Is there anything more pathetic than a used plastic bag?
They rip and tear. They float away in the slightest breeze. Left in the wild, their mangled remains entangle birds and choke sea turtles that mistake them for edible jellyfish. It takes 1,000 years for the bags to disintegrate, shedding hormone-disrupting chemicals as they do. And that outcome is all but inevitable, because no system exists to routinely recycle them. It’s no wonder some states have banned them and stores give discounts to customers with reusable bags.
But the plastics industry is working to make the public feel OK about using them again.
Companies whose futures depend on plastic production, including oil and gas giant ExxonMobil, are trying to persuade the federal government to allow them to put the label “recyclable” on bags and other plastic items virtually guaranteed to end up in landfills and incinerators.
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Life would be so much more awesome if the rest of the civilised world adopted bottle/can deposit systems. Plastic bottles can be washed and reused. Aluminum cans? Melt 'em, reforge 'em, badassery continues.
I’m nervous about reused plastic disintegrating now. Aluminum, glass or wax paper is all we really need. Remember wax paper milk cartons? There are also aluminum “bottle” in the same shape as plastic ones, so preexisting vending machines can take them fine.
Yeah, and I’m also very hopeful about the bio-plastics developments. Right now, a lot of carton cup/food packaging folks are developing bio-degradable/compostable food containers that try to replace petro-polymers. That’d solve a huge swath of plastic recycling problems.
Problem with the bio-plastics are that they’re still plastics. The micro plastic issue is because they degrade over time. The particles flake off of plastic goods over time. Plastic designed to do that might not solve anything unless they do it quick enough that there’s a very small amount of time they’re in the environment before degrading to their elemental components.
Aluminum is really a perfect packaging material. Relatively cheap, easy to form through a number of methods, durable, and the recycling tech is damn near perfect. Something like 70% of all the aluminum humans have ever made is still in circulation because of that recycling. Glass comes in a close second. Neither are quite as easy or cheap as plastic though. And thus in pursuit of the almighty dollar, we poison the planet even further.