A new report from Greenpeace USA reveals plastic recycling has largely failed after decades of being touted by corporations as a solution to the pollution crisis. The report uncovered that only a fifth of the 8.8 million tons of the most commonly produced types of plastics — found in items like bott...
  • balsoft@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    This has been known for a while.

    To be clear, recycling itself is not the problem. We do need it and we do need more of it.

    The problem is that it’s touted as a “solution to plastic waste” and has been used by oil manufacturers to push even more plastic shit upon us. This is the wrong approach, we need to be reducing plastic production as much as possible, down to the absolute bare minimum.

    It is fucking awful when it gets in the environment (and some of it will get into the environment, no matter how good the recycling infra is); also, plastic has a very limited amount of times it can be recycled before losing most of its useful properties.