Recycling is garbage

and how many of you feel like being little boys today?

The Bangor Daily News published an article today that is every bit as false (and so no worse, but no better) than the garbage spewed about recycling by our government, media outlets, schools, and even churches. Virtue signaling and ignorance will beat facts, every time.

Redemption centers are the unseen heroes behind Maine’s recycling achievements

In the last year and a half, 50 to 60 bottle redemption centers in Maine have been forced to shut down due to financial challenges. If action is not taken quickly, the success of Maine’s recycling program could be in jeopardy. While many think of recycling as a simple individual action that reduces environmental impacts, the fact of the matter is that much of Maine’s recycling success is enabled by redemption centers, which require sufficient financial inputs in order to function.

Pro tip: they’re closing because the garbage they’re collecting has no independant value and thus generates no income.

The “Bottle Bill” program, which began in Maine in 1978, puts a 5- to 15-cent deposit fee on beverage containers. Consumers pay this deposit when they purchase bottled beverages and can get reimbursed by redeeming their empty containers at a redemption center. Redemption centers sort the bottles, which are then picked up by beverage companies. The companies pay the redemption center the deposit as well as a handling fee for their efforts. The handling fee allows redemption centers to make money, which allows them to pay their employees and keep the centers functioning.

This policy has been very successful. Redemption centers recycle 40,000 tons of material each year, accounting for 60% of all plastic recycled in the state and 100% of glass recycling, according to the Natural Resources Council of Maine. 

That’s a lie: there is no recycling going on here; these centers collect these materials in one location, where they’re picked up and trucked off to be buried or burned because you can’t reuse the stuff.

NPR, October 24, 2022: Recycling plastic is practically impossible: and the problem is getting worse

The vast majority of plastic that people use, and in many cases put into blue recycling bins, is headed to landfills, or worse, according to a report from Greenpeace on the state of plastic recycling in the U.S.

The report cites separate data published this May which revealed that the amount of plastic actually turned into new things has fallen to new lows of around 5%. That number is expected to drop further as more plastic is produced.

Greenpeace found that no plastic — not even soda bottles, one of the most prolific items thrown into recycling bins — meets the threshold to be called "recyclable" according to standards set by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation New Plastic Economy Initiative. Plastic must have a recycling rate of 30% to reach that standard; no plastic has ever been recycled and reused close to that rate.

"More plastic is being produced, and an even smaller percentage of it is being recycled," says Lisa Ramsden, senior plastic campaigner for Greenpeace USA. "The crisis just gets worse and worse, and without drastic change will continue to worsen as the industry plans to triple plastic production by 2050."

Waste management experts say the problem with plastic is that it is expensive to collect and sort. There are now thousands of different types of plastic, and none of them can be melted down together. Plastic also degrades after one or two uses. Greenpeace found the more plastic is reused the more toxic it becomes.

New plastic, on the other hand, is cheap and easy to produce. The result is that plastic trash has few markets — a reality the public has not wanted to hear.

Trent Carpenter, the general manager of Southern Oregon Sanitation, says when they told customers a couple years ago that they could no longer take any plastic trash other than soda bottles and jugs — like milk containers and detergent bottles — people were upset. They wanted to put their strawberry containers, bags, yogurt cups and all manner of plastic trash in their recycling bin.

"We had to re-educate individuals that a great deal of that material is ending up in a landfill," Carpenter said. "It's not going to a recycling facility and being recycled. It's going to a recycling facility and being landfilled someplace else because [you] can't do anything with that material."

That message has been difficult for the public to absorb with so many different bins in public spaces, and their own communities telling them to put their plastic in recycling containers.

Carpenter says they wanted to be transparent with their customers and tell them the truth, unlike companies that continue to tell customers that plastic, such as bags and containers, is being turned into new things.

"Politically it's easier to just say 'Gosh, we're going to take everything and we think we can get it recycled,' and then look the other way," Carpenter said of the other companies. "That's greenwashing at its best."

Greenpeace found a couple facilities are trying to reprocess cups and containers — sometimes called "number 5s" because of the markings on the containers. But the numbers are low. While 52% of recycling facilities in the U.S. accept that kind of plastic, the report found less than 5% of it is actually repurposed — and the rest is put into a landfill.

So blame the plastic companies?

An NPR investigative report found in 2020 that industry officials misled the public about the recyclability of plastic even though their own reports showed they knew as early as the 1970s and 1980s that plastic could not be economically recycled.

No one was fooled except those who wanted to be fooled. In 1996, NYT reporter John Tierney first used the phrase “Recycling is Garbage” in an article for the Times’’ Sunday Magazine, and although it still holds the record for the most hatemail ever received by the editors, his conclusion remains unrefuted. (Here’s a typical “refutation” found in the MIT Press Reader: the author concedes that Tieney’s right, but the useless labor of consumer recycling serves an “educational purpose“ by raising consumers’ awareness of how much they consume.Brilliant.)

So now it’s on to the final solution: ban all plastic and move on to coconut shells and banana leaves. Then, when it’s discovered that 30%-40% of all produce grown in third-world markets rots before it reaches the market, (and I’ve read estimates as high s 50%) our lords and masters will ban food.

"The real solution is to switch to systems of reuse and refill," Ramsden said. "We are at a decision point on plastic pollution. It is time for corporations to turn off the plastic tap."

After years of embracing plastic recycling, many environmental groups say they hope the public will finally see plastic for what they say it is — trash — and that people will ask themselves if there is something else they could be using instead.