Easy plastic waste solution is staring us in the face.

[ariadne0614]

Unfortunately, corporate lobbyists are making sure we don’t use it.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=0MWOXR_6qZc

[RandiFan1290]

1. A Plastic Pollution Solution Hiding in Plain Sight

[mitch96]

2. One South Asian country, I forgot which is using waste plastic to fill pot holes..

Apparently it's working well..
m

[IronLionZion]

17. India paves whole roads with plastic

Plastic roads: India’s radical plan to bury its garbage beneath the streets
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/jun/30/plastic-road-india-tar-plastic-transport-environment-pollution-waste

The man who paves India's roads with old plastic
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/09/the-man-who-paves-indias-roads-with-old-plastic

Normal people who got tired of waiting for the city government to fill potholes would put scrap plastic pieces inside and set it on fire. Researches looked into this as a paving solution, since there is plenty of garbage plastic and it lasts a long time. So might as well use plastic for things we want to last a long time, like roads.

[underpants]

3. 👀

Marking to watch later

[Sherman A1]

4. K&R

Thank You for posting.

[rgbecker]

5. Unbelieveable that only 10 states have deposit required.

This idea has been around for 20 years (and longer) yet is still fought off by the Capitalists across the country. Look at the rates of recycling in these 10 states now compared to before and to the averages across the US.

I weep for the future of the world. Over populated, overrun by people who do not care what they leave behind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_deposit_legislation_in_the_United_States

[meow2u3]

25. In NY, the container deposit law has been around my entire lifetime

I'm old enough to remember in the 60s my familiy having to put down a 5 cent deposit on every bottle and be returned that nickel when we brought back said bottles. When I was a kid, the container deposit was for glass soda and milk bottles.

[SergeStorms]

33. My sister and I...

would pick up empty bottles alongside the roads to get gas money for her car (a 1963 Ford Falcon convertible). There was a 2 cent deposit in the 60s and usually within a half hour we would find enough bottles for 2-3 gallons of gas. Of course gas was 39 cents a gallon then, so it didn't take all that many bottles. We'd pick up bottles to buy Beatles trading cards (with the rock-hard flat piece of bubblegum inside). We kids made a living picking up deposit bottles (a living for a kid, anyway).

I live in a College town, and most College kids just don't return bottles. There are people who go around town and collect all the empties ( 5 cents deposit now) and seem to do quite well subsidizing their income that way. New York has always been on top of the deposit bottle curve. I think the deposit should be 25 cents, or more. I imagine there would be a mighty roar from the beverage industry though.

[meow2u3]

35. I left New York in 1980

and where I live now in PA, there is no container deposit law. I see a lot of bottle litter along the side of the road and a container deposit law would not only reduce the litter and plastic pollution, but it would also reduce the need to manufacture more plastic containers.

[SergeStorms]

36. Yep! That's the purpose of it.

You seldom see bottles or cans alongside the roads here. People still throw all their other crap out their car windows. I still hate that. People still don't get it. They're killing their home planet. Planets aren't recyclable, we can't go to the store and get another, but some people just don't care.

[sinkingfeeling]

6. To the Greatest page!

[MineralMan]

7. When I was just a lad in the 1950s, soft drink bottles

had a 5 cent deposit on them. Like many other young lads, when my pockets were empty of change to buy junk food and comic books, the solution was close at hand. I'd go around looking for soft drink bottles. A lot of people just threw them away, just like they do with plastic bottles today. So, a trip down the alley behind most streets and peeking into trash cans would result in a dozen or more soft drink bottles. If you found just 10, that was a half-dollar in your pocket. All you had to do was walk or bike to whatever store that sold soft drinks and hand over your loot. The cashier at the store would hand you the money.

Not only did it get the bottles returned by many people, it provided gainful self-employment for children.

It wasn't just the odd half-dollar, either. If I needed more money than that, I just had to look in more trashcans in the alleys. Or, after a weekend, the trash cans in parks were another rich resource to be mined. A nickel at a time.

[Whiskeytide]

11. I wish I still had all the comic books I bought with deposit $. n/t

[zackymilly]

14. Or the baseball bubblegum cards I bought and put in my bike spokes.

[Whiskeytide]

20. Those too. I suffered the same fate as many ...

... kids of the late 60s and early 70s. I had gotten a huge collection of old 40s and 50s comic books from two families with older boys that went off to college, and my mother had gotten them for me because I loved comic books so much. I literally had hundreds. Put them in several boxes tucked away in my closet and went off to college myself. In about '84, when the vintage comic book craze was in full swing, I thought "I have a treasure trove at home" - only to then learn that my mother had cleaned out my closet and they had a gone to the dump sometime in '82. The least she could have done was recycle them!!

[SergeStorms]

34. I wish I had...

all the Mickey Mantle cards I destroyed back then. Of course I wouldn't be the cool dude I am today without that clickety-clack sound from my bicycle back then either.

