recyclable plastics from you, but not actually-recyclable glass! Seems like the choices for the whole ‘recycling’ collection, is just another fossil-fuel/plastics industry subsidy.
It’s not futile to pick up trash washing up on a beach just because more will wash in. Do we not pick trash up off the ground even though more will be dropped there?
In Quebec, we have an app Ça va où ? that tells you if and where items should be recycled. Despite its French name, an English version is available.
This would be a perfect opportunity to use artificial intelligence. An app where I can take a picture of something and it will tell me how to best dispose of it. Need it to be exhaustive in particular for all the types of plastic containers I come across as some can be recycled and some can’t.
If the private sector doesn’t want to solve this problem then have the Fed Gov step in. With capability to tailor rules to each municipality
Around here the recycle bins are always filled with all manner of trash. From household garbage bags to construction materials to junk appliances. I’m sure it all goes to the dump because I don’t see anyone spending the time and money to sort that, if they even could. It seems like I’m seeing fewer bins these days anyway.
Guess the plebes got the memo. Kindly remember I”m in a state of perpetual sarcasm.
I am just old enough to remember milk in paper cartons or returnable glass bottles, ice cream in cardboard boxes, coffee in metal tins and, who can forget, Coca Cola in its famously indestructible green returnable bottles.
[rant]
Let’s not mince words. Single use plastic packaging should be banned. If we nibble around the corners changing recycling symbols, nothing of any substance will change and we will continue to move closer to Idiocracy’s rubbish mountain world. Plastic recycling was always a scam to increase plastic industry profits at the expense of society and the environment. [/rant]
The Coke Bottle, indeed! The photograph did not come through in the original post, but the 6.5-ounce Coke bottle was a thing of beauty for multiple reasons.
Yes, all true BillS. And it bothers me a lot that we can’t turn glass bottles in for money like we used to. When we were kids we lived about two miles from a grocery store. We would walk slowly to the store on a Saturday, picking up the glass bottles. By the time we got to the store and turned in all our bottles there was enough money for candy and maybe a comic book, which we all shared. I feel sorry for modern kids, they can’t do that anymore! It was fun, we got exercise, and it cleaned up the bottles from the side of the road. But kids are barely allowed to do leisurely stuff like that anymore, anyway.
I, too, many years ago, returned bottles to the grocery store to collect the deposit. Maybe we could do that with plastics as well. The “external” costs of massive landfills and pollution could be reduced if significant costs were placed on things like plastic containers at the point of sale. If you had to pay a deposit for a plastic bottle of water, let’s say 50 cents , my guess is it wouldn’t go in the trash. Perhaps when returning to the grocery store, you would place the item in a recycling bin, with sorting by bar code, and get your money back. With half the country living paycheck to paycheck, one would think a lot less plastic would go to landfills.
Many decades ago, drinkable water came from a tap. No bottles, nor deposits required. Only a glass, made out of glass, that was reusable.
People living paycheck to paycheck did not come up with the whole plastic thing, but the rich ones. You are trying to treat symptoms, not the cause.
Me too, BillS!
The garage and workshop of our house (inherited ‘intact’, i.e., crammed with ‘stuff,’ from my in-laws, is filled with large-sized coffee cans, which in turn, are filled with metal ‘stuff;” screws, nails, washers, bolts, pieces of wire, some new, most used.
And, as mrsyk and Daniil, above, the root cellar in our basement is filled with glass bottles, from the old bail canning jars, to gorgeous, wide-mouthed enormous bargain sized peanut butter jars (a staple of my husband’s diet growing up) to my more recent collection of green and brown glass wine and bourbon bottles (love the ones with sturdy cork!). Have passed on many of them to Amish friends, but the collection is added to regularly.
We are fortunate to have a regional dairy that bottles milk in half gallon returnable (if you want your $2 back) glass bottles. So heavy that they serve as part of my daily weightlifting regimen.
I do still buy milk in returnable glass bottles. It comes from a local family-run dairy farm that produces and bottles its own milk, and has been around for at least seven generations. You can also stop by the farm and enjoy their ice cream in the summertime. Just the type of small business everybody everywhere claims to want.
So the city has decided to use eminent domain to put a highway through it to reduce commuting times.
Jesus wept.
The ice cream I buy still comes in cardboard tubs, and many milk and cream products are available in cardboard cartons. Ditto egg cartons. But these are choices I make, and of course WAY too many products only come in plastic.
