How to get politicians to change views:
Plastic causes ed and shrinkage
this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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They'll blame woman for being too slutty and fucking everyone BUT THEM.
Unfortunately they'll just claim not praying to god enough and the existence of trans people causes ED and shrinkage...
Thats crazy we all know trans people do the opposite for that lot.
I wonder how much the oil industry subsidies are responsible for making recycled plastic more expensive than the new one...
The biggest issue seems to be around a lake of thinking. Recycling used plastics into more plastic is certainly energetically infeasible, and letting plastics escape to contaminate the environment is also unacceptable. However plastic can be recycled, or perhaps reused, into other things, notably as a partial replacement for aggregate in concrete. This process is low energy, doesn't require sorting the plastic, and actually enhances the thermal and noise insulation properties of the concrete, whilst also reducing it's overall weight. There are undoubtedly other things a stable, non-biodegradable, waterproof and hardwearing substance could be used for given some though.
The more I see plastic being integrated into construction, the more I worry we're just postponing the inevitable. Concrete, stone and steel and basically reusable or recyclable and low impact on the environment when dumped. Plastic on the other hand slowly degrades into microplastics and seeps into waterways. Sometimes we forget that buildings don't last forever.
That's a fair concern, but, as you say, concrete is recyclable, and I would expect (though I admit I haven't looked for studies) that it still would be when it has some amount of plastic aggregate. If the plastic breaks down in the concrete, the microplastics should be trapped, and will be reincorporated when the concrete is reused.
Nothing is going to be a perfect solution to plastic, we need to find alternatives to its use, but in the interim it seems sensible to find effective ways to reuse it rather than just dumping it and hoping for the best.
Maybe the best solution was to trap it in our bodies all along! /jk
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Recycling rates are low, but I wouldn't quite call it a myth. There's a lot of materials that get lumped together as 'plastic', that each have to be handled differently.
Some are relatively non-toxic and easily recycled. More can be, but aren't profitable without incentives. Some are very toxic, and recycling those are difficult. Then there's a lot of rarer types that make it hard to collect and sort. There's also mixed materials, where it's hard to separate the plastic to recycle.
Generally everyone should be minimizing plastics, but check how they're handled locally so you know what's recylable.
It seems there's been a flip. The myth is now that plastic is not recycled and it's all been a lie which is the actual lie.
The information around what types of plastics are easily recycled has never been a secret.
There is this weird mindset where people, often children are given a simplified explanation of things and then feel they were lied to when they find out their is nuance.
The entire world of information works this way. If the nuance was included from the start no one would learn anything because they would be bogged down in details. Every topic is a Wikipedia like rabbit hole with no bottom. It's what we have specialization in society.
The issues with plastic are not in its recycling. It's that is breaks down into what are essentially forever chemicals. This is the dilemma.
Producing less plastic because it's not recyclable is bad messaging.
Producing less plastic because it creates a substance that will last for eons is the problem. We've known about this property for decades but the repercussions of it have become more pronounced.
We need to stop making more plastic and work out how to chemically dissessemble the plastics already created without creating a worse output.
In some places there's really no recycling. For example, islands where recycling would mean shipping plastics to the mainland. They just burn it instead - if you're lucky, for producing heating or electricity.
Sure but there is danger is telling people to not bother recycling. Even a location as you described since it could become possible in the future and it's actually better for it to be shipped off than buried. Keeping plastic out of the environment is not a waste of fuel.
The focus should be a return to glass bottles that are reused. This was still a thing into the 90's in my area.
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The sad thing is, only types 1 & 2 plastics are recyclable in any real fashion, and sometimes not even then.
That means types 3 through 7 are better disposed of in the trash, where at least they’ll be sealed into a landfill instead of being shipped overseas to end up somewhere far less environmentally secure.
These types are the numbers inside the recycling symbol. Many things are mixed and matched - a plastic bottle might be a type 1 (recyclable), yet its screw-on cap is typically a type 5 (largely non-recyclable). Always try to find the recycling symbol and dispose of anything not a type 1 or 2 in the trash.
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The good news is that global warming (I prefer to call it Anthropogenic Runaway Global Heating because of the acronym) is going to completely fuck us all anyway, to the extent that plastic in the environment isn't going to matter by comparison. At least oil turned into plastic and buried isn't oil turned into CO2.
The two problems have a decent amount of overlap though. For example, I recently learned that car tyres are a huge contributor to microplastic pollution. This means that improving public transport infrastructure will reduce CO2 emissions and microplastic pollution.
But we still have microplastics in our brains, which does warrant some concern I think.
Sadly that is the problem. YOU did not think, the microplastics in your brain did.
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Hey, maybe all the plastic will lead to such significant fertility issues, populations will crater, and ARGH won't even matter anymore!
Treating waste water? Water treatment plants cost so much that they will never compete with dumping raw sewage into the river!
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Convincing detail here.
The priority is to keep used plastic out of the environment, which generally means out of waterways.
These guys are recycling, but I'm not sure it's the recycling most of us have in mind. Toxic tofu (YouTube)
I really can't wrap my head around this... (https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/project-earth-frugalpac-sustainable-wine-bottles-recycled-cardboard-central-california/)
The idea has absolutely no foresight. They want to "lower the carbon footprint" by putting less carbon in the atmosphere and polluting the future's soil and water even more.
If only some government somewhere on Earth had sponsored research on this. We could have known.
Or we did and no one cared.
Remember, if one depends on the media for information, you only get information dumb people can understand.
The ~~only safe~~ safest way to dispose of plastic is to incinerate it...maybe it can replace some fossil powerplants...idk.
That's not safe either. The best is to ban it.