How Big Business Broke Recycling (And Blamed You)
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- Опубликовано: 24 апр 2024
- Recycling has been the gold standard for fighting pollution for decades. But most plastics can’t be recycled and the companies that push for recycling are the ones often generating the most emissions and waste in the first place. Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant looks at how we have been told to “reduce, reuse, recycle” to shift the responsibility from companies to the individual.
Based on the book by Jenny Price.
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I'm so glad PBS is making these videos to inform the public. I hope they cover how industries send microplastic contaminated wastewater to local wastewater treatment plants that are not designed to filter it, allowing for microplastics to go back into the environment and passing the financial responsibility to fix it onto the public.
that was a fun start and then the more i read the worse it got, i really hope this is all fixable
Not without some heads that shall roll...
Are they pbs?
Keep Shining the Light
its incredibly easy for waste water plants to remove microplastic
Also, can we talk about the right to repair? I'm getting tired of throwing out appliances because there's no one able to fix them -- for lack of parts, lack of knowledge, lack of accessibility to the area of the appliance that needs fixing. I'm SICK of throwing out toasters and kettles cuz no one can fix them.
I've kept an dehumidifier running for over 15 years because I can take it apart and clean it but I can't with the new one we bought recently
you can't even buy rebuild kits for new cheap push mowers, you just buy a whole new carb for 20$ lol, solid half pound of useless plastic
It's all disposable including ev's.
I love taking my electronics apart and cleaning them. It's the only thing that gets me to vacuum.
I hear 'ya, though doesn't help when the bulk of stuff is manufactured overseas, where environmental regs are non-existent, and the labor & materials to make new ones are often cheaper than the repair.
Yes! Some tiny part of an appliance breaks and you have to buy a whole new one. It’s wasteful and infuriating.
The hot plate on my coffee pot rusted through. It took me forever to find a metal disc that would fit. And when I did, I laughed maniacally at my success.
One of plastic's biggest investments isn't R&D or manufacturing. It's Congress.
Congress works for big business. Ive manufactured, worked retail, and now I drive freight. It is hilarious the companies telle consumers not to use plastic. They individually wrap socks. They wrap things in the factory to keep dust off. They wrap the individual socks in larger bags, then tape them(more plastic) put them in card board, tape them again and saran wrap them into oblivion to attach them to pallets( all of which require mass deforestation), then they send em to the retailers distribution center, who un wraps them, sorts them and then saran wraps them to their pallets. Then if they dont use them all they re wrap them, or if they dont sell, they put them in plastic garbage bags and throw them in a compactor. Did I mention the socks are made out of plastic or have plastic content?
@zeroshepard9513 socks! I can't find 60 per cent cotton socks; they just make 100 per cent polyester, petroleum socks and say they wick moisture. Low quality petroleum socks.
@@Rubicola174 that may be true, but the price certainly is somewhat proportional to the service. it may not cost that much to get the draft for a new law, but it’ll cost a bit more (still not that much more considering the severity) to be able to write that draft yourself (which is literally how most laws are created, draft put on desk of committee by corporate employed lobbyist, presented to parliament as is, most likely passed without discussion, probably with a good portion of bought votes)
@gooser__43 Wool is actually good in hot and cold if you get a midweight with high wool content. Some brands are even USA made. Pricey, but I tried going back to cotton and decided wool was the cats pajamas... well, the sheep's.
@@zeroshepard9513 thanks
Tax plastic manufacturers to pay for cleaning up the mess they created.
They blame the companies buying it, as they cannot make an end user NOT just toss it around. So now we get taxed every piece of plastic we temporarily use..
They will just give the tax to the consumers
@@mariofixright but that price signal would give an opportunity for alternatives to step in because they wouldn’t have the marginal cost of plastic in their price
Yes. Manufacturers should pay a recycling tax when they sell products. That recycling tax should be based on what it would cost to dispose/recycle after it is no longer in use. This would encourage manufacturers to create products that cost less to recycle..
" manufacturers to pay for cleaning up the mess they created" - This video, and your comment, are just an attempt to make people feel better. It's always "they/them/their" problem. In case you don't realize it, you are part of the problem.
One of the best explainer videos for this issue. I worked as an engineer with plastics for more than 20 years and we avoided recycled plastics because they are so inferior. The motto Reduce, Reuse, Recycle is in descending order meaning we should focus on reducing first and then reusing and use recycling only as a last option because there re so many issues with it. This video shows this wonderfully!
Thanks so much!
Also, kids being sold recycled needles for their lining of juice boxes.. thats just one contamination of 1000s from recycled plastic and pfas.
I am not saying this view is incorrect, and it feels like an engineering perspective on the issue. The order Reduce, Reuse, Recycle also represents a descending order of control by engineers. Reduce is better engineered materials, a high level of control. Reuse shifts control to post market. Recycle intends to create a marketplace for used up material, or post reused. I don't have and answers or recommendations for what might work and the way the plastic lifecycle exists now does not work.
That being said plastic still seems like a net gain for humankind. It's the waste that is an issue and I mean almost all waste.
