Until Oil & Gas Subsidies End, Plastic Recycling To Remain The Lie It Is Today, @ 9% Of Waste Stream

[hatrack]

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With plastic production set to triple globally by 2060, plastics made primarily from oil or gas are a growing source of the carbon pollution fuelling climate change. Much is also ending up in oceans and severely impacting marine life. Promises by major plastics producers like Nestle and Danone to promote recycling and include more recycled plastic in their containers have been mostly broken. The plastics lobby, along with supermarkets in countries from Austria to Spain, sometimes avoid this responsibility by lobbying against deposit return schemes that include plastic bottles.

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Most plastic packaging is produced from seven grades of plastic that are largely incompatible with each other, and are costly to sort for recycling. Apart from PET, or Polyethylene terephthalate, the world's most common plastic labelled with a #1, and high-density Polyethylene (HDPE), which carries the #2 symbol, five other plastic types might be collected but are rarely recycled, say Greenpeace. PET is the most recyclable plastic and there is a strong market for its byproduct used to make drink bottles, food containers or fibers for clothes. But the harder plastics numbered 3-7 have a very small market since the value of the raw material is lower than the cost of recycling.

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The post-consumer plastic resin created from recycled material is being undercut by cheaper prime material, limiting the market for recycled plastics. Reporting by New York-based market analysts S&P Global, shows demand for raw recycled plastic slowing due, among other factors, to rising transport costs for recycling businesses in Asia and a slowdown in the construction sector that creates plastic building materials.

Ironically, plastic bag bans in Africa and Asia have limited the amount of feed material, which, in addition to low recycling rates globally, is also raising the price of recycled material. While the price of virgin plastic is at the whim of fluctuating oil and gas prices, these fossil fuels are often subsidized. According to Sander Defruyt, who leads the New Plastics Economy initiative at the US-based non-profit, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, recycled plastic would be more competitive if fossil fuel subsidies were phased out.

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https://www.dw.com/en/why-most-plastic-cant-be-recycled/a-64978847

[2naSalit]

1. It's become like...

Lead from gas, it is in everything all over the planet.

[orthoclad]

2. They used "recycling" as a scam

Oiligarchs try to phrase the conversation as "consumer choice" in order to dump responsibility onto the public and avoid the consequences of their action.

They externalize the costs.

If subsidized petrochemicals weren't so artificially cheap, you know damn right well they'd pull out those hidden patents from the safes and start mining their waste materials instead.

Instead, the world has to clean up their shitty diapers at public cost. And animals choke and strangle on their pvfeces.

Mind you, I reuse and recycle as much material as I can, but I'm one individual versus concentrated obscene wealth and political power.

[orthoclad]

3. From the article: a picture

shows the reality of what the oiligarchs are dumping on the world.