It has been at least a decade since the futility of plastic recycling has been known.

Any politician that tries to rectify the plastic situation will get voted out because people would experience a reduction in quality of life.

It is the same reason why the solution to reducing carbon emissions has not been enacted worldwide, which is increasing taxes on fossil fuels until consumption goes down (which would also solve the plastic issue).

But again, that will cause short term pain by having to consume less, such as not living in big houses/spread out suburbs, flying and driving to far flung vacations, using large personal vehicles, convenience and cheapness of plastic packaging, etc.

> It has been at least a decade since the futility of plastic recycling has been known.

To you. Not to the general population.

I do not think it would make a difference. Replace plastic recycling with the harms of carbon emissions, surely that has been known by sufficiently many people. When push comes to shove, sacrifices on a collective basis are hard to make. Especially when you can point to others that are not making them.

Not to put down carbon emissions, but microplastic pollution is a much much much worse problem to have

I'd rather not eat a credit card every year.

And the sacrifice would be to have nice glass containers like we use to have? How is that even a sacrifice?

The fact that governments and the media talk only about carbon emission (without doing much, if I can add - they gave plenty of time to the oil titans to diversify their investments) and don't do anything for plastic is already telling you which industry owns your governments.

> And the sacrifice would be to have nice glass containers like we use to have? How is that even a sacrifice?

The sacrifice is less consumption, due to prices rising because costs of using glass containers is more. See how pissed off people in the US get when gas prices rise.

When gas prices rise, people have to cut back on all consumption, and that pisses off the voting population like nothing else.

Oh yeah totally, I'm in agreement with the rest of your post.

It's just that in my personal experience most people are extremely ignorant of what can be recycled. They don't even read the flyer their local garbage company gives them. The state of the recycling bin in my apartment complex is an absolute disgrace.

Ever since I was a kid in the early 90s, I always wonder how it was possible that the logistics of recycling sorting could possibly work. How could recycling even happen if all this plastic needs to be sorted into 10 categories and then paper (but not greased paper) and metal and etc. Not only would the system have to account for people who made errors in sorting the recycling, but the system would have to account for the people who do not care to sort it.

So was the world was asking individuals to recycle, and was employing legions of people at the waste facility to double check all the recycling. But then why ask people to bother sorting in the first place? And how would it even be possible to double check and sort all that plastic? It just did not pass the smell test.

And then of course it finally came out that we were just packing it up and shipping it back to China where they did who knows what with it. Gave everyone in the US political points and plausible deniability.

Anyway, I consider recycling to be worth near zero. At this point, the only mitigation is reduce, then a far way down is reuse, and that is it.

>Especially when you can point to others that are not making them.

Each country is only responsible for x% of global emissions. The rest of the world is responsible for 100%-x%. As 100%-x% > 50% each country has to do nothing as the rest of the world is always the worse polluter.

What is this type of fallacy called? I see it all the time.

I do not see what the 50% threshold has to do with anything, nor why the idea of not sacrificing for the whole unless everyone else is sacrificing is a fallacy.

If US makes it so its residents cannot afford to go to Hawaii and Taihiti and Seychelles for their honeymoon, but China continues to allow their residents to go, then unless the people of the US are very selfless, I predict it is not going to well for the leaders of the US.

It is a prisoner’s dilemma, if anything.

Sounds like prisoner dilemma but it's quite incorrect to say that this is a problem.

Human societies have been signing agreement and treaties to access shared resources like bodies of water and grazing land for thousands of years.

There are millions of international laws around trade, transportation, safety, aeronautics down to the smallest details.

Regulating emissions is so unpopular because it goes against financial interests of large companies.

> Regulating emissions is so unpopular because it goes against financial interests of large companies.

You do not think the general public would be pissed off if they could no longer expect to live in detached single family homes on quarter acre lots and drive large personal vehicles?

It is enormously politically unpopular to let gas prices go up, and I do not see how one can blame large companies for that.

> You do not think the general public would be pissed off

This is a strawman and a false dichotomy often pushed by the industry:

1) choose between modern lifestyle and its ecosocial impact or go back to 1900. Other options cannot be discussed

2) make a mess (e.g. microplastics) and then blame/fine consumers for despite being overwhelmingly responsible for the decisions around industrial processes

e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...

[as a side note, most people I know live in apartments, by choice. A lot of them have no car.]

I did not come to my conclusion due to “the industry”. I came to it from observing how people behave and what their expectations are. When people’s expectations are not met, it causes unhappiness.

