this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
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The thing is just that its not that one woman, but hundreds of millions if not billions of people that follow trash separation rules.
This would actually have a pretty large effect, however sadly the recycling system is broken and often just a complete lie in many places in the world.
This is why I recycle.
But it still sucks to see so much work undone by a few greedy fucks.
I appreciate your recycling efforts. I'm in Chicago where recycling rates are horrible. I'm building a plan to improve recycling rates for next year, but I still have a lot of work to do in terms of the system regarding transparency and user-friendliness.
Are you in a position with the power to implement this?
To start a benefit corporation I don't need be in a position of power. I will eventually need investor money though to scale.
In many places in the world, or mainly the US? I keep seeing this claim repeated but usually any proof is just about the US
Germany is doing okayish:
Source (PDF)
Arent they still off-sourcing the actual recycling to a 3rd world country?
Especially for paper no … or rather it’s complicated. There is demand for recycled paper and we have lots of products which are made with these.
If I understand it correctly, Germany imports more waste paper than it exports. But the quality between those two differs
Nah, at least not most of them. Electronics recycling however is one where i wouldnt be surprised if it gets offloaded to elsewhere.
I've ranted in various places over the years but it's 100% true in my city in Canada.
Decades ago we built a massive publicly-funded recycling system because the City could actually draw profit from the collection and sale of materials.
But about 15 years ago China stopped buying the waste, and it became a new shell-game of collecting the material but literally unable to do anything with it or sell it, so any that does get sold mostly ends up in the down-stream recycling economy, where the bulk of it ends up being burned. The rest goes into the regular old landfill. Even waste cardboard has no value anymore.
People who separate recycling in our city now, are just pre-sorting it for the waste management company and keeping it out of their regular waste (profit) stream.
We do have our ewaste centers but knowing people that work there, I can say anecdotally I've been informed that the metal and rare metal waste is collected and sent for processing in Ontario, the rest of the bits (all the plastic which is 90% of eWaste) goes into the regular waste stream where it's buried or burned, but never recycled.
Notice how Pepsi and Coke don't use recycled plastic? If that doesn't condemn the whole recycling "meme" as a sham, I don't know what would.
Regarding the wording. In German(y) we have two kinds of "Verwertung" (utilization). The material one (recycling) and the energetic one (incineration). Both is viewed as reusing the waste. Sometimes energetic utilization can supply the power and/or heat needed for material utilization.
Burning it doesn’t have to be as bad as burying it.
EDIT: I guess it depends on how it gets burned. The company, my dad worked for, used it to produce steam, for the chemical companies located there, among other things.
Guess where that waste used to go
Don't be that smart ass that thinks he's cool and guarding some super secret information, and he only speaks in riddles and leading questions.
Everybody knows where that plastic went.
Wow. You got it perfectly right: everybody knows where that plastic went. This is why I wrote it like that, and didn't have to explain how it got dumped in the ocean all along. I wasn't playing riddles, I assumed it was otherwise obvious and common knowledge. Jeez, sorry if it didn't come off the way I meant.
I think a lot of first world countries like do it (e.g. the UK sends around 60% away), because recycling elsewhere is cheaper than doing it at home.
And it's cheaper still if you don't bother to check that it hasn't just ended up in a landfill in Bangladesh or something.
I think also part of the issue is that plastic can be recycled, but not in the same way as metals or glass. That plastic bottle might get shredded and used in road surfacing (where it will doubtless leak micro plastics everywhere), which is probably not what most people envisage when they clean it up and separate it nicely.
I had to check, and it looks like at least as far as plastic goes, in Finland it's sent to two domestic recycling plants, and everything they don't have the capacity to handle is shipped to Sweden's Site Zero in Motala (dunno where they go from there.)
But yeah, something like using shredded plastic for road surfacing definitely isn't what I'd call a sensible way to recycle the material. It's just adding an extra step before getting to "microplastic endocrine disruptors EVERYWHERE"
Isn't it somewhere like only 1% of the recycling stuff actually getting recycled? The rest goes to some kind of landfill to a poor country that decides to take it. I saw this in some documentary
For plastics, pretty much. The thing about plastic recycling is that it's more expensive that making new plastic, and the recycled stuff is lower quality and unsuitable for many uses.
