Lots of people have completely bought into the recycling message. To them I say: Why aren’t Pepsi and Coke’s own bottles made from recycled material?
I’m now 50 and I lived through a huge part of the push for recycling, I saw how our city implemented recycling programs, what they did with the waste, and so forth. I’ve seen all of this evolve for decades now.
At first there was a moderate amount of profit to be made by our city, harvesting and selling plastic to China. Well after a while China stopped paying for the plastic and our city no longer had a market.
Then our city bought into the propaganda from the soda peddlers that the way to go was not to insist on industry change, but to enjoy the benefits of adding hidden recycling surcharges to consumer goods. Why, think of the revenue! Think of how shiny you can make your recycling facilities that collect waste nobody will buy!
It’s been a long way since 1995 when our city started the recycling program. As the plastics game faded, weirdly enough the recycling operations were privatized with little public oversight. Weird hey.
Its a huge charade… now the taxpayers have built a massive recycling infrastructure for a private company to collect our meticulously cleaned trash. They separate the concrete, metal, and electronics scrap, the rest gets burned or sent to be burned. We waste an insane amount of water cleaning our trash before they incinerate it. We pay a fucking shitload as taxpayers for this farce and the waste management company are rolling in money. Stinks worse than any dump.
Worked in an European Recycling Center and this is exactly it. In my case, Austria, we’re collecting the trash sending it 2 or times around in the country before burning it. And then we call it recycling. Wondering why our beloved mountains shrink every year.
At least burning it generates energy and if you do it right it releases minimal byproducts besides CO2 the real problem is just dumping it in the ocean/landfills that slowly wear down and end up inside our bodies
Lots of people have completely bought into the recycling message. To them I say: Why aren’t Pepsi and Coke’s own bottles made from recycled material?
I’m now 50 and I lived through a huge part of the push for recycling, I saw how our city implemented recycling programs, what they did with the waste, and so forth. I’ve seen all of this evolve for decades now.
At first there was a moderate amount of profit to be made by our city, harvesting and selling plastic to China. Well after a while China stopped paying for the plastic and our city no longer had a market.
Then our city bought into the propaganda from the soda peddlers that the way to go was not to insist on industry change, but to enjoy the benefits of adding hidden recycling surcharges to consumer goods. Why, think of the revenue! Think of how shiny you can make your recycling facilities that collect waste nobody will buy!
It’s been a long way since 1995 when our city started the recycling program. As the plastics game faded, weirdly enough the recycling operations were privatized with little public oversight. Weird hey.
Its a huge charade… now the taxpayers have built a massive recycling infrastructure for a private company to collect our meticulously cleaned trash. They separate the concrete, metal, and electronics scrap, the rest gets burned or sent to be burned. We waste an insane amount of water cleaning our trash before they incinerate it. We pay a fucking shitload as taxpayers for this farce and the waste management company are rolling in money. Stinks worse than any dump.
Worked in an European Recycling Center and this is exactly it. In my case, Austria, we’re collecting the trash sending it 2 or times around in the country before burning it. And then we call it recycling. Wondering why our beloved mountains shrink every year.
At least burning it generates energy and if you do it right it releases minimal byproducts besides CO2 the real problem is just dumping it in the ocean/landfills that slowly wear down and end up inside our bodies
too complicated,
why not use the current system where you sell the garbage to the poorest countries for them to just dump it in the sea/rivers/unregulated burning…