I wish this myth would die, or we fully priced-in the externality cost of plastic recycling.

Look into the roughly 15 step process of recycling those cheap plastic bottles, including pressurised steam, abrasive steps, cold and hot water, and chopping into pieces before yet more washing. It is probably vastly more expensive in energy costs, especially when after all that it's still common to lose batches to contamination. It's miles from returning bottles into the same supply chain and the factory having as first step washing and rinsing the old bottles.

Broken ones were recycled in place, and they were already of exactly the correct type and colour.

Why do they clean it before shredding?

This process starts with the shredding:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyF9MxlcItw

And then giant bales of plastic chips are hand sorted by color in China!

Going entirely on memory, so I may have misrepresented a bit or been out of order. I seem to remember there's an initial automated sort and wash before shredding to remove dead mice, contamination from single stream recycling, assorted junk thrown in the wrong bin and so on. Then after shredding there's washing and rinsing stages, and a steam and abrasive stage to remove glue and labels etc. It left me quite astonished how incredibly involved it is when I looked into it.

Hand sorting? This really is fundamentally broken isn't it?

My college room mates and I were still doing this with Miller High Life bottles as late as 2003-2004. If you collected a dozen cases you'd have enough returnables for a free case of beer!

Similar for the plastic beer pitchers at UW-Madison's terrace. You'd pay like a $1 deposit on the pitcher, if you bring the pitcher back, you get the dollar. Drunk kids or the indifferent would leave their plastic pitcher and some enterprising person would come by pick it up and return it for cash. There is a lake nearby, so it's important these didn't make it in the lake.

The deposit system seemed to be pretty effective. Folks took an active role.

Maybe there are modern day systems that could be developed. I wonder if people would subscribe to a Uber/UPS like system for fluids like beer, soda, milk, yogurt or water? Comes in sterilized glass bottles using an electric vehicle. I suppose it could be reusable plastic, but for folks paying a premium, glass would be nice. Something like $50 month for a couple cases of beer, going up in price as you order more.

A festival in Brisbane, Australia had exactly the same approach.

The festival was Parklife and I think it was back in 2012?

$1 price increase on all cups, bottles and food containers. If you brought the item back (it didn't have to be yours!), you got a $1 back per item. It started off as coupons so you could purchase other goods with the coupon but at the end of the festival you could cash them in.

Never in my life have I gone to a one-dayer EDM festival and went home with significantly more money than I started with.

The economics of the choice being, the festival didn't need to pay for cleaners on significant overtime rates. And we're incentivised because I made a fucking profit from an EDM festival!

For the life of me I can't find an article on the event.

Needless to say after some choice after market vitamins, I was motivated to clean the venue during artists I wasn't too interested in. I was also incentivised since the festival was held in my cities Botanical Gardens which are around the corner from my office.

At the end of the festival, not a scrap of rubbish could be found.

It wasn't an absolute success though. Some people started fishing rubbish out of bins to get their own coin back towards the end...

It was the same in Spain, we carried the casco in the basket (of course not plastic, but hemp)... only the meat and the fish were wrapped in waxed paper and of course the cans, but there were only a few products that weren't fresh.

Now there's an absurd mass of plastics.