I appreciate your recycling efforts. I'm in Chicago where recycling rates are horrible. I'm building a plan to improve recycling rates for next year, but I still have a lot of work to do in terms of the system regarding transparency and user-friendliness.

Germany is doing okayish:

Source (PDF)

I've ranted in various places over the years but it's 100% true in my city in Canada.

Decades ago we built a massive publicly-funded recycling system because the City could actually draw profit from the collection and sale of materials.

But about 15 years ago China stopped buying the waste, and it became a new shell-game of collecting the material but literally unable to do anything with it or sell it, so any that does get sold mostly ends up in the down-stream recycling economy, where the bulk of it ends up being burned. The rest goes into the regular old landfill. Even waste cardboard has no value anymore.

People who separate recycling in our city now, are just pre-sorting it for the waste management company and keeping it out of their regular waste (profit) stream.

We do have our ewaste centers but knowing people that work there, I can say anecdotally I've been informed that the metal and rare metal waste is collected and sent for processing in Ontario, the rest of the bits (all the plastic which is 90% of eWaste) goes into the regular waste stream where it's buried or burned, but never recycled.

Notice how Pepsi and Coke don't use recycled plastic? If that doesn't condemn the whole recycling "meme" as a sham, I don't know what would.

I think a lot of first world countries like do it (e.g. the UK sends around 60% away), because recycling elsewhere is cheaper than doing it at home.

And it's cheaper still if you don't bother to check that it hasn't just ended up in a landfill in Bangladesh or something.

I think also part of the issue is that plastic can be recycled, but not in the same way as metals or glass. That plastic bottle might get shredded and used in road surfacing (where it will doubtless leak micro plastics everywhere), which is probably not what most people envisage when they clean it up and separate it nicely.

For plastics, pretty much. The thing about plastic recycling is that it's more expensive that making new plastic, and the recycled stuff is lower quality and unsuitable for many uses.

Metal.recycling, especially aluminum, makes economic sense and does better.

about 21% of recyclables across the us: https://recyclingpartnership.org/residential-recycling-report/

as low as 9% in some states and as high as 34% in one of them

Like it’s been said that differs vastly by location. Afaik here in Germany it works quite okay … and European countries tend to have a higher incineration rate than the US. Burning the trash certainly isn’t the best solution, but at least it converts them into energy instead of just burying it somewhere.

But that aside, I like these "new" cups. It replaces part of the plastic with cardboard. That allows the plastic to be thinner, focusing on sealing it up and the cardboard handle the stability or even light protection. Though it can definitely be that there are some which are still as thick as they were, but that wouldn’t make sense for the producer. Here in Germany the plastic is often see-through and the cardboard printed on both sides. That’s usually used as advertising space, infos for waste disposal, but I’ve even seen it being used for cup noodles to mark the fill level.

Afaik paper is the thing where reycling works best currently, so it should be a win to replace plastic with paper.

The recycling rate increased in 2023. 79.3% of all paper and board consumed in Europe was recycled

- https://austropapier.at/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/23-00-EPRC-Recycling-Report.pdf

IIRC plastic recycling is basically bullshit (except maybe PET bottles?) but aluminum is actually effective. Makes you wonder why we don't use more aluminum packaging in general.

Plastic isnt the only material that you can recycle...

i lost faith in recycling the more I read about it.

especially when most recycling is sent to poor countries to be burned, and if it is actually recycled it is then shipped back again as a single use spoon, then sent back... all the way to less quality materials, and some uses are for fleece that produces a shit ton of microplastics.

real solutions is to ban single use plastics (maybe exceptions for medical uses).

now I'm in the States and I have no idea how to recycle where I am anyways.

We have separate trucks here, but I was behind the recycling truck one day and watched it pull into the landfill.