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The two problems have a decent amount of overlap though. For example, I recently learned that car tyres are a huge contributor to microplastic pollution. This means that improving public transport infrastructure will reduce CO2 emissions and microplastic pollution.

But we still have microplastics in our brains, which does warrant some concern I think.

Hey, maybe all the plastic will lead to such significant fertility issues, populations will crater, and ARGH won't even matter anymore!

That's still the way it works in Denmark, but with plastic bottles too. Something like 98% of all bottles are recycled.

They'll blame woman for being too slutty and fucking everyone BUT THEM.

Unfortunately they'll just claim not praying to god enough and the existence of trans people causes ED and shrinkage...

It ain't capitalism, it's the stupid fucking consumers. If a product, already plastic wrapped 3 times before they touch it, has a tiny hole, "Oh no, that one has a hole. I want another one." Hell, anything imperfect gets tossed. My dumpster at work is packed full of plastic because assholes won't take anything even slightly unperfect.

It's the idiots buying single, shrink wrapped potatoes. It's the idiots who think a Keurig cup is an ecological disaster, while every other drink they buy wastes 4-5x as much. How about the idiots buying kitchen containers while they toss the, often better, container their food came in?

When I was young, it was the idiot hippies whining about paper bags, like we were chopping down old-growth forests instead of making them from lumber waste (which is sustainable). Congrats assholes, you won, now we're buried in plastic bags and choking turtles to death.

Until people stop buying so much new shit, reject plastic containers (as much as feasible) and start paying a premium for biodegradable packaging, we're sunk. Or, better yet, we could force less waste via legislation.

unfortunately they never make it to mainstream media

Sounds like this "mainstream media" is not doing its job. This might have some kinds of implications for the current state of affairs in the USA. Can't put my finger on exactly what though.

Sad that NPR is not considered "mainstream" these days. Maybe Joe Rogan will post something to Facebook about it?

Have we considered calling it a tariff instead of a tax? Tariffs on all new plastic. It might work.

Yes... plastic recycling can work, in theory, but the financial incentives are not naturally inclined to be in a way that recycling is feasible, since externalities encompassing the damage that plastic production has to our world are not accounted for in its price. (Caveat: the products that can be made from recycling are physically unable to be perfectly like the previous products they came from)

Like the cost burden of tobacco use being put on both users and producers, plastic must be dealt with the same way in terms of taxation levies so that plastic alternatives and plastic recycling are competitive compared to new plastic from oil by-products.

We have bottle deposit in some states in the u.s. Some do it better than others though, grew up in Michigan and there any place that sold bottles had to be able to return them and a lot of the grocery stores had the machines. Moved to California and it seems like none of the stores are set up for it and the cashier will often turn you to a recycling center.

Most plastic can’t be recycled into something usable. Plastic degrades quite a bit with each recycling, leaving a bunch of microplastics behind (same thing with “biodegradable” plastic). It would be better to tax it enough (or ban it) to make it not used in certain applications.

They also both have the advantage of being things that will naturally degrade over time if left outside instead of just sticking around forever

Correct. Paper (PS: or at least brown cardboard), glass and alu will always be great candidates for recycling.

Yup! Those things are easy (comparatively) to recycle because they're single material items, so the process is:

• clean
• break down / melt
• rebuild

"Plastic" is thought of as a single material, but even vegetable packaging will be made of around 5-10 different polymers, so for it to be valuable, you need to break it down back to those original polymers.

It's not a issue with recycling as a whole, its specific to plastic as a material.

The more I see plastic being integrated into construction, the more I worry we're just postponing the inevitable. Concrete, stone and steel and basically reusable or recyclable and low impact on the environment when dumped. Plastic on the other hand slowly degrades into microplastics and seeps into waterways. Sometimes we forget that buildings don't last forever.

It seems there's been a flip. The myth is now that plastic is not recycled and it's all been a lie which is the actual lie.

The information around what types of plastics are easily recycled has never been a secret.

There is this weird mindset where people, often children are given a simplified explanation of things and then feel they were lied to when they find out their is nuance.

The entire world of information works this way. If the nuance was included from the start no one would learn anything because they would be bogged down in details. Every topic is a Wikipedia like rabbit hole with no bottom. It's what we have specialization in society.

The issues with plastic are not in its recycling. It's that is breaks down into what are essentially forever chemicals. This is the dilemma.

Producing less plastic because it's not recyclable is bad messaging.

Producing less plastic because it creates a substance that will last for eons is the problem. We've known about this property for decades but the repercussions of it have become more pronounced.

We need to stop making more plastic and work out how to chemically dissessemble the plastics already created without creating a worse output.