We spend a massive amount of money to drill oil and make so much out of plastic. We need to make reusing these single use plastics and other plastics easier to recycle and upcycle and use them more than once.
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More people would recycle if it was easy to do so. Like I currently don’t have a recycling center anywhere remotely close to me. If there was a recycling facility in every county like the county dumps & do recycling pickup like the garbage pickup, it would make huge strides.
You have to make it easy, or people these days won’t do it.
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Exactly, that’s one thing that needs to happen. It would also create jobs for those people in those counties. And you put recycle bins around towns. Some countries in Europe even have machines that will pay you for certain items if you recycle them.
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I agree. However, there is not a big market for used plastic so most of it is in the same dump as our regular trash. My HOA charges me $75 for a stupid recycling trash can with all of it in the dump. I would like to see a tax credit or something for aluminum, steel, copper…these are the items with a market.
I would like to see massive use of plastic and Styrofoam be a thing of the past.
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My HOA took away all of our recycling bins because people couldn’t understand it (I brought it up at the meeting that they were deciding at, and I live at a community with older people) and they didn’t have good education materials (ie pizza boxes can’t be recycled, plastic bags, etc). I saw at a building that looked like Costco, I believe in Michigan, people could recycle their bottles and cans and instantly get money back at machines, this should be implemented everywhere. I think more education on recycling and putting money back in people’s pockets (even just cents) would help, maybe the homeless would care more about leaving trash around if they could recycle it for a meal.
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It’s not always about making it easier to recycle something it usually has more to do with the cost to recycle the product. that is why so much of what was shipped as recyclable goods were shipped to 3rd world countries and ended up more as trash then anything. it cost too much here in the Us to recycle some things and so corporations were shipping it to countries where labor was cheeper and often included child labor. We as humans need to pay more attention to the whole life cycle of a product then just what we see.
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Yes because people have been intentionally confuses but the Recycle symbol and internal symbols to make people think an item is recyclable when there was no market for that second stream product from the beginning.
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I wholeheartedly agree! Mapping out the root causes could really shed light on the best solutions, and it’s definitely something we could dive into. For example, we could create a list of ways to reduce waste and limit our environmental impact, from simple actions like bringing reusable bags and containers, to shopping at farmers markets for unpackaged or locally grown produce. On a larger scale, we could encourage people to avoid single-use plastics, support companies with eco-friendly packaging, and even push for local policies that promote sustainable practices. There’s a whole world of changes we could explore to address the problem—from educating people on the impact of their choices to working toward systemic change. Imagine if everyone took small steps that, together, could make a huge difference!
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