Greenpeace gives up on recycling plastic
American Thinker,
by
Thomas Lifson
Original Article
Posted By: DVC,
10/31/2022 11:33:08 PM
Recycling almost everything is an uneconomic scam[i], but that hasn’t stopped many localities from enforcing recycling mandates, and employing lots of people to sort through garbage and spend large sums on trying to find another use for the materials. At great expense to taxpayers.
But finally, Greenpeace has realized that recycling plastic makes no sense. In City Journal, John Tierney writes:
Greenpeace has seen the light, or at least a glimmer of rationality. The group has issued a report accompanied by a press release headlined, “Plastic Recycling Is A Dead-End Street—Year After Year, Plastic Recycling Declines Even as Plastic Waste Increases.” The group’s overall policy remains delusional
Reply 1 - Posted by:
Heraclitus 10/31/2022 11:46:15 PM (No. 1320470)
But plastic is a petroleum by-product, right? End fossil fuels, end plastics! Voila!
14 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
RWPollock 11/1/2022 12:08:38 AM (No. 1320475)
As much as I would like plastic to be feasible to recycle Greenpeace and the like should not go around promoting and pushing for policies that are not well thought out. Cart before the horse mind set. The push for electric cars..same thing…the cart before the horse. Future policies or ideas from Greepeace will be ignored. You can only cry wolf so many times.
20 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
Vesicant 11/1/2022 12:53:57 AM (No. 1320491)
It's not like trash companies or container makers go out of their way to help us figure out which plastics or other material actually can be recycled. It sure seems like there are only two types of plastic in the whole world that can be recycled, but they're a secret. The recycling symbols are a joke, and you need a Ph.D in organic chemistry to figure out the names.
14 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
SweetPea3 11/1/2022 2:25:54 AM (No. 1320520)
I have always found it ironic that donks demand that we eliminate petroleum and its by products by putting out our recycling in those bug plastic barrels. Kinda like the way they scream about conserving water but demand all containers be washed clean before they are put in those big plastic recycling bins.
18 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
Trigger2 11/1/2022 4:16:51 AM (No. 1320535)
All of eco-terrorist Greenpeace policies are dumb and stupid.
9 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
Michaelus 11/1/2022 6:18:12 AM (No. 1320574)
Recycling will never happen as long as it is free to dump plastic waste in the ocean or super cheap to send it to a landfill.
7 people like this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
Red Jeep 11/1/2022 6:59:20 AM (No. 1320606)
Why not return to glass bottles and containers and paper bags, our world before plastics?
19 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
petrichor 11/1/2022 7:23:22 AM (No. 1320627)
If we can just forget practicality then we'll all use glass bottles and go to the store for "fill-ups". Glass recycling is a big waste of effort. I think cardboard recycling is the only thing that actually works.
3 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
jeffkinnh 11/1/2022 7:27:42 AM (No. 1320634)
Yet another liberal program based on "feel good" instead of reality. Like most liberal programs it is costly and ineffective. We are all little robots washing and sorting our plastic to no good purpose. Decades of wasting our time.
7 people like this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
udanja99 11/1/2022 7:56:54 AM (No. 1320666)
Agree, #4, not to mention that recycling requires two different garbage trucks burning “fossil fuels” instead of one.
10 people like this.
Reply 11 - Posted by:
Msquared112 11/1/2022 9:05:30 AM (No. 1320727)
Name one environmental effort that has yielded anything worth while. With the possible exception of cleaning up Los Angeles' air to some small degree, what other enviro-efforts have worked economically or quality of life-wise for human beings, not for snail-darters?
4 people like this.
Reply 12 - Posted by:
Zigrid 11/1/2022 11:10:00 AM (No. 1320856)
WE need some engineers...who know what they're doing to come up with a plan to eliminate plastic containers....and discontinue all taxpayer's funding to green peace...and while WE're add it...defund planned parenthood...they serve no purpose now...
5 people like this.
Reply 13 - Posted by:
zephyrgirl 11/1/2022 11:12:30 AM (No. 1320857)
Recycling is the ultimate "feel good" initiative. It is "the right thing to do" so let's do it in spite of it costing lots of money, and accomplishing nothing. As with many leftist programs, we're stuck with it because no one has the guts to terminate a leftist initiative.
4 people like this.
I agree with #7 -- go back to glass bottles. Worked fine back in our day. I remember Tom the Milkman would come every week and leave the bottles of milk on the porch and pick up the empties we left out. Of course, nowadays there would be no one home at most houses during the day and the milk would go bad. Or get stolen.
5 people like this.
Reply 15 - Posted by:
MDConservative 11/1/2022 12:28:26 PM (No. 1320942)
FTA: "Recycling almost everything is an uneconomic scam[i], but that hasn’t stopped many localities from enforcing recycling mandates, and employing lots of people to sort through garbage and spend large sums on trying to find another use for the materials."
And there is the real goal of recycling...politicians love to create jobs and here is a slew of them for the proles. I'm surprised New Jersey doesn't require attendants (energy installation professionals) at vehicle recharging stations.
3 people like this.
Reply 16 - Posted by:
Kafka2 11/1/2022 12:57:08 PM (No. 1321007)
30 years ago, Greenpeace saw all the cups, plates, bags and straws were made from paper (trees) and had a big campaign to “save the trees.” So many of these things are now made from plastic. Now after seeing a picture of a sea turtle with a plastic straw up its nose (was this staged?) plastics have gone from good to bad. Their answer, make these things out of paper. (To he!! with the trees.)
It would be nice if the Greenpeace people would make up their minds.
4 people like this.
Reply 17 - Posted by:
DVC 11/1/2022 2:12:00 PM (No. 1321102)
Re #3, most plastic items, like bottles, have a number on the bottom which tells which polymer the item is made from. IF we all wasted a huge amount of time and sorted all our plastic waste ACCURATELY by number, it might be slightly easier to recycle, but there are still huge barriers and it takes large amounts of wash water and strong detergents to get the dirt, food and label debris off of the plastics. LOTS of dirty water waste.
Just burn the plastics/polymers in high temp power furnaces to get some benefit from the hydrocarbon energy that went into making them.
5 people like this.
Reply 18 - Posted by:
Schnapps 11/1/2022 2:13:23 PM (No. 1321105)
Before there were plastics, any non-metal products were made of a combination of wood, leather, rubber and paper. I don't want a computer or my power tools made of wood and leather or paper.
Face it. Plastics are here to stay. If recycling were limited to grinding it up and using it for road fill, that's okay.
1 person likes this.
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Even the ecocrazies at Greenpeace have realized that this is a total loser. But they propose and EVEN STUPIDER "fix", of course. Burn the plastic in high temp furnaces and get the energy back out of the hydrocarbons, at least.