Yes, "Reduce, reuse, recycle" implies that of these, reduce is the best option. But the issue is that it implies that recycle is a viable option, not much worse that the others. For wastes that have already been minimized and reused as much as possible, recycling what is left is great. But there's a sharp drop off in efficacy at each step.
As a kid, I thought these were all close to equivalent. Seeing what is presented to kids today, it still feels that way. It's not... even if everything gets recycled, it's still far better to reduce waste or reuse containers rather than relying on recycling.
Sadly yet again the United states is stopping the rest of the world from advancing
Nailed it with this one line: "it's cheaper for companies to make more plastic than to recycle it"
= all about the bottom line💰
The free market always makes the right choice….for the market.
It's consumers making that choice.
@@Robert-cu9bm uh huh... and tell me. When was the last time you saw shampoo available to purchase in a glass/metal/cardboard container? Just using that as one example, but it's not consumer choice when there is no choice.
@@anthonydelfino6171
They do, they chose the cheapest product in plastic which forced the others to move away from expensive packaging, otherwise they'd have no business.
@@Robert-cu9bm and that happened what? 50? 60 years ago?
consumers TODAY don’t have choices
It's always nice to be reminded that our throwaway society is literally only decades old. It's not too late to change.
It’s far too late bud. The corporations control the regulators.
Sadly while the United states exists we are going to see the destruction of the planet in the next few years. Your insatiable greed for money is not sustainable especially when you're propping up China who is poisoning the planet so you can have toys
The companies that lied should be held accountable for fixing the monster they made.
The companies responsible, have made so much money on producing & using plastic, that they don't want to change. With this money, they can lobby and pay politicians to turn down any laws that make them change.
And they cannot be allowed to dictate how that happens, which is what they are currently lobbying to do.
By who? The government they control?
the people who pushed this on to The public retired with their millions of dollars in corporate bonuses decades ago.
What a naive statement. You still think the system works? It's designed so that they are never accountable.
Big business has broken the planet.
Money broke everything, greed just made it worse.
Corpocracy
Salt was originally a salary and money. So you are blaming your salary and salt... yvan, greed is the primary goal of corporations, by their own laws.
@@dertythegrower And money bought those laws, so back to square one for the root of evil.
No, it's the economic profit system that's to blame, not big businesses. Businesses have to compete for market share. It's not in their best interest to recycle.
What? Big corporations aren’t working for the public interest?? OMG 😱 how shocking.
Grew up with Nova science; your documentaries on the world inspired me to enter the field of environmental science. Watching Terra content now is a bittersweet experience because of the direction we’ve gone, but I cannot thank you enough for continuing to make the material that you do, and focusing on the reality of the situation we find ourselves in. PBS is the premier educational platform of our nation.
I'm glad to see PBS using the correct framing, which is that this is a problem of production and not one that end-users must take responsibility for individually as you often hear and read in most mainstream media and literature. And it's just wrong that taxpayers are footing the bill for recycling in the form of city-operated recycling centers.
Amen.
Plastic bag 'recycling' is the latest scam in this story. Plastic bag bins are at every grocery store but 90% of bags put in those bins end up in landfills or incinerators. 10 % end up at recycling plants that theoretically recycle them but probably not.
You can pack them and make park benches and chairs, etc... and it looks decent kind of like a tiedye but inside the compressed plastic
The plastic bags were the only safe option during the Covid pandemic though.
@@francismarion6400 Nope. Paper works just fine.
@@NeighborhoodOfBlue Paper wasn't an option. The tree huggers took that out.
What do you think happens to paper and cardboard "recycling"?? 🤣
The lack of reuse is sad. When I was in college, we'd take weekend trips to Mexico, buy beer direct from the breweries, and they'd come in glass bottles that had *VERY* clearly been through the bottling machine dozens or hundreds of times, just getting thoroughly cleaned between reuse. Rather than breaking them down and remelting them into new bottles. The breweries even gave you a ton of money to bring back the bottles - more than half the total price to buy!
Thankfully, we are starting to see a return to actual reusability. In my town, it's common to be able to get beer in "growlers" that you fill at the brewpub, take home, and fill your cup from; then you just rinse it and refill it on your next trip.
Even my local sports stadium has moved to reusable drink cups. Instead of throwing away tens of thousands of cups per game, they have collection containers for the reusable cups next to the trash cans so they wash and reuse them game after game. (I'm sure many get thrown in the trash, I don't see on their website if they actually dig through the trash for them, or if they're just considered lost.)
It's still that way in Germany. Buy a case of beer, and you can tell the bottles have been reused (old adhesive lines from where the old labels were removed). Returning the bottles for deposit (pfand) is a big deal (even though it's a small amount per bottle).
Some local dairies do this with big glass milk jugs. Its also not the ultra filtered watery milk either.
@@HotMudrsin California their are some milk companies that are now selling milk in glass jars. There's a three dollar deposit, incase the bottle is not returned, but you get it back or vouched for the next bottle.
