The price isn't some random number attached to an activity. It captures the various costs associated with it and is helpful in directing behaviors for this very reason.
Recycling is more expensive, it likely means that there are associated costs (e.g. transportation, sorting, cleaning, processing, etc) that make it less economical than just throwing it in a landfill. And all these additional costs likely make it the "wrong" decision since they likely contribute to carbon emissions or otherwise wasteful use of the earth's resources
If the price to companies profiting from plastics included exteralities I could possibly agree with you but as it stands these costs are normally paid by disadvantaged individuals or marginalized ecosystems.
Of course, the Soviet Union doing something doesn't automatically mean it's economical or sensible, but at least in premise it should be useful for something.
> And all these additional costs likely make it the "wrong" decision since they likely contribute to carbon emissions or otherwise wasteful use of the earth's resources
I think this doesn't often hold true, yes, an efficient market begets economically efficient resource allocation, but there's more to environmentalism than efficient resource allocation. Your example is good, it's certainly more economically efficient to use less petroleum when transporting goods, and that efficiency can be reflected in final costs. But let's look at another example:
Say you're buying lumber to build a house. There's a local lumber farm that sustainably grows and cuts down trees. Since its close, transportation costs (and associated emissions) are low - largely coming from amortized land costs and labor. However there's another company that buys cheap land from farmers in the Amazon, with cheaper labor, ships it up via freight, and sells it for marginally cheaper. The costs in the latter example are largely driven by transportation - and while cheaper, has a significantly larger carbon impact.
How does this apply to recycling though? Landfills in developed countries have little, if any externalities, because they're engineered to contain waste.
https://practical.engineering/blog/2024/9/3/the-hidden-engin...
That's the same thing I've seen demonstrated. It's really too bad that the plastics industry seized on the opportunity to greenwash wasteful amounts of plastic packaging by giving people a recycling bin that claims to do something useful with that discarded plastic, when in reality it's rare for post-consumer plastic to make any rational sense (other than those things like we're discussing, where people in practice waste even more resources in the recycling process just to feel good that the plastic material itself was technically not 'wasted').
Only if it doesn't offgas. Or leech.
I'm fine with stipulations like using some kind of (economically-viable) filter on the resulting smoke.
All that I "know" about it is only based on vibes so that's why I'm asking.
Better to bury it. Put it back in the ground, where it came from.
The price isn't some random number attached to an activity. It captures the various costs associated with it and is helpful in directing behaviors for this very reason.
It doesn't capture all of the costs. Key term here is "externalities", which are things that should be priced into a transaction, but currently aren't. Like the environmental impact of manufacturing process.
If all major externalities were priced in, and recycling would still be more expensive, then we could confidently say that it's the wrong thing to do.
Or we could use a ton of energy and chemicals to recycle paper (and also to clean it since all consumer recycling in the US is "mixed stream" meaning someone's used dirty yogurt container and beer bottles are all over the paper), and produce much worse paper.
But all "recycling" is too valuable to helping people feel good about consumption, for us to be honest with ourselves about how pointless most of it is besides aluminum and glass, and maybe steel.
This does not have the effect on atmospheric CO2 that you implying, unless the resulting paper is deeply buried - not incinerated, or left to rot, or biodegraded in any way.
Collect enough, and you can melt them into solid blocks that could be used like this laptop stand. Recycling common plastic of the same type (PE, PP) is actually easily done with commonly available equipment, unlike paper.
There are certain exceptions to this -- nickel cadmium batteries come to mind -- but for things like this, the question isn't "is it more economic to produce it new than to recycle it?" so much as it's "is it more economic to recycle it than to dispose of it properly?"
Depends on the price of oil. Metal recycling is far more cost effective that extracting from ore. Glass, too, is very economical to recycle.
Plastic recycling was never about recycling, it was to convince people to use plastics.