this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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Recycling is for most parts a scam
The depends on the material and the recycler. Metals, glass, organic waste, paper, and car battery recycling is pretty good. South Korea, and several European nations have really efficient recycling programs. Even some plastics like PET are easy to recycle. The issue is that a lot of plastics make it very difficult to recycle especially if they are embedded into another material or are specialized for their usecase and most places have trash recycling programs pun intended.
the best thing to do with your car battery is throw it in the ocean. The electric eels use it to recharge.
Plastic recycling is the biggest scam of them all, they ship tonnes of it all over the world. PET gets "recycled" once. Ship around the world, Get some fleece clothes back which can't be recycled.
For non plastic:
Most my packaging materials are going in the fireplace. That way a get energy back.
instead of A, clean it with hot water using energy B, getting in my car driving to recycle center using energy C, have it shipped to a recycling plant,other side of the world or whatever. Using energy from oil.
Material for paper can be made co2 neutral. Organic waste , sure just compost it.
Metalls yea here we have something we're it's great to recycle.
Glass. Meh just heated sand. But old glass needs to be disposed of somewhere so yea it is a point in recycle it.
What should be done is reuse and not using materials I can't recover energy at home from. That's a heck of a lot better.
Glass bottles that gets refilled is a great example. Other good ideas is to repair instead of throwing a way stuff. True for everything from cars to laptops.
From a capitalists view recycling means (to a certain extent) free labour, raw materials and transports.
Reusing and repairs means less sales.
Wish it was that simple, but glass & construction-grade silica sand are actually becoming somewhat scarce and facing shortages. The composition, purity, and grain size make some sand vastly more desirable than other sand. There's already commercial operations grinding down quartz slabs, because thats easier than trying to sieve and process out all the non-quartz grains.
And sand-dredging operations arent any less damaging to the enviroment than other strip mining methods even where there are good deposits. Glass recycling is good.
Ok thanks did not know that. But let's compare this against a better approach.
Energy use for recycling
Vs reuse
Standardized bottle and jar sizes with pant ( not sure about en word, you pay a bit extra and get it back when returned) that instead of being melted down get a cleaned and reused.
Sweden had a good system that's still works but not as good as it use to ( some types was removed and different sizes in use) but still have it for 33 cl bottles, as an example.