I'll try to find the article because I can't remember which university it was (not a huge one but a pretty big one) where student news staff basically discovered that the school's recycling program was a scam. The state had essentially rolled out an incentive program encouraging schools to recycle more and gave the ones that signed up a bunch of green trash cans and money to get a recycling program started. This university had taken the money, put out the trashcans, made a big deal about to the student body and I wanna say even fined them if they were caught misusing the recycling cans by throwing away regular trash in them, but never actually did anything to implement a recycling program. All the trash went to the same place. They just pocketed the money.
I've seen a lot of trash cans with two openings - one blue for recycling and one black for trash. Both clearly go into a shared bin. It's so blatent.
@gedelgo3242 Even when things are recycled" most of the time it is sold to China to recycle the plastics and most of that is just dumped in the ocean once they are out at sea because there is no profit to recycling it. Less than a quarter of plastics are even recyclable and the profits are slim at best so they just keep what can be used.
@@gedelgo3242 hahaah that's awesome I want a trash bin like that for my house lol
@@gedelgo3242 All of those that I've seen have a divided bin under the lid. Look into it before you jump to conclusions
I liked the glass bottle days. I remember some people would do glass blowing with some of the old bottles, made some neat stuff.
It's not just plastics, many industries have pushed the blame and the responsibility for the pollution, waste and other environmental issues from the producer to the consumer. No industries take any responsibility at all for the mess they leave behind. It's all pushed onto the individual and the costs are covered by public money, not companies.
I'm all in favor of long-term plastics for car bumpers, appliances, tools, etc., but we really need to eliminate single-use plastics in favor of bamboo, hemp and other plant materials, and also use permanent steel mugs and recycled paper.
These long-term plastics are the ones dragging down this 9% recycling rate. The 9% not only includes what goes in our blue bins, but uses all plastics ever manufactured as the denominator. PBS's early example of yogurt container is misleading because HDPE containers are highly valuable because they are so easy to recycle with a recycling rate of 29% (2018 epa study). Still not great but there are so many parts of the US that still dont have reasonable access to recycling. Don't get me wrong, single-use items are downright silly when there is reusable alternative.
One amazing factoid about aluminum - we know how much "ever produced" is still in use because the use of aluminum is *REALLY* recent. It wasn't until the 1880s that Aluminum production became cheap. Before that, aluminum was often more expensive than gold! (The top of the Washington monument is aluminum because it was "a fancy expensive metal" at the time of its construction! And at the time, at about 7 pounds, it was the largest ever cast aluminum object.)
3:11 another thing people do not consider is the fact that aluminum cans? Yeah, they're lined in plastic.
AFAIK that thin plastic liner just burns when the aluminium is recycled.
@@yvan2563 Well, yeah but that's not a good thing?
Then there's the whole microplastic particles ending up in your system thing.
I find it funny that incinerator/generator is BAD, but burning the plastic liner in open flumes is not and ENVIRONMENTAL. 🤣 Japan can reach 84%, half of which is thermal regen but that still is much better than USA. So it is you (USA) that's the problem. But what does one expect from a group that thinks quick-fire baseline coal plants don't count towards emissions in their green utopia.
That plastic liner is basically the only way to make Al can usable for food. Steel cans are also lined with plastic or some paint. But compared to a plastic container, it is very small amount.
Regarding emissions of burning it, I have no idea. The only hint I have is they melt at very high temp, so maybe the plastic is fully burned (ie CO2+H2O+residue), and that residue amount is small and can easily be removed from the molten metal.
Burned off in the recycling process.
If you want it to stop make the shareholders pay. Take 10 cents a bottle out of dividends payments and the problem will be solved quickly.
They'll add 15 cents to the cost of coke. Always pass the buck to 'consumers'.
@@Ou8y2k2 the money we get back for returning our empties hasn't gone up in decades. I was SIX returning Coke cans for 5¢ in the early '90s. They've er, canned, the whole incentive program effectively. That 5¢ is barely worth 2¢ in these times, and the floor for purchasing even the cheapest candies from a bin has gone up in that time.
Why isn’t t it solved then, you think?
@@MauroDraco capitalism wants to pay nothing for the invincible right to maximum profit. Which means bottle deposits don't follow inflation, which means no investment in ACTUAL recycling. And since capitalism is the religion of our time, nobody can legislate anything unless they can sell everyone on the profit available in doing it.
Once upon a time, in a not too distant past, recycling was subscription based. Milk was delivered to your doorstep in a glass container. You drank the milk, left the empty glass container on your doorstep. A few days later someone returned, picked up the empty glass container and left you another full glass container of milk. The empty glass container they took away, was cleaned and refilled with milk...and the entire process started all over again. That was true recycling! The system we have now is inferior and it's a sham. Ahhhh, the good old days!
They was Reuse, not Recycle.
@@kanderson-oo7us yes, exactly and it worked perfectly!
Well, just remember, the second that microplastics are deemed hazardous, these companies will be hit with the largest class action lawsuits the world has ever seen.
