As a counter-example, British Columbia recycles its post-consumer waste. There are state of the art sorting facilities near Vancouver that receive this material, sort it, grind it, clean it, and pelletize it. It's then bought and used to produce various industrial and consumer goods.
The recycler receives a subsidy (set through open bid) because the cost of sortation, grinding and cleaning is somewhat less than the recovery price of commodity resins. (Post-industrial plastics, or highly sorted plastics, are much cheaper to recycle and are processed without subsidy.)
The idea that all plastic recycling is "pretend" recycling is false, damaging, and encourages adoption of environmentally damaging alternatives or use of virgin plastics. We should either use more bins and pre-sort everything (which will result in lower recycle rates, but much more economic streams) or subsidize processors to sort streams out and turn them into useful material to be re-used.
The city where I live has 14 sorts of garbage. You have to sort, clean, put it in clear special bags and write your name on it. If you don't do it right, it doesn't get removed (and your neighbours gang up to figure out who screwed it up if you don't write your name). Of course, it's Japan and people are used to following rules, but the system works quite well.
One of the things I don't like about these kinds of issues is the lack of understanding that garbage is as much a social problem as it is a technical problem. We assume that people can't/won't do things and evolve a culture where it is true.
I agree. In the States, we largely adopted "blue bin" recycling that encourages people to dump everything they think might be recyclable into the same blue bin. The idea was that this would encourage high recycling rates, and eventually technology would catch up and figure out how to efficiently sort everything.
So far, that hasn't happened, so we just got high recycle rates but terrible streams of material that are not economic to recycle.
I agree that the Japanese approach would be a better one, even though it would take large social change, and would result in lower recycle rates for quite a while.
> The idea that all plastic recycling is "pretend" recycling is false
It is a pretend _solution_ to plastic polution, because it is incomplete to say the least (like all types of recycling)... and while that is ok for other materials, it is not acceptable for plastic .
For most other recyclable materials it is merely unfortunate, a lost opportunity to reduce sourcing of virgin materials: most metals, glass, wood, cardboard, paper - if they go in the ground it is at least not toxic and even biodegradable short and long term, (and some quantity will always go in the ground, to say otherwise is wishful thinking).
> , damaging and encourages adoption of environmentally damaging alternatives or use of virgin plastics.
No, the idea that it is "pretend" allows us to break the delusion that we are ever going to stop plastic pollution by recycling and move forward: acknowledging that the current solution is woefully inadequate due to the nature of the material means environmentalists and policy makers can focus their efforts on the source of the problem.
> We should either use more bins and pre-sort everything (which will result in lower recycle rates, but much more economic streams) or subsidize processors to sort streams out and turn them into useful material to be re-used.
You keep doing that, for the few parts of the world that have the luxury to care about sorting their rubbish with more granularity, and can afford to actually recycle some minority of it... globally we will continue dumping vast quantities of it in the ground and ocean, the world will never be able to recycle even 50% of plastic waste (honestly 50% would be an incredible feat), so yeah... stop pretending this is going to work, if even 10% of plastics keep going in the ground each year we have failed.
Alternatively imagine what might happen if all the effort focused on attempting to recycle plastic went into forcing packaging manufacturers to switch to biodegradable alternatives. Subsidize manufacturers materials research into viable alternatives, that's an investment that will eventually eliminate plastic pollution, not just stem the flow by subsidizing plastic recycling.
TL;DR Plastic is pollution, paper isn't, keep recycling what paper we can, but don't pretend recycling plastic stops pollution. Plug the hole in the boat and stop bailing out water... otherwise we will definitely sink because the hole is much bigger than any bucket you can make.
The recycler receives a subsidy (set through open bid) because the cost of sortation, grinding and cleaning is somewhat less than the recovery price of commodity resins. (Post-industrial plastics, or highly sorted plastics, are much cheaper to recycle and are processed without subsidy.)
The idea that all plastic recycling is "pretend" recycling is false, damaging, and encourages adoption of environmentally damaging alternatives or use of virgin plastics. We should either use more bins and pre-sort everything (which will result in lower recycle rates, but much more economic streams) or subsidize processors to sort streams out and turn them into useful material to be re-used.