My understanding is that the overwhelming majority of recycled material just ends up with the rest of the trash.
I'm asking because over the years I've hoarded an incredible amount of the plastic flower pots that house plants come in, and I've recently admitted to myself that I'm never going to use them. I'd chuck them all into the recycling, but they're all dirty so I have to wash each one individually, and I'm not sure if there's any actual point in doing that.
So real talk, up until a little while ago, the global solution to recycling plastic was to dump it all into ISO containers and ship it off to China. At that point the plastics would be sorted into the types that it was profitable to melt down into pellets for new products, or it would just go in some landfill. The amount of pollution and costs to deal with that pollution got so bad in China, that the government put a ban on the importation of foreign plastics waste, leaving global North countries with the choice of pretending to recycle and landfilling everything, or finding some other developing country to offload their waste onto. Recycling their own plastic was not considered. Since recycling is dictated by the profit motive of which plastics it is profitable to recycle, there is a clear contradiction at play, since making new plastic is cheaper, so in any case there is no good solution.
Naturally, the increase in landfilling of waste in the west was blamed on China, since the west deems their responsibility in creating environmental disaster absolved under the contract of "we send you our filth and it's your job to take care of it because we paid you", especially if China would in turn landfill the waste.
Recycling is full of contradictions. A take that states it is simply bad or good will be incorrect. It has elements of both and criticisms / promotions can both be true at different levels of analysis and impact.
The typical Western socialist take will be largely critical and correct in terms of the function it serves in capitalism: it's mostly there as a PR campaign to address extremely wasteful production + distribution methods.
This is definitely true for plastics, where it is absurdly difficult to even know what plastics you can recycle in your locale and the vast majority ends up in landfills - if they actually wanted to recycle the stuff, they could, but they'd need to (1) change production to use more recyclable plastics and (2) standardize and fund large-scale plastic recycling centers so that there is no question whether an item is recyclable. Here's a fun example: even in places with relatively advanced recycling programs will not recycle the black plastic containers that tons of food service companies use. Solely because they close to use the black stuff rather than clear. Consequently, these liberal cities have literally promoted the use of something worse than styrofoam... as a replacement for styrofoam (the black plastic is heavier and more energy-intensive to produce). This kind of thing characterizes plastic recycling in general: it's mostly a waste of time at the systemic level.
On the other hand, let's look at the personal level. If you do know this stuff, you can try to avoid difficult-to-recycle plastics and put the correct items in the bin, which will make it so that you're not wasting the energy of the recycling sorting system and are actually getting your plastic bottle into the recycling pipeline. The system is inefficient PR bullshit, but you should still recycle, especially if you can learn what items should be recycled.
There are other materials that are efficiently recycled and we should promote their recycling, namely aluminum cans, steel cans, and glass. It is significantly more efficient to recycle aluminum than mine and process bauxite.
Finally, if your concern is climate change and the environment and you want to address your contribution via consumer choices, prepare yourself to need a PhD in systems analysis because the tradeoffs are complicated and difficult to compare. Example: glass is actually recyclable and will break down into an insert material, so you should buy drinks in glass bottles instead of plastic, right? Well it's not so clear, since it takes a lot more energy to produce and transport a glass container than a plastic one. You would need to know the total carbon inputs in an opaque supply chain in order to make an informed decision, and that's just within the realm of a single person making a consumer choice, a very limited contribution.
If there is one thing that is pretty much a guaranteed boom, it's to reduce consumption overall. Rather than think about supply chains on containers, don't buy the drink. Just make yourself a nice drink at home and out it in your water bottle. Cook from scratch because you will see all of the packaging and transportation required and have a less abstract relationship with your food and production. Prevent waste (don't let your food go bad). Buy shit second hand.
Those three R's weren't lying, reduce + reuse are way better than recycling.
PS we won't actually solve this problem without revolution. Capitalism will always try to push these costs onto society and will generally succeed without a counterbalance like a socialist party in power, dictatorship of the proletariat, etc.
Plastic recycling, specifically, is pretty much a joke. Aluminum, glass, and paper recycling can be legit (depends on local recycling infrastructure) but plastic recycling is basically a marketing exercise for plastic manufacturers. A lot of the time, the type of plastic is not easily recyclable (if at all), or not efficient to recycle, and often there are multiple types of plastic in a given item, making recycling infeasible.
In short, find a way to reuse or repurpose plastic, and if you can’t do that, you might as well toss it in the trash, because it’s going to end up in a landfill either way.
This exactly, glass is by far the easiest, but I have been told aluminum is most likely to actually get recycled due to the material itself being the most valuable. But I haven't done too much research.
Plastic recycling is a psyop from the oil companies to assuage our guilt over flooding the planet with plastic waste.
Glass and metal recycling are the real deal.
as far as I know metal and glass is easy enough to reuse, they just melt them down so I don't think you even have to wash them.
Plastic recycling is mostly cope I think, too expensive and impractical for most types of plastics. The trash just gets exported to India or something.
As others said, plastic recycling is a joke and most of the time you shouldn’t even bother. Paper it depends, it has to be clean (no pizza boxes) but clean dry paper is okay, may be worth it depending on your area.
Aluminum and glass are actually recyclable, you basically just melt them back down and they’re good as new again. Easier with aluminum than glass, the best method for glass is to return them, wash them, and reuse them, but for some reason the US got rid of its infrastructure to do that like 60 years ago. But melting glass down also works well, if not as nice as reusing.
There are a couple of uses, depending on where you are. While the vast amount of plastic isn't recycled in Sweden, it is burned in a furnace in order to create district heating or electricity and the ashes get landfilled.. Not a brilliant solution, but far better than just sending it off to a landfill as is. By separating stuff it is helpful for making sure that the unsorted garbage can be mixed appropriately to burn with no kindling, plastic is very flammable. Glass and metal are good to recycle anywhere. Paper and cardboard is also fine to recycle a handful of times. Separating organic matter is also useful for composting, granted it is also used to create methane gas, so I'm not sure if it is good as a coal sink.
Used to be a really good system of reusing glass bottles for drinks, same bottle for all brands just wash them and slap a new sticker and bottlecap on there. But that is dying out in preference to PET bottles. Shit sucks.
Oh and per your flower pots donate them to a local collective farming group. Like an urban farm.
What are some legitimate ways to refurbish or reuse shitty broken plastic like the kind used in food packaging?