If we were to keep glass we would have to mandate one color. It turns out that to recycle glass you have to have only one type of glass……green, clear, brown etc. You cannot mix them. That seems so easy…..mandate that all glass containers be a certain type of glass and the tops be easily recyclable as well. A functioning government might be able to do that. And plastics are ridiculous although there there could be a government mandate that all plastic packaging be a certain type…….no exceptions…..with major fines for violation. So manufacturers would have only a limited number of packaging options. It seems like it would be easy to implement. We could extend the restrictions to automakers who use tons of plastic. In doing car repair we are bewildred by the number of different compounds but to repair a fender we have to be sure the material we use is compatible with the plastic. I understand Singapore burns it all for energy and somehow can clean the air. Plastic is just petroleum. I guess the operative word here is a functioning government serving the people……so expect absolutely nothing but eyewash without camaign finance reform.
People have long forgotten that the EPA slogan was “reduce, reuse, recycle”, in order of preference. Recycling was the easy road to virtue, so naturally that’s the road we travel. If only half the money spent on making plastics acceptable had been spent on reducing consumption and reusing items…
I was wondering when someone would remember that.
Reduce, is the easiest but would impact financial efficiency as Amazon’s business model would be broken with out 2 cardboard boxes for every package. It would also require more transportation, as we would have to send the “Plastic Milk Crates” back to the milk producer. You could also send the glass bottles back in the crate. A way around that would be to “Localize” your dairy so that the cows were down the street, instead of across the country.
Reuse – how about putting “dish pits” back in restaurants, so that all the cutlery & plates were washed instead of put in the recycling / landfill
Recycle – this requires planning of the waste stream. For instance, if only plastics that have products downstream would be allowed to be recycled. For instance, plastics that can be turned into plastic wood for decking that has a long lifespan. I prefer using this recycled product to wood as it lasts much longer and does not require constant maintenance.
Recycling was the easy road to virtue. It still is! Yours is a nicely distilled sentence, thanks.
We have become a throw away society. All the stuff which goes to land fill could be reduced by fixing things. Where I live The power is down several times a year, so most homes have generators.Our current one came from the dump, where it had been left after a tree fell on it causing very visible damage, but still readily fixable. It has electric start which the previous one did not. I have for decades made my own beer, still using the short stubby bottles from when they were the standard.
One problem packaging is the dog food bags, substantial but not recyclable. One day we will wake up.
Yes! I affirm: returnable containers, or bring your own container, or do without. I also support the notion of repair. And I also subscribe to the policy of making your own beer.
I have not yet done so (well, once or twice over at my friend’s house), but I have a freezer full of blackberries, and this year is the first crop of elderberries, and it’s rumored that the two berries make an awesome red wine.
Yes I have rhubarb wine in the cellar. most fruits can be turned into wine. Apple cider was a mainstay here a 100 years ago.
You could use the big dog food bags as garbage bags.
I save the plastic bags from the large bags of kibble. They are practically indestructible and you get a good size panel when you cut them to flat. I just used a couple of these as a ground cloth under the mom’s day deck I built this spring, this to keeps weeds from growing up through.
I want a new product.
I want a “composite” material that uses the strengths of two different materials … in order to make a “super” material that’s better than either constituent material.
I want this super material to be made from recycled plastic, and recycled glass.
OK so far? Alright, let’s get this job done in 2 steps:
1. Melt the glass, extrude the hot glass through tiny holes to make threads of glass, twist the threads into a “yarn”, and weave the glass yarn into a fabric. This is done at industrial scale now, nothing new here.
2. Now melt the plastics (those that can be melted down; not all can). Spray that liquefied plastic onto the glass fiber to fuse the yarns into a plastic-infused fabric – a “sheet”.
Not just any “sheet”. This sheet is really strong, waterproof, and flexible The input materials were free.
The plastic doesn’t have to be pristine, or mono-color, or pure, etc. It just needs to flow when the plastic is hot (seep between the fibers) and be dry and stable when it cools off.
The sheets would be about 1/8″ thick, and cut into 2′ or 4′ by 8′ sections, like a sheet of plywood, only thinner and stronger and waterproof and most-chemicals-proof.
Do this job at the landfill. It doesn’t take much space and acre or 2 will be fine for this plant.
But wait! Not done yet.
Now we’ll take those sheets, and make them into a panel we can use to make a building. Not just any building, but a durable, well-insulated, strong, earthquake-proof building. Did I mention “well-insulated”?
