Plastic recycling remains a myth: Greenpeace study

Some countries are leading the way, including India, which recently banned 19 single-use plastic items. Austria has set reuse targets of 25 percent by 2025 and at least 30 percent by 2030 for beverage packaging, while Portugal has also set the 30 percent by 2030 goal.

Chile is moving to phase out single-use cutlery and mandating refillable bottles.

This seems uncomfortable, impractical, complicated and expensive to do, but it is also absolutely necessary as long as proper recycling of discarded plastic is not realistically possible.

Worst case scenario people and companies will switch from plastics once their convenience is reduced so much, but that would also be a positive development so there is no downside.

It’s not so simple as propagated. I still know the era when there had been less plastic and for example all beverages were sold in glass bottles. They cashed in a little extra price for the glass bottles and that was reimbursed when bringing them back for recycling. But the big problem was first the different colors and second the energy intensity of the recycling process. One brown beer bottle in the container of white / transparent glass and game over so to say. And of course nowadays the exorbitant energy prices and the much higher wages , taxes and other costs, would probably make the bottles as nearly expensive as their contents. Maybe something has to be done, yes, but if one factor then becomes better, one or more other worsen. It’s therefore naive to believe that those problems can be solved easily and quickly.

They didn’t recycle bottles. They washed them and the companies reused their own bottles.

Oil companies are going to do everything they can to stop research and implementing recycling of plastics other than water and milk bottles. It will always be “economically unfeasible” so they can sell petroleum products used to make them. Recycling is just PR nonsense to the oil companies.

You’re wearing Costco water bottles, and it’s marketed at high-tech clothing.