https://climatejustice.social/@breadandcircuses/112303357717712825 Scroll down inside that link for a slightly more extreme version (NSFW).
this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
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I'm fond of saying that recycling is almost exclusively bad for the planet. It's true and people don't like hearing it.
The rhetoric causing people to put their guard down is what’s bad, or actually recycling is a bad thing?
Recycling was actively brought forward as a solution by the oil companies to push the blame of plastic use onto consumers.
So while recycling rare metals is always valuable, plastic is definitely not. Almost all plastic gets buried in landfills, and the only way to make this not happen is to not make products with plastics.
By creating and marketing plastic recycling as a solution that the consumers must take onto themselves, it allowed them to rake in profits by moving everything to cheap plastic alternatives.
We are now literally made of microplastics as a result.
What I don't understand is why burning plastic waste and using the generated heat (for example for district heating) is not discussed more often. I think recycling offers very little benefit over simple burning of plastics due to the amount of oil still being burned everywhere compared to the amount of oil used for plastic production.
I guess I'm surprised we don't do it but we all know that burning plastic is gonna end up directly in the lungs of some poor people who have to live by the pollution factory