I do not know any people with kids that would choose to live in apartments, or without cars. I would be surprised if there is anything more than a tiny minority (in the US) with kids that does not have a goal of living in a spacious home with backyards and garages in a nice school district.

These expectations are at odds with reducing carbon emissions. Companies being responsible for emissions is just a fiction of accounting. At the end of the day, I believe that a large portion of voters in USA would retaliate against a group of politicians that would make their lives more expensive under the guise of helping future generations and require them to give up large amounts of their quality of life.

However, it is also true that large companies get to disproportionately dump whatever feeble attempts at reducing consumption that do get enacted into consumers, such as water restrictions that affect individuals, but exempt the largest water consumers.

I guess my overall point is we need sufficient people to lower their quality of life expectations, and then that will propel the political will to make the necessary changes to force reductions in consumption.

> Companies being responsible for emissions is just a fiction of accounting.

Uh, you think Bob leaving the lights on in his house compares to operating a factory in terms of carbon emissions? I haven't seen the data and you aren't presenting any but my default assumption would definitely be that industry manufacturing and farming things at huge scale and pumping exhaust into the air by the ton is a way bigger factor than whether Bob drives a hybrid.

And to experts since the 1940s.

Also, before I studied material science (and therefore became an “expert”), I had heard that plastics are difficult to recycle in the mass media - as a teenager in the 90s. The information was there in a digestible form, but most ppl ignored it because it was easier to pretend that we were doing something with our blue bins.

I have clear recollections in undergrad (not mtls science) of throwing plastic into the garbage and getting lectured about it. And lecturing back that recycled plastic isn't really a thing.

“A decade since”

Its been known since Flory Higgins back in the 1940s, and DeGennes completed the understanding in the 70s: the crux of the problem is melted plastics dont mix.

If anything in the last few decades methods for recycling plastic have been investigated fairly successfully. But they’re either expensive (sort plastic, return to feedstock), or have image problems (burn in thermal plants, turn into diesel).

Plastic is recyclable.

However, the cost of recycling it is generally more than the reclaimed value of the material, especially for mixed recyclables.

So, we have to do one of two things: either subsidize the recycling of plastic (e.g.: tax plastic packaging, send tax money to subsidize conversion), or switch back to segregated bins (downside: consumers put less material in).

Many people have been spreading misinformation that plastic "isn't recyclable." This is not true. In California, 87% of beverage containers are recycled (thanks, bottle bill!).

British Columbia enacted an "Extended Producer Responsibility" (EPR) bill that taxes plastic packaging and uses the funds to centralize and subsidize conversion of material. This resulted in the most sophisticated sortation and recycling plant in North America, located in Delta, BC, where they use laser spectrum analysis to sort plastic, shred and grind it, use high speed cameras and air puffs to sort by color, and then convert it back to usable resin.

This resulted in a 56% recovery rate of all rigid plastics sold in BC. I would argue that 56% needs to improve - it would be good to get over 80% - but plastic has massive CO2 advantages over other materials, such as aluminum or glass, that are incredibly energy intensive, and anything with a 56% recycle rate blatantly disproves the idea that recycling is a myth.

However, without proper public-private partnerships and good regulation, it's very hard to get high recycle rates, and that plagues much of America and other provinces of Canada, where people then throw up their hands and claim it's impossible.

What the oil industry said and still says is that it's profitable to recycle plastics and it's "a gold mine".

But thanks that was all very interesting.

has anyone considered legislating a reduction in the types of plastic that can be used for packaging that would result in an easier time sorting? I.e. all bottles must be made of same thing?

Relevant discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24714880.

The oil/plastic industry is one of the biggest.

People underestimate the enormous lobbying and marketing power that comes with that.

Plastic is recyclable though. 3D printing guys do it all the time when they spin their own fiber out of left over junk.

And “made out of recyclable plastic” is a thing, and it works.

What isnt recyclable are mixed plastics, ie consumer plastic. But industrial users (ie folks who have large quantities of the same thing so sorting is cheap) can and do recycle plastic.

Most plastic can be recycled, but it costs more to do so and you get a worse end product than virgin plastic so it is generally not done.

This is why many municipalities maintain their recycling program despite the fact that most of the material ends up in the landfill. The hope is that in the future either virgin plastic will become so expensive that recycling makes sense, or someone will figure out a better way to recycle plastic and make it economically viable. They want to keep people in the habit of recycling.