Lol, if oil companies got away with lead in gas they'll get away with this too
Well, it won't mean much until Chevron actually gets forced to pay out the billions it owes for killing people in the Amazon.
Those companies own the government, and nothing will ever happen
Reduce trash, ban all plastics, buy and carry your own water bottle!!! Thank you for this informative news clip!!!
I lit up coke's customer service when they did their last "recycle campaign".
I told them, "i cant build a recycling plant but you can and wont."
You actually believe a building that says recycling on it recycles? It's a scam up until recent China was taking the majority of our "recycling" and disposing of it. It's just way too expensive factoid they won't tell you so it gets dumped in other countries.
Thank you for keeping me sane 🦋
"Socialism for the rich. Rugged individualism for the rest of us."
This is exactly what I want to see from pbs
Every things needs to be recycled or reused.
Every manufacturer needs to design products so that they can be easily recycled.
All new products should be made with recycled content.
All products should be designed with disassembly in mind, both for repairability and recyclability.
Really truly and honestly thank you for the uptick in content regarding these long time issues
When I was a little girl (the past millennium...) all dairy products came in glass bottles and containers; some came in cartons. You gave the glass ones back to the milkman when buying fresh dairy. And, you could get some coins or a discount when taking back to the shop the empty bottles of all liquids. Cooking oil was sold in glass bottles, or in bulk - you took your own bottle to the grocery store and it was filled according to how much you wanted. Sugar, and other goods like those ones were also sold in bulk - they were put in paper bags. Others came in cartons, or light cardboard boxes. Trash was packed in newspaper sheets.
Indeed, plastics are necessary for several things, but for most of the single-use stuff, it is unnecessary.
By the way, do you know why drinking straws are called "straws"? They were made from literal straw. I never knew what plant it was used for them, but straws were literal hollow *straws* when I was a little girl. Very resistant. Didn't taste bad.
sugar came in paper bags here, 5Kg bags, and the "lower quality" brands came in plastic, now they are all plastic
The problem is you need a “milkman” traveling through your neighborhood in order for the bottle returning business to work. You also need to have your whole neighborhood supplied by the same milk supplier. This business model just will not work in 2024.
@@onetwothreeabcwhy not?
@@S.A.White... Because (I guess) you don’t want to pay $10 for a bottle of milk everyday.
@@onetwothreeabc why would a milk delivery man cause milk to be $10?
Fun Fact: In 2022 plastics were detected in human blood for the first time (in circa 80% of those tested). The stuff had obviously already been found in other parts of the human body. The health impact is not yet known, but at least some guys made a profit for a while. Let's hope it doesn't get past the blood-brain barrier or compromise immune function or interfere with reproduction. EDIT: OK just scratch the part about about the blood-brain barrier, because research has already shown that microplastics can breach the blood-brain barrier. Let's hope it doesn't interfere too much with reproduction, then! Would be a shame if we did Children of Men to ourselves.
everyone should see this, knowledge is power
That was sadly depressing, exasperating and ultimately really really messed up.
😡
PBS Terra, thanks for covering this. This is exactly the type of content I would like to see covered in news, such that we can illuminate this variety of corruption and put a halt to it if possible.
A concept to reduce the disposable mentality and reject planned obsolescence starts with changing the perception of what a landfill's purpose is and when a consumer has to recon with the full cost of the products they are buying. The full cost being a full circle to convert the materials purchased back into a safely usable commodity. By viewing a landfill as a storage facility much like a storage locker that has an ongoing cost to store a product until that product is removed and then incorporating that cost into future purchases of that product will eventually make those products which are lacking R&D to return them back into something useful and thereby remove them from the landfill, into unaffordable elements in a responsible economy. Products that have a longer life cycle will become more affordable and products that are easily reused or inexpensively converted into other in demand useful products become the winners in the market.
Municipalities/states/etc receive their costs of collecting and storing and transporting end of life materials before they are purchased and disposed of, regardless of how and where the consumer has abandoned the product. Eventually the industry that wishes to produce and or import will need to invest in responsible circular product management to continue being able to sell their product affordably and competitively.
THANK YOU PBS !
Everyone should also watch THE STORY Of BOTTLED WATER by The Story of Stuff Project.
As a licensed Wildlife Rehabber for 25 plus years, the percentage of intake wildlife which has been injured, entwined &/or ingested fossil fuel produced plastics goes up each year.
Since the 1990’s, I have encouraged people to buy only products which come in glass containers, to bring their own cloth shopping bags to grocery stores, to store leftovers in reusable GLASS, & to shop “in season” & local.
I worked at a beverage bottling facility about 20 years ago. It was not difficult to be consumed by despair when watching 300,000 bottles of water blast down the production line each day. And a major bottleneck in our output was actually being able to get enough plastic bottles into the warehouse to keep up with production. It was such an issue that we ended up installing our own blow-moulder so we could form the bottles on-site.
It goes reduce, reuse and lastly recycle in order of importance. The first two are more important than recycling. We mainly focus on recycling while ignoring reducing consumption or reusing when possible. That’s the way I was taught in school too.
