Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
The price stuff can change through taxation that makes new plastic more expensive than recycled plastic.
As we all know, taxation is super popular and has never been controversial, ever.
At the very least flaskepant has worked great for like a century here in Norway. Always kind of surprising when other countries don't have it.
Most plastic can’t be recycled into something usable. Plastic degrades quite a bit with each recycling, leaving a bunch of microplastics behind (same thing with “biodegradable” plastic). It would be better to tax it enough (or ban it) to make it not used in certain applications.
Should've made the producers responsible for collecting and processing all plastics they produce. It that makes certain products economically non viable, than that's on them to innovate better processes.
Have we considered calling it a tariff instead of a tax? Tariffs on all new plastic. It might work.
Yes... plastic recycling can work, in theory, but the financial incentives are not naturally inclined to be in a way that recycling is feasible, since externalities encompassing the damage that plastic production has to our world are not accounted for in its price. (Caveat: the products that can be made from recycling are physically unable to be perfectly like the previous products they came from)
Like the cost burden of tobacco use being put on both users and producers, plastic must be dealt with the same way in terms of taxation levies so that plastic alternatives and plastic recycling are competitive compared to new plastic from oil by-products.
Being an old man this really gets me. I love the internet and the way computers today but there is a whole lot that worked fine before plastics were so common. Almost nothing in the grocery store had plastic and everything was pretty much as convenient as nowadays. Sure you had to pay a deposit on the glass bottles but you got it back when you returned them.
That's still the way it works in Denmark, but with plastic bottles too. Something like 98% of all bottles are recycled.
If I had to choose glass or plastic, I am always choosing glass. Glass is such a good material. It is infinitely recyclable, the bottles can be reused for several years, and if they are buried they don't release microplastics.
Really annoyed to have believed in plastic recycling even into my thirties. Being an idiot is such a burden sometimes.
I wrote a school report on the plastic garbage patches (pacific, indian, north atlantic, south pacific) when I was still in my twenties. Maybe it was a coincident, but I had a real big depression around that time, so maybe ignorance would've been preferable.
Right now it looks like paper and metal recycling is still good as far as I can read in two minutes. If someone has a correction let me know.
Correct. Paper (PS: or at least brown cardboard), glass and alu will always be great candidates for recycling.
Aluminum is the poster child for recycling, really. It takes more energy to extract it from the ore than it is to recycle it.
Former aluminum process engineer: This^
Yeah same and I hate when people just say well might as "well not recycle at all then" :/ that kind of defeatism doesn't help either
Yup! Those things are easy (comparatively) to recycle because they're single material items, so the process is:
"Plastic" is thought of as a single material, but even vegetable packaging will be made of around 5-10 different polymers, so for it to be valuable, you need to break it down back to those original polymers.
It's not a issue with recycling as a whole, its specific to plastic as a material.
there have been several articles exposing plastic recycling as green washing. unfortunately they never make it to mainstream media
i saw a chart somewhere showing less than 1% of plastic in use today is recycled but I can't find it now
Sad that NPR is not considered "mainstream" these days. Maybe Joe Rogan will post something to Facebook about it?
NPR is definitely mainstream
I think the word you're looking for is "corporate" or "for-profit". Thats what they're not.
And this is how capitalism eats itself. Nothing can be done without a market incentive, including not suffocating our planet to death.
How to get politicians to change views:
Plastic causes ed and shrinkage
They'll blame woman for being too slutty and fucking everyone BUT THEM.
I wonder how much the oil industry subsidies are responsible for making recycled plastic more expensive than the new one...
Recycling rates are low, but I wouldn't quite call it a myth. There's a lot of materials that get lumped together as 'plastic', that each have to be handled differently.
Some are relatively non-toxic and easily recycled. More can be, but aren't profitable without incentives. Some are very toxic, and recycling those are difficult. Then there's a lot of rarer types that make it hard to collect and sort. There's also mixed materials, where it's hard to separate the plastic to recycle.
Generally everyone should be minimizing plastics, but check how they're handled locally so you know what's recylable.
It seems there's been a flip. The myth is now that plastic is not recycled and it's all been a lie which is the actual lie.
