Saw a stat that changed my mind about recycling plastic

I always thought recycling plastic was basically a no-brainer, but I read something from a waste management report that said only about 9% of plastic actually gets recycled. The rest goes to landfill or gets burned. That number shocked me because I'd been putting all my plastic in the blue bin for years thinking it was helping. Found it in a news article about a study by Greenpeace. Did that stat change anyone else's mind about what they recycle?

3 comments

3 Comments

karenb971mo ago

Wait, does your town even tell people what's actually recyclable?

price.ben1mo ago

The real trick is those numbers count every piece of plastic ever made, not what's actually recyclable in your area. My town doesn't even take half the stuff people toss in the bin, it just goes straight to the dump regardless.

blake7921mo ago

Yeah, that "straight to the dump" part is pretty accurate but I gotta push back a little on the numbers thing. In my experience, the recycling rate stats usually only count what actually gets processed, not just what gets thrown in the bin. Like, the EPA tracks municipal solid waste, and they try to separate out what's actually recycled from what's just collected. But your main point still stands though. A lot of places have what they call "wishcycling" where people toss things like plastic bags or greasy pizza boxes in the recycling bin thinking it'll get recycled, and then it just contaminates the whole load and ends up in the landfill anyway. So even if those numbers are somewhat accurate on a national level, they don't mean much for your specific town's situation.