But then if you're not buying as much low-quality disposable crap, you're not giving big companies as much money. It's a classic case of wanting to have your cake and eat it too.
Like most of products. It does not mater any more who produce them. The ingeniers design with a lifetime programed to brake as soon as possible. Even Japanese cars are braking now like if they were from US companies.
@Patrick Bateman no it means your thrifty. That's what made this country and the greatest generation. People used to buy things and throw them oit when there was no more use for it. Communism would just flat out prevent you from consuming due to unavailability of product. Or provide you with a product that you didn't want or need.
Plastic is recyclable, it's called thermal depolymerization. It's the same process as cracking crude oil, breaking long chain carbon molecules into short chain, aka oil and gas. But our society won't use this technology because it would make drilling obsolete before our existing oil rigs break even.
@@N8_R You would need a shit ton of plastic to use it for oil. And not even profitable. For it to be profitable crude oil will have to cost at least 3 times what it costs right now. You know what happened in the world last year when oil price went through the roof
@Jaehong Song I see a shit ton of plastic in this video. And to say it's not profitable, that is a specious assertion at best. Where are you citing this 'three times the cost' idea? What heuristic data do you base that claim on? And of course the technology is not at an industrially scalable state of development, since banks and corporations have not put any R&D into it. And I ride a bicycle, so mostly Ive noticed food prices go up.
As a metallurgist, I will say that if you recycle any one thing as a consumer it should be aluminum (really any metal, but aluminum is most common for average households). It’s one of the few things that we can recycle almost infinitely, then takes less energy to recycle than it does to make from ore. It’s the one item I will go out of my way to make sure it gets recycled. I consider paper in a landfill to be beneficial as a good source of biomass 😊.
Does recycling batteries do anything good? Batteries are one of the things I recycle because I was led to believe that we wouldn't have to purchase as many rare metals from China if we recycled batteries.
@@TheNewRobotMaster Recycling batteries is good mainly because they contain heavy metals, carcinogens, sulfuric acid, etc (depending on the type of battery), which will leak out in a landfill and contaminate the ground water. The extra benefit of recycling the NiMH batteries and other rechargeables, is that it does prevent the need to harvest new materials...athough I'll be honest that I'm not as familiar with the different types of rechargeable batteries and how they are recycled.
@@jonpatterson7211 Per my previous comment, if someone is willing to pay you money for it, then it is beneficial to recycle. If no one will pay you for an item, that means it cannot be recycled profitably, which means that the recycling process requires more inputs in time, energy, etc. than it outputs. Which means that it is actually wasteful to recycle that item.
I worked in the plastics injection molding tooling industry for 30 years. Most plastic pellets (plastic parts come from pellets often supplied in bags) can only contain 2 or 3 percent recycled plastic. As one increases that percentage, the quality reduces. Plastic degrades every time it melts and reforms. Even at that low amount, it's mostly for very low grade junk stuff. You really don't want your expensive auto or phone parts to contain recycled plastic.
I used to believe in the lie, until around 2015, then I stop recycling. New plastic is better quality & cheaper. So why would anyone pay more money for crap?
That's why you use recycled plastics for cheap consumer goods, single-use products, packing material, etc. Do you think tires get recycled into new tires? No they get shredded into mulch for playgrounds and artificial fields.
The only reason I recycle and compost is because my city has a 1 bag limit per week for garbage pick up. After that it’s $2.00 a bag. I wish there were practical alternatives to having such a wasteful society. I do what I can to reduce waste but it’s hard.
That’s common knowledge dude no need to work in plastic injection to know this. What you apparently still don’t know is that recycled materials won’t necessarily go to the exact same use. As mentioned before for low precision or low longevity etc.
I remember watching pen and tellers video on BS decades ago as a kid and telling my parents recycling was mostly pointless outside our aluminum cans. This is nothing new, it's bizarre it took this long for some people to come around
@@DurzoBlunts does colore glass work? I mean I know what multi colored paper tends to not be recycled just wondering if glass colors cause similar issues
@@DurzoBlunts Glass is pointless....it doesnt cause damage and you can make more...same deal with paper. Put it in a landfill and it helps rot everything away.
I recall, as a 16 yr old in 1970, that the grocery store I worked in was trying to steer customers toward plastic bags, saying the slogan, 'Save a Tree'. This was in response to doomsday predictions that we'd run out of trees on Earth by [Insert Year Here]. Due to this mass hysteria, we now have a huge problem with disposal of these accumulated plastic bags, as opinion has now swung back in favor of paper bags once again. Nobody will step forward to take responsibility for bad policy of the 1970's
@@roybiv7018 This sounds like one of those time memes... "Gravity was invented in 1665." People in 1664: *everyone floating away on flying landmasses I think we could have survived.
Yep, plastic is the devil now, but several decades ago plastics were considered the environmental savior of the world... also, remember that plastic was the answer to glass bottles. It's why I don't like most environmentalists. Don't get me wrong, I hate seeing trash on the street and I loathe pollution, but there's a difference between an honest guy cleaning stuff up with his own hands and a billion dollar business asking for money for a solution that isn't even proven to work. -- What's your opinion on electric vehicles? I think at best they're overblown, but at worst, it's starting to rhyme like how plastic was lauded years ago.
I was a carpet installer for decades, taking vanloads of old, petroleum based carpet and pad to the dump every week. I always found it amusing when people told me my juice bottle was going to make the difference.
I do construction and demolition. In one hour we send more stuff to a landfill than 10,000 people do in a day, a tiny fraction of copper and metal is worth even separating for recycling.
We should be incinerating most of our trash for energy. Japan does that safely because they have no other choice. They have to actually take back the oceanfront to build new landfills so they switched to incinerating.
They actually do make a difference. Plastic food containers make tiny pee pees and and soy boys due to phthalates. I am environmentally minded , but the hysteria and propaganda divert most of the meaningful efforts. Plastic pollution is a problem and so is mercury in the oceans but the banksters want to make $$$ trading carbon credits etc. The move to plastic syringes is another non landfill based problem for example. They cannot be heat sterilized and this leads to all sorts of bad outcomes including actually reusing dirty needles to say nothing of just more plastic waste. But most of it is driven by liberal math making it worse and propaganda.
I used to reuse my grocery bags as garbage bags, now I have to buy garbage bags. That is a negative gain for me and a 0 gain for the environment! I have to sort and wash my garbage for their monetary gain. Clown world.
I am 61 years old. i grew up in the 1960's and 1970's having graduated high school in 1979. i am just old enough to remember when the school had milk in small bottles that were collected at the end of the day, returned to the dairy, cleaned and refilled. i remember switched to milk cartons and plastic bags were going to save the planet by eliminating paper bags. i remember the huge trash bags the school would have hauled away to be put in the dump and not returned to the dairy for cleaning and reuse. and plastic bags are now a bane to society.
And products were made to last wile now they are programed to brake so you have to keep consuming what could last a lifetime. This is the mayor contribution to world polution.
I'm with ya, turning 60 soon, it was save the trees! I mention a minute ago how I remember milk being delivered in glass bottles and we would put the empties out and like you say, they would be washed, things made way more sense back them! All around!
I'm so old, I remember using paper milk cartons and glass soda bottles.... The amount of single use plastics that we've increased over the past 20 years, simply by slapping a 3-arrow imprint on it, is astounding
You're so old that you are correct. Paper and glass work great. The main takeaway from this video is "recycling is dumb, stupid govt cant make me!" when it should be "The plastic lobby duped us in to thinking this shit is recyclable all for big biz profits" but that's not libertarian-loving/capitalism-loving for this crowd.
@@anderivative Not to mention plastics have been shown to have estrogen mimicking chemicals linked to low testosterone, breast cancer, and feminization. We can do without plastic.
Back in college I was preparing to do a “persuasive speech” and chose to do it on recycling. Once I started doing my research I learned how inefficient it was overall and decided to persuade people to reconsider recycling with “reduce, reuse, but think twice about recycling.” Unbeknownst to me I was giving my speech on Earth Day and my class ended up giving me a standing ovation. I think they were all as surprised as I was by what I had learned!
Touché. Stossel knows why recycling plastic is difficult. Not all plastic can be recycled. And why aren't there hardly any automated recycling centers in the U.S.? Humans recycling plastic can give them cancer. So why can't they just stop selling them?
Yep. Mr. Stossel knows why recycling plastic is difficult. It's never an easy solution for us consumers to not having to buy items that contain it. Why aren't there hardly any recycling centers that are automated? Because they'd cost MORE than just buying items that have plastic on them! There have been some improvements on purchasing items that aren't made of plastic. Just cardboard. Humans recycling plastic can give them cancer,even if they were wearing masks,goggles,and wearing biohazard suits that cover up from the head to the feet. In air-conditioned facilities that also have ventilators that's equipped with them in every one of them. It'd certainly cost more. But is worth it? Some plastics cannot be recycled. But there are ways. If they're made from oil,then why don't oil refineries and the companies find a solution to end that mess? One of the little-known secrets of plastic. It's part of the earth, right? Probably it's part of nature, right? So why are they a problem polluting our water and sewer systems in this country? There has to be a solution.
Insane.. As a former logger in Alaska, I watched fully logged mountainsides repopulate with trees ready for harvest again in less than 20 years. The oldest, most abundant, and most renewable energy source on the planet is being treated like a rare commodity while we pump oil into the shapes of toys for our children.. I'm not crazy, you're crazy!
@@LiberatedMind1 The rate at which they're cut down can be controlled, observed and distributed over a wider area while attempting to plant more trees than those which are cut down.
@@arvaneret_329 No you don't get it, the rate of cut down is dependent on industry demands. People need lumber for houses and such. You can plant as many as want, and its a good thing to do, but by the time those grow back many more will be cut in their place.
I remember probably 10 years ago recycling barrels were installed in Boston common. After a few years the local news got a tip that the "recyclables" were being thrown in the regular trash. So they went out and filmed it. Yup. The sanitation workers would open the recycling bin and into the dump truck it went. There were no facilities for recycling. But it sure made people feel good.
When I attended college in the 1990's, the campuses all had fancy color-coded recycling receptacles for each specific item. Then, one day a building custodian said hey, watch this -- as the recycling truck arrived and dumped all of those separated items into a single compartment of the truck. He even told me that there were not actually any compartments inside the truck -- it was one bin. So all that sorting at the source is pointless -- the truck mixed everything together, to be re-sorted at a fancy, expensive facility. About the only beneficial part of the recycling industry in my state is that it employs lots of otherwise un-employable people such as those with limited mental capabilities (Retards) to sort all of those recyclables.
I remember the local recycling did not take pizza boxes. But the leftist co-workers at my group home job swore I was destroying the world and they were saving it. I would throw the greasy group home pizza boxes in the trash and they would fish them out, and sneak them back in the recycling boxes and later chew me out. I arrived on recycling morning and got cursed out by the recycling guy who would throw the pizza boxes on the lawn if I didn't fish them all out of the big recycling barrel. It's like a cult.
The same thing was done on the TV news, a long time ago, here in NYC. The dumping station (called a transfer station) was shown, where all the trash was piled. Once there was enough, it was all scooped up into trucks and taken away - along with the regular trash. But yet, not even a month ago, some neighbors were fined $50 when caught having three or four empty plastic bottles in front of their house at the curb from overnight. The fine for mixing recyclables with regular trash is $200 as another neighbor found out during this past Spring. Those neighbors didn't know how to hide those recyclables more effectively so as to avoid detection. It's all just another way to grab money. You live and you learn!
I have lived in the UK for decades and in the Rue D'Arlon, off Place de Luxembourg, Brussels, Belguim for five years. In both places I have seen 'recycling' wagons coming to empty bottle banks where people have put their bottles into separate green, brown, and clear bottle banks for collection. However, the trucks in both places just empty the green and brown and clear bottles into one large hopper, all mixed and smashed in an instant. The people who love this stupidity the most are pencil-neck bureaucrats infesting our public offices - it keeps them in a job.
If I remember right, part of the push for switching to plastic bottles was because they were so easily recyclable. Same with paper bags to plastic bags. Save the trees. I would love glass bottles again. Everything tastes better when stored in glass vs plastic.
I'm so annoyed about people wanting to conserve/recycle paper to "save the trees". Nearly all paper comes from "forests" that were planted for that very purpose. The nice straight trees, all the same age/diameter, simplify/economize the process of cutting them and shipping them to the processing plant. Large quantities of tiny saplings are soon planted so the process can be repeated years later. They're as much a crop as beans, wheat or corn. There's just a longer period between planting and the harvest.
The plastic straw people were very successful. Now when I go to Starbucks I have to drink out of a cup with a plastic lid, but no straw. Mission accomplished. The disposable mask army has saved the environment!
ironically the only product starbuck's are able to recycle is the used coffee grounds which are recycled into fire-logs to be incinerate, everything else is either sent to landfill or incinerated as is.
i noticed that the other day when i got a drink and a hotdog at costco, no straws anywhere, but a plastic lid with a hole in it that didnt work. the lid fit so loosely i didnt trust it to stay on. so i just drank it out of the cup...
I've been advocating against recycling ever since I toured a recycling facility during graduate school. The plant manager even admitted to sending most of it to the dump. Meanwhile, workers spend the day terrible conditions. It can't be good for their health.
I volunteered for a recycling organization, where they encouraged people at events to recycle and guided them into depositing into the correct bins. We then had to dump out the contents and sort everything more precisely. The eye opening part was how much time it took to sort and clean those things after the event. On top of that the biggest eye opener was a manager telling us that it had to be this way, because last year, she took 100s of disposable plates home and washed them in her bathtub! It was so insane! 😞
Well, towns have managed to get around this by charging people per bag for their trash, but charging NOTHING for recycled crap. So, unless you want to spend more money on their overpriced bags, you need to put your garbage in those stupid bins. I hate these people!
"not worth" meaning not lining the pockets of trillionaires enough. This doesn't mean recycling can't work, but when most of the waste is up to the big money buyers, the problem isn't the people being taxed for it all. Put the Ministry of Plenty in charge of sand, guess what is suddenly "rare" on earth!!!!
@@seankingwell3692 I was thinking just a short while ago: maybe the best solution is to go directly to the dump, pour out the recyclables, pull out the profitable pieces, that are easy to get, then keep them, and then leave the rest at the dump as opposed to sorting everything.
Aside from the landfill vs recycling debate, the logo is a triangle because it represents "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle". If someone is preaching recycling without avidly doing the other 2 then they do not believe in thier own words.
John is a true journalist. His "devil's advocate" style of interviewing gets his interviewee to talk. John has been outstanding for over 50 years. I saw John when he was a very young reporter for CBS in New York City and he is still the same. Tells truth. Yes, more than 50 years.
He's right about this one, but he also lacks the courage to propose real solutions. "You can't tell people what to do". Well, somebody needs to tell everybody that we are either going to have to come up with some perfectly sustainable solutions ASAP, or else start giving up a lot of modern conveniences that are not sustainable. Anybody who chooses their own convenience over sustainability is an a whole, and sadly that is 99.9% of humans
@@jayphoneuser2538 according to who, or what? This comment sounds like the same climate alarmism Stossel rails against, with no real argument, plus you didn't provide any solutions either lol. Or sources. Why do we need an immediate solution?
I have done a lot of things and once I worked at a government grant project researching recycling of household garbage. We spent more time shut down cleaning the plastic bags out of the machinery than running. It broke down to one hour running, 5 hours clearing. Plastic gets wound up in the various rollers (conveyor belt, crushers, and especially the shredders) and actually from the pressure bonds to all the other plastic. We used small pneumatic chainsaws (12" with tiny chains) to cut the thick bonded (it would get 1 to 1-1/2 thick on the rollers and solid, not a bunch of film layers) and had to swap them out frequently because the plastic dulled the chain teeth quickly. The unsorted garbage piled up and they were taking it to the landfill anyway. The wet garbage was supposed to be dried and burned to dry the next wet garbage but the engineers had to put in oil tanks and fuel the fire that way because the dryed, burning garbage didn't dry the new garbage enough... Then they couldn't get the pollution down from the smoke of the burning dryed- wet garbage (wet garbage is food scraps and paper) and the stack scrubbers NEVER functioned right. It was a $80 million project and only ran a year, total failure and they shut it down and scrapped all the machinery
That makes it extra-despicable that Amazon recently started putting a recycling logo on their packing materials, knowing full well that even though it's in fairly large print, people won't notice that it says you should take it in TO THEIR STORE to get it recycled. If I wanted to go to a store in the mall instead of using the convenience of curbside recycling pickup or a neighborhood recycling bin, why would I be shopping on Amazon?