Metal.recycling, especially aluminum, makes economic sense and does better.
about 21% of recyclables across the us: https://recyclingpartnership.org/residential-recycling-report/
as low as 9% in some states and as high as 34% in one of them
Like it’s been said that differs vastly by location. Afaik here in Germany it works quite okay … and European countries tend to have a higher incineration rate than the US. Burning the trash certainly isn’t the best solution, but at least it converts them into energy instead of just burying it somewhere.
But that aside, I like these "new" cups. It replaces part of the plastic with cardboard. That allows the plastic to be thinner, focusing on sealing it up and the cardboard handle the stability or even light protection. Though it can definitely be that there are some which are still as thick as they were, but that wouldn’t make sense for the producer. Here in Germany the plastic is often see-through and the cardboard printed on both sides. That’s usually used as advertising space, infos for waste disposal, but I’ve even seen it being used for cup noodles to mark the fill level.
Afaik paper is the thing where reycling works best currently, so it should be a win to replace plastic with paper.
- https://austropapier.at/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/23-00-EPRC-Recycling-Report.pdf
Recycling (edit: besides metal) does literally nothing, like it's actually 0% helpful, as long as we're producing more plastic than ever before every single year. We're closing in on 500 million tonnes of plastic produced—not total, produced—annually. Every single person can put every single piece of plastic in the recycling bin, and we'll still have more plastic than existed 50 years ago. There are many things that individual action can accomplish, and this is not one of them. We need legislation for this.
IIRC plastic recycling is basically bullshit (except maybe PET bottles?) but aluminum is actually effective. Makes you wonder why we don't use more aluminum packaging in general.
Yeah, I'm going to update my comment. Metal recycling is genuinely good, and recycling makes an enormous impact on the production of new metal
Any recycling you can't get money back for is either a scam or just not being done. Most city recycling programs just ship the trash to some other country, for instance.
Even the aluminum containers are coated with plastic (soda cans, for example)
Plastic isnt the only material that you can recycle...
True, that honor belongs solely to metal. Glass is mostly recyclable, though most types of it that aren't bottles will just be thrown in the trash. Paper is in theory recyclable, but putting that in recycle bins is basically just as effective as putting plastic in. Neither of those actually helps as long as we're producing more and more paper and more and more glass every year. The only thing that helps is reducing production.
Paper can be composted or burnt, and will decompose relatively quickly if dumped. I can't see any post-use situation where paper is anywhere nearly as bad as plastic.
What does that have to do with the production of new paper? Deforestation remains an ever increasing problem. It's not as bad as plastic, but recycling it is just as futile
Recycling paper (or not recycling) is far better than plastic is every respect. It's not so much futility in this case so much as inefficiency.
Paper also is rarely, if ever, fully recycled, usually being downcycled into rougher and rougher materials like cardboard and egg cartons. No matter how well it gets recycled, it's not going to displace primary production.
If you want to talk about futility here, the problem is way bigger than recycling. It's consumerism, unrestrained capitalism, and ROI of power now vs power later. No amount of recycling of any quality will fix the world alonge but it is one step of many.
The latter half of your comment is why I dont even bother. The "recycling" here is picked up and dumped into the same truck, there is no separation facility, just a landfill/incinerator.
Im not paying extra to lie to myself.
i lost faith in recycling the more I read about it.
especially when most recycling is sent to poor countries to be burned, and if it is actually recycled it is then shipped back again as a single use spoon, then sent back... all the way to less quality materials, and some uses are for fleece that produces a shit ton of microplastics.
real solutions is to ban single use plastics (maybe exceptions for medical uses).
now I'm in the States and I have no idea how to recycle where I am anyways.
We have separate trucks here, but I was behind the recycling truck one day and watched it pull into the landfill.
I remember my home district had one spot that handled both trash and recycling, so maybe there’s a chance of it still getting somewhere useful.
Nope, I've been to the landfill plenty of times, and there's no separate spot for recycling. The company that picks up the recycling is a private company not affiliated with the municipality.