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As we should all know by now, plastic recycling is a sham. That little recycle symbol (“chasing arrows”) on bottles? Invented by a consortium of plastic industry front groups to put the onus on the consumer to fix the problem they’re creating. Just like the personal carbon footprint was.
Plastic is a) made of oil, b) hard/impossible to sort properly, c) environmentally harmful to process (you have to use a lot of energy to melt it down and reform it into something new), d) often made of and contaminated by toxic materials, and e) not economical to recycle in more than 90% of cases. And less than 10% of it actually gets recycled.
It can also only be recycled once — the composition of plastic makes it such that when you melt it down, a plastic bag (or bottle or …) cannot be made…
Read the full article originally published at cleantechnica.com.