<story><title>Recycling was a lie to sell more plastic, recycling industry veteran says</title><url>https://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/the-passionate-eye/recycling-was-a-lie-a-big-lie-to-sell-more-plastic-industry-experts-say-1.5735618</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>My understanding is that, at least in NYC, the paper is pretty much all turned into pizza boxes.&lt;p&gt;Which are brown. You don&amp;#x27;t have to worry about the inks or &amp;quot;substandard&amp;quot; or whatever&amp;quot;. And then the pizza boxes aren&amp;#x27;t re-recycled because of grease.&lt;p&gt;You suggest we stick to trees instead of recycle, &amp;quot;for paper&amp;quot;. But the whole point of recycling is to turn paper into pizza boxes (and presumably also our Amazon shipping boxes, etc.).&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you&amp;#x27;re trying to argue against recycling paper... when the reality is it&amp;#x27;s a &lt;i&gt;huge&lt;/i&gt; success, when you realize paper is recycled into cardboard.</text></item><item><author>cogman10</author><text>Paper recycling is much in the same vein.&lt;p&gt;It requires a lot of harsh chemicals to remove the inks.  The output paper is substandard.  The whole process is energy intensive.&lt;p&gt;And, the messed up part about the whole thing is that throwing away paper is one of the best things you can do for the environment.  It is natural carbon sequestration.&lt;p&gt;We are far better off tree farming for paper.</text></item><item><author>PaulKeeble</author><text>Something I watched and read about last year was that injection molding of plastic can be done only when one third or less of the pellets are recycled. If there is too much recycled material in the mix it doesn&amp;#x27;t flow into the mold correctly and one third is the most you could possibly use and then that product can not be recycled again. The polymers that make up the plastic simply aren&amp;#x27;t capable of reforming over and over.&lt;p&gt;Given that plastic at best gets 1.3 uses, the initial one and then a third of that material can go into a recycled container. That is it. When you compare that to the thousands of reuses of glass bottles we used to do for milk it is really apparent how awful the plastic process is, its barely better than just throw away. This also ignores the fact that huge amounts of the plastic used isn&amp;#x27;t actually recyclable at all.&lt;p&gt;The triple whammy to all this is that all over the planet people have been cleaning their plastics with hot water, drying and then separating it into different rubbish bags with separate collections and additional bins etc. All for a giant lie about recycling that was never true. We have wasted substantial energy and time on something that never worked and helped destroy the environment even more because of it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lumost</author><text>The OP is alluding to the fact that growing forests, cutting them down, and then burying the resulting paper should use less energy then recycling and produce less toxic waste products due to fewer chemicals. Such activity has a strong possibility of being a carbon negative process.&lt;p&gt;It &lt;i&gt;may&lt;/i&gt; be better for the environment to sustainably harvest trees to produce cardboard then to recycle other paper products.</text></comment>
<story><title>Recycling was a lie to sell more plastic, recycling industry veteran says</title><url>https://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/the-passionate-eye/recycling-was-a-lie-a-big-lie-to-sell-more-plastic-industry-experts-say-1.5735618</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>My understanding is that, at least in NYC, the paper is pretty much all turned into pizza boxes.&lt;p&gt;Which are brown. You don&amp;#x27;t have to worry about the inks or &amp;quot;substandard&amp;quot; or whatever&amp;quot;. And then the pizza boxes aren&amp;#x27;t re-recycled because of grease.&lt;p&gt;You suggest we stick to trees instead of recycle, &amp;quot;for paper&amp;quot;. But the whole point of recycling is to turn paper into pizza boxes (and presumably also our Amazon shipping boxes, etc.).&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you&amp;#x27;re trying to argue against recycling paper... when the reality is it&amp;#x27;s a &lt;i&gt;huge&lt;/i&gt; success, when you realize paper is recycled into cardboard.</text></item><item><author>cogman10</author><text>Paper recycling is much in the same vein.&lt;p&gt;It requires a lot of harsh chemicals to remove the inks.  The output paper is substandard.  The whole process is energy intensive.&lt;p&gt;And, the messed up part about the whole thing is that throwing away paper is one of the best things you can do for the environment.  It is natural carbon sequestration.&lt;p&gt;We are far better off tree farming for paper.</text></item><item><author>PaulKeeble</author><text>Something I watched and read about last year was that injection molding of plastic can be done only when one third or less of the pellets are recycled. If there is too much recycled material in the mix it doesn&amp;#x27;t flow into the mold correctly and one third is the most you could possibly use and then that product can not be recycled again. The polymers that make up the plastic simply aren&amp;#x27;t capable of reforming over and over.&lt;p&gt;Given that plastic at best gets 1.3 uses, the initial one and then a third of that material can go into a recycled container. That is it. When you compare that to the thousands of reuses of glass bottles we used to do for milk it is really apparent how awful the plastic process is, its barely better than just throw away. This also ignores the fact that huge amounts of the plastic used isn&amp;#x27;t actually recyclable at all.&lt;p&gt;The triple whammy to all this is that all over the planet people have been cleaning their plastics with hot water, drying and then separating it into different rubbish bags with separate collections and additional bins etc. All for a giant lie about recycling that was never true. We have wasted substantial energy and time on something that never worked and helped destroy the environment even more because of it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tuatoru</author><text>Pizza boxes?&lt;p&gt;A lot of paper is coated in clays, waxes, or plastics, and many inks might make paper unsuitable for use in food grade products like pizza boxes, without heavy processing.&lt;p&gt;Shipping boxes, maybe. If the structural properties of the resulting board are OK.&lt;p&gt;But most post-consumer paper is unusable for one reason or another. Recycling of industrial packaging is a slightly different story.</text></comment>