Even Greenpeace Says “Most Plastic Simply Cannot Be Recycled.”

For decades we’ve been told recycling helps the Earth. It really doesn't.

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Recycling is a “sacrament of the green religion,” says Science Writer John Tierney.

He once debunked recycling claims in an infamous New York Times column “Recycling is Garbage.”

“It’s even more true today,” Tierney tells me.

Greenpeace now says plastic recycling is a “dead-end street.”

Often it's also a costly scam.

[TheInfamousCloaker]

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"

[tadroid]

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.

[ExilefromCrownHill]

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

[mountainmover]

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!

[davidcooke]

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.

[cw]

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 😊.

[briandreggors]

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.

[autumnsun]

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.

[douglasjackson]

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

[gerikbensing]

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!

[lightning]

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.

[buddyrevell]

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.

[ajfurnari]

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

[bikinggreg]

I've never recycled plastic. My cousin is a plastics engineer and said it was all BS 20 years ago.

[paulevans]

6:52 "They get a charge out of telling people what to do." Nailed it.

[TeishaPriest]

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! ;-)

[bobjoatmon]

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

[pup]

"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.

[kenyongray]

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.

[brianw]

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.