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this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2025
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Recycling is a fraud. It was invented by the oil and plastic industry to pass the blame to consumers and shield themselves from repercussions. While some plastics CAN be recycled, its only numbers 1-3, every other plastic cannot be recycled or its so expensive that companies had no incentive to do it, and this still doesn't include paper that also has a limit on what it can be recycled to.
Plastic recycling is a lie, sure.
Recycling other materials like aluminum, steel, copper, glass, and a ton of other materials is perfectly sound. Oil companies just piggybacked on the success with those materials to sell their lie.
Not as much as you think. Many of the recyclable materials you mentioned are “contaminated” with the contents they were used to deliver because folks don’t wash them well enough. It’s not their fault; we’re told to “rinse” the materials, but they really have to be fully washed, a tough task for many of those cans with crevices and ridges that are often missed. Other contaminants include throwing in what you think is the correct metal or plastic, but it’s not, and that ruins a whole batch.
As usual, John Oliver says it best.
Raw materials come from the ground. By your standards of “contamination” aren’t raw materials much more contaminated?
A lot of work goes into refining glass, aluminum, steel, copper etc. A lot of impurities have to be removed to make those materials for the first time.
Raw materials is not what we’re talking about here. Local recycling plants are not processing raw materials - that’s a completely different process. They are very limited systems designed to process consumer materials.
We’re talking about whether recycling is feasible.
Whether or not it is feasible is decided by how hard it is to do compared to just making new materials.
Your comment seemed to be saying the contaminates in recycling make them harder to recycle back to their raw materials (compared to making new raw materials).
Metallurgy isn't my field, but here's an educated guess...
There are different kinds of contaminants. In raw ore you largely have silicate rock and metals. In recycled material you have relatively pure metal (alloys), and a large variety of volatiles.
Now with ore you can grind it all into sand, sift it, and smelt all the heavy grains. The rock should mostly just separate from the metal, these are just phase changes. But with recycling, those volatiles are going to burn and some are going to react with the metals, changing the chemical makeup. And with ore, you basically know what minerals you're working with. With recycled materials, it's anyone's guess. Does this can contain some food residue? Or an oil? Perhaps chemical cleaning agents? Is another plastic container stuffed inside?
There's a lot of variables with recycled materials, I imagine it's hard to predict how some of those variables react.
For metals, it's pretty trivial to remove slag (contaminants) from the metal. Basically everything floats to the top and you can just scrape it off.
SOME recycling is a fraud. Glass, metal and paper is great for recycling.
Plastic in general is just awful.
Where I live it's only 1-2. Also, sorting is a challenge, and we often don't know if it actually gets recycled or ends up on a ship to India.
Ours just goes to the landfill. I happened to be behind one of the recycling trucks when I was on a dump run once, and it pulled into the same trash pile I did.
Stopped paying $25 a month for it when I got home.
Paper can be recycled 7 times. Every time the quality degrades because the fibers get shorter. The last recycle is purely for toiletpaper or crêpe.
Suri, but everyone uses toilet paper and that will never be recycled so it's still a good idea to recycle paper.
Also I remember talking to someone who makes plastic molds and they were saying that recycled plastic loses some of its desirable qualities, so even recyclable plastics have a limited lifespan.
I agree but it doesn't have to be that way.
In all honesty plastics should be phased out since its in every guys sperm.
Well in that case I have no problem "phasing out plastics" on the nightly.
I try and do my part.
100% is not realistic physically. You should phrase the question as a world where everything that's possible to be recycled is recycled, and where it isn't we go back to materials that are naturally recycled or reusable. Basically a world where plastics and other materials that are one-time use are banned. It's a great topic, as we don't remotely realize how much we throw away. The scale is huge. The change in what is affordable or possible would be huge too.
We could do a lot better, and it would be impactful. Some things have to be disposable in our modern world though, at least with current technology. Just medical use alone is a big example.
Thats the natural progression no?
Then clearly we're resisting "natural" progression, whatever that means. It's definitely against the direction for economic growth, and that runs the world. Line go up.