Ever since the current "elected" so-called U.S. President decided to do everything in his power to raise gas and electric prices (thus increasing my utilities and everyone else's), everything burnable that used to go into my recycling bin now goes into the wood stove in my shop to keep my electric heat from running. Laundry detergent jugs, milk jugs, food containers, oil bottles, cardboard boxes, vitamin bottles.....you name it. All of this puts out an incredible amount of BTU's. And I don't feel the least bit guilty for doing it. The worshipers of the green environmental "god" are going to pay a price for their idolatry.
Being old, (50) i remember when we had real recycling. Glass bottles you took back to the store, your mum had good quality shopping bags that probably lasted a decade or more, and irony of ironys, milk delivered by an electric vehicle every other day. The 70's were the most advanced we ever got.
Where I live is moving back to that. Plastic bags are banned and people are charged for paper to encourage them to bring their own bags. The local milk producer exclusively uses glass and you get a deposit back when you return the bottle. I'd rather be forced to remember to bring a bag to the grocery store than forced to rinse and sort my garbage
I'm even older, 66 (this might start an age race). As you mentioned, in addition, meat was cut fresh and wrapped in grease paper. Loaves were wrapped in waxed paper (which was reused to wrap sandwiches). The local Cooperative store weighed out sugar, butter and cheese in the quantities you needed. I still have milk delivered in recyclable bottles, but sadly the delivery vehicle is not electric.
@@astrecks Please tell me if you had an electric vehicle deliver your milk ,what was used to charge that vehicle? You people make me laugh. And also the original commenter saying a electric vehicle delivered his milk every other day. LOL 😂
@@freedomrings1420It’s possible, electric cars had originally been invented around the same time as gas cars. Reason why electric never took off til now is because Ford managed to make a cheap gas car, electric cars costed a premium. Funny thing is it’s still the same to this day, that said it is rather unlikely for a business to use electric but if it’s a personal vehicle being used for business then it’s game on.
@@freedomrings1420 Yes, when I was a kid the milk was delivered everyday by an electric vehicle. They were known as milk floats. The batteries were charged at the local dairy depot. When I went on holidays to my aunties, the milk was still being delivered by horse and cart. Why do 'us' people make you laugh? just curious!
My dad was a polymer R & D chemist his entire career. I remember his outrage and headshaking when McDonald’s, under pressure of the greenies, ceased using styrene clam shells. That polystyrene was reused for many useful items. It was replaced by a multi-ply paper from which it was impossible to separate the layers to then re-purpose. Such is the stupidity and inanity of the green movement.
There is conflicting arguments in the green debate and its not like there’s one belief. Stossel even said that the reason throwing plastic away is better is because landfills are regulated so that they don’t leach chemicals out. This regulation is by the green movement
The green movement has a noble goal. But the rest of the world pollutes many times over what we we do. We need to make good choices and do our part, but this is getting ridiculous. These garbage companies are turning us into indentured servants, forcing us to sort our refuse. We’re facing fines if we put something in the wrong container. A container the charger us money for. We pay for a service, and they control us? The system is wack.
@@joospis In the 1970's the "Environmentalists raged against recyclable renewable paper products in favor of plastic. There are now islands of plastic 3 times the size of France in the ocean. Where are all the paper bags?
@@deathharpproductions3094 They'll complain that the forests are gonna be killed, old growth forests (those are not being used for stupid crap like toothpicks and paper ect) but then they think plastic is the solution...crazy how they think. Biggest problem if it is one, is people buying junk products and throwing them away far too soon. Pay twice as much get 10 20 times a better product.
@@zeehero7280 now we use heavier "Callico" bags that are clearly made of plastic products and contain a hard plastic bottom and cost $1 or we get a heavy plastic bag for 15c, both supplied with the supermarket brandings
I was a super recycler. My recycling bin was always five times more full than my garbage and I was proud of it. But the moment I found out that recycling was a total scam, I stopped completely. Now I don’t waste a single brain cell on that bullshit. Everything goes in the trash. Edit: in response to the remarks about aluminum, glass, metal… If I can get paid for it (copper, steel, electronics, etc.), I take it to the scrap yard. If I don’t get paid for it, it goes in the trash. Sue me. Do you want me to recycle? Put a deposit on it. Make me bring it back. If there’s money in it, I’ll bring it back. I am old enough to remember eight packs of glass bottles of Coke and Pepsi that we used to have to return to the store. I thought that worked pretty well. Besides, putting a deposit on trash means the bums can clean the place up and get paid for it.
Still the wrong attitude as: 1. Aluminum 2. Steel cans 3. Glass are still good to recycle and most get's reused. Paper & plastic are the ones that don't really end up working in the end.
@@77Treasurehunter77 How does that make sense when spending time to recycle those things will ultimately cause more energy use and emissions that pollute the air from the factories that try to recycle? You are still thinking with your "lied to" recycling helps the climate brain. Think deeper here, it is a scam. Guess who are majority owners in these recycling companies? Big oil. You still think you are helping the climate?
Was more eco friendly back when I was growing up 60s and 70s, much less throw-away products back then and you could get a refund on pop bottles, beer bottles, milk came in a carton, my parents saved bread bags for use around our home, used them for packing sandwiches. Is insane how much plastic crap we throw away today for the sake of convenience!
Yes indeed, it's really an American problem. I don't know why, but America HATES implementing proper policies, especially on companies. It's not like low waste packaging, or recycled plastics don't exist, it's that the companies aren't forced to use them, so they don't care. This works rather well in Europe, most western countries have figured those things out by now, USA is again lacking behind.
@@CHMichael In my country, you must pay for a plastic bag if you didn't bring your own bag. It's a good incentive to bring your own proper bag, which almost everybody here does.
That makes sense in places that are highly populated and short on land fill space, for example in Singapore. But it requires more of the equipment that drives up the cost of coal fired power plants, and produces more green house gases per unit of energy than poor quality coal. In the western US it probably makes more sense to land fill trash and use natural gas for generating power.
because it cant just be filtered, plastic burning, just like oil burning is INSANELY toxic, and a lot of those toxic chemicals eat the insides of machines. most of the reason turbines burn diesel or natural gas (almost always natural gas) is its a really clean burn, and none of the chemicals from it are especially corrosive. it would make the millions in maintenance be required dramatically more often. just imagine having to do an engine rebuild on your car every 10k miles instead of 200k, AND spending a ton on it to get some special fuel system custom fitted to it
I live in a town of 250,000 people. My neighbor is a garbage truck driver. The city pays him $70,000 to $180,000 a year depending on how much he wants to work. Those recycling green cans create the need for 2 separate trips to an address. Recycling scam is money in the bank for that driver.
Damn. I’ve read more and more all the plastic trash just gets tossed. Aluminum & glass ok.yeah, two trucks a week to the same addresses, that’s retarded.
Here in Kawartha Lakes, Ontario, Ca., we are "forced" to perpetuate the sham with civic mandates and prosecution for failures to comply. We must use only clear garbage bags so the waste collectors can see whats in it, and if ANY "recyclables" are visible in it they tag it with a red sticker and leave it behind, then a waste management type enforcer comes to investigate and fine $. FYI clear garbge bags are more $ and harder to find than the usual green or black ones, but we MUST use them only or be prosecuted by the tyrants.
@@PMofKhanadah LoL.. You just whined about how your Socialist Overlords force you to put your garbage in see-through bags, so the garbage-Commissaire can inspect it, then you get offended by me calling Canada what it is??
I've tried to share videos like this with people and some of them have gotten incredibly angry at me, calling me a liar, and won't watch the video anyway. Religion runs deep, sadly.
@@jhoughjr1 If you acknowledge that the current gestures are useless, you can develop better alternatives. Could it be that you don't want improvement? That it's all posing and power-grabbing at heart?
People don't like to be told they're doing something wrong, so they're apprehensive at first. Just be understanding and try again. Maybe they'll come around.
@@Lot_2023 It sucks when people take one extreme side or the other. It clearly isn't all bs. In fairness the elites and the government lying to us so much, contributes towards people saying it's all bs.
@@Lot_2023 in my city we have to pay 35 dollars a month for a recycling bin. It goes in the same truck as the trash, it Never gets seperated and the city has admitted it only has the bin because of state law but that same law doesn’t require it to be recycled, only collected in a bin marked for recycling. That’s how it’s a scam.
I'm 67, I remember as a boy that our dustbin was emptied once a week and it was rarely full. My parents grew up during the war when everything that could be was reused. Pop (soda) came in glass bottles which could be returned for a small reimbursement, in fact all kinds of bottles, beer, milk, etc were recycled. Socks were darned until there was more darn than original sock. Parcels were in brown paper & tied with string, my mother would save both to re-use.
We DO need to go back to glass bottles, I used to live on Diet Snapple but they switched from glass bottles to plastic, I quit it that very day. My family has reusable water bottles so we don't "need" to buy plastic water bottles anymore, saves tons of money.
@@TheVenominside , Hoarding typically is brought on by trauma and it can hit all ages not just older folks. Hoarding is not making due with what you have as the first poster is exemplifying. They are saying stuff should be reused and repaired to extend its useful life or recycled that is not hoarding.
@@joemiller9931 , Yup, exactly. My grandparents lived through the great depression, they reused and saved whatever they could. My grandma even to almost the day she died washed out and reused plastic zip bags (even had a little rack to dry them on), she reused all glass bottles and jars and reused newspapers as packing material. All my grandparents were very thrifty...they hoarded what they needed to survive, not how some folks hoard these days.
My daughter works for our community's recreation center. She said the recycling containers get emptied into the trash bin at the end of the day. At least people feel good when they put their disposable water bottles into the recycling bin.
The plastic industry itself came up with the 3 arrows recycle logo and the numbering category for recyclables to look like they were managing the issue and to give people a way to feel good about using plastics. "I use plastics but I recycle so I'm more ethical than you."
@@janeclayton151 that might work for some items, but isn't going to work for everything. If it's biodegradable it will be prone to rot, bacteria, mold, fungus etc. growing in/on it. No thanks.
I don't think everyone thought they were 'more ethical', most people just wanted to contribute to fixing a huge problem. But yes, the plastics companies were incredibly deceptive and that's shameful.
@@janeclayton151 Not always as easy as it sounds because some materials are picky about what they can be stored in, but I like to think more companies are trying than not. I like to THINK that.
Almost as much as religious people do shouting at people about morality. Or righteous conspiracy theorists screaming at people about whatever nonsensical garbage they've come up with this week.
This video is intentionally misleading, as you can see what people took away from it in these comments. It's 1) recycling doesn't work, 2) gov'ment bad, 3) "dont tell me what to do I don't wanna do it!!!". How about: 1) Recycling glass, metals, compostables is very efficient, 2) The plastic lobby fooled people and govt in to believing their crappy packaging was recyclable for the sole purpose of their own profit, and 3) Capitalism did this, not Greenpeace. The dude straight up shows how dumps become lovely ski resorts as if there's no issues in between. What a joke.
Al gore in his Oscar winning documentary said the Arctic would be gone by 2013 and polar bears would be extinct. Polar bears are thriving right now and not even on endangered list. Media was also fearmongering about 10 years ago, citing "experts" that were predicting Florida would be underwater in 7 years. Australia even warned in 1999, that in 20 years, there would be no more snow. They just had historic record snowfall. Climate has always been changing. That's why ice age is cyclical and Sahara desert was lush 10,000 years ago.
That’s not what climate is. Yes it does change over time but climate refers to long term weather patterns. We have observed “hottest year on record” multiple times and polar bears, while there are a lot of them now, are threatened (not endangered) meaning they will go extinct if trends continue.
@@xenomorphbiologist-xx1214"hottest year on record" from thermometers placed near air conditioning units, or in airports near runways. The climate alarmists do thier best to try and nudge the numbers up, to continue the grift.
The mantra growing up was 'REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE.' We seem to have forgotten the first two in pursuit of the most feel good action - Recycling. If people reduced the consumption of single-use plastics and continued to reuse them as secondary wrapping, storage, garbage bags around the home, etc., we'd go much further than just the hollow motions of recycling.
Ah, the ubiquitous "If people". If people would just do what you think is right then what? The world will be good? The oceans won't rise? Polar bears won't drown? You are welcome to wrap your stuff in dirty plastic. Or you could waste water and clean it. Do what you like but leave me out. I just love throwing shit away and getting new stuff in new bags and new wrappers.
I was a child of the 80's, and 90's, and I clearly remember multiple times having to sit through the recycling will save the earth BS in school growing up, with even one video being a parody of the Terminator called the "Recyclenator", and another with child celebrities in the early 90's(some from Doogie Howser) trying to fear monger us into thinking kids of the future will have to wear yellow hazmat suits just to go outside, and play if we don't change our ways!! it's 2023, and it ain't happened yet, but as Mark Dice says "Celebrities Know Best!!"😂😂
Yeah, environmentalists seem to think litter is radioactive or something. Paper litter is negligible to the environment. It gets broken down quickly, often hidden in piles of leaves, the cans and bottles on the other hand never go away. As a landscaper I see this shit happen at our commercial properties often. D&B has a forest area in front of them that everyone tosses their bottles and cans from pregaming. I see other litter there too but its only the bottles and cans I have to clean up.
LMAO recyclenator can just picture the lame square sob that thought that was really cool. and they're greenwashing the kids with climate scaremongering. and their kids will get some other bs crisis.
I've always been concerned about the amount of water being used to rinse out plastic containers prior to throwing them into the recycling bin. I think preserving our natural resources is more important.
If it's food in that plastic container, then you can simply collect this water and use it to water plants outside. Thus, no water will be wasted in the process and plants outside will get some fertilizer.
There's only one appropriate way to recycle paper and plastic, it's by burning it under a boiler, to run a turbine, to generate electricity (which is needed even more as more people buy electric cars). The U.S.A. (and I think probably the rest of the world) has one hundred times more trees now, than we had one hundred years ago. And as a result we have more and more and bigger and bigger forest fires every year. Proper forest management requires cutting far more trees than what are being cut. And recycling paper is an environmental disaster.
I remember when grocery stores switched from paper to plastic bags because everyone was so concerned about saving trees. Now, they're saying plastic is worse for the environment than paper.
I am from south Georgia and one of the biggest things is pine tree farms. We have thousands of acres of trees that are constantly being planted, thinned, and harvested on a rotation. Paper is a renewable resource.
I knew a man that worked in the trash collection industry. He told me recycling was invented as a way of increasing revenues, and in the end most stuff goes to the same place anyways.
One day my son left school late and saw the janitor emptying the recycle barrels into the dumpster with all the other trash. He learned more that day AFTER school. 😊
@@anderivative He learned about deception, a life lesson. You know, don't just believe, follow through, investigate, seek out truths. He pulls the curtain back on most everything of interest.
A couple of years ago our city finally admitted the whole recycling program was a lie. They had been dumping it all in the regular trash. I was surprised at the lack of outrage. Maybe like Santa Claus people had figured it out long ago and were just going along with the crowd.
I live in desert area where water conservation is a must, yet waste a lot of water rinsing plastic containers or metal cans for recycling. I’ve often wondered how this makes any sense at all. I also wondered about the added pollution caused by the extra trucks needed to pick up the recycling materials. You unequivocally answered my questions.
Interesting video. For the past few years, I adamantly recycled plastic bottles. But about a year ago, I was listening to a local talk radio station. The show's host said that plastic bottles are just ending up in landfills.
