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Comment by Over2Chars | Hacker News Reader

Getting the recycling into the recycling location is just one of the problems.

recycling plastics is not cost effective (another random article) https://greentumble.com/is-recycling-worth-it

the real "solution" is reducing use, not recycling, and re-use, not recycling. Recycling is what should happen with what's left over after the other two "Rs" (remember the 3 R's?).

Instead the plastics industry says "use as much plastic as you want, we'll pretend to recycle it" and everyone pretends that it's actually happening, and it's not. I think that's called "green washing"

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> recycling plastics is not cost effective

This is a specious claim with an unjustified goal. Municipal waste management is not expected to be “cost effective”. We don’t need to recycle because it’s profitable, we need to recycle to reduce plastic production and plastic waste.

Of course we need to reduce demand, you’re right. We need to avoid plastics in the first place, and that should be higher priority than recycling.

But there’s nothing wrong with the idea of recycling. Yes, today’s recycling is not happening as advertised. But that’s not because recycling doesn’t work, it’s because people aren’t doing it. It’s a social problem we have, not a process problem.

The three Rs were in order of priority but because reduced consumption didn't exactly translate into what works for a sustainable economy under current incentive paradigms almost anywhere in an economy with lots of consumption we kind of wound up with the least important of the guidelines being what we could more reliably practice (the reasons are another discussion entirely).

Almost all the most pressing problems for the human species seem to be Wicked Problem classes and it's part of why I don't have a lot of expectation that any of them will be solved even _if_ catastrophic events like constant war and mass deaths happen. I also have doubts that whoever survives any of these kinds of events would be more genetically predisposed to solving these problems in the future either.

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