Remind me why it’s up to the consumer and local municipalities to recycle their products…
Out here they’re required to recycle their own waste. And we (consumers) get a cashback for bringing the empty bottles back to the store (any store) intact!
Can and glass jar drinks taste so much better to begin with. I never got why PET became the goto bottle… cans recycle so well too…
It feels like if we can have a 2x price increase on everything and somehow manage, we could have banned PET and had a 1.05x price increase and not even notice it.
plastic is cheap, plastic is light, plastic is durable. it’s not that strange that PET bottles became the standard
but like, why wouldn’t they recycle their bottles? PET bottles are the single easiest to recycle plastic, they very obviously have the infrastructure to do it, are they just not doing it in the US because being shitheads is part of their mission statement?
Recycling plastic is a sham created by the plastics industry to make us let them create as many plastics as they want. Yes, it can be recycled, but a heck of a lot of the time, it’s not profitable to do so, and a certain percentage will be littered, fall off a truck, or whatever, and end up in the ocean. Ultimately, that’s all their fault for making it in the first place.
If a someone manufactures poison and sells it to whoever wants it, and someone puts it in the water supply, who is more at fault, the person who put it in the water, or the person who profited by no-questions-asked sales?
Capitalism works this way, unfortunately.
Here is one more article based on a 2025 report saying something similar.
Only 9.5% of plastic materials produced globally in 2022 were manufactured from recycled materials. The findings, reported in Communications Earth & Environment, are part of a comprehensive analysis of the global plastics sector, which also reveals a large increase in the amount of plastic being disposed of by incineration and substantial regional differences in plastic consumption.
Plastic production has increased from 2 million tons per year in 1950 to 400 million tons per year in 2022 and is projected to reach 800 million tons per year by 2050. As a result, plastic pollution is a pressing and growing global issue, posing major challenges for the environment, economy, and public health.
