NPR admits that most “recycled” plastic ends up in landfills
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
January 19, 2023
NPR recently published this article, which is titled, “Recycling plastic is practically impossible – and the problem is getting worse.”
The article states:
“The vast majority of plastic that people use, and in many cases put into blue recycling bins, is headed to landfills, or worse, according to a report from Greenpeace on the state of plastic recycling in the U.S.”
“The report cites separate data published this May which revealed that the amount of plastic actually turned into new things has fallen to new lows of around 5%. That number is expected to drop further as more plastic is produced.”
“Greenpeace found that no plastic – not even soda bottles, one of the most prolific items thrown into recycling bins – meets the threshold to be called ‘recyclable’ according to standards set by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation New Plastic Economy Initiative. Plastic must have a recycling rate of 30% to reach that standard; no plastic has ever been recycled and reused close to that rate.”
None of that surprises me. Below are two videos, which I’ve posted here before.
The first video shows that much of the recycled garbage from rich countries (the U.K. in this case) gets sent to poor countries, where it just sits there on the ground without any covering or protection, getting blown around, and often ending up in rivers and ultimately the ocean.
The second video shows a landfill in a rich country (the U.S. in this case). The landfill is well sealed and covered, and is now a park with grass, trees, plants, and animals.
Recycling is a scam. It makes people feel good, but it actually hurts the environment instead of helping it. The environment would be a lot better off if we stopped recycling, and put our garbage into landfills. The proof is in the videos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRQLilXLAIU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zcMfDbxmgU
Here’s the NPR article:
Recycling plastic is practically impossible – and the problem is getting worse
By Laura Sullivan
October 24, 2022
The vast majority of plastic that people use, and in many cases put into blue recycling bins, is headed to landfills, or worse, according to a report from Greenpeace on the state of plastic recycling in the U.S.
The report cites separate data published this May which revealed that the amount of plastic actually turned into new things has fallen to new lows of around 5%. That number is expected to drop further as more plastic is produced.
Greenpeace found that no plastic – not even soda bottles, one of the most prolific items thrown into recycling bins – meets the threshold to be called “recyclable” according to standards set by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation New Plastic Economy Initiative. Plastic must have a recycling rate of 30% to reach that standard; no plastic has ever been recycled and reused close to that rate.
“More plastic is being produced, and an even smaller percentage of it is being recycled,” says Lisa Ramsden, senior plastic campaigner for Greenpeace USA. “The crisis just gets worse and worse, and without drastic change will continue to worsen as the industry plans to triple plastic production by 2050.”
Waste management experts say the problem with plastic is that it is expensive to collect and sort. There are now thousands of different types of plastic, and none of them can be melted down together. Plastic also degrades after one or two uses. Greenpeace found the more plastic is reused the more toxic it becomes.
New plastic, on the other hand, is cheap and easy to produce. The result is that plastic trash has few markets – a reality the public has not wanted to hear.
Trent Carpenter, the general manager of Southern Oregon Sanitation, says when they told customers a couple years ago that they could no longer take any plastic trash other than soda bottles and jugs – like milk containers and detergent bottles – people were upset. They wanted to put their strawberry containers, bags, yogurt cups and all manner of plastic trash in their recycling bin.
“We had to re-educate individuals that a great deal of that material is ending up in a landfill,” Carpenter said. “It’s not going to a recycling facility and being recycled. It’s going to a recycling facility and being landfilled someplace else because [you] can’t do anything with that material.”
That message has been difficult for the public to absorb with so many different bins in public spaces, and their own communities telling them to put their plastic in recycling containers.
Carpenter says they wanted to be transparent with their customers and tell them the truth, unlike companies that continue to tell customers that plastic, such as bags and containers, is being turned into new things.
“Politically it’s easier to just say ‘Gosh, we’re going to take everything and we think we can get it recycled,’ and then look the other way,” Carpenter said of the other companies. “That’s greenwashing at its best.”
Greenpeace found a couple facilities are trying to reprocess cups and containers – sometimes called “number 5s” because of the markings on the containers. But the numbers are low. While 52% of recycling facilities in the U.S. accept that kind of plastic, the report found less than 5% of it is actually repurposed – and the rest is put into a landfill.
Similarly, the National Association for PET Container Resources, an industry trade group, found in 2017 that only 21 percent of the plastic bottles collected for recycling were turned into new things.
The low reprocessing rates are at odds with plans from the oil and gas industry. Industry lobbyists say they plan to recycle every piece of plastic they make into something new by 2040. In interviews with NPR, industry officials were unable to explain how they planned to reach a 100 percent recycling rate.
An NPR investigative report found in 2020 that industry officials misled the public about the recyclability of plastic even though their own reports showed they knew as early as the 1970s and 1980s that plastic could not be economically recycled.
The American Chemistry Council, an industry lobby group, initially did not respond to NPR’s request for comment on the Greenpeace report. After publication, Joshua Baca, vice president of plastics for the group, sent an email to NPR calling Greenpeace’s views “misleading, out of touch and misguided.”
He said the industry believes it is “on the cusp of a circularity revolution” when it comes to recycling plastic by “scaling up sortation, advanced recycling, and new partnerships that enable used plastic to be remade again and again.”
Environmentalists and lawmakers in some states are now pushing for legislation that bans single use plastics, and for “bottle bills” which pay customers to bring back their plastic bottles. The bills have led to successful recycling rates for plastic bottles in places like Oregon and Michigan, but have faced steep resistance from plastic and oil industry lobbyists.
