Plastic, which is made from oil and gas, is notoriously difficult to recycle. Doing so requires meticulous sorting, since most of the thousands of chemically distinct varieties of plastic cannot be recycled together. That renders an already pricey process even more expensive. Another challenge: the material degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can generally only be reused once or twice.

The industry has known for decades about these existential challenges, but obscured that information in its marketing campaigns, the report shows.

Nope, they just lied. It wasn’t just that people weren’t re-using, people ARE reusing plastic products. But industry lied about the viability and cost to recycle the material.

At a 1956 industry conference, the Society of the Plastics Industry, a trade group, told producers to focus on “low cost, big volume” and “expendability” and to aim for materials to end up “in the garbage wagon”.

Then they pushed non-reusability.

An internal 1986 report from the trade association the Vinyl Institute noted that “recycling cannot be considered a permanent solid waste solution [to plastics], as it merely prolongs the time until an item is disposed of”.

Despite this knowledge, the Society of the Plastics Industry established the Plastics Recycling Foundation in 1984, bringing together petrochemical companies and bottlers, and launched a campaign focused on the sector’s commitment to recycling.

They’ve always known recycling to be a short term solution but hid that to get around the inevitable legislation against plastics.

Well that’s exactly the lie they sold. Reduce? Reuse? Absolutely. No question.

Recycle? If it makes sense. Should you recycle magazines? Sure, I’m sure it’s possible… But that glossy coating means you’d have to put it through a bunch of rounds of chemical baths or something to separate that plastic crap off. Same with cardboard - if it’s glossy, it’s probably not going to turn back into wood pulp, and if it’s oily it’d also ruin the batch (after a certain amount) so no pizza boxes either.

It’s like that for just about anything you want to recycle - you have to look at the cost. And I mean full cost - the energy cost, fossil fuel used to produce required chemicals, the river those chemicals end up eventually, the environmental opportunity cost of bothering with it vs creating it fresh, and finally the man hour and infrastructure costs

Even if we publicly funded it, it’s still an externality to the producer.

And that’s the lie. It’s like bailing out a cruise ship with a drinking cup… Theoretically it seems like “hey, if we can just move faster and we all do it, it could work!” But the numbers won’t work. You can’t scoop water up infinitely fast, and the geometry is going to limit how many people can increase the speed of bailing out water.

The only way this works is by plugging the holes or building enormous systems to offset the water coming in.

Reduce, reuse, recycle is a lie because it was never possible. Not for plastics - paper works pretty well, glass can work (but it’s a lot of energy if you don’t reuse it), metals work if the price is right.

But plastic barely works to create an inferior product (where only a portion of the material is recycled - you always have to add new plastic, sometimes only a few percent, sometimes more than half). You also have to sort it, ship it, wash the crap out of it, and deal with all the micro plastic-infused solvents. Because plastic sheds from heat, cold, UV light, mechanical pressure, and looking at it funny - every step of the process, you’re dusting the surroundings in micro plastics. Even rainwater is full of micro plastics. And generally, it all ends up washed into the nearest body of water and the soil

And what’s worse, is everything is coated in plastic if not made of it originally.

The only answer is to make companies stop wrapping everything in plastic… Yeah, it’s super convenient and cheap, but we could figure out better options.

People are so worried about the AI alignment problem, but the corporate alignment problem is a much bigger threat - we have to make them want it, because the campaign to “reduce, reuse, recycle” bought them 40 years of complacency

Plastic containers don’t need to be melted down and remade into anything; they can be cleaned and reused. But we just throw them away, or send them to be recycled immediately, and still consume more; completely ignoring the first two R’s.

Except a plastic bottle start leaking cancerous shit after a week or so iirc

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/08/health/bottled-water-nanoplastics-study-wellness/index.html

I’m going to be pedantic, but there is one R missing, the one with the most impact : Refuse.

So it’s Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

If you can, buy products that don’t have plastic in them at all. This is the biggest impact you can have as an individual.