So how do we do all that?
Take some more of that (free) plastic, melt it down, and inject little air-bubbles into it (aerate it) and make it into a foam. Roll the foam out into sheets 1″ – 2″ thick, 2′ or 4′ wide, 8′ long ….
you see where I’m going with this, right?
Sandwich that foam-sheet between two composite-material sheets while the foam is still hot so it will fuse with the top-and-bottom composite-material sheets upon contact.
Now I’ve got a building panel. It’s light, strong, waterproof, thermally efficient. It can be cut, drilled, and fastened together almost like lumber or drywall. It can also be fused together using more plastic and fabric.
I can use that panel to make a house, a store, a school, a walk-in cooler, the walls of a panel-van (truck to transport refrigerated goods). That panel would be pretty handy, right?
Those panels would create a steady demand for _recycled_ bottles and plastic.
Guess what? That demand is only a few short miles from where that glass and plastic originated. The sheet and panel factory is right beside the collection point. Where’s that? At the land-fill. Remember, though: the term “land-fill” is going to be replaced by the term – and the concept – of “re-manufacturing center”.
So now we’ve reduced transport. Reduced energy loss from building envelopes. Re-used very expensive but currently hard-to-reuse materials.
You probably know that transport and building-envelope heat transfer (in and out) are responsible for much of the CO2 that’s getting dumped into the atmosphere.
Aren’t new products cool?
===
I’m not a plastics expert. I’ve never built or seen a factory that can do what I describe above, although I have seen Youtube vids that address many aspects of this proposal. So this might not work technically.
There are millions of engineers around the world that are good at solving problems like this one.
We could call it ‘fiberglass’!
That’s exactly what it is, and thanks for pointing it out. There’s already plenty of existing mfg’g and materials experience in the commercial world to make and use this product.
The prob with fiberglass is that it’s expensive because the inputs are expensive.
What makes this product different is that the inputs could, potentially, be much less expensive, and the inputs are concentrated (by other paid-for processes) to one convenient location: the “land-fill”. This same principle applies to wood, paper, aluminum, steel to name a few. The land-fill waste stream is actually a river of free inputs that we don’t currently know how to use … economically.
As is pointed out, accurately, below – recycling works when the outputs are valuable enough to offset the costs of waste-stream processing. That’s the game. Once they’re valuable enough to address the processing costs, plus some profits, well … get out of the way or you’ll be run over by commercial interests.
So the trick here is to identify waste-stream processing technique and down-stream products that – between the two – provide profit impetus to recycle.
There are two “products” here: 1) the resource-recovery process, and 2) the product(s) that use the recovered resource.
I’ll say it again: new products are cool. New product = new pathway forward.
That, to me, is the important subtext here, not particularly the chasing arrows logo with its largely false claims of recycling, truth-in-advertising, non-recyclable marshmallow bags and all that.
The plastics industry, which, as the article notes, called the economic case for recycling plastic “virtually hopeless” in 1969 changed its tune a decade later and went all in on “recycling.” The economic case hadn’t changed but placing chasing arrows logos ubiquitously on plastic allowed the public to feel virtuous about recycling—they were “taking care of the problem” and “doing the right thing”—and, far more importantly for the corporate giants backing the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, shifted the focus away from the industry producing the plastic onto the individual. (It’s the same rationale that led British Petroleum to create and promote the “carbon footprint.”) As the article says, plastic is “the oil industry’s backup business plan” as countries shift away from gasoline. As long as recycling “works” (even if it largely doesn’t), the oil industry can still churn out hundreds of millions of metric tons of the stuff every year.
In a way, that is how we deal with pretty much every problem, isn’t it (we as in modern Liberal society, I mean)? Everything is due to bad individuals, making bad choices, with zero collective responsibility…except racism.
Edit: well, “collective” responsibility that we have, I guess, is a.ways that “they” (whoever that X regards in contempt) are responsible, and they should be made to pay, never “we.”
all that plastic, inside and outside of the panels, will be flammable. Thus, a no go.
JohnD: good point. Didn’t think of that.
Now let’s observe: plywood and lumber are in houses and are quite flammable. The remedy is to put drywall between the wood and potential ignition sources.
In the context of these proposed plastic panels, some possible, partial mods might be:
a. using a plastic additive that reduces flammability, or
b. using the product in non-home settings, or
c. cladding the product in a material that isn’t flammable
But your objection is valid. I’ll have to think more on it, and thanks! Better to get the show-stoppers early than late.
