The whole idea was bastardized by corporates to avoid accountability and place the blame on the consumers for buying the products they sold to them.

You know what works? Bottle buyback programs.

You know who has lobbied heavily against bottle buyback programs? Coca-Cola.

I don't know what it's like nowadays, but I was living in Germany around 2008-2010 and they had a great recycling program. You bought these clear yellow recycling bags that were sold at any store and put anything recyclable in it. No sorting required. Put it out with trash and they'd sort it all at the recycling center.

Every week I'd have 2-3 recycling bags and maybe one trash bag every other week. So much was recyclable, I almost didn't have any real trash.

Then I moved back to the US and my local recycling service only collected type 1, 2, and 7 plastics. And aluminum cans. Paper/cardboard had to be manually dropped off at the nearest recycling center, batteries needed to go to a separate plant for processing. And if anything had touched food, if was ineligible for recycling.

Heck my current US recycling service only comes every other week. I have twice as much recycling as trash each week! My trash can is mostly empty every week, while my recycling is always overflowing. But they recycle so few products, they've decided it's not worth hiring a team to collect every week. So annoying...

news flash. only about 1% of plastic in use today is recycled.

look up the history. npr has a good article iirc. companies introduced plastic recycling to make consumers feel less guilty.

better to not use plastic as much as possible

It's a good reminder that real change has to come from upstream. Making it the consumer's responsibility just guarantees failure while giving everyone involved permission to just not give a fuck.

Hopefully whatever comes after this collapse of capitalism will resemble a circular economy more than this shit show.

It doesn't even matter.

My entire state of individual people could recycle to high hell and it wouldn't offset the corporations and data centers.

And in some cities in the state I live, they can't process the recycling fast enough so it ends up in landfill anyway.

We need to hold the biggest contributors to the fire. That is the best use of our time and energy.

It's a measure put in place to make us feel better about it and then shift the responsibility and blame onto the citizenry. It's not about about actually reducing plastic waste, you can only do that by using less plastic.

Its like helmet laws for cyclists. They exist, not to prevent head injuries but to shift responsibility for the injury from the State (infrastructure) and the driver to the cyclist. All of the best cycling places don't have helmet laws as they massively undermine the uptake of cycling. They have infrastructure.

Jay walking is another example. People used to be allowed to walk in the street and cars were given the responsibility to stay under 10mph and not run down people. The auto industry lobbied for jaywalking laws so that the liabilities of their machine would be born by the pedestrian, not the owner of the machine.

Plastic pollution is therefore our fault because we didn't recycle hard enough. When in reality it is our fault because all we really want is to feel good about it, not fix it.

Yeah I religiously rinse and dry mine because I don't want even the chance of being more a part of he problem than I already am. It is so freakin hard to stay away from plastic if you don't have discretionary income.