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Comment by RandomWorker | Hacker News Reader

Markets are efficient and fossil fuel companies are ruthless in making money. So obviously they will price their new plastics always cheaper than recycled.

Cost of recycled and new plastic can easily be inverted by just taxing new plastic until it’s twice as expensive as recycled. Recycled can be subsidized with new plastic taxes. Problem solved!

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Globally only 9% [1] of plastic waste is recycled, and there's a lot of reasons why. It can be dirty, contaminated, low-grade, or simply require more inputs than producing new plastic. The idea that plastic can be meaningfully recycled was an oil industry propaganda campaign to make people feel better about consuming it.

The only way to really make a dent here is to reduce consumption.

We do agree though that the externalities should be priced in and that is a good use of government.

[1] https://www.oecd.org/environment/plastic-pollution-is-growin...

I cannot agree enough with this statement. While some products such as glass and aluminium can be recycled quite effectively, I can’t help but cringe when literally every recycling bin I peek into is filled with 90% contaminated or flat out non-recyclables, because people just put everything in the wrong bin to avoid guilt. I wonder if recycling is even a net positive at this point? Ie, would we be better just throwing everything in the trash if it meant people actually considered their consumption?

Another crazy invention is “compostable” packaging. This has really taken off in the past few years. Yet no one seems to understand that it needs to be composted commercially, yet virtually none of it is. It can’t be recycled, and if you put it in the bin, it won’t compost. Conveniently this is never mentioned. These products are basically a trick designed to keep consumption high by allowing individuals to absolve themselves of guilt.

Reducing consumption is the only solution.

It's even worse when you put contaminated plastics in the recycling bins because if a container load exceeds a certain threshold level of contamination the whole load has to be landfilled.

Fossil fuel companies certainly are ruthless. Though, there's no need for them to play pricing games with recycled plastic. Tax-wise, there is not nearly enough recycled plastic. It turns out most plastic cannot be recycled at all. A number of stories broke not too long ago that the myth of plastic recycling was pushed by oil industries to make everyone feel good about using plastic because they were then "recycling" it.

Some references:

"How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled" - https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...

"California is investigating Big Oil for allegedly misleading the public on recycling" - https://www.npr.org/2022/04/28/1095305949/california-is-inve...

"Big Oil Sold the World on a Plastics Recycling Myth. It May Be Too Late to Undo the Damage" - https://time.com/6173859/plastic-recycling-big-oil-damage/

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