Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/02/a-brief-history-of-the-recycling-lies-told-by-the-plastics-industry.html
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It’s not being “easy to market to.” The consumer holds no blame for this. People were lied to. The plastics industry would love for consumers to accept blame for their lies. And it’s really irritating how often that works.
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Can we just go back to around the mid 80s where there was more glass and cardboard and fiber board boxes? Remember glass bottles with the Styrofoam around them? (Nix the styrofoam). Aluminum cans instead of plastic bottles?
Plastic makes sense in a lot of places, but in a lot of places it does not.
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Make America Great Again and bring back returnable bottles.
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Our company sells to Amazon.
Amazon orders way too many of some items based on their algorithms.
Then they start returning items. One at a time. In those blue plastic bubble packs. The returns department ends up with entire trash bins full of blue plastic Amazon bubble mailers.
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For years our local recycling operation was very frustrating in what plastics they took. “We take shampoo bottles, but not conditioner bottles” (not much of an exaggeration).
They now use the plastic recycling #'s as God intended.
But it all still gets compressed into a cube and shipped off somewhere to sit for years before getting sent to yet another Third World country and it becomes their problem forever. Sigh.
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As long as the petrochemical industry is treated as a god instead of the criminal enterprise it is, we’re fucked.
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I can remember people saying that even if fossil fuels were casually destroying the world we depend on to live, we still needed the oil industry for plastics. There’s a fun bit of irony, huh. 
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… they’ll take whatever I throw in the bin, and if they don’t like it they can send it somewhere else, that’s literally their job 
You just didn’t try hard enough
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I wonder if they’ll have the shameless nerve to rebrand the current batch of “well, looks like microplastics are in basically every flavor of tissue sample we poke closely enough” as evidence that reuse and recycling is both universally popular among consumers and so easy that you don’t even need to be aware you are doing it?
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I’d be pretty surprised to see some of the more specialized and exotic engineering and very-specific-properties plastics and petrochemicals go anywhere(some of them would likely even be the sort of thing where people would actually suck it up and start the synthesis from a less convenient feedstock rather than give them up); but I assume that the industry is not interested in losing its current “replace paper, glass, and low-effort metal in all applications!” volume to go chase a relative handful of esoteric specialty applications.
I was just ranting about this with my mate Pete this morning, who is similarly incensed.
In the UK, I remember handing in glass bottles for a little pocket money and meats coming wrapped in paper instead of plastic. I’m sure we could go back to that and save a shitload of cash as well as the environment.
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So, we’re told that putting in a plastic (or other material) that isn’t expected will foul the line - instead of picking the offending item off the conveyer, they’ll just re-direct that portion to the waste pile.
Or worse, an inspector in China will find more than the allowed ‘bad’ plastics in a bundle and reject the whole shipment.
Sometimes that error isn’t an error.
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I keep all of mine and use it as packing materials. Not sure you could do that in a business setting, but maybe?
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I have mentioned it but folks higher up describe it as “looking unprofessional.”
So I take some home and re-use for my own personal mailings (kind of tough to remove the old labels completely.)
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The larger-size padded plastic envelopes make good laptop sleeves.
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A reminder that there is a fine case to be made that we wouldn’t have curbside recycling at all if it wasn’t for Big Soft Drink’s eagerness to divest itself from bottle-refilling.
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Nice. I’ve started using them on my bike seat-- the seat is so worn it soaks up moisture from rain or sweat, but this comfy blue bubble pack fits over it nicely, with a little folding.
I also use them for bringing home food from work, keeps stuff like hummus or juice from leaking all over the place.
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