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Recycling by choice is stupid (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/goodoffmychest@lemmy.world
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Giving consumers a choice to recycle to better the environment doesn't work and is dumb. Evidently, if I want to stop plastic pollution, I need to carefully sort my plastics, but only certain types with my garbage service. This ends up being about half of my purchases. The other half of plastics just go into my garbage bin for landfill. Nevermind the plastic number on each item.

Same with batteries! Everybody is just tossing them. I'm suppose to put tape in the ends and put them in a zip lock. People are not going to do this.

We need laws for the source of the issue instead of these fake fixes that rely on the consumer to "do good" that didn't work.

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[–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

Hank Green made a video on this. As long as we extract fossil fuels at current rates, raw materials for new plastic just comes out as a byproduct. This would be true even without subsidies, unless the lack of subsidies made gas so expensive that people switched to other sources of energy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=325HdQe4WM4

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    Thanks for the source. This is something I'm well aware of. This is also the reason stuff gets double packaged today (six packs of beer wrapped in film), the packaging industry is constantly looking for stuff to push additional packaging to, raw materials are cheap, and if they don't use them the oil industry will have a lot of waste.

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