https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/06/how-recycling-has-become-a-largely-empty-gesture.html
Corporations sold Americans on the chasing arrows — while stripping the recycling logo of its worth.
It was always an empty gesture designed from the start to put the onus on the general population so that plastic could still be produced and sold at ever increasing rates without any responsibility for its outcome. This is also why the least effective part of reduce, reuse, recycle was always emphasized.
That entire motto is a distraction, so that corporations can whinge about consumers not doing "their part".
And don't forget, corporations are also encouraging people not to reduce purchases, and designing their products such that reusing is either impossible (good luck reusing a torn potato chip bag), infeasible, or even dangerous.
Recycle is just the final, catch-all lie at the end. It only works for very specific types of plastics, and even then usually can only be done an astonishingly few number of times.
As the article notes,
the recycling push has encouraged consumers to accept wasteful packaging, particularly plastics, when forcing the use of more biodegradable material would have been a less damaging course of action.
How people got sold recycling works:
♻️. It all goes in a cycle. Circular Economy. Green = natural = good. No waste. Yay!
How corporations actually define "recycling":
https://www.sika.com/en/knowledge-hub/can-concrete-be-recycled.html
Bullshit. Deposits on beer bottles works great. Always has.
And I get paid to recycle copper $$
Just don't buy plastic.