This lady keeps on dropping truths. Keep them coming.
I remember in the ‘90’s.
“Switch to plastic to save the rainforests!” (We weren’t told plastic was made of petroleum)
So society switched.
Now we have a plastic pollution problem, and big plastic is now advertising “we’re devoting (insert fraction of a percent of their annual profit)
I doubt anything will get done in my lifetime
Who ever told you plastic would save the rainforests? I was around in the 90s and no one claimed that. And yes, we knew plastic was from oil. Plastic was lightweight & cheap.
"How and why [the plastic items] were made in the first place truly the key question. Great video. Thank you.
Plastic is a tricky issue because it depends on it's use function. I once emailed a tea brand because I quite liked the tea but was annoyed it was wrapped in plastic. They saw my email and replied if they were to remove the plastic outer wrapper from the tea bag that the product I and many others have come to enjoy, wouldn't stay as peak freshness as long, the taste and flavor would diminish.
I do hope someday we'll have a better solution for plastic though. I've heard of sugar cane used as a plastic swap but I'm not sure if its a blend of plastics AND sugar cane.
Just a suggestion: try emailing them again and suggesting they use plant-derived biodegradable plastic.
None of my tea bags are wrapped in plastic. I use 2 bags instead of one - that should make the tea company happy! There's also a tea shop that sells loose tea stored in glass jars, for storage at home in glass jars. The variety to choose from is super fun.
really happy with the things this series points out, espcially this one. Hopefully it'll help make future, better waste management/ usage policies happen easier and faster.
I like that this one pulls back the curtans on how companies keep public content while keeping the production of their products going and waste continues to grow
we skipped reduce using non-resusable materials as consumer society grew at some point
I've never seen such a succinct video about the issues with recycling, thank you so much, I'm going to recommend this to people.
I believe the keystone subject is our lifestyle in general. We expect everything to be in non perishable containers. We want every comfort in consumable from food to appliances.
Where the fallacy starts is, the public actually has the capability to grow and surround local food economies. Eliminating as much necessity for preservation to begin with.
This would require big box stores to yield their strongholds for the projects of the general public.
This is one of the reasons we need to increase upcycling, it may have been corporations that started it, but corporations aren't going to reuse those items, there's no interest in doing so. But if you MAKE things out of that garbage, you can reduce the demand for plastic. I also try to use canning jars or reused glass jars whenever I can. If you put a bottle of water in the sun for an afternoon, I can TASTE the plastic in the water! I also discovered a shop in my area that sells laundry sheets by the each, so I don't need to get a massive subscription in order to get the benefit of them.
My town banned single use grocery bags because people kept throwing their bags out and leaving them all over the ground. And people STILL do it with the dogpoop bags that aren't included in that ban! The paper bags weren't as strong, but guess what? the volume of litter went WAY down!!!
And then of course I figured out how to make plastic bags into yarn AFTER that was all done. XD Which I thought was hilarious! I also learned how to turn 1 liter soda bottles into fly traps and 2 liters into hanging planters! I don't buy single serve yogurt cups (too much sugar!) and reuse the yogurt containers with lids as tupperware and small plant pots! I save disposible for anything that's gross and nasty.
The main driver of my doing this isn't environmentalism either, it's poverty! If I reuse those yogurt containers and drink bottles I don't NEED to buy tupperware or plastic seedling pots! A word on reusing the latter btw, you can reuse plastic seedling pots from seedlings you buy from the store. HOWEVER, you should wash them with dishsoap and water first! The reason is that reusing pots without washing them can spread plant diseases to your seedlings! 😱🥬always scrub garden containers with soap and water when you transplant a plant out of them!!!!!!
I am an electrical engineer, and even though my expertise is far from this field, I have been thoroughly trained in issues of chemistry and thermodynamics. I knew long ago (since the early 90s) there is no market for recycling and therefore most of the plastics I separate will go to a landfill somewhere, apparently 81% of it does. And that land fill might be a giant plastics waste island in the pacific. I have tried to minimize my use of plastics. The least one can do is prefer products that come in metal or glass. Yes they have a carbon footprint, but there is the potential to recycle those with renewable energy. This story is correct that the responsibility has been thrown on the consumer, so lets have the consumer reject all products in plastic.
Regardless of who's fault this is humanity pays the bill in the near term for the cleanup in the long term for the role flammable fossils play in our ever growing man made climate catastrophes. Thanks for you work!
I was a Garbo for 25 years. My partner and I serviced the trash Contracts for Sequoia/Kings Canyon National Parks and Sequoia National Forest. Plus the Town of Three Rivers and the Army Corps of engineers Terminus Dam We had our Diversion (recycling) numbers up to 80% at one point and then the County(s) decided their Landfills weren’t making enough money and stopped us from taking loads to the MRF. (Materials Recycling Facility) It’s all about $$$$$. From every angle. Damned if we do and damned if we don’t.
