A man has decided it’s easier to become a climate change denier than spend 90% of his free time scrubbing out the remnants of an M&S Broccoli Cheese or Waitrose Cannelloni in order to recycle …
Personally, I think the 1982 Tylenol Murders were the flashpoint that ignited the rise of overpackaging. Everything is tamper-proof sealed, which means more plastic.
Am doing work with plastics. When someone says "made with 100% recycled plastic" I automatically know it'll be brittle and it'll suck. Sadly, plastic isn't really recyclable. The bonds break down in the injection machine itself if you leave it a minute too long (heated). Now imagine getting a product that was injected properly, cutting it up, then remelting it, making pellets out of it and then melting those pellets to inject again. Plastic isn't metal, it doesn't melt and freeze without loss of strength.
I seem to remember some of the biodegradable plastics being chill and some of them just decomposing into like micro plastics way faster which doesn't matter at all and sucks, somebody reading this get me a source on that it's 12:16 and I'm tired
I'm not sure about the chill ones, but most of them just put starch in the polymer chain at various intervals. Bacteria break down the starch, which visibly breaks down the plastic, however it leaves behind tiny polymer chunks - microplastics.
I imagine a good biodegradable plastic is quite expensive, probably more so than other green alternatives.
its worse living in a condo. The chance everyone will put in appropriate things 100% each week to the recycling dumpster is pretty much nill and then it gets mixed up in a truck with the other area condos. I wash my stuff but am almost certain its all going to landfills.
Sorting at the consumer level isn't even the real problem. It's the fact that most plastic isn't even recyclable and of the kinds that are, there's no guarantee that your town has the facilities to recycle those. The whole system is broken and never actually worked.
Remember in the 90s when everyone switched to plastic bags to save the trees or some bullshit? The manufacturers / oil companies knew that plastic recycling didn’t work and they pushed it so hard anyways.
Ugh I forgot about that after losing my job, going broke, and moving back in with the parents. I still get pissed that at least one of the coworkers can't get it right though.
Cleaning plastic for recycling and believing it gets recycled is important to make people accept plastic in their lives. It was never really about recycling.