Brings me back to a time when an old owel was trying to save our forests. So our whole 6th grade class went to war over brown paper bags at the store. We collected money by selling our moms peanut butter cookies ( don't freak out back then it was ok to have peanuts in school. The kid that was allergic to them was smart enough and just didn't eat them). It was a hard fought battle but over time we did win and replaced all those brown biodegradable paper bag with cheap plastic ones. Fast forward a couple decades and our war caused a great plastic island in the middle of the pacific Ocean. What I learned from the whole thing is when these groups decide to save the planet whaT they're really doing is lining their pockets with our money and could care less about the planet...
THAT is the truth. In our state we now pay .08 tax for each sack we use to carry our groceries to the car. A store owner told me they have to pay extra for the “thick reusable” sacks, they can’t use their old inventory of sacks and the state keeps that as a tax!!! So the store owner of course charges us in raised good prices. It’s a fun little new trick they have found to make more money.
And another freedom stepped on! Its just about more control besides the fact, who the hell are these people. America has more agencies that have zero faces.
the high school young republican mindset is that anything that the government mandates or even suggests is bad, hence why you probably liked that comment. As Reagan said when he told people to just give their money to the rich people (trickle on your face econ), the government is BAD. Except for bombing brown people for profit and stopping gay ppl from marriage.
I've been skeptical about recycling for as long as I can remember. I recall it being pitched heavily when I was a kid ( 90s) and thinking about how all this crap needed to be trucked, sorted, probably trucked again, reprocessed, trucked again ect until it was turned into something useful. It didn't seem very logical. Well as it turns out that is the case. It's also highly subsidized by government because it's not cost effective at all. It's a complete scam!!
Okay. But don't you think this dude gets a charge out of saying the mainstream is wrong? Both claims prove nothing about whether recycling is worthwhile or not.
@@zorby3774 no. I think he gets a “charge” out of exposing government lies, and proposing an alternative view. I know you libtards hate alternative ideas, but you better get used to it.
My wife bought one because it makes her feel better, as she finally admitted. The only thing I recycle is glass, because I like smashing them into the big collection bin. Although its changed a bit when I first got here I was amused to see the one thing Americans recycled was the one thing Czechs did not: aluminium cans.
@@robertb1610 I don't know about cardboard but crushing cans and taking them in will get you a little money. They wouldn't go in the recycle bin though.
I remember when my new neighbors moved in next door. In typical tree-hugger fashion I noticed how painstakenly and carefully they would flatten all their cardboard and stack them according to size and neatly line them up in the recycle container, from small to large - perfect! Same with cans, diligently wash them, remove labels, and had a special crusher to flatten them and place them in their container. Same with glass - washed, labels off, carefully stacked in their own container. Paper neatly stacked and tied in a bundle. Placed them all in perfect alignment on the curb. Very feng-shui! As they walk away, they look back a couple of times, with a big smile, feeling very proud of their accomplishments. That all changed when the garbage collector rolled in. He dumped everything all together in the same receptacle. I will never forget the look of horror on my neighbor's face!!!
This comment is stupid. Everything you mentioned can and should be easily recycled. This video even said, for example, that paper and cardboard and glass and metal is easily recyclable and good too. It’s talking mostly about plastics. But yeah I’m sure the story really happened that way.
Australia is experimenting a process of 2 types of plastic waste streams. Clean and dirty. Clean is used to remake packaging. Dirty is made into lumber style products or returned to useable oil.
I remember when plastic bags were introduced in the 90s because environmentalists were complaining about needing to save the trees. Now environmentalists are complaining about plastic being everywhere, so now we are back to using paper bags lol
I discovered those brown paper bags are produced in China after they dismantled all the US paper mills and sent the equipment to China. The little paper handles are glued on by Uyghur wage slaves. Happy Falafel Day!
@@robertmarmaduke9721 i literally dont believe that only because (china running) a machine doing it would be 500x faster and cheaper im not defending china, china bad. but that does sound a little bit too propaganda-y considering how easy of a task putting glue on something and pressing two pieces of paper together could be automated
could this be the reason the milk given out by my elementary school was in plasic bags. Yes, everyday at lunch we can a small bag of milk. It was strange.
I’m in my 40s for context. The older I get, the more I think that my grandparents were onto something. They weren’t the consumers that my generation tends to be, and many of their frugal practices were actually less wasteful to boot. If I can re-use something I already have instead of purchasing something new, I’ve saved money and generated less waste. Never thought I’d give up my electric dryer, but when it broke last year the cost of replacing it and the doubling of my electric rates made me decide to switch to drying my clothes on a drying rack “for a while”. Honestly, I may never get another dryer. My clothes are not wearing out as quickly and I don’t have to worry about shrinking something because I accidentally put it in the dryer. What do you know? Grandma wasn’t as crazy as I thought she was for air drying her clothes! ;-)
grandma would have preferred the automatic dryer.. the reason it seems better is the tech that frees up the your time in other areas still makes your day seem light. grandma has no such things. so her day was full dawn till dusk..
The amount of information the general public is under informed about is insane! I learned about this particular issue when I managed a landfill project 20 years ago.
@@raven4k998 Plastic is technically recyclable but glass is a far better option. We use plastics because they're cheaper for companies which means more profit. This is an issue of capitalism trashing the earth more than it is about recycling not working.
@@victorchiappetta3230 that "feeling" was manufactured by big biz to promote using cheapass plastic to increase profits. We wouldn't have gone down this plastic road if the FACTS weren't covered up that plastic doesn't recycle well. Maybe ppl like their feel feels but they didn't make them up themselves: Capitalism fooled them on purpose.
The general idea of throwing our modern trash in a hole is just bad... Some of that stuff will be there for millennia. How about self-decomposing plastics? How about incentives for less disposable waste in products? How about creating items that are repairable instead of disposable? How about prioritizing ecology over economy? How about suing the waste removal companies for not delivering what they promised? How about improved and automated recycling equipment? How about charging customers for the amount of trash they create vs a flat monthly fee? How about laws preventing transport of waste outside a certain radius? It comes down to future awareness and personal responsibility. John Tierney is advocating laziness.
When I was growing up, we bought dry goods in paper, carboard boxes, or burlap bags, grocery bags were paper, too. Soda came in glass bottles you took back to the store to be refilled, and had a nickel deposit, so us kids would gather them from along the road to get money for candy or other treats, they didn't litter the highway. We reused glass jars for canning or other purposes, and tin cans as well, I still use coffee cans for storage of nails, etc. in my shop. It was used, reused, and fixed or used for something else when it broke, until it was used up. Jelly jars were cast to use a standard canning lid specifically to be reused, and the company that didn't would go broke! Table scraps went to the dog, or into a compost pile. Paper got used to start the wood stove or burn pile, or used for wrapping parcels or crafts in the case of the paper grocery bags. Nothing was wasted if we could help it. There wasn't a trash pick up, we didn't need one. We'd go down to the landfill once or twice a year for what little we had to get rid of, if even that. When the plastic industry did it's big push, we were laughed at for being dumb hillbillies that were just behind the times. Not so dumb, were we?
I worked at an appliance recycler. The issue was not recycling the freon, foam insulation, oil, metals, and glass. These all can be readily separated, recycled and have a secondary market. The biggest issue was the plastic. Because there are MANY different plastic chemical compositions and they cannot all be comingled and recycled as one "plastic", there is a very limited secondary market. A lot of the plastic shelves and bins can be salvaged as used parts, but most of the other plastics are just ground down and hauled to the dump.
@@languagetruthandlogic3556 I have a recycle plastic item, that I just bought because I liked it and had money to waste. I still don't actually know how they achieved it but it seems legit because it cost like 30x more than the item normally would. I assume it was extremely labor intensive and they had to use items that were easy to spot that used one composition, I think maybe it was made out of fishing lines or specific nets or something. So for certain things I bet it's easier to recycle it, for your garden seats maybe they specifically also use other older broken plastic chairs which is worth it since it's a larger object.
@@languagetruthandlogic3556 Some plastics (like milk jugs) are very easily recycled even yourself, however many plastics either require extremely fine control of temperature and humidity processes (plus who knows what contaminants they have in them throwing off that process) that is seems exceptionally difficult. But there are definitely some recycled plastics like melting milk jugs into things you could even do at home (though as with melting all plastics, there are some air pollution concerns etc). I 3d print thermoplastics, so those you can easily remelt into a mold if it fails, but the problem is that you need like a $10k machine (lots of material resources) to recycle it back into a useable material to 3d print with, and even a hobbyist not valueing their time is never going to have like $200 in waste materials (that's like 25 pounds of plastic of 1 type that you need to recycle, and it can't be too degraded, and needs a lot of processing). However, if you have a large mold like a 2x4 board you want in plastic, you could easily melt down 20 pounds of plastic into that with minimal tools, its just that a 2x4 normally doesn't cost anywhere what your time will, so unless its for a craft or artwork its not very feasible unless you are just messing around for fun.
Plastic recycling was to a significant extent touted by the American Petroleum Institute, the same organization that pretended that the dangers of leaded gasoline were actually caused by naturally occurring lead (and tried to bribe the scientist who proved that pre-industrial ice had like 0.1% of the lead content of pre-Clean-Air-Act industrial ice) and are leading advocates of climate science denial.
Most of it can be recycled into something useful such as plastic lumber , it’s just not profitable. If something isn’t profitable, no one will take on the burden to do it and I don’t blame them.
My wife asked me once why we recycle when we know it is a scam. I told her it helps put on a show to keep those green lunatics from harassing us. They are a pretty unhinged bunch. That and they charge more for an extra garbage can versus a recycle can.
Yup, that's why we do it. They charge us per garbage can, so we only do one. The recycling bin is a great way to get rid of plastics, cardboard and other things that would just overfill our trash can.
And this is why my recycle bin is more full than my rubbish bin on the weekly. If it's plastic, glass, aluminum, paper, cardboard... pretty much any container... it goes in the recycling bin. Recycling is free; each bag of rubbish I need a tag that costs $3. Typically I only have one kitchen-sized bag of garbage... sometimes not even that.
People in the plastic industry have known since the mid 80's that the recycling idea was a waste. I worked for a company that made small plastic spools for sewing thread. The most recycled plastic they could use was 4%. Almost nothing.
I did some work with a company that converted post consumer plastics into paint cans. The end result of mixing all types of plastic was an all black low grade plastic can. However, consumers demanded a metal lip and lid making it non-recyclable after one use.😆
I’ve got some cans of Behr paint I’m using right now. They are all plastic other than the handle and where it connects to the can side. The big lid has a smaller round cap that can be removed so a plastic pour spout can be put in it’s place. It seems to work pretty well so far but I’ve only had them for about a week.
Upon closer inspection I realized that the places on the side of the cans where the handle connects are also made of the same plastic as the can. So it appears that the only part of the can that isn’t plastic is the handle.
The saving trees fallacy is potentially one of the best litmus tests for whether or not someone understands where raw materials come from and how recycling works. Trees for paper are grown on "paper tree farms" just like any other harvestable plant. When new paper use is high, farmers grow more trees... When new paper use is low (and recycling is high) they grow fewer trees. If you think recycling paper leads to more trees you don't understand one of the most basic aspects that relates paper to trees.
It's not just that, it's that most paper isn't recyclable. If it has colored ink on, if it has the shiny surface on it like ads, if it was any kind of a food container, like a pizza box with even a spot of Grease on the cardboard it's trash.
That's not true. The acreage remains the same, as most of the pulp comes from paper company-owned land, such as Georgia-Pacific. The trees are already planted at the maximum efficient density -- this is an old science and industry. The only thing that changes is the harvested amount; so, it is true, that more recycling of paper would result in fewer trees cut down.
Which to soil exhaustion, which leads to increased demand in fertilizer, which leads to increase in energy consumption, which leads to bigger carbon footprint etc, hence climate change.
Stossel is the man, I hope to see more food regulation stuff from you. I am a Sr. Food scientist and there is so many ridiculous regulations that are truly hurting our consumer.
It's incredible that if people were really about the things they claim to care about (beyond just recycling), they would do the opposite of most of things we are berated and/or mandated to do.
Glad you mentioned the rinsing out thing. My wife will run about 4 litres of water off to get to hot water to rinse a small item of plastic which is wasting both the water and the energy used to heat it. Insane.
technically water is never wasted, it comes back after filtering. you are not crying that you literally shit in water while using toilets on a massive scale around the world. you drink that very same water after filtering. energy waste, sure.
@@Redmanticore I think most people will understand that I am referring to the wastage of resources used to supply the water that has been used unnecessarily.
When I worked at our local Sprouts, the plastic bag recycling bin was upfront to make it convenient for customers as they came in. When that bin was full, we would take it to the back, take It outside to the dumpster and throw it as if it were trash. I began telling people to take their bags elsewhere.
Did we work together? I did that exact same thing. It felt wrong but those bags are basically unrecyclable. Nowadays they're often more compostable which does just fine in the dump as well.
Damn, Sprouts sucks for that lol. I worked for a supermarket way back in the mid 90s and we would put the plastic bags in the baling machine with all the other plastic packaging that was removed by the night crew stocking the shelves. It would be baled in one big lump and hauled away on a truck SEPERATELY from the garbage lol
@@wesleyswafford2462 Or if you lived in my city, it was all taken to the giant incinerator plant and burned. At least the resulting heat was used to generate electricity.
John-we love you. Thank you for imploring common sense objectivity. I had an argument with my in-laws years ago about the “garbage of plastic recycling”-their response? “If they [the recycling company] don’t recycle it’s not our fault, we still do our part to put it in the recycling bin”
A lot of spot on points. Mostly a scam is true. However I would take my laundry container back for a refill. I miss returnable soda and beer bottles. We did’t know how “green” we were back in the day. I remember returnable milk jugs too.
@@saulofontoura notice that in this video they showed a reusable cloth bag as an example of something worse for the environment than plastic bags. It was just a visual that went by in a second or two, but it was in there. Biased reporting. There is no counterpoint to the point Stossel is trying to make. He's pushing an agenda. Where is the counter argument?
@@Lightsngear One hint is the block O…. No mandatory recycling in Ohio, just the useless blue containers that most of which is probably thrown in landfills.🤷🏼♂️
I only recycle what I get paid for, & nobody in Louisiana pays for plastic or paper... I'll haul metal to the scrapyard all day, but paper & plastic don't pay...
I've been trying to tell this to my wife for years now. She doesn't seem to believe me and she believes all that stuff we're throwing in the blue bin is actually being recycled. The only reason I'm even going along with that is because it saves room in our regular dumpster during the times where we don't have enough room in our regular trash bin. I think I'm going to save this video and get my wife to watch it with me, maybe that will help.
Well, they sort of recycle the plastic - by burning the stuff to generate heat. It is called "thermic recycling". It is better than putting it in a landfill...
@@xornxenophon3652 You ever light a piece of plastic and see what kind of noxious fumes come off of it? It is a big myth that we are running out of land to bury trash. Landfills makeup a tiny fraction of a percent of the land in the United States. It may be an issue in Europe I don't know but we have a massive amount of unused land in the USA. Once the landfill is full we can plant grass and trees on it and you can't even tell there was ever a landfill.
@@xornxenophon3652 Did you not watch the video? Most of the plastic gets shipped over seas to countries like Malaysia. They burn it yes, not to create heat, but to get rid of it.
After watching this video........the fact that all the plastic bottles could possibly end up in another country or in the freaking ocean instead of being recycled.... it's going in the regular trash now... the only thing I'm recycling is cereal/cracker/etc boxes, aluminum cans....metal cans, etc. I'm not doing this because I'm lazy.... but because I'd rather it end up in a safe landfill than in the ocean because i put it in the recycle bin.