One more mod: if you had to, you could clad the insulation-foam with a thin sheet of aluminum or steel (both obtainable at the reclamation center, but need more specialized equipment to make sheets out of it).
That’s what your refrigerator is: foam plastic with a covering of either sheets of plastic (on the inside) or sheets of aluminum or stainless steel on the outside of the insulation-panel sandwich.
And one more point, upon further reflection.
There’s a tendency among we humans to “stop thinking” at the point an idea hits an iceberg (“it’s flammable, that’s a no-go”).
That tendency to stop is where the really good product developers shine. They don’t stop. They twiddle the problem dimensions a bit more, and … find a way forward.
Like what “twiddling”? Conceive of product devel as a Rubik’s cube. The dimensions of the cube are:
Application. What problem is the product designed to solve?
Materials. What materials (they all have different properties) are appropriate?
Mfg’g technique: How do you form/machine/assemble the components to create the product?
Those three dimensions (sides of the cube) have _many_ variations, and the more repertoire the product developer has .. the more variations they’re aware of … the more opportunities to twiddle the cube toward a viable solution.
Really good product developers are basically highly-evolved Rubik’s cube problem-solvers.
If it was either a structural panel or just filler, ,if it was in a building, it could be sandwiched between/integral to brick/ block/ or stucco it, or plaster it on the inside.
turn it into sheets that are intended to be under slabs of concrete…
or inside aerated autoclaved concrete building panels… walls,floors,roofs,etc. which might also be able to make use the clinker from those coal plant ash pits, that the energy companies are trying to cover up and ignore. I think the fly ash can be used in Autoclaved aerated concrete… a great product IMO.
Bigger is better, and if the cost is helped by the chemical companies who create this pollution, which is their business… it would be a cost of doing business… and the people could get something for that cost… regulatory frameworks are also needed for these plans. to distribute the costs.
I think roads are a place that can use an endless amount of infill.
The low grade asphalt, which is the majority of the volume of a paved surface, gets covered by “good asphalt”… so it holds up better..
glass and plastic should go into those piles of “cheap” asphalt which are covered by other asphalt(maybe JUST including glass bits in the exterior layer) so there is no wearing away of plastic particles as the road wears. The plastic infill, is not seen by sun, or worn by rain, or traffic.
The grade of recyclables can be poor… the sorting may not have to be perfect; making it easier to achieve and less expensive. All tucked away inside the roads. Which are not going anywhere…
Well-done, Rob.
Hope our paths cross again. You have really good product devel talents.
I like your idea. It seems to scale. If only we could dispose of our nuclear waste in such a manner.
A lot of glass that is recycled currently goes into asphalt right now, as do recycled tires.
There’s an outfit in my area that recycles clean glass bottles and jars into more glass bottles and jars (repeatglass.com) but a. you have to know about it; and b. you have to drop off your used bottles in bins, often located by libraries or restaurants.
Glass is infinitely recyclable, yet most of it winds up in landfills.
Tks, Carla. What an obviously terrific product/service. Gotta go check this out.
Oops. A duplicate happened. I was not involved, and bear no responsibility.
In fact, due to the ignominy I am now suffering, I should be entitled to some sort of recompense.
OK, just checked out repeatglass.com.
This is a phenomenal service, conceptually. Check out their “about” tab, and see how simple their business model is.
This is a mom n pop operation, 2nd time around for them. They know what they’re doing.
Also check out the RepeatAmbassador tab on the website. Genius, bottom-up marketing. Yay.
I love it when I see something this good, and appropriate, that actually works.
Wonder what their financials (P & L statement, in particular) says.
Perhaps at some point declining hydrocarbon production will raise the costs of the inputs to plastics/polymers production to the point that it will be imperative to reformulate these products in ways that would facilitate re-use at scale in a “circular economy” for polymers. I am no chemist, but I have the impression that it is possible to design synthetic polymers with cleavable linkages, which would permit bio- or enzymatic degradation or even depolymerisation to monomers. Perhaps, if we are forced to wait long enough, “the Market” will find solutions.
I imagine that this could be accelerated through legal mandates, but that seems unlikely in polities in which money purchases policy.
“People in my old building would regularly put general garbage in the recycling bins.”
I lived in Eastern Europe for a couple of years in a beautiful 1920s apartment bloc. But only old people there with dogs. Lots of dogs (and young media start-uppers who were never at home). Retired had many pets because they were extremly poor and had no other company and entertainment.
