Oh I’m so fucking sorry this manufacturer gave you clear instructions on how to recycle properly
Your life must be truly horrible 😂
Nah, get the fuck outta here with that bullshit.
Ignoring the fact that hardly any plastic is actually recyclable in the first place, your argument is that conscious consumers should accept additional responsibilities on the off chance that it MIGHT actually get recycled?
We figured out how to print on basically any surface a long time ago. How about we hold companies to a standard of responsible packaging, instead of yet again passing the buck to the end user.
this user probably thinks it’s too hard to collapse a cereal box before sending it to recycling
I’m pretty sure the infuriating part is that the plastic label isn’t recyclable at all.
We need both. We need companies to do more to make things out of easier to recycle or compost materials, and we need consumers to do more to separate things to make them easier to recycle. It’s far too late to push responsibilities around, we all need to be responsible.
Yep, this package design is about awareness, as much as responsibility
The dipshit that replied to me is beyond that, but kids will grow up with it, and think about it
hardly any plastic is actually recyclable
Almost every thermoplastic is recyclable easily, though not necessarily profitably (because the new materials are so cheap).
Recycling that PET bottle into a different usable object would involve cleaning it, cutting it into a shape appropriate for your chosen remanufacturing process (filament or flakes), heating it to melted but not too hot, then forming (fdm, molding, etc.).
My guess would be that getting a durable graphic printed on PET is more difficult since we don’t see that, and adhesive or wrapped labels are almost certainly more expensive than printing would be if it were easy.
Edit to add: I agree that more responsibility needs to be on the manufacturer, but don’t buy into the misinformation that plastic can’t be recycled. Make it more expensive to use new plastic than recycled material.
You forgot about polymer shortening. During the first synthesis process from petroleum to the usual type of plastic, long polymer bonds are formed which give the plastic its malleable-yet-durable characteristics. During shredding to get the plastic into a more feedable shape (as in feedable through a hopper into an extruder to be melted) those polymers are shortened. This polymer shortening ends up leading to a more brittle plastic, and because of this new plastic beads are added to rejuvinate.
Because of this, recycling plastic inherently requires new plastic in its process, and old plastic is only recyclable for a few cycles until its essentially garbage being mixed into the process.
We are essentially just pushing out the inevitable, which will be that we’ll need to dispose of massive amounts of plastic waste that is unusable after a few cycles. I imagine we’ll eventually just have to compress this waste into blocks and bury those blocks deep underground like nuclear waste.
Printing “this shit is milk” on a bottle is dirt cheap. It’s practically free. They probably already do it with the expiration date.
Problem is, some bright-eyed fuckfuck at PepsiCo realized they could sell more shit using labels with no visible dot matrix and a color palette with vomit-inducing vibrancy and 69 million shades. Approximately 90 seconds later, everyone else decided that they need to wrap their plastic in some plastic to “stay competitive”. The industry collectively stuffed some lunch money in Ronald H. W. Gore’s titty pocket, and here we are, decades later, with a mountain of unrecyclable garbage that no one even knew couldn’t be recycled. And it’s not even their fault, for the same exact reason we don’t expect people to know not to lick the lead paint off their mid-20th century coffee mugs.
Plastic is better off just going in the trash. The ability to recycle it is largely a lie. Especially plastic that touched food as it needs to be clean to recycle.
This is absolute nonsense.
In Germany, between 38-48% of plastic is recycled (source). Sure, that‘s far from all of it, but still far, far better than nothing.
The recycling rate might be lower in other countries, but just giving up and putting everything in the regular trash is probably the worst thing you could do.
It could be recycled, it’s just that the world is too cheap to bother with it.
Recycling only works when the price of the material is high enough to justify the reclamation process. It doesn’t work for plastic because of the insane subsidies given to the petroleum industry. If we had a significant enough carbon tax, you’d start seeing more actual plastic recycling.
Imagine doing something slightly inconvenient, let alone something that can take a whole second.
I think the point was, you’re removing plastic from plastic to recycle plastic. The plastic you removed won’t be recycled. So…what’s the point? It’s terrible package design.
The plastic you’re removing can’t be recycled. if left on the bottle, some recycling centers (maybe most actually) just throw out the bottle because it’s more cost effective then preparing the bottle for recycling.
Any and all plastic bottles experience this problem (plastic bottle caps are bad too). This is a company making it more likely your bottle will be recycled, by making it easier to remove the non recyclable materials.
I think you are on to something, mr Whistleblower. Keep digging and call Greta when you have drawn conclusions! In the meantime, move stealthily, they may be watching! :-)
It all gets dumped in the ocean