Here in Michigan, we have this cruel tax on poor people called the bottle bill. If you buy something with bubbles in it, you have to return your garbage in order to get $.10 back. Ironically, two companies have the Monopoly on this industry. One company sells the machines to collect people's trash at the expense of store owners, the other is a company that recycles that has a monopoly on Michigan's bottles. This strange irony is that almost every municipality in Michigan has a recycling program, so poor people have to pay twice to recycle their soda pop. Thank you government!
Watched people in poverty stricken villages up north spend their entire free government food check (EBT) on cases of the least expensive soda they can buy, so they can return the cans and spend the deposit on whatever they like.
@@bhough410 I know that experience, I grew up working in a liquor store near Detroit. The old food stamps that were a dollar we're great for buying a five-cent piece of gum. We have to give him $0.95 in change. They do that four times over and then buy a half pint with their government money.
This was an awesome video. Thank you, John. I seriously have never seen anyone else put forth true information like you do. I have been watching your journalism ever since you were on 20/20. Thank you for everything you do.
plenty of things are very recyclable. Plastic has been known to be a shitty recyclable since the 90's and plastic bags are almost complete waste. None of this is new. Why didn't he mention glass, wood, metals? "Telling people do to things they don't want to do" uh yeah, sorry for the inconvenience CUZ UH MA FREEDOMZ!
This video was designed for the stupid people. “true information” If you believe what’s been presented here by people who obviously do not understand recycling and it’s potential, then heaven help us all !!!
This whole article reminds me of “Homer Simpson, Portrait of an Ass Grabber.” I have a love hate relationship with John Stossel’s stuff. It’s entertaining but must be viewed with critical thinking in mind. I saw “Plastics is a lie… a big lie… to sell plastic.” quoted to CBC 23 Sep 2020. I looked up. It was an article about a documentary. A commentary discussion rather than say a statement of fact. I’ll reply with a link but it will likely be filtered. There was another comment here which if changed to just “Recycle what can be recycled and use less crap you just throw away” I could get behind. Many want to take “docs” and “commentary” like this and stop all recycling. That view is lazy, stupid, and throws the baby out with the bathwater. The city I live in doesn’t have blue box. Recycling is self sort and only put in what there is a market for. My city both gets praise and crap. I.E. Glass doesn’t go into recycling here, it’s sharp edge hazmat and contaminates the product.
So you mean to tell me that my practice of saying "screw this insanity, it's too complicated" for the last 4 decades of my life and throwing everything into the trash has been the best practice all along? Awesome.
Actually, no. He mentions in the beginning that recycling works for things like paper and aluminium. You should recycle those. Only plastic is the problem.
@@apokalypthoapokalypsys9573 Right, and those are things that I do recycle, which I didn't make clear in my original comment. But hey, that's what I get for trying to write something quick while I'm on my coffee break.
Believe you me, I just made the manager at the truckstop just totally crack up with my minute-long diatribe about the focus group the CEO used to come up with stronger, thicker, more unwieldy 'reusable' plastic bags that I would just love to wrap around a sea-turtle's neck with my bare hands!
Years ago I read an article that claimed that 85 percent of the garbage in landfills was actually composed of paper and that by covered it with dirt was the very thing that kept it from decomposing, depriving it of the oxygen that was needed to speed the process.
I stocked grocery store shelves after school in the late 1960's & early 1970's. One of my boss's gripes was the breakage of, and loss of potential sale, of anything bottled in glass. The grocery store got compensated by the wholesaler, but, just like anything to do with money, the paperwork was a pain in the ass, and the compensation was slow in coming. Plastic packaging was in its infancy at that time. Retailers embraced plastic packaging with open arms because it reduced breakage & loss to unheard of minimal levels previously not possible. Plastic, in its thousands of different chemical formulations, and tens of thousands of differing shapes; is the one hundred million pound gorilla lurking in humanity's shadow. The Cousteau brothers proved conclusively decades ago that *every single* ocean, inland sea, large freshwater lake, and river system in the world was contaminated with microscopically small, round globules of plastic. Particles that they then theorized would continue to reduce in size until they were small enough to pass through cellular menbranes. A theory for which they received an incredible amount of criticism for from the scientific community at large, and for which they were accused of being *fear mongers.* Time has proven the brothers to be absolutely correct in their assumptions regarding plastic. Plastic, regardless of its chemical composition, is simply immune to chemical decomposition from water, the earth's *Universal Solvent.* ALL that happens is that the spheres continue to shrink in size. Humanity has embraced plastic for an incredible number of reasons, all of which have improved the quality of life, and the general standard of living, for hundreds of millions of people since the 1940's, when the first plastic was invented. However, no one seems willing to accept the idea that plastics may ultimately be responsible humankind's eventual demise if we don't figure out how to deal with them. All metals can be resmelted, and reused. Glass has no limit to how often it can be melted, and reused. Paper, cardboard, and all other carbon compound organic materials can be broken down by composting, and returned to the soil. Plastics are unique in that they have either an incredibly limited ability to be recycled, or no ability to be recycled at all.
I remember working in a grocery store. Soda was in returnable glass bottles, and you got a discount on the next 8-pack of bottled soda when you returned the empties. But eventually went to plastic.
PEI (Canada's smallest province) was one of the last jurisdictions to enforce an "all glass pop bottle" policy. They finally realized the cost and energy needed to ship and clean all that glass was more expensive and produced more pollution compared to plastic. However, it did make it a unique place to visit and I swear there is nothing better than an ice cold Coke in a glass bottle.🤗
Oh john Stossel! There are SO MANY other issues and attitudes in this world similar to this that are either deliberately or erroneously forced upon us as some good and righteous/virtuous cause! Thanks for continuing your good work sir!
exactly, thats the real problem with plastic. that and general micro plastics in the environment. What we really need is a way to dispose of plastic that ensures we don't have micro plastics everywhere.
"Recycling is a sacrament of the green religion" it is and it's not. Recycling is useful because you can recycle some plastics but the myth was propagated by the oil industry. The proper response should be to introduce policies that don't allow for rampant production of plastics that pollute the environment. Governments would need to fight the whole fossil fuel industry though and that's hard considering that they keep distorting the public opinion about pollution, climate etc. They are using green activists as pawns to make them the bad guys and that's how they push regulation away. it's really freaking irritating how different movements act the way the fossil fuel industry wants them to...
6:20 - Paper shopping bags, in my experience, are actually stronger than those pathetic flimsy plastic bags. And I like them for other reasons. I hope they don't go away. I need them in my garden.
Then again, I get your point about all the other plastics that aren't as recyclable as we once thought. I don't think we were misled at first, I just think we've learned more since we first thought that.
I saw a vid about using unrecyclable plastic as building material. They heated it to fuse the plastic into "Concrete Blocks," which didn't break and were bug proof. It seems like a good idea, but there is little about its success, cost, or practicality in real world applications.
Yah, experimented with that back in 2012. Loaded a vessel (with a lid and a trickle of nitrogen to drive the oxygen out the vent) with plastic and used nichrome heater wire to heat the plastic to melting. Had a mold we'd made for garden paving blocks and we filled it full of sand (for filler and to block UV light from eating up the block quickly) and some ground up charcoal briquettes for the carbon dust for UV protection. We had to put a vaccum pump on the outlet of the mold and shut the melting pot vent so it got about 2 pounds pressure... Between the pressure above the very thick viscous molten plastic ( just a random mix of household plastic, basically PE and PP) and the vacuum below the plastic flowed through the sand and filled the mold. We made 20 of those paver 'stones' and they came out very nice. Used thenm to make a walkway between a back door and a side garage door. They are still there and just as good as the day they were made. Not slick, the sand at the surface gives an antiskid effect.
The real funny thing was years ago in Vegas they told us to separate the different color beer bottles. I then talked to the trash guy and he said..."it's stupid, it gets to the main trash location it all gets dumped back together and they pay people to separate it again!"
If we all separated the different materials and then could put them separately into different bins, the % of things that would actually be recycled would be much higher vecause there would be much less impurities. Switzerland is one of the few countries that does this But separating everything so that it ends up in the same truck is pure stupidity...
I saw a documentary about a guy who recycle plastic bags in Africa and made fence post out of them. He said he can't make them fast enough and runs his machine round the clock. Seems like a good idea to me.
There's no 1 solution.. People should consume less, choose to buy things with the less amount of plastic possible, and, ALL oil companies should be fined super hard, and mandated to find a non polluting alternative to plastic with a short deadline. Also, they should be obligated to pay for all the expenses to get rid of all the plastic polluting the world! That would solve things! PERIOD
Great reporting as always. I never cared to recycle and never played with that religious cult…however, when I lived in Japan, I actually did recycle. Their system WORKS and they actually have a whole process in play. You should have reported on it John.
I second this. I remember at the local city office (区役所) I read a bunch of panels that explained how recycling worked and what kind of plastics were recyclable. It surely wasn't merely 5%! (unless the information was a lie...) Yokohama has stricter rules about recycling than other cities so it better damn well be worth the extra hassle! ):
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It is always ironic that so many people go "You must recycle everything" instead of "You should reduce your usage of low quality disposable crap"
Reducing consumption? That's anti capitalist which means you are a communist
But then if you're not buying as much low-quality disposable crap, you're not giving big companies as much money. It's a classic case of wanting to have your cake and eat it too.
Like most of products. It does not mater any more who produce them. The ingeniers design with a lifetime programed to brake as soon as possible. Even Japanese cars are braking now like if they were from US companies.
@Patrick Bateman no it means your thrifty. That's what made this country and the greatest generation. People used to buy things and throw them oit when there was no more use for it. Communism would just flat out prevent you from consuming due to unavailability of product. Or provide you with a product that you didn't want or need.
Yes. Use furs instead of plastic jackets.
My Dad was a chemical engineer in the petrochemical business in the 50s-80s. He called it wish-cycling. They wish it could be recycled.
Plastic is recyclable, it's called thermal depolymerization. It's the same process as cracking crude oil, breaking long chain carbon molecules into short chain, aka oil and gas. But our society won't use this technology because it would make drilling obsolete before our existing oil rigs break even.
@@N8_R You would need a shit ton of plastic to use it for oil. And not even profitable. For it to be profitable crude oil will have to cost at least 3 times what it costs right now. You know what happened in the world last year when oil price went through the roof
@@jaehongsong4904 and we can just burn it and filter 98% co2 lol Bjorn Lumberg for the win!!!!!
@@N8_R this I said turn plastic into oil. We make plastic from oil. It's easy to change. But nooooo. Glad someone else gets it
@Jaehong Song I see a shit ton of plastic in this video. And to say it's not profitable, that is a specious assertion at best. Where are you citing this 'three times the cost' idea? What heuristic data do you base that claim on? And of course the technology is not at an industrially scalable state of development, since banks and corporations have not put any R&D into it.
And I ride a bicycle, so mostly Ive noticed food prices go up.
As a metallurgist, I will say that if you recycle any one thing as a consumer it should be aluminum (really any metal, but aluminum is most common for average households). It’s one of the few things that we can recycle almost infinitely, then takes less energy to recycle than it does to make from ore. It’s the one item I will go out of my way to make sure it gets recycled. I consider paper in a landfill to be beneficial as a good source of biomass 😊.
Does recycling batteries do anything good? Batteries are one of the things I recycle because I was led to believe that we wouldn't have to purchase as many rare metals from China if we recycled batteries.
Not coincidentally, aluminum cans are one of the few things that you can actually get money for in many places.
CW, I understand glass is pretty high on the list of recyclables. What's your take?
@@TheNewRobotMaster Recycling batteries is good mainly because they contain heavy metals, carcinogens, sulfuric acid, etc (depending on the type of battery), which will leak out in a landfill and contaminate the ground water. The extra benefit of recycling the NiMH batteries and other rechargeables, is that it does prevent the need to harvest new materials...athough I'll be honest that I'm not as familiar with the different types of rechargeable batteries and how they are recycled.
@@jonpatterson7211 Per my previous comment, if someone is willing to pay you money for it, then it is beneficial to recycle. If no one will pay you for an item, that means it cannot be recycled profitably, which means that the recycling process requires more inputs in time, energy, etc. than it outputs. Which means that it is actually wasteful to recycle that item.
I worked in the plastics injection molding tooling industry for 30 years. Most plastic pellets (plastic parts come from pellets often supplied in bags) can only contain 2 or 3 percent recycled plastic. As one increases that percentage, the quality reduces. Plastic degrades every time it melts and reforms. Even at that low amount, it's mostly for very low grade junk stuff. You really don't want your expensive auto or phone parts to contain recycled plastic.
I used to believe in the lie, until around 2015, then I stop recycling. New plastic is better quality & cheaper. So why would anyone pay more money for crap?
That's why they build low precision parts with recycled plastic... like trays, crude toys, etc...
That's why you use recycled plastics for cheap consumer goods, single-use products, packing material, etc. Do you think tires get recycled into new tires? No they get shredded into mulch for playgrounds and artificial fields.
The only reason I recycle and compost is because my city has a 1 bag limit per week for garbage pick up. After that it’s $2.00 a bag.
I wish there were practical alternatives to having such a wasteful society. I do what I can to reduce waste but it’s hard.
That’s common knowledge dude no need to work in plastic injection to know this. What you apparently still don’t know is that recycled materials won’t necessarily go to the exact same use. As mentioned before for low precision or low longevity etc.
I remember watching pen and tellers video on BS decades ago as a kid and telling my parents recycling was mostly pointless outside our aluminum cans. This is nothing new, it's bizarre it took this long for some people to come around
Aluminum steel and glass, some paper.
It should stop there and that's all
@@DurzoBlunts does colore glass work? I mean I know what multi colored paper tends to not be recycled just wondering if glass colors cause similar issues
@@DurzoBlunts Glass is pointless....it doesnt cause damage and you can make more...same deal with paper. Put it in a landfill and it helps rot everything away.
I wish more people would have watched BS...that episode changed how I think about recycling...now I know its a scheme.
@@forestcityfishing4749 glass is easy to recycle.
I recall, as a 16 yr old in 1970, that the grocery store I worked in was trying to steer customers toward plastic bags, saying the slogan, 'Save a Tree'. This was in response to doomsday predictions that we'd run out of trees on Earth by [Insert Year Here]. Due to this mass hysteria, we now have a huge problem with disposal of these accumulated plastic bags, as opinion has now swung back in favor of paper bags once again. Nobody will step forward to take responsibility for bad policy of the 1970's
Paper bags make lousy bathroom trash can liners.
@@roybiv7018 so what? Find something else. I don't even use them. They're not necessary.
Leftists never take responsibility for their idiocy.
@@roybiv7018 This sounds like one of those time memes...
"Gravity was invented in 1665."
People in 1664: *everyone floating away on flying landmasses
I think we could have survived.
Yep, plastic is the devil now, but several decades ago plastics were considered the environmental savior of the world... also, remember that plastic was the answer to glass bottles.
It's why I don't like most environmentalists. Don't get me wrong, I hate seeing trash on the street and I loathe pollution, but there's a difference between an honest guy cleaning stuff up with his own hands and a billion dollar business asking for money for a solution that isn't even proven to work.
--
What's your opinion on electric vehicles? I think at best they're overblown, but at worst, it's starting to rhyme like how plastic was lauded years ago.
I was a carpet installer for decades, taking vanloads of old, petroleum based carpet and pad to the dump every week. I always found it amusing when people told me my juice bottle was going to make the difference.
I do construction and demolition. In one hour we send more stuff to a landfill than 10,000 people do in a day, a tiny fraction of copper and metal is worth even separating for recycling.
We should be incinerating most of our trash for energy. Japan does that safely because they have no other choice. They have to actually take back the oceanfront to build new landfills so they switched to incinerating.
People are Sheeple. They will do what they are told. And Greenies are disgusting, degenerate Commies. Let's "recycle" these phonies!
They actually do make a difference. Plastic food containers make tiny pee pees and and soy boys due to phthalates. I am environmentally minded , but the hysteria and propaganda divert most of the meaningful efforts. Plastic pollution is a problem and so is mercury in the oceans but the banksters want to make $$$ trading carbon credits etc. The move to plastic syringes is another non landfill based problem for example. They cannot be heat sterilized and this leads to all sorts of bad outcomes including actually reusing dirty needles to say nothing of just more plastic waste. But most of it is driven by liberal math making it worse and propaganda.
and that is why bottled water is the stupidest thing ever.
