From what I understand, shipping containers are sent out from Asia stuffed with goods, but there isn't nearly as much going in the other direction. The containers need to go back whether they're full or not, which is why it ends up being so cheap to ship plastic. And the CO2 caused doesn't really change as a result.
To the rest of your point though, I agree. My wife is a hardline recycler. I generally am too, but I have a hard time seeing the benefit in recycling soft plastics.
Thank you for the included link. This is an aspect of international shipping about which I was wholly ignorant. The particular section mentioning the "international exchange" occurring in Singapore was particularly concerning because even species from areas not visited by the transiting vessels can "hitch a ride", so to speak.
Is there really much of a point in recycling anything but reasonably clean paper/cardboard (I know stuff like greasy pizza boxes won't get recycled), and clean metals (like aluminum cans). Like, aside for those, will much realistically get recycled?
Aside for the insane amount of amazon boxes I toss in recycling, so very little of my trash fits the bill of things that will reasonably get recycled...
Glass is another (the other?) material which is worthwhile to recycle. Like plastic, glass never decomposes. Unlike plastic and unlike paper/cardboard, it can be endlessly remelted and remade into new products without a loss in quality. It's a huge savings in material and energy cost to use recycled glass in the manufacture of new glass.
If you have a recycling bin labeled "glass", absolutely do throw (place) glass bottles into it. It will almost certainly be valued and reused. If you have a single-stream recycling output - just one bin labeled "Recycling", there's less of a case...processing and separating is more expensive and less successful, and a small fraction will actually get recycled.
Everything I've read recently indicates that "recycled" glass is generally just crushed and used as road base instead of being melted down and re-used as containers etc.
We only had a few kinds of bottle designs, standardized across the whole country. I worked in a brewery over the summer, in the filling section. The whole day trucks would arrive full of empty bottles collected from various stations. They would go through a large washer, with a visual inspection afterwards (the most boring job there was, that was before that could be reliably automated, 1980s). Occasionally new bottles were fed into the system, but very few, <10% I would say.
I also had a relative who owned a recycling station where people brought paper (mostly newspapers and magazines), cardboard, and lots and lots of bottles, and got money for it. The amount (of money) was significant enough that those shops were pretty busy, and especially the young (like me) could quite significantly add to their pocket money.
The main point was the standardization. Germany today also has lots of stations to receive cans and plastic and glass bottles in exchange for a bit of money - but it is a PITA because not just have the bottles to fit, but even the labels!! The machines at the retailers only take back bottles of brands that they sell. Crazy!
This seems like something that could be brought back through legislation instantly, and I cannot understand why we're prioritizing the freedom to make your own unique bottles over this. There is 0 reason why all beer cannot be sold in identical bottles - after all, the label can still be unique and identifying your brand. Then the bottles just get washed and reused.
Although these days an aluminium can is the more popular container, and they are indeed used only once. Proper bottles are getting rare, which I hate, since the bottle is much more pleasant to drink from in a hot sauna. Doesn't burn your lips.
We visited a local recycling center where ours goes for a tour for our FLL Robotics team. It seemed pretty modern and it appeared they were actually recycling everything they could, sorting by machine and hand. So hopefully our single stream is getting recycled properly.
It does seem wasteful to ship trash across the ocean to be recycled. But maybe it makes sense to do so.
"Remelting glass to make more glass is more energy intensive than making new glass."---hdfbdtbcdg
The first source I found on this subject directly contradicts your claim:
"The primary energy consumption totals are 17.0 x 10^6 Btu/ton of bottles with no postconsumer recycling, 14.8
x 10^6 Btu/ton with maximum recycling, and 15.9 x 10^6
Btu/ton for the current mix of recycling. The total primary energy use decreases as the percent of glass recycled rises"
---Energy Implications of Glass Container Recycling
Argonne National Laboratory
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/legosti/old/5703.pdf
Cool! I seem to have been wrong. I wonder how those numbers compare with reuse? One would have to look at TOC including transport (e.g. transportation of wine bottle back to growing regions).
That it can be recycled without "waste" doesnt mean its worthwhile. Making glass costs a large amount of energy. As far I know, when plastic is recycled, it is better for the environment than using glass.
We're so wasteful in the US. I'd guess that when glass is reused to the point of needing recycling it's a different balance - e.g. when beer bottles in areas of Europe are cleaned and refilled.
That was the practice not so long ago in the US too. But it is complex. Reusables were thicker and heavier than modern bottles, not just the super light high life bottle, but almost every bottle, I believe, and cans are so light in comparison.
It's true, but where/how it survived in Europe seems like it's a regionally or even city localized bottle re-use cycle which might shift the balance of costs and re-use.
Re-Use is the way to go, I generally check in at the re-use centre in our town, the scrap yard and the local auction sites before buying anything new.
Its a shame everything electronic is basically landfill due to either lack of circuit diagrams and parts or software that no longer works.. Ditto for new cars :-(
Parts of Europe has a good system for recycling plastic bottles. It works because you’re getting only one type of plastic in and nothing else. Look up Tomra machines.
Food waste might also be worth it? You can get some biofuel and compost out of it, which isn’t bad.
The US systems have mostly seemed completely pointless to me. Many of them seems to optimize for feeling good (I put it in the recycling bin!) rather than doing what it takes to make it worthwhile (I took the bottles and cans back to the shop and put it in a machine that verifies them, crushes them and sends them back to where they came from)
My understanding is that the temperature used to melt aluminum, steel, and other metals for recycling is so high that food waste burns off quickly and doesn't pose any contamination problems. At worst you might have some slag to skim off the top.
Paper is the main thing that frequently has contamination problems, because it can't be treated with high heat during the recycling problem lest you just end up paper. Even plastic is heated pretty decently during the recycling process.
You would need people to sort it by hand. There is no way you're going to find people who want to do that for a living in Western Europe. And even if you did you would have to pay them a decent wage.
To the rest of your point though, I agree. My wife is a hardline recycler. I generally am too, but I have a hard time seeing the benefit in recycling soft plastics.