“Satisfaction Guaranteed or double your Trash Back”
On the paper cup thing: It's very well-known that paper soaks up liquids, and it will destroy the cup soon after. I've read that most manufacturers tend to coat the paper item with a plastic (some use regular polyethylene, others might use perfluorinated stuff) to waterproof them. I don't know much about industrial chemical processing though, but chemically treating cellulose to be waterproof seems more time, chemical, and labor-intensive than spraying the waterproof stuff on it.
Here in Germany recycling works very well... maybe because of the 0.25 price tag attached to each and every plastic bottle, which you get back recycling in the machines that each and every grocery shop has...
Living in Denmark I'm inclined to agree. But I fear we're being misled. In Denmark you pay a small deposit whenever you buy beverages packaged in plastic bottles. The deposit is returned to you once you return the bottle. According to the body responsible for recycling plastic bottles - Dansk Retur System - 93% of all bottles included in this scheme are returned. 82% of those bottles are used for new plastic bottles. That's a 24% loss during the first two steps of the recycling process. It doesn't account for loss of material, downcycling or any other factor that affects recycling. Moreover, it relies on numbers from international partners who may prove unreliable sources, either because they use different definitions and calculations, or because they exploit poor oversight and simply burn the plastics they're meant to recycle. Danish media have uncovered multiple instances of this happening.
Even though Denmark - and possibly Germany - are doing well by international standard, we're probably not doing as well as we like to believe and we're deifnitely not doing well enough.
@@CitizenSnips314 , I'm actually Italian, not German... and in Italy it is pretty much the same as in most other places, where plastics are differentiated in households, but then thrown or burned instead of being actually recycled...
So, can Germany and Denmark do better? Sure.. Should they? Not yet! Let's give the rest of the world some time to keep up! 😀
Kudos to PBS - this is important.
Great channel glad I subscribed. All of PBS is excellent on RUclips.
An answer of "widespread regulation of the plastics industry" which includes a ban on single use plastic seems to simply ignore reality. It seems like regulatory control of the industry regulated by the industry is a significant problem not addressed. A regulatory body becomes a target to be captured.
Thank you very much for making this video. Everyone should be more aware of this
Thank you as always for making these important informative videos 🙏
1). Reduce plastic in the waste stream.
2). Use AI/robotics as part of the post use waste stream processing.
3). Convert non-recyclable plastics into building material.
4). Ban landfill disposal. Replace with power plant incineration.
Yes conversion to biodegradable/helpful eco-friendly waste. AI I hope is being used to use abstract/complex holistic approaches to environmental catastrophes. And to predict possible future impacts of new solutions decades from now.
@@MeissnerEffect My reference to AI/robotics deals with the sorting of trash, which is presently a dirty job.
i saw the frontline on this too a few years ago. i love you pbs!
Good to see someone finally connecting the dots between the oil and packaging industries and the permanent waste they create.
I'm not a professional, but I am passionate about the environment. Here's a few ways I'm attempting to help reduce my plastic waste on a personal level. These are also budget friendly.
• Recycle what you can ovi.
• I don't get unnecessary plastic bags. If that's the thin bags for fruit or veggies to refusing a bag at checkout if I only got a couple of things. I also TRY to remember to bring my reusable bags when shopping.
• Food won't come wrapped in plastic if you grow it yourself. It's also A LOT cheaper (once you get past the start up cost, but even then if your crafty it can still be affordable) Whether that's a garden or Planting fruiting trees/bushes/vines. Trees are great, put them in the ground, water them for a couple of years and get fresh food for at least a decade. More if your into nuts.
• I try to lean more towards cans/glass bottles when I can afford it.
I think if more people actually tried to reduce their plastic waste things would get a little better. I think the first step to improvement is awareness. For me, it started off small and is still growing.
One way to help at the consumer level is to try to avoid buying products with plastic, like single serve water bottles. I carry a refillable travel cup instead.
I also try to reuse plastics that I do buy, like the bags my bread comes in. They can be used instead of buying new sandwich bags, etc.
Exactly. Like this video explained, consumers can't do much downstream. The one thing all consumers CAN do is vote with your dollars. Don't buy from the worst offenders if possible. When their profits fall, companies HAVE to take note.
Thank you for making this excellent video!
Yeah, work in stretch film industry before, you know, where you wrap your finished good with plastic? It's actually a miracle where if properly wrap, it can protect the finished good from rain or impact while transporting. Sadly, it is not highly recyclable, because we can only use up to 5% of recycled LDPE material in production. Higher than that the stretch film became stiff and brittle.
I celebrate this documentary.
And along those lines-Lets look at the macro: in almost every way possible corporations have shifted tasks on to us.
Reducing former jobs and avoiding creating new ones: we all have continuously been ‘working from home’ for them for decades.
Recycling costs must be built into the cost of the product. This includes every device vehicle etc.
The only thing that is being recycled are the same old lies.
Here in the UK, in the 1970-1980s when we were children, we had glass milk bottles delivered and the empties were collected for sterilization and re-use. Also empty glass pop bottles, you took back to the shop, and whatever was on the cap, such as 5 pence, was what you received. They also went back to the manufacturers, who sterilized them and re-used them.
