In Australia a company called REDcycle supposedly recycled soft plastics from all the major supermarkets. After a decade or so operating the business collapsed and it was discovered that they had about 11,000 tonnes of the stuff stockpiled in 40+ warehouses across the country because they hadn't figured out how to recycle it.
Instead of being in a landfill and leaching microplastics it's all bundled up and contained. I don't really understand this defeatist attitude where if something is not perfect we should drop it all together. From my point of view any effort at sorting trash is beneficial to the ecosystem because even if we don't have a method to deal with the problem now, we can wait a generation or two for technology to improve.
Some cynics think the plastic industry supports sham “recycling” efforts that don’t actually work, in order to alleviate customer guilt and forestall a ban or mandatory reformulation.
The bad thing, in this line of thought, is that we’re being lied to and taken for fools. Tricked into buying things we’re promised are recyclable when they’re not.
The costs of storing more and more plastics will only increase, storage is cheap at first, and that's why they did that, and when it starts getting expensive, they abandon ship. It is either classic fraud or incompetence.
These plastics will have to be dealt with eventually, recycling, burning or burying them. Waiting is just a waste of money. If we wait "a generation of two", we will be drowning in warehouses full of plastics like over-ground, inadequate and expensive landfills.
These are plastics, not nuclear waste. The "wait and see" strategy works for nuclear waste works because such waste is compact, hazardous and potentially very valuable. It also decays naturally, so the simple act of waiting makes it less hazardous. Plastic waste is the opposite of that: bulky, relatively harmless, mostly worthless, and it becomes worse as it degrades.
They tried to keep it secret that they were storing the garbage instead of recycling it. The trash still needs to be disposed. Your response is to question whether this was fraud and a bad thing. That’s a weird response.
> I don't really understand this defeatist attitude where if something is not perfect we should drop it all together.
No it shouldn't be dropped. But it certainly should be fixed. It's a bit disrespectful to the consumer to make them drag their plastic back to the store only for them to end up in the same place as their trash bin. That's the kind of thing that creates environmental apathy. Which makes it harder to drive change. People don't like being lied to.
However since then many small cycle plastic to oil (Pyrolysis) plants have popped up, which are set to scale up. This reclaimed oil will be used to create new plastic.
Australia is targeting 50% recycled content in its packaging by this year.
