this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2025
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Important to note that recycling some things makes sense, like metal. And recycling glass makes sense but sanitizing and reusing bottles makes alot more sense. There's also been a push to compost as much paper product as possible since that makes way more sense than recycling paper. Our green bins now take any brown cardboard with no tape and pizza boxes.
PET for example is also feasable to recycle. Problem with plastic recycling is mostly that plastic waste is not just one type of plastic.
Biggest misconception by far. You can't just "melt it down" like you can with glass or aluminum or steel
You can recycle it though and it's economically viable.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PET_bottle_recycling
I was agreeing with your "not just one type of plastic" comment
Sorry, text-based communication is hard sometimes.
How does composting paper make more sense than recycling? From what I can tell we have pretty well established paper recycling mechanisms, at least here in Germany.
Edit: typo.
In most countries, recycling paper only made financial sense if they shipped it to poor countries or used prison labor so it could be inexpensively sorted thru. Traditionally it was China, but they stopped accepting it. And letting microorganisms do what they do consumes less resources like electricity and less industrial chemicals.
In Germany the recycling is sorted at the household level, rather than the mixed recycling that is practiced in other countries. The paper, plastic, glass, and compost all get their own bins and/or bag color.
When recycling first started where I live, we had multiple bins. Paper, and i want to say metal/glass and plastic. Plus garbage and yard waste. But I'm refering to the fact that paper by itself faces additional sorting prior to recycling.
I would guess that it's because recycling requires energy input, while compost doesn't require hardly any energy.
I am pretty sure recycling does not require more energy than using fresh trees. You can even use the waste pulp to produce biogas.
recycled paper is lower quality, so you still have to add fresh paper pulp to it
Sure. It's not a closed cycle. But if you need to cut down less trees, that is a win for me.