The information around what types of plastics are easily recycled has never been a secret.
There is this weird mindset where people, often children are given a simplified explanation of things and then feel they were lied to when they find out their is nuance.
The entire world of information works this way. If the nuance was included from the start no one would learn anything because they would be bogged down in details. Every topic is a Wikipedia like rabbit hole with no bottom. It's what we have specialization in society.
The issues with plastic are not in its recycling. It's that is breaks down into what are essentially forever chemicals. This is the dilemma.
Producing less plastic because it's not recyclable is bad messaging.
Producing less plastic because it creates a substance that will last for eons is the problem. We've known about this property for decades but the repercussions of it have become more pronounced.
We need to stop making more plastic and work out how to chemically dissessemble the plastics already created without creating a worse output.
In some places there's really no recycling. For example, islands where recycling would mean shipping plastics to the mainland. They just burn it instead - if you're lucky, for producing heating or electricity.
The sad thing is, only types 1 & 2 plastics are recyclable in any real fashion, and sometimes not even then.
That means types 3 through 7 are better disposed of in the trash, where at least they’ll be sealed into a landfill instead of being shipped overseas to end up somewhere far less environmentally secure.
These types are the numbers inside the recycling symbol. Many things are mixed and matched - a plastic bottle might be a type 1 (recyclable), yet its screw-on cap is typically a type 5 (largely non-recyclable). Always try to find the recycling symbol and dispose of anything not a type 1 or 2 in the trash.
The biggest issue seems to be around a lake of thinking. Recycling used plastics into more plastic is certainly energetically infeasible, and letting plastics escape to contaminate the environment is also unacceptable. However plastic can be recycled, or perhaps reused, into other things, notably as a partial replacement for aggregate in concrete. This process is low energy, doesn't require sorting the plastic, and actually enhances the thermal and noise insulation properties of the concrete, whilst also reducing it's overall weight. There are undoubtedly other things a stable, non-biodegradable, waterproof and hardwearing substance could be used for given some though.
The more I see plastic being integrated into construction, the more I worry we're just postponing the inevitable. Concrete, stone and steel and basically reusable or recyclable and low impact on the environment when dumped. Plastic on the other hand slowly degrades into microplastics and seeps into waterways. Sometimes we forget that buildings don't last forever.
The good news is that global warming (I prefer to call it Anthropogenic Runaway Global Heating because of the acronym) is going to completely fuck us all anyway, to the extent that plastic in the environment isn't going to matter by comparison. At least oil turned into plastic and buried isn't oil turned into CO2.
The two problems have a decent amount of overlap though. For example, I recently learned that car tyres are a huge contributor to microplastic pollution. This means that improving public transport infrastructure will reduce CO2 emissions and microplastic pollution.
But we still have microplastics in our brains, which does warrant some concern I think.
Convincing detail here.
The priority is to keep used plastic out of the environment, which generally means out of waterways.
Treating waste water? Water treatment plants cost so much that they will never compete with dumping raw sewage into the river!
Which is why my local water treatment plant built a brand new pipe so they can dump directly into the river rather than the local nature reserve.
I'm so glad we privatised that...
Dont forget the goal of disrupting actual leftist movements into confusion
Honestly, the whole concept of "recycling" plastic feels more like a PR strategy than an environmental solution. If it were genuinely effective, we’d see investment, innovation, and accountability—like we do with metals. Instead, we’re handed the guilt while corporations keep pumping out garbage.
Honestly if it was up to me I'd just ban plastic flat out unless you got some kind of "this is actually really important and NEEDS to be made of plastic" cert
Interesting to compare aluminium recycling with plastic recycling
When the true aim is to recycle material, industry comes to the party and you get a refund scheme, even purpose built deposit facilities that can be set up locally
When the aim is to misdirect public attention toward a non solution you get government mandated plastics recycling bins and penalties for "contamination" plus never ending messaging (gotta keep the lie alive with constant repetition lmaooo). Coercion is just a lowkey admission that the material isn't worth recycling
The real question isn't how to get the plastics industry to change, it's how to make the ruse no longer a tenable position for governments
