Hopefully lots of people read this and wake up about recycling. It certainly is broken.
"The government doesn't properly support recycling efforts so that it's cheaper to make a bottle out of recycling...or support plants being built so it's cheaper to make bottles and other plastic products from recycled materials."
Even if government got it's slimy hands in there and managed to make it cheaper to recycle than to produce somehow, it's beside the point. When it comes right down to it, it almost universally requires much more energy to recycle than to produce.
The energy is still dirty so the water, air, and soil are too and will be for a long time to come whether you and me recycle the detritus of commerce or not. Maybe once we topple the captains of industry and serve just desserts for their ecocide we can make real progress on dousing the flames.
More likely I see the fire continuing to burn while we urge politicians to do our bidding instead of excising them and doing it ourselves.
Prove me wrong. I hope I can.
It doesn't necessarily have to be more expensive to make bottles from recycling...or even just make other items more often from recycling. The trash always has to come from the person's house, so the cost to bring it to the facility should be paid for just like trash. Then you have the cost of sorting...which would be less if they didn't switch to single stream recycling...but can be automated now anyway. So, then you just have the price of grinding it, washing it, and remelting it. Considering they have to boil the oil and put it through an industrial distillation process and all that, there's no reason that they couldn't lower the cost of recycling so it would be more competitive with virgin plastics. We just haven't invested in plastic recycling facilities, because the cost has to come down for most companies to buy more, which only happens when there are more facilities doing cleaner more efficient processes.
The crazy thing is that it doesn't have to be. They actually could do a secondary burning of many stacks, as well as carbon capture. People just need the incentives to actually upgrade their facilities. Right now, it's just not there. The politicians keep cutting the regulations and people don't force them to clean it up unless it's in their neighborhood.
I think we'll likely end up in one of those dystopian futures, where we have to wear breathers and masks outside and all the buildings have serious systems to clean the air so the workers don't die. And maybe the rich will live in domes.
"They actually could do a secondary burning of many stacks, as well as carbon capture."
I recently saw a story about oil companies doing secondary burns of gas they would have just wasted. They used the energy to mine Bitcoin, and somehow it also worked out with regulations that they could produce more I believe by reducing waste or some such. While they're still burning fossil fuels, carbon dioxide is a less potent greenhouse gas than methane.
Not that I like the fossil fuel industry or anything. It can definitely already be less devastating though, but they're not willing.
Yeah, and we actually can technically deal with carbon dioxide pretty easy. There are various building materials that can be made with carbon...or even from anything made from carbon. One of the worst things about us destroying our oceans is that algae and such deal with a lot more carbon dioxide than all the forests...which we are also destroying at a record pace. We could start making buildings out of products that capture carbon either with plants or machines.
Concrete doesn't have to be reinforced with steel. It can be reinforced with fabric like a cast.
We could grow all sorts of things for building materials.
BTW, capturing methane for farmers is extremely lucrative. I saw a documentary once on a farmer that's using the methane from his cows to power his farm. I laugh every time idiotic politicians talk shit about methane from cows, because right now we're just throwing money away burning natural gas on oil rigs and letting piles of cow shit fume off with the methane. I'm not a huge fan of fossil fuels either...but that's because of the way the industry is. They're raising all those animals, why not increase their income and help the environment at the same time?
I think the primary problem is that they're just unwilling to learn. Ironically there are tons of ways they could increase their profit while doing things good for the environment. They'd just rather do things the way they have always done them because they don't like change.