In the UK we are also drowning in plastic and more and more rules are enforced regarding what we must recycle, plus reduced waste (rubbish) collections to force people to use less. However, we know that the plastic is not being recycled.
My husband worked at a company where they had two large dumpsters, one for recycling and one for non-recycled. He stood and watched the bin truck turn up and pick both dumpsters up one after the other and empty them into the back. He asked the driver, 'Are there two chambers in the truck, then?' The driver replied, 'No.' My husband asked, 'What the f*ck is the point in separating it then?'. The driver said, 'It's separated back at the depot'. Yeah, right 🤔🤔🤔
We have stop oil people protesting everywhere while they glue themselves to the roads which require chemicals to assist their removal, most of which are derived from oil, they wear synthetics and use mobile phones and drink from plastic bottles. You confront them with the fact that they are using petrochemical products, and they look at you blankly. They just don't get it. Big oil companies are still going to be doing what they do, as they will still be able to sell the oil due to the plastic and synthetics industry.
Thank you for actually saying this out loud 🎉
Exxon's net profit in 2019 was $14.34 billion. They committed $1.5 million that year to the Recycling Partnership - less than 1 percent of their net profit.
The CEO made $23.5 million in 2019.
I really enjoy this series! 💗
Glad this is really reaching people. Very important message here
I worked in metal recycling for about 5 years, after working cleaning up hazardous waste sites for over 11 years. I was shocked at how greenwashed recycling has been indoctrinated into our vocabulary as this clean green industry
It's not!
Take a look at your cars, school busses, washing machines, lawn mowers, airplanes etc, with all the plastic, rubber, vinyl, cloth, insulation etc, everything non metal and while yes the metal itself can be forever recycled think about where all the non metal ends up, multiply that with the consumption based American Dream and well can we admit that perhaps we have a consumption crisis of epic proportion that needs to be addressed!!
Thanks for this clarifying insight. Maybe a decade or so ago Germany was supposed to be making car recycling easier by requiring auto manufacturers take back and recycle all cars when consumers were done with them- including all plastic parts. One of the underlying intents of this law was supposed to be to get auto manufacturers to use fewer, recyclable plastic choices because the manufacturers became responsible for closing the recycling circle. Any idea if they are still doing this, and does it apply to autos sold globally, or just those made to be sold and recycled in Germany?
The op-ed raises crucial points about the complexities of plastic waste and recycling. It's clear that we need comprehensive solutions that involve both industry and consumer responsibility to tackle this pressing environmental issue. 🌍
PBS coming with the bangers lately. 👌🏽
Thank you 🙏
Not sure how it is in the US, but you still can get a lot of stuff in glass containers. There are even new shops here in germany that sell complettly without any packaging and anyone needs to bring their own containers. Milk, juce, honey, certain meat products and others i mostly buy wrapped in glass. I trained my butcher to not use plastic to seperate sliced pieces and toothbrush is made of bamboo and i am a single person household at the lower spectrum of income.
From what i heared about solutions to plastic there is a combination of two technologies the future may help.
High pressure treatments, breaking up molecules and gaining crued oil from that paired with some day having fusion energy as the first one is rather eenrgy hungry.
One of the biggest obstacles to address this problem is that the plastic producers don´t have to publish a list of ingredients and as such hindering i.e. research institutes to look into pollutants or carcinogenics. In Europe chemical companies use thousands of ingredients of which just about 1% could be identifies independently
Great video - hope more people watch it
I used to buy certain products because I thought they were recyclable , it’s just scam to keep selling the products that are usually not healthy. Once I read the ingredients I can’t buy , there are healthy products just extremely rare. Would like to see more glass and ceramic also people having enough land to self sustain if they choose , so difficult for many to afford . 😭🙏🏼
Great video! Can PBS do a video on the energy wasted on lighting the night?
Well, according to corporations, they are people, too~ So they should be held responsible just as much as us.
Hey PBS. Was wondering if you could cover some of the Greenwashing practices used by the FSC?
Love your content
you forgot to mention that of Unclaimed CRV Deposits.
Given the redemption rate is approximately 58% States get to keep the "abandon" 42%. In California alone this is approximately $100 million a year.
this combined with the fact that it's cheaper for supermarkets to pay a fine for not taking back cans makes it all that much more profitable.
Heat and compress this stuff into building blocks and build with it. Strong, light, heat insulating and imperishable - a commercial opportunity.
I really like this series.
I have worked with plastic for more than 40 years. I can say it is only recyclable to a point. Every time you put it through a machine it degrades somewhat. Any ink or glue for labels, or remanence of previous content is contamination. A red ring around a white bottle neck is contamination even if the same material. Even preparing the material to be reused can be a nightmare trying to grind up gallon jugs, or thin bags is not as easy as you might think.