The building had a NYC style garbage system with garbage pipes from top floor to bottom. And the old residents, too weak to walk downstairs, stuffed EVERYTHING into the garbage hatch on their floor – which would jam the entire system over time, and the garbage instead of sliding into the garbage tons in the basement, would start rotting stuck behind the walls.
Then came the rats, and then came the fights between the rats and the dogs, some dogs spending more time in the beautiful staircase out of fear of the animal fights outside, peeing onto the stairs… The house became a pretty awful metaphor for the entire country´s state…yes I left since I was there only on assignment in the first place. (I tried to talk to people who were permanent native residents there. But they just shrugged it off…)
The 40,000 pound diesel trucks picking up bags of grass clippings and leaves..,
Don’t forget the gas-powered leaf blowers used to collect said leaves, instead of spending an extra 15 minutes raking by hand.
Also, you can just let the leaves stay where they fall. They will decompose quickly over winter and fertilize the soil for “free.” If your neighbors or HOA complain, move somewhere else. I’m serious.
Leaf blowing provides the new migrants with work. Here in California this is pretty much the entry level job. Everyone has a gardner who hires a few of these leaf blower guys. The smell and sound are loathsome.
Oh dear. Almost daily, if I am able to leave my home… I observe the house free?, street folks? Extra Grocery Cash People? from many walks of life dumping cases of water they have purchased into the parking lot at the big box stores, grocery stores. Here in Oregon, it appears to be one way to get “cash on the hoof”. Case after case of drinking water and the like…poured onto the asphalt. The empty plastic bottles (perhaps some glass as well)? Are immediately taken over to the street side redemption center. Huge community postings thru the towns in the area as well… “I have a garbage bag of free cans for recycling”. The new “plasma donation boon”; except it is…recyclables. Appears many mishaps with folks individual garbage/recycling being gone thru…hum. Life in rural Oregon, 42 degrees North, 123 West. Carry on.❤️🐈⬛ Oh, and the civic minded, collecting for a cause, Spray and Neuter seems to be running in first place💙🌎💚
There is no bottled water being sold at a price that people are buying the bottled water for the nickel they get from the redemption center. Show me the place that sells bottled water at less than .05 per bottle.
Recycling/reduce: Another case of the easy way should be the right way, the right way should be easy. Locally, it is very difficult to recycle through trash collection or local collection centers (as they are few and far between). The most reliable are the “junk” haulers, in their old pick-ups, looking for metal.
Stores should make it easier to use our own bags – only Aldi makes it a normal practice.
It’s the not the wastefulness. It’s the fact that the fetishization of wastefullness is the distinguishing charachteristic of North American society. Shout out to NC and the commentariat at large for being my primary refuge from that reality lo these many years.
North American society used to fetishize thrift. What changed that? Here is an article which explains part of the organized and engineered pressure to go from fetishizing thrift to fetishizing consumption.
https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-gospel-of-consumption/
“Recycling” is a terribly-broad sweeping generalization.
I personally know and work with companies and municipalities that make a s#!t-ton of money from recycling: metals, cardboard and paper, oil (yes).
But plastic?
If it’s not nearly virgin cutouts, punches, scraps from production, forget about it– it’s still toxic waste and hazardous as all hell to store. When the mountains of plastic-trash catch fire there’s no stopping it, aside from letting it burn-out on its own.
My point is, dollars rule (here the same as elsewhere). Recycling works very well when there’s money to be made from it.
I use to think that we did a fair bit of recycling here in Oz – until it came out about five years ago that we were packing our garbage into shipping containers and sending them onto other countries. In the link below there is an Indonesian customs officer holding up a newspaper from one such container and I can go downtown to buy that publication myself-
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/indonesia-sends-back-hundreds-of-shipping-containers-full-of-waste/j07ebubf2
OK, you did consumer recycling, which is where I think the distinction should be made– consumer recycling is about half-bullshit or greater.
The bales of recyclables are priced between base material less contaminants, i.e., office paper plus or minus trash bags and lunch waste– clean, virgin-material is easily 2x price.
But here we are: my industrial/production recyclables are equated to consumer-trash… nucking-futs, imo.
Make plastic waste into building bricks? I recently heard a BBC program about a young woman in Kenya who experimented with using waste plastic to make into fairly strong building bricks and now has a small business showing it can work on some level.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ocean-pollution-kenya-plastic-bricks-eye-on-earth/