Say it isn’t so — most plastic should go into the trash?

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/12/14/why_its_probably_better_to_throw_plastic_in_the_trash_152089.html

I am shocked, shocked I tell you, to hear that a huge corporation with massive profits from plastic production would have lied to us about plastics being recyclable.

https://apnews.com/article/california-exxonmobil-lawsuit-plastic-8c5830696ffb02031c53c3077457ebc5

An interesting take from the RealClearPolitics article is lumping glass, and plastic together. If you use something glass, even if you don’t recycle it, it’s gonna get crushed and eventually will pulverize back down to the level of silicon dioxide it came from. Otherwise known Sand. Plastics on the other hand disintegrate into smaller and smaller particles which will never fully break down over thousands and millions of years.

When I was a kid, we would go visit my grandmother, and she had a wooden crate in her garage full of glass bottles of soda. We can have as many as we like, but the rule was you had to put the bottle back so she could return it for its deposit. If I’m not mistaken, those bottles were cleaned locally and reused. I don’t think any kind of local reuse infrastructure like that exists anymore, but it might be worth at least investigating whether it’s possible.

At any rate, my main take away from the RealClearPolitics article is reduce my use of plastics in the first place. I suppose a different tank would be that old plastics aren’t quite so bad as everyone makes it out today. That’s horse hockey.