If the public was more open to excepting less than perfect production so that some contaminated material could be used anyway, and if BLACK was the color of choice for more products, so color contamination can be covered up. would be a big help in reusing the materials. I have tried to think of a lego like construction for a storage shed of 100% recycled plastic, but they (Rubber Made I think) beat me to it. I don't know if they are made with recycled material or not. Plastic fences would be a good place to use recycled material if people would except black spots in their white fence.
My family sorts out the recyclable items from the rest of the household waste and puts it in a separate container. The town makes two pickups each week, once for other items and once for recyclables, but the recyclables are all mixed together and compressed just like the garbage. This makes me suspect that almost none of the recyclables actually get recycled.
regional governments have now banned "single use" plastic grocery bags. Because the stores had already put in place a 3c credit for bringing in your clean bags from last time for re-use, the proper name for a program should be banning "single USERS" of plastic grocery bags! When the plastic grocery bags get contaminated, they become garbage bags in our house, but gov wants us to buy real garbage bags which have more plastic per capacity volume. And the alternatives allowed, such a paper bags and cloth bags, are worse for the environment... paper bags take more energy to make than plastic, and so do the cloth, and the cloth have a surprisingly short life before it has to be trashed.
Most people want the convenience of the disposable plastic containers and bags, returnable glass bottles were discontinued per customer demands. As for recycling where we’re are at there is no recycling, as we’re semi-rural suburb
We need to stop using words like "lobbied". It's bribes.
Does it matter? The outcome is what matters.
Thank You for funding this video. 1st step to a tobacco level legal outcome in 2050 or so.
Great doc! Ok, so my city has stopped using single use plastic bags, straws, and take out food containers..But! What are these pale brown mock-cloth-feeling bags made of??? Paper straws and cups, ok. But don’t drink too slowly- i had a cup of hot tea and as time went on the paper cup was getting softer and softer, i wondered if it could get so soft it would crumple if i picked it up. And the honour-system of everybody putting products in the correct bins fails as soon as an a*hole dumps eg: food garbage into the cardboard bin. It is a DISASTER
The ban of plastic bag wasn't a great solution. It was replaced with reusable tote.
But most people just throw them in the trash anyway .
Now it just became an extra fee when shopping.
I suggest to store let customers use the container boxes they already throw away.
There's DIYs on making hard PVC type plastic sheets. These sheets can be used like lumber in making things, by using special grade tools.
What "single use" plastic is being banned? STILL only things that shift the burden to consumers. My country banned plastic shopping bags--that means everything that goes into the reusable bag can (and often does) have plastic packaging. But if you forget your reusable? You'll need to spend $2 on a tote bag that is ALSO plastic-based, or use a paper bag that 1) breaks and 2) is not accessible for anyone with disabilities that affect their hands. Or you can go home and come back, which for most people includes gas powered cars because our cities were designed around them.
The most galling thing is that no one I know treated them as single use, we all used them as our garbage bags. Now instead of collecting them in a bag of bags for our garbage, we are told to buy boxes of truly single use plastic garbage bags. Paper ones are not waterproof, and alternatives are not in budget for many in my city where most struggle to afford rent and food.
We can add the loss of accessibility for some disabled people who used posable plastic straws when those were banned as well. Honestly, I consider all of the bans I've seen just more of the same greenwashing that expects us to do extra work while companies put no R&D into plastic alternatives.
That sounded like Philip Glass playing during the credits. If so, nice use of a relevant artist for a video about reusable materials. Love these videos as resources for my Physics students when we talk about energy.
Infinitely Recyclable Glass and Aluminum packaging should make a comeback as the primary way to package everything. For things that it "doesn't make sense" to package with those materials, cardstock and cardboard are biodegradable, as long as they're not plasticised.
There's some important oversights in this video:
It really depends on the type of plastic as to how "recyclable" the plastic is, or isn't. It would be pretty easy for governments to tax the #### out of the less recyclable variants. Not to mention overpackaging as well.
Research into ways to utilize recycled plastic is also severely lacking. Add to that the processing of recycled plastic. Nobody has invested much of anything into it. Billions have been invested into oil and gas extraction (exploration and research). Imagine if even a fraction of that were invested into better recycling techniques.
THIS IS AN IMPORTANT ONE: The video does touch on the fact that the burden of recycling largely rests on the tax-payers shoulders. The kind of skip over an important metric, that being that landfills are completely ignored when assessing the net environmental impact of recycling versus using raw natural resources. Same usually goes for the financial impact. Dealing with waste is very taxing. Reducing emissions is important, but recent research is indicating that it's even more crucial to protect things that absorb carbon emissions. Most the stats and figures you see completely ignore both the landfills themselves and the means to get the waste to the landfills. And also the fact that the plastics make it much harder to deal with other forms of waste.
Even with existing technology, recycled plastic is largely underutilized. I know this because I am researching the use of recycled plastics for cast-in-place concrete accessories. "New plastic is cheap". It isn't, trust me. There seems to be barriers to other competitors entering the market.
It’s insane that this problem has been known about for so long, and there were even some laws in the 1970s to begin to address it, but progress has stagnated because the industry wanted it to.