Recycling plastic is a bad idea and, until we can be sure of where it’s going, we should stop doing it 🚮 ✍️ This sounds like a really spicy hot take, but it’s not. I think it is pretty much accepted among people who study these things 🔵 TomChivers
at the bottom, so liquids can’t leach out of them into groundwater. They’re divided into subcompartments called cells, and as each cell is filled it is sealed over with a thick clay cap so the contents can’t escape. The contents decay and give off methane, but that methane is either burnt off or captured for use in energy. And nothing in that landfill is going to end up in the ocean.
There’s also not a major shortage of space to put new landfills in. Once you’ve filled your landfill you can cover it up and farm on it, or build a golf course or whatever. We can and should also try to reduce how much plastic we use – although only within limits. Lots of the plastic we use is really helpful – plastic food wrapping, for instance, reduces food waste; disposable plastic bags are, certainly compared to heavy-duty canvas bags for life. You’d need to use an organic cotton bag 150 times in order for it to be energy-efficient compared to using a supermarket plastic bag once.
In the future, AI and bioengineering technologies – which can sort recycling efficiently and break down plastics into reusable chemicals, respectively – will probably make plastic recycling efficient and effective. When we reach that point, we should make sure we do it. We could even retrieve old plastic from landfill, if that’s cost-effective; it’s not as if it’s going anywhere.But at the moment, as it stands, too much of what we put into “recycling” ends up in the seas around east Asia.
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