I used to reuse my grocery bags as garbage bags, now I have to buy garbage bags. That is a negative gain for me and a 0 gain for the environment! I have to sort and wash my garbage for their monetary gain. Clown world.
I'm 75 YO with serious pain and all these extra steps that recycling forces me to do physically HURT me.
I am 61 years old. i grew up in the 1960's and 1970's having graduated high school in 1979. i am just old enough to remember when the school had milk in small bottles that were collected at the end of the day, returned to the dairy, cleaned and refilled. i remember switched to milk cartons and plastic bags were going to save the planet by eliminating paper bags. i remember the huge trash bags the school would have hauled away to be put in the dump and not returned to the dairy for cleaning and reuse. and plastic bags are now a bane to society.
did you save your bottle caps? me too. I miss little bottles of milk ...
And products were made to last wile now they are programed to brake so you have to keep consuming what could last a lifetime. This is the mayor contribution to world polution.
I'm with ya, turning 60 soon, it was save the trees! I mention a minute ago how I remember milk being delivered in glass bottles and we would put the empties out and like you say, they would be washed, things made way more sense back them! All around!
Glass. Can be recycled...containers reused. And it is old school...like me. 🤣
I think a lot when I go to the grocery store I wish I could bring reusable containers and just take the stuff home in those.
I'm so old, I remember using paper milk cartons and glass soda bottles.... The amount of single use plastics that we've increased over the past 20 years, simply by slapping a 3-arrow imprint on it, is astounding
Glass IVs were used in hospitals.
You're so old that you are correct. Paper and glass work great. The main takeaway from this video is "recycling is dumb, stupid govt cant make me!" when it should be "The plastic lobby duped us in to thinking this shit is recyclable all for big biz profits" but that's not libertarian-loving/capitalism-loving for this crowd.
@@anderivative Not to mention plastics have been shown to have estrogen mimicking chemicals linked to low testosterone, breast cancer, and feminization. We can do without plastic.
@@anderivative I use the green bin for personal convenience...there I said it. ♻
@@anderivative Bro facts, they're lambasting greens for ideological blindness while actively engaging in it to an even greater extent lol
Back in college I was preparing to do a “persuasive speech” and chose to do it on recycling. Once I started doing my research I learned how inefficient it was overall and decided to persuade people to reconsider recycling with “reduce, reuse, but think twice about recycling.” Unbeknownst to me I was giving my speech on Earth Day and my class ended up giving me a standing ovation. I think they were all as surprised as I was by what I had learned!
reduce, reuse, but think twice about recycling. I love that Gerik
yet you can't refrain yourself from buying cheap crap from amazon
That’s neat!
great comment @gerikbensing
You would get heckled and possibly chased out of town if you did that in a college today.
Mr. Stossel,
You have been one of my favorite and most trusted sources of information from way back in your 20/20 days. Please keep up the great work.
Touché. Stossel knows why recycling plastic is difficult. Not all plastic can be recycled.
And why aren't there hardly any automated recycling centers in the U.S.?
Humans recycling plastic can give them cancer.
So why can't they just stop selling them?
Yep. Mr. Stossel knows why recycling plastic is difficult. It's never an easy solution for us consumers to not having to buy items that contain it.
Why aren't there hardly any recycling centers that are automated?
Because they'd cost MORE than just buying items that have plastic on them!
There have been some improvements on purchasing items that aren't made of plastic. Just cardboard.
Humans recycling plastic can give them cancer,even if they were wearing masks,goggles,and wearing biohazard suits that cover up from the head to the feet.
In air-conditioned facilities that also have ventilators that's equipped with them in every one of them.
It'd certainly cost more. But is worth it?
Some plastics cannot be recycled.
But there are ways.
If they're made from oil,then why don't oil refineries and the companies find a solution to end that mess?
One of the little-known secrets of plastic.
It's part of the earth, right?
Probably it's part of nature, right?
So why are they a problem polluting our water and sewer systems in this country?
There has to be a solution.
Insane.. As a former logger in Alaska, I watched fully logged mountainsides repopulate with trees ready for harvest again in less than 20 years. The oldest, most abundant, and most renewable energy source on the planet is being treated like a rare commodity while we pump oil into the shapes of toys for our children..
I'm not crazy, you're crazy!
“Energy source”, meaning -coal- charcoal?
Your lack of understanding is frightening. May you never hold any meaningful power.
Imagine thinking oil is renewable.
Yeah problem with your logic is that the rate at which these trees grow 20 - 30 years, is far longer than it takes to cut them down (just months).
@@LiberatedMind1 The rate at which they're cut down can be controlled, observed and distributed over a wider area while attempting to plant more trees than those which are cut down.
@@arvaneret_329 No you don't get it, the rate of cut down is dependent on industry demands. People need lumber for houses and such. You can plant as many as want, and its a good thing to do, but by the time those grow back many more will be cut in their place.
I remember probably 10 years ago recycling barrels were installed in Boston common. After a few years the local news got a tip that the "recyclables" were being thrown in the regular trash. So they went out and filmed it. Yup. The sanitation workers would open the recycling bin and into the dump truck it went. There were no facilities for recycling. But it sure made people feel good.
When I attended college in the 1990's, the campuses all had fancy color-coded recycling receptacles for each specific item. Then, one day a building custodian said hey, watch this -- as the recycling truck arrived and dumped all of those separated items into a single compartment of the truck. He even told me that there were not actually any compartments inside the truck -- it was one bin. So all that sorting at the source is pointless -- the truck mixed everything together, to be re-sorted at a fancy, expensive facility.
About the only beneficial part of the recycling industry in my state is that it employs lots of otherwise un-employable people such as those with limited mental capabilities (Retards) to sort all of those recyclables.
I remember the local recycling did not take pizza boxes. But the leftist co-workers at my group home job swore I was destroying the world and they were saving it. I would throw the greasy group home pizza boxes in the trash and they would fish them out, and sneak them back in the recycling boxes and later chew me out.
I arrived on recycling morning and got cursed out by the recycling guy who would throw the pizza boxes on the lawn if I didn't fish them all out of the big recycling barrel.
It's like a cult.
The same thing was done on the TV news, a long time ago, here in NYC. The dumping station (called a transfer station) was shown, where all the trash was piled. Once there was enough, it was all scooped up into trucks and taken away - along with the regular trash. But yet, not even a month ago, some neighbors were fined $50 when caught having three or four empty plastic bottles in front of their house at the curb from overnight. The fine for mixing recyclables with regular trash is $200 as another neighbor found out during this past Spring. Those neighbors didn't know how to hide those recyclables more effectively so as to avoid detection. It's all just another way to grab money. You live and you learn!
I have lived in the UK for decades and in the Rue D'Arlon, off Place de Luxembourg, Brussels, Belguim for five years. In both places I have seen 'recycling' wagons coming to empty bottle banks where people have put their bottles into separate green, brown, and clear bottle banks for collection. However, the trucks in both places just empty the green and brown and clear bottles into one large hopper, all mixed and smashed in an instant. The people who love this stupidity the most are pencil-neck bureaucrats infesting our public offices - it keeps them in a job.
@@zz449944 If true, what a horrible way to treat those who cannot defend themselves.
If I remember right, part of the push for switching to plastic bottles was because they were so easily recyclable. Same with paper bags to plastic bags. Save the trees. I would love glass bottles again. Everything tastes better when stored in glass vs plastic.
I'm so annoyed about people wanting to conserve/recycle paper to "save the trees". Nearly all paper comes from "forests" that were planted for that very purpose. The nice straight trees, all the same age/diameter, simplify/economize the process of cutting them and shipping them to the processing plant. Large quantities of tiny saplings are soon planted so the process can be repeated years later. They're as much a crop as beans, wheat or corn. There's just a longer period between planting and the harvest.
@@robertvirginiabeach absolutely correct man!
You bought that story? It's lighter, therefore cheaper to ship. Notice I didn't say light, just lighter. A box of CDs is darn heavy.
@@verreal I was a lot younger back then 😂
@@robertvirginiabeachBut the more trees we have = more reduced co2 from the air and trees put back o2
We have been drowning in a deluge of lies for so many decades now. About everything.
The plastic straw people were very successful. Now when I go to Starbucks I have to drink out of a cup with a plastic lid, but no straw. Mission accomplished. The disposable mask army has saved the environment!
The disposable condom people too
ironically the only product starbuck's are able to recycle is the used coffee grounds which are recycled into fire-logs to be incinerate, everything else is either sent to landfill or incinerated as is.
The new plastic lid takes way more material to make than the old lid/straw as well.
i noticed that the other day when i got a drink and a hotdog at costco, no straws anywhere, but a plastic lid with a hole in it that didnt work. the lid fit so loosely i didnt trust it to stay on. so i just drank it out of the cup...
@@ge2719 big pharma want us to have rotting teeth is the only logical reason behind this nonsense
I've been advocating against recycling ever since I toured a recycling facility during graduate school. The plant manager even admitted to sending most of it to the dump. Meanwhile, workers spend the day terrible conditions. It can't be good for their health.
I just throw it in the dump :/ I knew it was the right course
I volunteered for a recycling organization, where they encouraged people at events to recycle and guided them into depositing into the correct bins.
We then had to dump out the contents and sort everything more precisely.
The eye opening part was how much time it took to sort and clean those things after the event. On top of that the biggest eye opener was a manager telling us that it had to be this way, because last year, she took 100s of disposable plates home and washed them in her bathtub!
It was so insane! 😞
Well, towns have managed to get around this by charging people per bag for their trash, but charging NOTHING for recycled crap. So, unless you want to spend more money on their overpriced bags, you need to put your garbage in those stupid bins. I hate these people!
"not worth" meaning not lining the pockets of trillionaires enough. This doesn't mean recycling can't work, but when most of the waste is up to the big money buyers, the problem isn't the people being taxed for it all. Put the Ministry of Plenty in charge of sand, guess what is suddenly "rare" on earth!!!!
@@seankingwell3692 I was thinking just a short while ago: maybe the best solution is to go directly to the dump, pour out the recyclables, pull out the profitable pieces, that are easy to get, then keep them, and then leave the rest at the dump as opposed to sorting everything.
Aside from the landfill vs recycling debate, the logo is a triangle because it represents "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle". If someone is preaching recycling without avidly doing the other 2 then they do not believe in thier own words.
"they get a charge out of telling people what to do." That is the one liner that explains why common sense doesn't matter in our world today.
It's not common at all anymore is it?
Hearing this just shows bad faith on their part. Environmentalism is subject to ideology, but is not just made up to get libertarians are ruffled up.
Much of this garbage is about power and control.
Yep, BLM/Antifa/DSA/DNC Karens on a power trip, totalitarian dictators who love to dictate people’s whole lives!
@@JohnDoeSr you gotta relax
John is a true journalist. His "devil's advocate" style of interviewing gets his interviewee to talk. John has been outstanding for over 50 years. I saw John when he was a very young reporter for CBS in New York City and he is still the same. Tells truth. Yes, more than 50 years.
So you think he is over 70? He is doing pretty good.
@@ArtOfHealthhe's 75.
@@ArtOfHealth Yes, he is. Cloer to 80 than 70. He is indeed doing well.
He's right about this one, but he also lacks the courage to propose real solutions. "You can't tell people what to do". Well, somebody needs to tell everybody that we are either going to have to come up with some perfectly sustainable solutions ASAP, or else start giving up a lot of modern conveniences that are not sustainable. Anybody who chooses their own convenience over sustainability is an a whole, and sadly that is 99.9% of humans
@@jayphoneuser2538 according to who, or what? This comment sounds like the same climate alarmism Stossel rails against, with no real argument, plus you didn't provide any solutions either lol. Or sources. Why do we need an immediate solution?
I have done a lot of things and once I worked at a government grant project researching recycling of household garbage. We spent more time shut down cleaning the plastic bags out of the machinery than running. It broke down to one hour running, 5 hours clearing.
Plastic gets wound up in the various rollers (conveyor belt, crushers, and especially the shredders) and actually from the pressure bonds to all the other plastic. We used small pneumatic chainsaws (12" with tiny chains) to cut the thick bonded (it would get 1 to 1-1/2 thick on the rollers and solid, not a bunch of film layers) and had to swap them out frequently because the plastic dulled the chain teeth quickly. The unsorted garbage piled up and they were taking it to the landfill anyway.
The wet garbage was supposed to be dried and burned to dry the next wet garbage but the engineers had to put in oil tanks and fuel the fire that way because the dryed, burning garbage didn't dry the new garbage enough... Then they couldn't get the pollution down from the smoke of the burning dryed- wet garbage (wet garbage is food scraps and paper) and the stack scrubbers NEVER functioned right.
It was a $80 million project and only ran a year, total failure and they shut it down and scrapped all the machinery
Wow, that's an incredible story. Might have been more effective just to incinerate everything in the plasma field of a research fusion reactor.
Thanks for sharing. That is a lot of good, useful information that everyone needs to know. Not a lot of pie in the sky rhetoric.
That makes it extra-despicable that Amazon recently started putting a recycling logo on their packing materials, knowing full well that even though it's in fairly large print, people won't notice that it says you should take it in TO THEIR STORE to get it recycled. If I wanted to go to a store in the mall instead of using the convenience of curbside recycling pickup or a neighborhood recycling bin, why would I be shopping on Amazon?
I guess I could save up a whole bunch of Amazon packages and take them in all at once...
Ever since the current "elected" so-called U.S. President decided to do everything in his power to raise gas and electric prices (thus increasing my utilities and everyone else's), everything burnable that used to go into my recycling bin now goes into the wood stove in my shop to keep my electric heat from running. Laundry detergent jugs, milk jugs, food containers, oil bottles, cardboard boxes, vitamin bottles.....you name it. All of this puts out an incredible amount of BTU's. And I don't feel the least bit guilty for doing it. The worshipers of the green environmental "god" are going to pay a price for their idolatry.
What we need to do for the kids is to stop the federal government from racking up debt in their name.
We need to worry about ourselves while we are here alive and let the kids do the same when they are adults! Smh…
@_DB.COOPER Terrible egoistic and disgusting mindset
@@PaulWegert-oc2me I agree the video contains all those things you just stated. Good post.
Oh I’m sorry I didn’t know what smh means😅😅have a nice day
@@PaulWegert-oc2me it doesn’t surprise me just how much you don’t know about reality.
Being old, (50) i remember when we had real recycling. Glass bottles you took back to the store, your mum had good quality shopping bags that probably lasted a decade or more, and irony of ironys, milk delivered by an electric vehicle every other day.
The 70's were the most advanced we ever got.
Where I live is moving back to that. Plastic bags are banned and people are charged for paper to encourage them to bring their own bags. The local milk producer exclusively uses glass and you get a deposit back when you return the bottle. I'd rather be forced to remember to bring a bag to the grocery store than forced to rinse and sort my garbage
I'm even older, 66 (this might start an age race). As you mentioned, in addition, meat was cut fresh and wrapped in grease paper. Loaves were wrapped in waxed paper (which was reused to wrap sandwiches). The local Cooperative store weighed out sugar, butter and cheese in the quantities you needed. I still have milk delivered in recyclable bottles, but sadly the delivery vehicle is not electric.
@@astrecks Please tell me if you had an electric vehicle deliver your milk ,what was used to charge that vehicle? You people make me laugh. And also the original commenter saying a electric vehicle delivered his milk every other day. LOL 😂
@@freedomrings1420It’s possible, electric cars had originally been invented around the same time as gas cars.
Reason why electric never took off til now is because Ford managed to make a cheap gas car, electric cars costed a premium.
Funny thing is it’s still the same to this day, that said it is rather unlikely for a business to use electric but if it’s a personal vehicle being used for business then it’s game on.
