Unless we standardise on a single formulation of soft plastic, recycling it seems doomed.
Prohibiting it being used in the first place seems like it might actually be the simpler task.
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Reducing how much is used in the first place should always have been the priority. But businesses hate the idea of any message to use less of something. So they lobby for things like recycling to be pushed instead, because that both focuses the attention on the behaviour of individuals instead of them, and allows them to keep selling more. And people in general seem to be more than happy to believe that recycling magically fixes the waste problem so that they can keep buying their convenient single use products and not have to do arduous things like remember their own shopping bags.
Genuine question:
Assume that it's financial viable, is there anything stopping me from establishing a manufacturing facility whose goal is to produce as much plastic waste as possible?
Because if there isn't, there's our problem...
There are no facilities in Australia which can recycle soft plastics in commercial quantities. It requires a special process which is very energy intensive and expensive to run (pyrolysis / depolymerisation). The only country in the world which does it at commercial scale is Japan, and even they only process around 10% of their soft plastics. Still, it's better than the 0% we do here.
It's unlikely to ever be done here in Australia because it's a lot more expensive to recycle this way than just making new plastic.
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