I’ve randomly heard various iterations of the claim recycling is a scam but never received a fleshed-out explanation or anything
I get 2 totes to get rid of trash for a household of 8 for 30 dollars a month. Compared to the 45 charge for a second trash can, its simply practical. Now what they do with it is unknown to me.
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.
If you’ve heard no explanation to why this would be the case then it’s probably not something you need to waste any mental energy considering.
There’s been a few scandals where waste planned for recycling just gets shipped to the third world countries and dumped.
But also, recycling is a scam because its been pushed onto the consumer by industry where industry should be dealing with the full life cycle of their product design choices.
Industry
bribeslobbies federal government against regulations that would require them to either make better material choices in design or clean up their mess. Instead they push for policies that require the consumer to foot the bill and local government to attempt to clean up the mess.Consumers aren’t in a position to
bribelobby federal government. Local government isn’t equipped to clean up the mess properly so they ultimately rely on industry who gets to charge the local government to clean up the mess created by industry and then only pretend to clean it up rather than actually clean it up.Your answer is perfectly correct for plastic, but not really for other materials.
Basic materials like glass and metal sure, but is also true for complex things like E-Waste and machines, for chemicals or oils, or for things made from toxic or dangerous substances like asbestos.
The scam remains though, glass and aluminium are particularly recyclable, but a lot of the time it is still pushed to the consumer and local government to deal with cleaning it up.
Yeah, that is also true. In the end it’s way easier to list the recyclable things that are not a scam than the opposite. In term of volume though I guess glass and metal are still significant.
Yeah and at the end of the day the cost to make things more recyclable will still likely be born by the consumer in higher prices instead of higher local government rates, but we could at least be forcing more recyclable packaging and better product choices with circular lifecycles.
Unbridled capitalism sucks. The drive for ever increasing profits is a race to find the most loopholes. We as consumers have mechanisms to protect the things we care about in government and regulation and it should be working for us collectively, not to just help a few sociopathic arseholes consume harder than anyone with another private yacht. Sadly government tends to be easily captured by private industry.
The solution is simple, have government regulate effectively. Sadly the steps to get there are complex and a lot of them seem almost insurmountable.
Ted Ed: https://youtu.be/_EF4LXLxquM
Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. In that order.
Recycling isn’t necessarily a scam, but it’s far more effective to just reduce the amount of waste.
Depends a lot on the material, and your location. Paper recycling, mostly legit. Metal, probably. Plastic, unlikely.
Metal: definately.
Metal has been commonly recycled since the days of the village blacksmith.
There is a commercial buyer of scrap metal in every city of any significant size, and has been for longer than the word “recycling” has been in daily use by the general public.
Some day I’ll meet this Nate guy. I guess he’s hard of hearing?
Paper recycling unfortunately makes the problem worse than just sequestering the carbon in a landfill. :(
Yes it is a scam.
For more context, that link is a YouTube video by Rollie Williams of climate town (YouTube) and host of the Climate Deniers Playbook podcast.
He’s a comedian with a masters in Climate Science. His content is great with quirky editing. Couldn’t recommend him more.
It depends on your location and the material, but plastic recycling is kind of a scam. Basically, it requires a lot of labor and energy, the resulting plastic is kind of shit, and as a result plastic is rarely recycled once and basically never recycled twice or more.
The numbers in that link are quite old, I see 2015 and 2010 mentioned. In the Netherlands where I live recycling is a lot higher than ten years ago. That said, a lot of recyclers went bankrupt the last two years because virgin materials are a lot cheaper.
There is labour and energy but it is less than drilling new oil and all that processing and energy to make new material.
“It’s a scam” is a non-statement without further elaboration. What is “scam” supposed to mean here? How exactly are people supposedly fooled? What expectations are not fulfilled?
Not in China.
Oh, do they have some sort od magical plastic nobody else in the world has?
Metal and glass can be recycled almost endlessly. Two of the most renewable materials on earth. Paper can be recycled a few times before it just needs to go to the landfill to decompose. Everything else is not actually recyclable. And the environmental cost of collecting, shipping and re-processing those materials into something “possibly” useable is way more taxing on the environment than throwing them away.
We need to put money and time into finding renewal & recyclable alternatives to plastics and other non-recyclable materials, instead of wasting time moving empty plastic bottles all over the planet to be “recycled”.
Plastic bottle made from PET are highly recyclable, actually. Other plastics are as well, to varying degrees. Sorting is the biggest issue. When you collect PET bottles separately, you can grind them down and make new bottles out of that.
