this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
819 points (99.3% liked)
A Boring Dystopia
9748 readers
227 users here now
Pictures, Videos, Articles showing just how boring it is to live in a dystopic society, or with signs of a dystopic society.
Rules (Subject to Change)
--Be a Decent Human Being
--Posting news articles: include the source name and exact title from article in your post title
--Posts must have something to do with the topic
--Zero tolerance for Racism/Sexism/Ableism/etc.
--No NSFW content
--Abide by the rules of lemmy.world
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Recycling is mostly a scam. Most recycled trash is just dumped on third world countries.
This is wrong, please stop spreading this misinformation.
It probably differs from country to country, but in Germany, for example, between 38-48% of plastic is recycled (source). Sure, that‘s far from all of it, but still far, far better than nothing. Falsely claiming that recycling is mostly a scam and, by that, implying that it doesn‘t make sense to try to recycle you trash, is a horrible idea and only makes the situation worse.
Even in that article, they’re talking a bout collecting 48% of plastics but actually recycling 39%. I’m all for giving credit where it’s due, because it’s much better than we do here on the US. But is it not still a scam that so much that people attempt to recycle never is?
No, I don‘t think it is.
Not everything that isn‘t working perfectly is automatically a scam. There are many factors that might prevent a relatively large amount of trash from being recycled, like, for example, contamination with other substances or additives, unseparated composite materials or simply technical limitations.
That‘s not a scam, though, that‘s just the current state of the available technology.
Here in Germany, it‘s pretty common knowledge that these limitations exist. Recycling is still very common, as ~40% is still far better than 0%.
Here in the us, consumer recycling rates are highly variable, depending on where you are, but the common mistake is single stream recycling. Even in areas with high rates of recycling, that much worse sorting means a lower quality waste stream less likely to be recyclable