The EV cult is straight up delusional, at this point.
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This is going to blow your mind, but plastics actually really suck at being recycled. You know all those endless bottles and plastic containers you throw in the recycling bin? You know where they end up?
In the ground, as landfill. Because that's all it's good for.
Plastic degrades and has to be hyper-sorted before recycling and it costs about 5x as much to recycle plastic as it does to make new plastic.
tl;dr, recycling is a scam and is just a fancier way of saying 'landfill'.
The hippies living in cities large enough to have single-stream recycling still manage to be awful at sorting. I see people throwing straight-up garbage in public recycling bins, and that contaminates the entire batch.
What's the point if it's just another glorified garbage can?
Apartment dwellers are the worst. They'll walk their dogs and put the dog shit bags in the recycle bins in front of people's homes even though they are bright fucking blue with a giant recycle symbol on them. They either are so dumb they don't know blue bins are for recyclables only, so dumb they don't know bagged dog shit isn't considered a recyclable, or such selfish cunts they don't care and do it anyways.
The fuckin retards in my neighborhood routinely bag their dogs shit and then leave it sitting on the curb or even in the middle of the road. I've lost count of the number of bags of shit I've seen pancaked on the road by cars running them over.
Seen that too. And of course some people walk their dogs who then shit on the sidewalk and dont pick it up.
Somebody walks by and drops cans of cheap malt liquor. Or drives by. I hope they are walking by. This happens constantly. And it's supposedly a nice neighborhood.
All mine goes to the same place, so IDGAF.
Metal recycling is not a scam. Plastic is.
Metal recycling isn't a scam, but a metric shitload is landfilled because separating plastic and cans is a pain in the ass.
Easy way to tell: In the suburbs, if you put out a big pile of plastic on your front lawn, it'll be there a million years from now. If you put out a big pile of metal on your front lawn, it'll be gone in an hour or two by scrappers who make good money recycling metal.
If recycling plastics was anywhere near profitable, they'd be gone in moments, too. The only plastics you're getting rid of are plastic shielding on big metal things.
I knew it was a scam, I was just curious about what he meant behind "can't reuse 100% of a milk jug" because that implies that there are some parts of a milk jug that CAN be recycled.
Any time you recycle anything there's waste in the process. Assuming the entire jug is recyclable, you'll loose a certain percent of the mass of the plastic by melting or grinding it to be used. Even if you cut it you still lose some of it.
Polymers (plastics) become strong through a process called cross-linking.
A polymer is a ultra-long molecule. Think of a regular molecule as a pea, where as a polymer is a strand of noodles.
When a plastic is poured into shape, cross linking ties every noodle together where they touch. This gives the plastic a fixed shape.
When you recycle the plastic, either through heating them (for thermo-plastics) or melting them with solvents like acetone, most of the polymers are conserved. That is the macro-molecules remain long.
However the properties that allow cross-linking between the polymer strands is severely degraded.
I will give you an example. DVD cases made out of recycled plastic are brittle and break easily. They are utterly shitty for the job of keeping your DVDs safe.
Some plastics are more recyclable than others. Some plastics are strong enough that even at 50% strength they are still useful. MOST are not.
For example, recycling plastic milk jugs would see milk jugs shredded and then combined with 50% new plastic to produce a milk jug that is 50% recycled plastic.
I've found that lids and caps are pretty bad since they're often made from #5 plastic over #1 or #2.
This is true. The correct way to "recycle" plastics is probably to burn them in a controlled environment to recover the energy. Then ideally use plants/bioreactors to produce new monomers from atmospheric CO2 and polymerize them.