Paper and cardboard are also properly recyclable. However it’s not often economical to do so depending on shipping distances (AKA costs) to a facility that can process it.
Recycling is the final reasonable option, not the first.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
The scam is in the material choices.
Metal and Glass are easy to recycle. It’s also cost and environmentally effective. Particularly with reuse of glass bottles.
Paper can also be recycled. It can also be composted with food waste.
Plastics are the big problem. They can’t easily be recycled, and the resultant plastic is low quality. Any more than 20% remelt is considered unreliable. The only viable options are landfill or incineration.
Recycling plastics is basically a scam. It shifts the blame onto consumers, letting big companies pocket the savings over glass or (waxed) paper containers.
We need to bring back a culture of reusing glass containers. Return, wash, and repack.
We now get milk in glass bottles (extra plus, it tastes FAR better than supermarket milk). We are also trying to phase out plastic use where we can. IKEA is actually remarkably useful for that. They have a lot of glass or wooden kitchen stuff.
I’m also careful to avoid “perfect is the enemy of good” situations. I’m not plastic free, just changing what can be changed without huge disruptions.
Proper recycling isn’t a scam but corporations polluting a billion times more than citizens is why it’s sort of a scam to insinuate that personal recycling could make a difference with such massive levels of corporate pollution.
If we switched it around, people didn’t recycle but corporations did, we’d be 10000x better off.
But optimally everything should be recycle ofc. But that’s an ideal situation and the real world doesn’t usually support those.
Who is that, Arrrr?
Some children’s show I guess. Lemme check.
https://en.meming.world/wiki/Well_Yes,_But_Actually_No#Origin
A claymation, stop-motion picture titled The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!, also known as The Pirates! Band of Misfits in the United States, was released in August 2012.
One of the movie’s characters, Pirate Captain, responds to a question posed by another character with “Good guess, but actually no.” The line is frequently misheard as “Well yes, but actually no,” giving the image macro its trademark line.
Car battery recycling is rather effective, reclaiming nearly all materials.
Yes, and think when growing up the three R’s Reduce Reuse Recycle but which one was pushed the most to use Recycling the only one that doesn’t reduce consumption so companies profits are not hurt.
It’s complicated, take it material by material.
The one that’s closest to a scam is plastic. Virgin plastic is made from oil industry by-products, so in most places it’s a lot cheaper than recycled material and tends to be better quality, because it’s hard to properly sort composite resins. It tends to end up overseas somewhere in Asia, despite ongoing efforts by governments on both sides to end the practice. Burning the plastic to generate electricity is in many places labelled as ‘recycling’ but to me it’s not, it’s just efficient incineration. In British Columbia we take it a little more seriously, where RecycleBC is responsible for ensuring recycled material generally stays within the province, tracks the amount that is successfully recovered and generates reports on recycling’s efficacy, but it means people here sort plastic containers, flexible plastics and all separately.
Glass is not really a scam, there are two ways it gets recycled. In places like Mexico, glass bottles are returned, cleaned and reused. Most other times, glass bottles and jars are crushed into silica, which can then be heated into another glass shape again, so the main cost is heat.
Aluminum (pop cans) are one material that is easy to recycle and cheaper and far less environmentally impactful for industry to use than from new refined bauxite, no real difference in quality. Steel cans (think soup cans) are good as well, and generally metal material recovered from larger items at scrapyards is recycled for profit.
Recycled paper is fine, it does save trees if you care about them. Recycled paper tends to become things like cardboard boxes and bathroom tissue, as quality does deterioate each cycle. I’ve been by a paper recyling plant, it stinks a lot of the time but I know they do good work there.
Organics are not recycling, these do successfully become mulch a lot, but anyway the word “compostable” is a bit of a scam and not regulated well. Especially those compostible utensils and bags, they may compost in very specific conditions, but don’t just disappear if you leave it on the ground or in the water.
In any case you’ll want to also consider the cost of transporting, sorting and processing when recycling. That’s why reduce and reuse are better ways to reduce impact compared to recycling. So while there usually is a benefit to recycling, when it’s emphasized particularly by pop bottle companies and oil funded entities, it’s kind of a guise to get you to consume more plastic. I think that’s why people call it a scam.
Virgin plastic is of course better quality, but it is not cheaper than recycled. Both vergin and recycled material is related to oil pricing. When oil surges and plastic prices go up, then suppliers are more likely to purchase recycled material to lower costs. But only about 20% regrind goes into new products.
