I think I read that no matter who you are and what you’ve done, only about 10% - 15% of all plastic you’ve recycled actually gets recycled. The vast majority ends up on barges being shipped overseas or to landfills.
This isn’t to say stop recycling, if it compiles plastic into places instead of just distributing across the globe, then maybe later when people get off their ass and realize we’re in trouble, they might make some kind of bacterial-world-ending-zombie-plague type solution for breaking down plastic waste, at least the plasti-zombie-plague will be isolated to particular regions and countries.
I really would like to know how you came to that conclusion. The OP is from Germany and is collecting abandoned bottles in the street and there are closed loop recycling programs in place. You return the bottle to the store, you get your 25 cents back, the bottle gets crushed and recycled into a new one. That kind of does work. Multiuse bottles are better, but I really struggle to understand how “Picking up discarded plastic bottles” releases more microplastics than letting those bottles out in the environment where they will become 100% microplastic
recycling plastic releases even more microplastics. ban plastic
I think I read that no matter who you are and what you’ve done, only about 10% - 15% of all plastic you’ve recycled actually gets recycled. The vast majority ends up on barges being shipped overseas or to landfills.
This isn’t to say stop recycling, if it compiles plastic into places instead of just distributing across the globe, then maybe later when people get off their ass and realize we’re in trouble, they might make some kind of bacterial-world-ending-zombie-plague type solution for breaking down plastic waste, at least the plasti-zombie-plague will be isolated to particular regions and countries.
Not to mention, the production takes petroleum. It’s also not recyclable multiple times.
I really would like to know how you came to that conclusion. The OP is from Germany and is collecting abandoned bottles in the street and there are closed loop recycling programs in place. You return the bottle to the store, you get your 25 cents back, the bottle gets crushed and recycled into a new one. That kind of does work. Multiuse bottles are better, but I really struggle to understand how “Picking up discarded plastic bottles” releases more microplastics than letting those bottles out in the environment where they will become 100% microplastic
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/23/recycling-can-release-huge-quantities-of-microplastics-study-finds
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2772416623000803
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0269749124005694
This really seems like the kind of situation where you fix one crack and another one pops elsewhere.
Not to mention, car tyres are possibly also one of the highest contributers to microplastics so we might as well be fucked.
edit: maybe my initial post was worded in a confusing way read my update above if you are interested