“The real solution is to switch to systems of reuse and refill,” Ramsden said. “We are at a decision point on plastic pollution. It is time for corporations to turn off the plastic tap.”
After years of embracing plastic recycling, many environmental groups say they hope the public will finally see plastic for what they say it is – trash – and that people will ask themselves if there is something else they could be using instead.
Video evidence shows that recycling hurts the environment, and landfills help the environment
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
July 13, 2020
Below are two videos.
The first video shows that much of the recycled garbage from rich countries (the U.K. in this case) gets sent to poor countries, where it just sits there on the ground without any covering or protection, getting blown around, and often ending up in rivers and ultimately the ocean.
The second video shows a landfill in a rich country (New York in this case). The landfill is well sealed and covered, and is now a park with grass, trees, plants, and animals.
Recycling is a scam. It makes people feel good, but it actually hurts the environment instead of helping it. The environment would be a lot better off if we stopped recycling, and put our garbage into landfills. The proof is in the videos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRQLilXLAIU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zcMfDbxmgU
Video evidence shows that recycling hurts the environment, and landfills help the environment
Below are two videos.
The first video shows that much of the recycled garbage from rich countries (the U.K. in this case) gets sent to poor countries, where it just sits there on the ground without any covering or protection, getting blown around, and often ending up in rivers and ultimately the ocean.
The second video shows a landfill in a rich country (New York in this case). The landfill is well sealed and covered, and is now a park with grass, trees, plants, and animals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRQLilXLAIU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zcMfDbxmgU
Recycling is a scam. It makes people feel good, but it actually hurts the environment instead of helping it. The environment would be a lot better off if we stopped recycling, and put our garbage into landfills. The proof is in the videos.
I just found out that recycling hurts the environment even more than I had thought
Ever since I read this 1996 New York Times article called “Recycling Is Garbage,” I’ve known that government recycling of plastic, paper, and glass wastes more resources than it saves, and that the environment would actually be better off if we put these things into landfills instead of recycling them.
Over the next 1,000 years, all of the garbage in the entire United States could fit into one landfill that was 100 yards deep, on a piece of square land which was just 35 miles on each side. Today’s modern landfills are well sealed, and when they are full, they get turned into parks. I live in Pennsylvania, which is the United State’s #1 garbage importing state. We keep approving new landfills, because we love the jobs and tax revenue that it gives us.
Well now we have this brand new article from the Guardian, which shows that our recycling hurts the environment even more than I had thought. It says that a lot of the plastic that we put into recycling bins gets sent to poor countries in Asia. Much of this plastic cannot actually be recycled, either because it’s contaminated with food debris, or it’s the wrong kind of plastic. These poor Asian countries mismanage much of their garbage, and much of this plastic ends up in the ocean. This other article, from the New York Post, says that 90% of the plastic in the ocean comes from 10 rivers, eight of which are in Asia, and two of which are in Africa. So much of the plastic that we recycle actually ends up in the ocean.
If the goal is to virtue signal, then by all means, we should continue to recycle our garbage. But if the goal is to protect the environment, we should put it into landfills.
Trash marked for recycling is going to landfills instead
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GKr1Z6pDBU
Plastic-munching bacteria can make trash biodegradable
If this is true and it can be used on a large scale, it’s fantastic news.
http://www.livescience.com/54016-plastic-eating-bacteria-could-reduce-trash.html
Plastic-Munching Bacteria Can Make Trash Biodegradable
March 10, 2016
A durable plastic called PET is considered a major environmental hazard because it’s highly resistant to breakdown. But researchers have found a potential new match for this hardy plastic: a newly discovered microbe that is astonishingly good at eating it.
An estimated 342 million tons (311 metric tons) of plastic are produced annually worldwide, and currently, only about 14 percent is collected for recycling, according to the World Economic Forum.
Most plastic degrades extraordinarily slowly, but PET — short for poly(ethylene terephthalate) — is especially durable, and about 61 million tons (56 metric tons) of the colorless plastic was produced worldwide in 2013 alone, according to the researchers.
Previously, the only species found to break down PET were rare fungi. Now, scientists in Japan have discovered bacteria that can biodegrade this hardy plastic.
“The bacterium is the first strain having a potential to degrade PET completely into carbon dioxide and water,” said study co-author Kohei Oda, an applied microbiologist at the Kyoto Institute of Technology in Japan.
The researchers collected 250 samples of PET debris from soil and wastewater from a plastic-bottle-recycling site. They scanned these samples for bacteria that could eat PET.
The scientists identified a new species of bacteria, which they named Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6, that could almost completely break down a thin film of PET after six weeks at a temperature of 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius). Appendages from the cells might have secreted compounds that helped to dissolve the plastic, the researchers said.
Genetic and biochemical analyses identified two key enzymes involved in the breakdown of PET. One enzyme worked with water to break down the plastic into an intermediate substance, which the other enzyme broke down into PET’s basic building blocks, the scientists said.
These findings could have a wide range of real-world applications, because bacteria should be easier to incorporate into devices to break down PET than fungi is. “We hope that we can develop a technology to handle such a lot of wasted PET,” Oda said.
In the future, the researchers would like to “improve the ability of the microorganisms to degrade,” Oda said.
It’s not known how these enzymes evolved, Oda said, and both enzymes bear little resemblance to the enzymes most closely related to them.
The scientists detailed their findings online today (March 10) in the journal Science.
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