@@freedomrings1420 Yes, when I was a kid the milk was delivered everyday by an electric vehicle. They were known as milk floats. The batteries were charged at the local dairy depot. When I went on holidays to my aunties, the milk was still being delivered by horse and cart. Why do 'us' people make you laugh? just curious!
My dad was a polymer R & D chemist his entire career. I remember his outrage and headshaking when McDonald’s, under pressure of the greenies, ceased using styrene clam shells. That polystyrene was reused for many useful items. It was replaced by a multi-ply paper from which it was impossible to separate the layers to then re-purpose. Such is the stupidity and inanity of the green movement.
There is conflicting arguments in the green debate and its not like there’s one belief. Stossel even said that the reason throwing plastic away is better is because landfills are regulated so that they don’t leach chemicals out. This regulation is by the green movement
The green movement has a noble goal. But the rest of the world pollutes many times over what we we do.
We need to make good choices and do our part, but this is getting ridiculous.
These garbage companies are turning us into indentured servants, forcing us to sort our refuse. We’re facing fines if we put something in the wrong container. A container the charger us money for. We pay for a service, and they control us? The system is wack.
The fda made them stop using one type of oil for another that turned out worse for your health.
@@joospis In the 1970's the "Environmentalists raged against recyclable renewable paper products in favor of plastic. There are now islands of plastic 3 times the size of France in the ocean. Where are all the paper bags?
@@deathharpproductions3094 They'll complain that the forests are gonna be killed, old growth forests (those are not being used for stupid crap like toothpicks and paper ect) but then they think plastic is the solution...crazy how they think. Biggest problem if it is one, is people buying junk products and throwing them away far too soon. Pay twice as much get 10 20 times a better product.
Recycling is BS, glad I never cared.
This is my favourite news channel. Thank you Mr. Stossol
In Australia we unironically switched from plastic bags to bags made out of plastic
you just turn the bag inside out and upside down? Death to the Emus, glory to Australia!
I’ll remember that
@@zeehero7280 now we use heavier "Callico" bags that are clearly made of plastic products and contain a hard plastic bottom and cost $1 or we get a heavy plastic bag for 15c, both supplied with the supermarket brandings
@@zeehero7280 Don’t forget to turn it ‘back to front’ as well. Works every time.
FOLLOW THE MONEY.
They banned 'free' plastic bags, but replaced them with... you guessed it, plastic bags... only now you pay a nickel for each...
I was a super recycler. My recycling bin was always five times more full than my garbage and I was proud of it. But the moment I found out that recycling was a total scam, I stopped completely. Now I don’t waste a single brain cell on that bullshit. Everything goes in the trash.
Edit: in response to the remarks about aluminum, glass, metal… If I can get paid for it (copper, steel, electronics, etc.), I take it to the scrap yard. If I don’t get paid for it, it goes in the trash. Sue me. Do you want me to recycle? Put a deposit on it. Make me bring it back. If there’s money in it, I’ll bring it back. I am old enough to remember eight packs of glass bottles of Coke and Pepsi that we used to have to return to the store. I thought that worked pretty well. Besides, putting a deposit on trash means the bums can clean the place up and get paid for it.
Recycling metals and clean cardboard are beneficial.
Still the wrong attitude as:
1. Aluminum
2. Steel cans
3. Glass
are still good to recycle and most get's reused.
Paper & plastic are the ones that don't really end up working in the end.
You should absolutely recycle paper and aluminium. Those are 100% recycled. Everything else isn't.
@@77Treasurehunter77 How does that make sense when spending time to recycle those things will ultimately cause more energy use and emissions that pollute the air from the factories that try to recycle? You are still thinking with your "lied to" recycling helps the climate brain. Think deeper here, it is a scam. Guess who are majority owners in these recycling companies? Big oil. You still think you are helping the climate?
Aluminum and steel are the only recyclables. Maybe glass and paper, but I don’t think the resale value is worth it for glass and paper.
Was more eco friendly back when I was growing up 60s and 70s, much less throw-away products back then and you could get a refund on pop bottles, beer bottles, milk came in a carton, my parents saved bread bags for use around our home, used them for packing sandwiches. Is insane how much plastic crap we throw away today for the sake of convenience!
👍 exactly what we did. We need to cut back.
Yes indeed, it's really an American problem. I don't know why, but America HATES implementing proper policies, especially on companies. It's not like low waste packaging, or recycled plastics don't exist, it's that the companies aren't forced to use them, so they don't care.
This works rather well in Europe, most western countries have figured those things out by now, USA is again lacking behind.
It kills me when people need a plastic bag to put their plastic milk bottle with handles in it.
I still used glass for milk in the 90s
@@CHMichael In my country, you must pay for a plastic bag if you didn't bring your own bag.
It's a good incentive to bring your own proper bag, which almost everybody here does.
@@taserrr and they will actually give you one that doesn't rip . ... since you really need one.
Why don't we burn plastic in power plants and filter the smoke? plastic is essentially oil.
That makes sense in places that are highly populated and short on land fill space, for example in Singapore. But it requires more of the equipment that drives up the cost of coal fired power plants, and produces more green house gases per unit of energy than poor quality coal. In the western US it probably makes more sense to land fill trash and use natural gas for generating power.
😆😝😝😝😝😝
because it cant just be filtered, plastic burning, just like oil burning is INSANELY toxic, and a lot of those toxic chemicals eat the insides of machines. most of the reason turbines burn diesel or natural gas (almost always natural gas) is its a really clean burn, and none of the chemicals from it are especially corrosive. it would make the millions in maintenance be required dramatically more often. just imagine having to do an engine rebuild on your car every 10k miles instead of 200k, AND spending a ton on it to get some special fuel system custom fitted to it
You are doing amazing work, John. Don't ever stop.
He always does amazing work! And the climate changes because of the sun. Try "recycling" that.
I live in a town of 250,000 people. My neighbor is a garbage truck driver. The city pays him $70,000 to $180,000 a year depending on how much he wants to work. Those recycling green cans create the need for 2 separate trips to an address. Recycling scam is money in the bank for that driver.
Damn. I’ve read more and more all the plastic trash just gets tossed. Aluminum & glass ok.yeah, two trucks a week to the same addresses, that’s retarded.
Here in Kawartha Lakes, Ontario, Ca., we are "forced" to perpetuate the sham with civic mandates and prosecution for failures to comply. We must use only clear garbage bags so the waste collectors can see whats in it, and if ANY "recyclables" are visible in it they tag it with a red sticker and leave it behind, then a waste management type enforcer comes to investigate and fine $. FYI clear garbge bags are more $ and harder to find than the usual green or black ones, but we MUST use them only or be prosecuted by the tyrants.
Yeah, but that's in The Peoples Democratic Republic of Canada, we all now what a totalitarian Hell-hole that country is..
@@hansemannluchter643 fu. That was nothing to do with my point. Where is your fn utopia boi.
@@PMofKhanadah LoL.. You just whined about how your Socialist Overlords force you to put your garbage in see-through bags, so the garbage-Commissaire can inspect it, then you get offended by me calling Canada what it is??
Self defense is the first law in nature.
Use it. You are a natural person. The government is made up. Unnatural
😳😩
This video should have way more than a million views. It should be required viewing in schools
I've tried to share videos like this with people and some of them have gotten incredibly angry at me, calling me a liar, and won't watch the video anyway. Religion runs deep, sadly.
yeah it makes lazy people think we can just keep burying our trash and just always find new places to bury it.
@@jhoughjr1 what? did you not watch the video?
@@jhoughjr1 If you acknowledge that the current gestures are useless, you can develop better alternatives. Could it be that you don't want improvement? That it's all posing and power-grabbing at heart?
People don't like to be told they're doing something wrong, so they're apprehensive at first. Just be understanding and try again. Maybe they'll come around.
@@jhoughjr1 fuck me. You just watched a video that explains to you that 95 percent of what goes to the recycling plant is can't be recycled. 😂
I've never recycled plastic. My cousin is a plastics engineer and said it was all BS 20 years ago.
Wed pyrolysis with the cheap thermal potential of "spent nuclear fuel assemblies". Walk away with a sulfur free source of oil, super clean diesel.
How is it ALL BS when SOME plastics are recyclable?
@@Lot_2023 It sucks when people take one extreme side or the other. It clearly isn't all bs. In fairness the elites and the government lying to us so much, contributes towards people saying it's all bs.
@@Lot_2023 in my city we have to pay 35 dollars a month for a recycling bin. It goes in the same truck as the trash, it Never gets seperated and the city has admitted it only has the bin because of state law but that same law doesn’t require it to be recycled, only collected in a bin marked for recycling. That’s how it’s a scam.
@Lot_2023 Exactly. His cousin isn't a very good "plastics engineer".
I'm 67, I remember as a boy that our dustbin was emptied once a week and it was rarely full. My parents grew up during the war when everything that could be was reused. Pop (soda) came in glass bottles which could be returned for a small reimbursement, in fact all kinds of bottles, beer, milk, etc were recycled. Socks were darned until there was more darn than original sock. Parcels were in brown paper & tied with string, my mother would save both to re-use.
We DO need to go back to glass bottles, I used to live on Diet Snapple but they switched from glass bottles to plastic, I quit it that very day. My family has reusable water bottles so we don't "need" to buy plastic water bottles anymore, saves tons of money.
And unsurprisingly, your generation also has the highest percentage of hoarders 🤔
@@TheVenominside ,
Hoarding typically is brought on by trauma and it can hit all ages not just older folks. Hoarding is not making due with what you have as the first poster is exemplifying. They are saying stuff should be reused and repaired to extend its useful life or recycled that is not hoarding.
@@charlottesmom Correct. People who grew up during the Great Depression often became hoarders, rightfully so!!!
@@joemiller9931 , Yup, exactly. My grandparents lived through the great depression, they reused and saved whatever they could. My grandma even to almost the day she died washed out and reused plastic zip bags (even had a little rack to dry them on), she reused all glass bottles and jars and reused newspapers as packing material. All my grandparents were very thrifty...they hoarded what they needed to survive, not how some folks hoard these days.
I remember when they told everyone to use plastic instead of paper to save the tree's.
The video said making plastic bags is half the emissions of other types. The cloth ones and paper bags. Switching was still the right move.
Worse, for Christmas trees now, cutting and using real pine trees is better than a reusable plastic one, for the environment. WTF.
Thank you Mr. Stossel! I have been watching you in class since the 2010's and I am so happy to see you have youtube channel!
My daughter works for our community's recreation center. She said the recycling containers get emptied into the trash bin at the end of the day. At least people feel good when they put their disposable water bottles into the recycling bin.
LOL.
Lol!
The plastic industry itself came up with the 3 arrows recycle logo and the numbering category for recyclables to look like they were managing the issue and to give people a way to feel good about using plastics. "I use plastics but I recycle so I'm more ethical than you."
we should be making containers and packaging that is biodegradable.
@@janeclayton151 that might work for some items, but isn't going to work for everything. If it's biodegradable it will be prone to rot, bacteria, mold, fungus etc. growing in/on it. No thanks.
I don't think everyone thought they were 'more ethical', most people just wanted to contribute to fixing a huge problem. But yes, the plastics companies were incredibly deceptive and that's shameful.
It was meant to visually mimic symbols used by the Eco movement and fool people into thinking the industry was being compliant.
@@janeclayton151 Not always as easy as it sounds because some materials are picky about what they can be stored in, but I like to think more companies are trying than not. I like to THINK that.
6:52 "They get a charge out of telling people what to do." Nailed it.
Almost as much as religious people do shouting at people about morality. Or righteous conspiracy theorists screaming at people about whatever nonsensical garbage they've come up with this week.
This video is intentionally misleading, as you can see what people took away from it in these comments. It's 1) recycling doesn't work, 2) gov'ment bad, 3) "dont tell me what to do I don't wanna do it!!!". How about:
1) Recycling glass, metals, compostables is very efficient, 2) The plastic lobby fooled people and govt in to believing their crappy packaging was recyclable for the sole purpose of their own profit, and 3) Capitalism did this, not Greenpeace. The dude straight up shows how dumps become lovely ski resorts as if there's no issues in between. What a joke.
@@anderivative 100%, he is disingenuous in the extreme.
@@Jon.A.Scholt like "safe and effective" with "rare and mild" adverse effects?
Al gore in his Oscar winning documentary said the Arctic would be gone by 2013 and polar bears would be extinct. Polar bears are thriving right now and not even on endangered list. Media was also fearmongering about 10 years ago, citing "experts" that were predicting Florida would be underwater in 7 years. Australia even warned in 1999, that in 20 years, there would be no more snow. They just had historic record snowfall. Climate has always been changing. That's why ice age is cyclical and Sahara desert was lush 10,000 years ago.
That’s not what climate is. Yes it does change over time but climate refers to long term weather patterns. We have observed “hottest year on record” multiple times and polar bears, while there are a lot of them now, are threatened (not endangered) meaning they will go extinct if trends continue.
@@xenomorphbiologist-xx1214"hottest year on record" from thermometers placed near air conditioning units, or in airports near runways. The climate alarmists do thier best to try and nudge the numbers up, to continue the grift.
@@xenomorphbiologist-xx1214 Nope.
The mantra growing up was 'REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE.' We seem to have forgotten the first two in pursuit of the most feel good action - Recycling. If people reduced the consumption of single-use plastics and continued to reuse them as secondary wrapping, storage, garbage bags around the home, etc., we'd go much further than just the hollow motions of recycling.
Now the mantra is "order online" pollute even more
Exactly
@@GregorMcIntosh I toss everything in the trash.
Yep, BUT marketing made it recycle reuse reduce
Plastic can be recycled - just use a solid fuel fluidised bed reactor.
Ah, the ubiquitous "If people". If people would just do what you think is right then what? The world will be good? The oceans won't rise? Polar bears won't drown? You are welcome to wrap your stuff in dirty plastic. Or you could waste water and clean it. Do what you like but leave me out. I just love throwing shit away and getting new stuff in new bags and new wrappers.
I was a child of the 80's, and 90's, and I clearly remember multiple times having to sit through the recycling will save the earth BS in school growing up, with even one video being a parody of the Terminator called the "Recyclenator", and another with child celebrities in the early 90's(some from Doogie Howser) trying to fear monger us into thinking kids of the future will have to wear yellow hazmat suits just to go outside, and play if we don't change our ways!! it's 2023, and it ain't happened yet, but as Mark Dice says "Celebrities Know Best!!"😂😂
Remember Captain Planet ??? Captain Planet, he’s our hero, gonna take pollution down to zero! Omggggg shit is in my head till this day
I remember all of that stuff in the 90s and thinking it was bull then at 12 years old
It’s way worse for kids today. They literally cry about it and try to destroy valuable paintings and objects for attention to their pain.
Yeah, environmentalists seem to think litter is radioactive or something. Paper litter is negligible to the environment. It gets broken down quickly, often hidden in piles of leaves, the cans and bottles on the other hand never go away. As a landscaper I see this shit happen at our commercial properties often. D&B has a forest area in front of them that everyone tosses their bottles and cans from pregaming. I see other litter there too but its only the bottles and cans I have to clean up.
LMAO recyclenator can just picture the lame square sob that thought that was really cool.
and they're greenwashing the kids with climate scaremongering. and their kids will get some other bs crisis.
I've always been concerned about the amount of water being used to rinse out plastic containers prior to throwing them into the recycling bin. I think preserving our natural resources is more important.
That's really only a concern west of the continental divide.
Same here. And then all that stuff gets washed in water again the recycling facility.
In places where water is abundant, it's no big deal. And a splash to keep the raccoons away is more than enough.
Me too
If it's food in that plastic container, then you can simply collect this water and use it to water plants outside. Thus, no water will be wasted in the process and plants outside will get some fertilizer.
There's only one appropriate way to recycle paper and plastic, it's by burning it under a boiler, to run a turbine, to generate electricity (which is needed even more as more people buy electric cars).
The U.S.A. (and I think probably the rest of the world) has one hundred times more trees now, than we had one hundred years ago. And as a result we have more and more and bigger and bigger forest fires every year. Proper forest management requires cutting far more trees than what are being cut. And recycling paper is an environmental disaster.
I remember when grocery stores switched from paper to plastic bags because everyone was so concerned about saving trees. Now, they're saying plastic is worse for the environment than paper.
I am from south Georgia and one of the biggest things is pine tree farms. We have thousands of acres of trees that are constantly being planted, thinned, and harvested on a rotation. Paper is a renewable resource.
Yup, I thought the same thing!
@@ranger601 the wood for sure, but the paper needs to be bleached as well
@@ranger601 110% let`s go brandon
Here in NY, plastic has been BANNED and it's BACK to paper!
I knew a man that worked in the trash collection industry. He told me recycling was invented as a way of increasing revenues, and in the end most stuff goes to the same place anyways.
Glass and aluminum recycle very well. Plastic not so much. Recycling was "invented" because some things become that thing again very easily.
One day my son left school late and saw the janitor emptying the recycle barrels into the dumpster with all the other trash. He learned more that day AFTER school. 😊
@@ibleebinU that's bad that all that plastic and aluminum didn't get recycled. What was learned exactly?
@@anderivative He learned about deception, a life lesson. You know, don't just believe, follow through, investigate, seek out truths. He pulls the curtain back on most everything of interest.
A couple of years ago our city finally admitted the whole recycling program was a lie. They had been dumping it all in the regular trash. I was surprised at the lack of outrage. Maybe like Santa Claus people had figured it out long ago and were just going along with the crowd.
I live in desert area where water conservation is a must, yet waste a lot of water rinsing plastic containers or metal cans for recycling. I’ve often wondered how this makes any sense at all. I also wondered about the added pollution caused by the extra trucks needed to pick up the recycling materials. You unequivocally answered my questions.
Interesting video. For the past few years, I adamantly recycled plastic bottles. But about a year ago, I was listening to a local talk radio station. The show's host said that plastic bottles are just ending up in landfills.
Brings me back to a time when an old owel was trying to save our forests. So our whole 6th grade class went to war over brown paper bags at the store. We collected money by selling our moms peanut butter cookies ( don't freak out back then it was ok to have peanuts in school. The kid that was allergic to them was smart enough and just didn't eat them). It was a hard fought battle but over time we did win and replaced all those brown biodegradable paper bag with cheap plastic ones. Fast forward a couple decades and our war caused a great plastic island in the middle of the pacific Ocean. What I learned from the whole thing is when these groups decide to save the planet whaT they're really doing is lining their pockets with our money and could care less about the planet...
THAT is the truth. In our state we now pay .08 tax for each sack we use to carry our groceries to the car. A store owner told me they have to pay extra for the “thick reusable” sacks, they can’t use their old inventory of sacks and the state keeps that as a tax!!! So the store owner of course charges us in raised good prices. It’s a fun little new trick they have found to make more money.
Exactly
What's an "old owel"?
No nut allergies in my schools in the 1970s. Vaccines are likely contributing to allergies and autoimmune disorders.
And another freedom stepped on! Its just about more control besides the fact, who the hell are these people. America has more agencies that have zero faces.
He hit the nail right on the head when he said “they get a charge in telling people what to do.”
the high school young republican mindset is that anything that the government mandates or even suggests is bad, hence why you probably liked that comment. As Reagan said when he told people to just give their money to the rich people (trickle on your face econ), the government is BAD. Except for bombing brown people for profit and stopping gay ppl from marriage.
Also, the environmental movement has now just become an economic one. There's a lot of money to be made in sell green eco-alternatives.
@@KellyS_77 it always was an economic movement, it is just that the first few move were helpful to the environment
Reminds me of all the mandates for the pandemic.
You said exactly what I took away from this.
I've been skeptical about recycling for as long as I can remember. I recall it being pitched heavily when I was a kid ( 90s) and thinking about how all this crap needed to be trucked, sorted, probably trucked again, reprocessed, trucked again ect until it was turned into something useful. It didn't seem very logical.
Well as it turns out that is the case. It's also highly subsidized by government because it's not cost effective at all.
It's a complete scam!!
"Freedom taken for granted because we don't know what oppression means."
Anthrax
He nailed it! “They get a charge out of telling people what to do.” It’s getting worse every single day.
And you never tell Americans what to do. I'm surprised we are still a nation.
Okay. But don't you think this dude gets a charge out of saying the mainstream is wrong? Both claims prove nothing about whether recycling is worthwhile or not.
@@zorby3774 no. I think he gets a “charge” out of exposing government lies, and proposing an alternative view. I know you libtards hate alternative ideas, but you better get used to it.
I wish he had talked more about how the petroleum/plastics industry financially backed pushing the idea that plastics are recyclable.
I’m done with it
My husband refused to get the recycling bin when we moved into this house because he said it was pointless. This was 20+ years ago. And he was right.
My wife bought one because it makes her feel better, as she finally admitted. The only thing I recycle is glass, because I like smashing them into the big collection bin.
Although its changed a bit when I first got here I was amused to see the one thing Americans recycled was the one thing Czechs did not: aluminium cans.
We really have two trash cans, one is blue
What about cardboard and aluminum?
@@robertb1610 I don't know about cardboard but crushing cans and taking them in will get you a little money. They wouldn't go in the recycle bin though.
I remember when my new neighbors moved in next door. In typical tree-hugger fashion I noticed how painstakenly and carefully they would flatten all their cardboard and stack them according to size and neatly line them up in the recycle container, from small to large - perfect! Same with cans, diligently wash them, remove labels, and had a special crusher to flatten them and place them in their container. Same with glass - washed, labels off, carefully stacked in their own container. Paper neatly stacked and tied in a bundle. Placed them all in perfect alignment on the curb. Very feng-shui! As they walk away, they look back a couple of times, with a big smile, feeling very proud of their accomplishments. That all changed when the garbage collector rolled in. He dumped everything all together in the same receptacle. I will never forget the look of horror on my neighbor's face!!!
Yes, they lovingly smiled at their garbage. That is totally a thing that happened
LOL 😂
Imagine writing all this down to stick it to the tree huggers!
@@Adyfire Don't cry ❄, I'm sure that you can find your safe place.
This comment is stupid. Everything you mentioned can and should be easily recycled. This video even said, for example, that paper and cardboard and glass and metal is easily recyclable and good too. It’s talking mostly about plastics. But yeah I’m sure the story really happened that way.
Australia is experimenting a process of 2 types of plastic waste streams. Clean and dirty. Clean is used to remake packaging. Dirty is made into lumber style products or returned to useable oil.
Yep. That's good. But it isn't easy. Or cheap for them to recycle plastic.
I remember when plastic bags were introduced in the 90s because environmentalists were complaining about needing to save the trees. Now environmentalists are complaining about plastic being everywhere, so now we are back to using paper bags lol
Doubly so since the paper for those paper bags came from tree farms. Plastic grocery bags were one of the biggest cons of all time.
I discovered those brown paper bags are produced in China after they dismantled all the US paper mills and sent the equipment to China. The little paper handles are glued on by Uyghur wage slaves. Happy Falafel Day!
@@robertmarmaduke9721 i literally dont believe that
only because (china running) a machine doing it would be 500x faster and cheaper
im not defending china, china bad. but that does sound a little bit too propaganda-y considering how easy of a task putting glue on something and pressing two pieces of paper together could be automated
could this be the reason the milk given out by my elementary school was in plasic bags. Yes, everyday at lunch we can a small bag of milk. It was strange.
I grew up in the era when plastic bags replaced paper and even then I knew it was a joke
I’m in my 40s for context. The older I get, the more I think that my grandparents were onto something. They weren’t the consumers that my generation tends to be, and many of their frugal practices were actually less wasteful to boot. If I can re-use something I already have instead of purchasing something new, I’ve saved money and generated less waste. Never thought I’d give up my electric dryer, but when it broke last year the cost of replacing it and the doubling of my electric rates made me decide to switch to drying my clothes on a drying rack “for a while”. Honestly, I may never get another dryer. My clothes are not wearing out as quickly and I don’t have to worry about shrinking something because I accidentally put it in the dryer. What do you know? Grandma wasn’t as crazy as I thought she was for air drying her clothes! ;-)
Using clothing dryer is obscenely decadent.
@@Psych0technic i use two i have one just to take the damp out of clothes and then another that i use to dry my laundry..
grandma would have preferred the automatic dryer..
the reason it seems better is the tech that frees up the your time in other areas still makes your day seem light.
grandma has no such things. so her day was full dawn till dusk..
USA. Rest of the world air dries
The amount of information the general public is under informed about is insane! I learned about this particular issue when I managed a landfill project 20 years ago.
plastic is recyclable and not recycled what a load of bs then why do we use plastic over glass then or something that is recycled?
@@raven4k998 try forming a coherent sentence so people can respond to your ramblings.
@@raven4k998 Plastic is technically recyclable but glass is a far better option. We use plastics because they're cheaper for companies which means more profit. This is an issue of capitalism trashing the earth more than it is about recycling not working.
@@victorchiappetta3230 that "feeling" was manufactured by big biz to promote using cheapass plastic to increase profits. We wouldn't have gone down this plastic road if the FACTS weren't covered up that plastic doesn't recycle well. Maybe ppl like their feel feels but they didn't make them up themselves: Capitalism fooled them on purpose.
@@anderivative yeah money over saving the environment what a thing
The general idea of throwing our modern trash in a hole is just bad... Some of that stuff will be there for millennia. How about self-decomposing plastics? How about incentives for less disposable waste in products? How about creating items that are repairable instead of disposable? How about prioritizing ecology over economy? How about suing the waste removal companies for not delivering what they promised? How about improved and automated recycling equipment? How about charging customers for the amount of trash they create vs a flat monthly fee? How about laws preventing transport of waste outside a certain radius? It comes down to future awareness and personal responsibility.
John Tierney is advocating laziness.
When I was growing up, we bought dry goods in paper, carboard boxes, or burlap bags, grocery bags were paper, too. Soda came in glass bottles you took back to the store to be refilled, and had a nickel deposit, so us kids would gather them from along the road to get money for candy or other treats, they didn't litter the highway.
We reused glass jars for canning or other purposes, and tin cans as well, I still use coffee cans for storage of nails, etc. in my shop. It was used, reused, and fixed or used for something else when it broke, until it was used up. Jelly jars were cast to use a standard canning lid specifically to be reused, and the company that didn't would go broke!
Table scraps went to the dog, or into a compost pile. Paper got used to start the wood stove or burn pile, or used for wrapping parcels or crafts in the case of the paper grocery bags. Nothing was wasted if we could help it. There wasn't a trash pick up, we didn't need one. We'd go down to the landfill once or twice a year for what little we had to get rid of, if even that.
When the plastic industry did it's big push, we were laughed at for being dumb hillbillies that were just behind the times.
Not so dumb, were we?
I worked at an appliance recycler. The issue was not recycling the freon, foam insulation, oil, metals, and glass. These all can be readily separated, recycled and have a secondary market. The biggest issue was the plastic. Because there are MANY different plastic chemical compositions and they cannot all be comingled and recycled as one "plastic", there is a very limited secondary market. A lot of the plastic shelves and bins can be salvaged as used parts, but most of the other plastics are just ground down and hauled to the dump.
Good comment. How are 'recycled plastic garden seats' made? They 'appear' to be recycled plastic?
@@languagetruthandlogic3556 I have a recycle plastic item, that I just bought because I liked it and had money to waste. I still don't actually know how they achieved it but it seems legit because it cost like 30x more than the item normally would. I assume it was extremely labor intensive and they had to use items that were easy to spot that used one composition, I think maybe it was made out of fishing lines or specific nets or something. So for certain things I bet it's easier to recycle it, for your garden seats maybe they specifically also use other older broken plastic chairs which is worth it since it's a larger object.
@@languagetruthandlogic3556 Some plastics (like milk jugs) are very easily recycled even yourself, however many plastics either require extremely fine control of temperature and humidity processes (plus who knows what contaminants they have in them throwing off that process) that is seems exceptionally difficult. But there are definitely some recycled plastics like melting milk jugs into things you could even do at home (though as with melting all plastics, there are some air pollution concerns etc).
I 3d print thermoplastics, so those you can easily remelt into a mold if it fails, but the problem is that you need like a $10k machine (lots of material resources) to recycle it back into a useable material to 3d print with, and even a hobbyist not valueing their time is never going to have like $200 in waste materials (that's like 25 pounds of plastic of 1 type that you need to recycle, and it can't be too degraded, and needs a lot of processing). However, if you have a large mold like a 2x4 board you want in plastic, you could easily melt down 20 pounds of plastic into that with minimal tools, its just that a 2x4 normally doesn't cost anywhere what your time will, so unless its for a craft or artwork its not very feasible unless you are just messing around for fun.
Plastic recycling was to a significant extent touted by the American Petroleum Institute, the same organization that pretended that the dangers of leaded gasoline were actually caused by naturally occurring lead (and tried to bribe the scientist who proved that pre-industrial ice had like 0.1% of the lead content of pre-Clean-Air-Act industrial ice) and are leading advocates of climate science denial.
Most of it can be recycled into something useful such as plastic lumber , it’s just not profitable. If something isn’t profitable, no one will take on the burden to do it and I don’t blame them.
My wife asked me once why we recycle when we know it is a scam. I told her it helps put on a show to keep those green lunatics from harassing us. They are a pretty unhinged bunch. That and they charge more for an extra garbage can versus a recycle can.
Yup, that's why we do it. They charge us per garbage can, so we only do one. The recycling bin is a great way to get rid of plastics, cardboard and other things that would just overfill our trash can.
A Prius in San Francisco with a COEXIST sticker is saving the planet and universe and stuff.
@@jamesrecknor6752 m'kay
Lol! So I can get a recycle bin added and not have to pay extra. Didn’t know that. Thanks.
And this is why my recycle bin is more full than my rubbish bin on the weekly. If it's plastic, glass, aluminum, paper, cardboard... pretty much any container... it goes in the recycling bin. Recycling is free; each bag of rubbish I need a tag that costs $3. Typically I only have one kitchen-sized bag of garbage... sometimes not even that.
People in the plastic industry have known since the mid 80's that the recycling idea was a waste. I worked for a company that made small plastic spools for sewing thread. The most recycled plastic they could use was 4%. Almost nothing.
I did some work with a company that converted post consumer plastics into paint cans. The end result of mixing all types of plastic was an all black low grade plastic can. However, consumers demanded a metal lip and lid making it non-recyclable after one use.😆
Plastic lids on paint cans work much better than metal ones. The metal ones rust.
I’ve got some cans of Behr paint I’m using right now. They are all plastic other than the handle and where it connects to the can side. The big lid has a smaller round cap that can be removed so a plastic pour spout can be put in it’s place. It seems to work pretty well so far but I’ve only had them for about a week.
Upon closer inspection I realized that the places on the side of the cans where the handle connects are also made of the same plastic as the can. So it appears that the only part of the can that isn’t plastic is the handle.
The saving trees fallacy is potentially one of the best litmus tests for whether or not someone understands where raw materials come from and how recycling works.
Trees for paper are grown on "paper tree farms" just like any other harvestable plant. When new paper use is high, farmers grow more trees... When new paper use is low (and recycling is high) they grow fewer trees.
If you think recycling paper leads to more trees you don't understand one of the most basic aspects that relates paper to trees.
It's not just that, it's that most paper isn't recyclable.
If it has colored ink on, if it has the shiny surface on it like ads, if it was any kind of a food container, like a pizza box with even a spot of Grease on the cardboard it's trash.
That's not true. The acreage remains the same, as most of the pulp comes from paper company-owned land, such as Georgia-Pacific. The trees are already planted at the maximum efficient density -- this is an old science and industry. The only thing that changes is the harvested amount; so, it is true, that more recycling of paper would result in fewer trees cut down.
Which to soil exhaustion, which leads to increased demand in fertilizer, which leads to increase in energy consumption, which leads to bigger carbon footprint etc, hence climate change.
Stossel is the man, I hope to see more food regulation stuff from you. I am a Sr. Food scientist and there is so many ridiculous regulations that are truly hurting our consumer.
This is great, a proper reality check on the illogical environmental policies created based on people's emotions and lies from corporations.
It's incredible that if people were really about the things they claim to care about (beyond just recycling), they would do the opposite of most of things we are berated and/or mandated to do.
dripping brown ooozz interesting they checked for that before saying it was in there🤣🤣🤣
Glad you mentioned the rinsing out thing. My wife will run about 4 litres of water off to get to hot water to rinse a small item of plastic which is wasting both the water and the energy used to heat it. Insane.
I do that too but when I don't I get bugs and stink in my bins.
technically water is never wasted, it comes back after filtering. you are not crying that you literally shit in water while using toilets on a massive scale around the world. you drink that very same water after filtering. energy waste, sure.
@@Redmanticore I think most people will understand that I am referring to the wastage of resources used to supply the water that has been used unnecessarily.
She's a keeper. Cleanliness is next to godliness.
That's only 1 gallon.
When I worked at our local Sprouts, the plastic bag recycling bin was upfront to make it convenient for customers as they came in. When that bin was full, we would take it to the back, take It outside to the dumpster and throw it as if it were trash. I began telling people to take their bags elsewhere.
Did we work together? I did that exact same thing. It felt wrong but those bags are basically unrecyclable. Nowadays they're often more compostable which does just fine in the dump as well.
@@anderivative I'm in Oklahoma.
Damn, Sprouts sucks for that lol. I worked for a supermarket way back in the mid 90s and we would put the plastic bags in the baling machine with all the other plastic packaging that was removed by the night crew stocking the shelves. It would be baled in one big lump and hauled away on a truck SEPERATELY from the garbage lol
@@wesleyswafford2462 Or if you lived in my city, it was all taken to the giant incinerator plant and burned. At least the resulting heat was used to generate electricity.
I've seen that same thing at convenience stores: employees taking the recycled plastic collection bag and dumping it into the trash bag.
Thanks, Stossel for these amazing videos.
John-we love you. Thank you for imploring common sense objectivity. I had an argument with my in-laws years ago about the “garbage of plastic recycling”-their response? “If they [the recycling company] don’t recycle it’s not our fault, we still do our part to put it in the recycling bin”
Thank you for always being a voice for truth and reasoning. You are appreciated John!
A lot of spot on points. Mostly a scam is true. However I would take my laundry container back for a refill. I miss returnable soda and beer bottles. We did’t know how “green” we were back in the day. I remember returnable milk jugs too.
For plastic bags I use bags made of cloth. Same four bags for years. That’s a simple way to avoid consuming hundreds of plastic bags.
@@saulofontoura notice that in this video they showed a reusable cloth bag as an example of something worse for the environment than plastic bags. It was just a visual that went by in a second or two, but it was in there. Biased reporting. There is no counterpoint to the point Stossel is trying to make. He's pushing an agenda. Where is the counter argument?
@@saulofontoura He reason I use them because they don't break open and spill my groceries all over.
Not sure where YOU live -- but every can & bottle bought HERE, needs to be returned -- or you spend money on a deposit you don't get back.
@@Lightsngear One hint is the block O…. No mandatory recycling in Ohio, just the useless blue containers that most of which is probably thrown in landfills.🤷🏼♂️
I only recycle what I get paid for, & nobody in Louisiana pays for plastic or paper... I'll haul metal to the scrapyard all day, but paper & plastic don't pay...
I've been trying to tell this to my wife for years now. She doesn't seem to believe me and she believes all that stuff we're throwing in the blue bin is actually being recycled. The only reason I'm even going along with that is because it saves room in our regular dumpster during the times where we don't have enough room in our regular trash bin. I think I'm going to save this video and get my wife to watch it with me, maybe that will help.
Well, they sort of recycle the plastic - by burning the stuff to generate heat. It is called "thermic recycling". It is better than putting it in a landfill...
@@xornxenophon3652 You ever light a piece of plastic and see what kind of noxious fumes come off of it? It is a big myth that we are running out of land to bury trash. Landfills makeup a tiny fraction of a percent of the land in the United States. It may be an issue in Europe I don't know but we have a massive amount of unused land in the USA. Once the landfill is full we can plant grass and trees on it and you can't even tell there was ever a landfill.
@@xornxenophon3652 Did you not watch the video? Most of the plastic gets shipped over seas to countries like Malaysia. They burn it yes, not to create heat, but to get rid of it.
After watching this video........the fact that all the plastic bottles could possibly end up in another country or in the freaking ocean instead of being recycled.... it's going in the regular trash now... the only thing I'm recycling is cereal/cracker/etc boxes, aluminum cans....metal cans, etc. I'm not doing this because I'm lazy.... but because I'd rather it end up in a safe landfill than in the ocean because i put it in the recycle bin.
@@One-Day-After-Another I put all my plastic in the blue bin who gives a f*** where it goes😂😂
Here in Michigan, we have this cruel tax on poor people called the bottle bill. If you buy something with bubbles in it, you have to return your garbage in order to get $.10 back.
Ironically, two companies have the Monopoly on this industry. One company sells the machines to collect people's trash at the expense of store owners, the other is a company that recycles that has a monopoly on Michigan's bottles. This strange irony is that almost every municipality in Michigan has a recycling program, so poor people have to pay twice to recycle their soda pop. Thank you government!
Watched people in poverty stricken villages up north spend their entire free government food check (EBT) on cases of the least expensive soda they can buy, so they can return the cans and spend the deposit on whatever they like.
yes sooo poor a dime matters. LOL
@@bhough410 Kinda just easier to sell their ebt directly.
Drink water out of your own non- plastic , no throw away bottle! Pop taste great but puts on the pounds and does zero for your health!
@@bhough410 I know that experience, I grew up working in a liquor store near Detroit. The old food stamps that were a dollar we're great for buying a five-cent piece of gum. We have to give him $0.95 in change. They do that four times over and then buy a half pint with their government money.
This was an awesome video. Thank you, John.
I seriously have never seen anyone else put forth true information like you do.
I have been watching your journalism ever since you were on 20/20.
Thank you for everything you do.
Penn and Teller's BS did a very thorough debate on recycling.
@@professerjeeves The truth can set us free.
Thanks
plenty of things are very recyclable. Plastic has been known to be a shitty recyclable since the 90's and plastic bags are almost complete waste. None of this is new. Why didn't he mention glass, wood, metals? "Telling people do to things they don't want to do" uh yeah, sorry for the inconvenience CUZ UH MA FREEDOMZ!
This video was designed for the stupid people. “true information” If you believe what’s been presented here by people who obviously do not understand recycling and it’s potential, then heaven help us all !!!
This whole article reminds me of “Homer Simpson, Portrait of an Ass Grabber.”
I have a love hate relationship with John Stossel’s stuff. It’s entertaining but must be viewed with critical thinking in mind.
I saw “Plastics is a lie… a big lie… to sell plastic.” quoted to CBC 23 Sep 2020.
I looked up. It was an article about a documentary. A commentary discussion rather than say a statement of fact. I’ll reply with a link but it will likely be filtered.
There was another comment here which if changed to just “Recycle what can be recycled and use less crap you just throw away” I could get behind.
Many want to take “docs” and “commentary” like this and stop all recycling. That view is lazy, stupid, and throws the baby out with the bathwater.
The city I live in doesn’t have blue box. Recycling is self sort and only put in what there is a market for. My city both gets praise and crap. I.E. Glass doesn’t go into recycling here, it’s sharp edge hazmat and contaminates the product.
So you mean to tell me that my practice of saying "screw this insanity, it's too complicated" for the last 4 decades of my life and throwing everything into the trash has been the best practice all along? Awesome.
Actually, no. He mentions in the beginning that recycling works for things like paper and aluminium. You should recycle those. Only plastic is the problem.
Recycle your glass, too
@@apokalypthoapokalypsys9573 Right, and those are things that I do recycle, which I didn't make clear in my original comment. But hey, that's what I get for trying to write something quick while I'm on my coffee break.
Believe you me, I just made the manager at the truckstop just totally crack up with my minute-long diatribe about the focus group the CEO used to come up with stronger, thicker, more unwieldy 'reusable' plastic bags that I would just love to wrap around a sea-turtle's neck with my bare hands!
always recycle aluminum Steel cans(they are not tin) should be recycled
most paper and carboard is also worth recycling and Clear glass
Years ago I read an article that claimed that 85 percent of the garbage in landfills was actually composed of paper and that by covered it with dirt was the very thing that kept it from decomposing, depriving it of the oxygen that was needed to speed the process.
I stocked grocery store shelves after school in the late 1960's & early 1970's. One of my boss's gripes was the breakage of, and loss of potential sale, of anything bottled in glass. The grocery store got compensated by the wholesaler, but, just like anything to do with money, the paperwork was a pain in the ass, and the compensation was slow in coming. Plastic packaging was in its infancy at that time. Retailers embraced plastic packaging with open arms because it reduced breakage & loss to unheard of minimal levels previously not possible.
Plastic, in its thousands of different chemical formulations, and tens of thousands of differing shapes; is the one hundred million pound gorilla lurking in humanity's shadow. The Cousteau brothers proved conclusively decades ago that *every single* ocean, inland sea, large freshwater lake, and river system in the world was contaminated with microscopically small, round globules of plastic. Particles that they then theorized would continue to reduce in size until they were small enough to pass through cellular menbranes. A theory for which they received an incredible amount of criticism for from the scientific community at large, and for which they were accused of being *fear mongers.*
Time has proven the brothers to be absolutely correct in their assumptions regarding plastic. Plastic, regardless of its chemical composition, is simply immune to chemical decomposition from water, the earth's *Universal Solvent.* ALL that happens is that the spheres continue to shrink in size.
Humanity has embraced plastic for an incredible number of reasons, all of which have improved the quality of life, and the general standard of living, for hundreds of millions of people since the 1940's, when the first plastic was invented. However, no one seems willing to accept the idea that plastics may ultimately be responsible humankind's eventual demise if we don't figure out how to deal with them.
All metals can be resmelted, and reused. Glass has no limit to how often it can be melted, and reused. Paper, cardboard, and all other carbon compound organic materials can be broken down by composting, and returned to the soil. Plastics are unique in that they have either an incredibly limited ability to be recycled, or no ability to be recycled at all.
OH MY GOSH... WE'RE GONNA DIE!!!! 😮😂😅😆💀☠️
@@archangelliii2536 If you get that freaked out, go eat a slug
In what earthly scenario do you imagine plastics being the demise of the most resilient creature on the planet?😂
I'm from the government and I'm here to help....
I remember working in a grocery store. Soda was in returnable glass bottles, and you got a discount on the next 8-pack of bottled soda when you returned the empties. But eventually went to plastic.
PEI (Canada's smallest province) was one of the last jurisdictions to enforce an "all glass pop bottle" policy. They finally realized the cost and energy needed to ship and clean all that glass was more expensive and produced more pollution compared to plastic. However, it did make it a unique place to visit and I swear there is nothing better than an ice cold Coke in a glass bottle.🤗
@@Baileyind - Pop does tastes better in a glass bottle. But also back then they used real sugar instead of corn sweetener.
Nothing like a soft drink from a glass bottle.
"they get a charge out of telling people what to do". True, that's a big part of all of this
@Beatnik um, yes it is and you just got your little charge for the day.
@Beatnik yes it is.
Oh john Stossel! There are SO MANY other issues and attitudes in this world similar to this that are either deliberately or erroneously forced upon us as some good and righteous/virtuous cause! Thanks for continuing your good work sir!
Like electric cars and "renewable" energy?
I recycle my paper and cardboard by making it into co2 and water. Excellent for plants. All you need is a lighter and a burning 🔥 barrel.
The sad part is they are throwing plastic in the ocean instead of landfills. This is disgusting.
"If we think of the ocean as a football field, we wont run out of room!"
exactly, thats the real problem with plastic. that and general micro plastics in the environment.
What we really need is a way to dispose of plastic that ensures we don't have micro plastics everywhere.
99.9% of plastic in the oceans are from commercial fishing nets and other equipment, good thing they banned straws lol
Trust is gone.
“Recycling is a sacrament of the green religion.” This was profound.
Yes, absolutely Lining us all up like mindless robots to serve as slaves to the Elite
and sad.
"Recycling is a sacrament of the green religion" it is and it's not. Recycling is useful because you can recycle some plastics but the myth was propagated by the oil industry.
The proper response should be to introduce policies that don't allow for rampant production of plastics that pollute the environment. Governments would need to fight the whole fossil fuel industry though and that's hard considering that they keep distorting the public opinion about pollution, climate etc. They are using green activists as pawns to make them the bad guys and that's how they push regulation away. it's really freaking irritating how different movements act the way the fossil fuel industry wants them to...
And innaccurate
@@markokostelac7282 which part?
6:20 - Paper shopping bags, in my experience, are actually stronger than those pathetic flimsy plastic bags. And I like them for other reasons. I hope they don't go away. I need them in my garden.
Then again, I get your point about all the other plastics that aren't as recyclable as we once thought. I don't think we were misled at first, I just think we've learned more since we first thought that.
I saw a vid about using unrecyclable plastic as building material. They heated it to fuse the plastic into "Concrete Blocks," which didn't break and were bug proof. It seems like a good idea, but there is little about its success, cost, or practicality in real world applications.
yeah China does it, it's called Tofu-Dreg
That is a cool idea. You could even use it for emergency housing after natural disasters in the U.S and everywhere else.
Damn, I never thought of that. Use the thing that takes 100,000 years to degrade for a house!
Yah, experimented with that back in 2012. Loaded a vessel (with a lid and a trickle of nitrogen to drive the oxygen out the vent) with plastic and used nichrome heater wire to heat the plastic to melting. Had a mold we'd made for garden paving blocks and we filled it full of sand (for filler and to block UV light from eating up the block quickly) and some ground up charcoal briquettes for the carbon dust for UV protection. We had to put a vaccum pump on the outlet of the mold and shut the melting pot vent so it got about 2 pounds pressure...
Between the pressure above the very thick viscous molten plastic ( just a random mix of household plastic, basically PE and PP) and the vacuum below the plastic flowed through the sand and filled the mold.
We made 20 of those paver 'stones' and they came out very nice. Used thenm to make a walkway between a back door and a side garage door. They are still there and just as good as the day they were made. Not slick, the sand at the surface gives an antiskid effect.
They're super expensive and break down in UV light.
The real funny thing was years ago in Vegas they told us to separate the different color beer bottles. I then talked to the trash guy and he said..."it's stupid, it gets to the main trash location it all gets dumped back together and they pay people to separate it again!"
If we all separated the different materials and then could put them separately into different bins, the % of things that would actually be recycled would be much higher vecause there would be much less impurities. Switzerland is one of the few countries that does this
But separating everything so that it ends up in the same truck is pure stupidity...
I saw a documentary about a guy who recycle plastic bags in Africa and made fence post out of them. He said he can't make them fast enough and runs his machine round the clock. Seems like a good idea to me.
There's no 1 solution.. People should consume less, choose to buy things with the less amount of plastic possible, and, ALL oil companies should be fined super hard, and mandated to find a non polluting alternative to plastic with a short deadline. Also, they should be obligated to pay for all the expenses to get rid of all the plastic polluting the world! That would solve things! PERIOD
Great reporting as always. I never cared to recycle and never played with that religious cult…however, when I lived in Japan, I actually did recycle. Their system WORKS and they actually have a whole process in play. You should have reported on it John.
I second this.
I remember at the local city office (区役所) I read a bunch of panels that explained how recycling worked and what kind of plastics were recyclable. It surely wasn't merely 5%! (unless the information was a lie...)
Yokohama has stricter rules about recycling than other cities so it better damn well be worth the extra hassle! ):