[MineralMan]

15. Really!

In the 50s, candy bars were 5 cents and comics cost a dime. Admission to the Saturday matinee at the movie theater was 15 cents, and popcorn was just 10 cents. 50 cents was real money back then, when you were a kid.

Bottle deposits kept a lot of kids busy back then. We were avid recyclers.

[Whiskeytide]

24. See my post 20. Among the hand-me-down comic books ...

... I acquired was - I distinctly remember - the introduction of Spiderman. One of my favorites. A vintage copy sold sometime in the last few years, I think, for almost a half million $. Ok. Now I've depressed myself all over again!

[MineralMan]

26. Yup. On the other hand, if all of us had held on to that comic,

it would just be worth a few bucks. We didn't, though, so someone did real well.

I didn't save any of them. We traded them a little, but it didn't take long for them to end up in the trash can. Today's comic book collectors are glad we tossed them, I'm sure.

[Nay]

31. Very true -- we ran our lives on the money we got from picking up bottles and getting

the deposit. Some bottles, root beer ones especially, were worth 5 cents, a LOT of money for a kid! We'd bike around, pick up bottles, turn them in for cash and spend, spend, spend. I remember one day I got a couple of dollars worth of bottles. Hoo boy, off to the penny candies and nickel candy bars. And a Supergirl comic. Plus an afternoon matinee for 25 cents. As you said, this was real money for a kid.

[Wounded Bear]

12. Got a penny each for beer bottles, too...

[zackymilly]

13. We would cash them in for cigarettes when I was young.

No age restriction on cigs back then.
So glad I never took up the habit when I got older.

[Kaiserguy]

22. I remember that well

Get on my bike and take a short ride and pickup glass bottles turn them in and have some spending money.

[cannabis_flower]

27. In our town

We used to have a movie theater that had a "Coke show" on Saturday morning around 10 am. If you brought in 3 Coke bottle you got into a double feature for free. It was two movies that kids would like with a cartoon between them them. Usually it was a comedy like Jerry Lewis in Hook Line and Sinker or Phyllis Diller and Bob Hope in With 8 You Get Eggroll or it might be a monster movie like Godzilla VS the Smog Monster. Great times.

[MineralMan]

32. Yeah! The Saturday matinee at our theater often showed Westerns as double features.

We had the cartoon in the middle, too. Sometimes it was comedies or action movies, but typically it was westerns.

The theater was usually packed, but the management of the theater didn't allow kids up in the balcony. Too much popcorn throwing, etc.

On Friday and Saturday, the same theater always had a double feature aimed at attracting teenagers. It was a small town of about 5,000, so that theater was about the only date place there was. the first movie started at 7 PM. The second one usually was over by 10 PM, to get the kids home by their curfew.

On the other hand, there were a lot fewer teens there for the second feature. I figured that out, once I got my driver's licence. Couples left to go park somewhere and fool around more seriously. There were limits on what you could get away with at the theater, really, even in the back row. The balcony was patrolled occasionally by an adult usher, who would light up kids who were going too far with his flashlight.

Fun times!

[MrScorpio]

8. Michigan leads the way, baby!

[shraby]

10. You bet!

It only took about a year and the roadsides didn't glisten any more.

Our local grocer was really against it cause he didn't want to deal with them, so I saved up a lot of bottles/cans to take back all at once just to irritate him.

There was 6 of us so it didn't take long to get enough to piss him off.

[LastLiberal in PalmSprings]

9. Solution: turn all the plastic waste into

LEGOS!

[Lonestarblue]

16. We need a solution for plastic bags also.

I recently met a co-founder of a Chilean company that partnered with the Chinese to develop dissolvable plastic bags. He gave me one to try out, and it really works. One of the large grocery chains here is already using the bags in some of their stores in Mexico. I’m hoping they bring them here soon. Obviously, they might be a problem in the rain or with wet foods, but think of how many plastic bags could just dissolve after use instead of polluting landfills and oceans.

[IronLionZion]

23. Cloth bags are a good alternative

strong, reusable, can hold up reasonably well in rain and wet stuff, etc.

Dissolvable plastics can be very irritating to use when wet. This happens with spoons and straws and other items that fail when using them.

[JudyM]

37. What does it become when it dissolves? Plastic

micropellets are harmful to aquatic life.

[Lonestarblue]

38. It just dissolves completely.

No pellets. It just goes away entirely and leaves no damaging chemicals behind. Obviously, dissolvable bags won’t work for all uses, but we need to look at all options.

[Blue_Adept]

18. We've had bottle deposits here going back to the early 80s in MA

We used to take back the big bags every couple of weeks to a place in town, watch them get sorted out. I used to do sorting at the supermarket before these kinds of machines became more common.

I don't buy as much soda now but still a decent bit. I don't use the bottle returns at all and "lose" the five cents.

Easier to just toss them in the recycling bin that my trash company offers. Usually the recycling bin is 75% full each week of proper recycling materials. The trash bin at maybe 30% since so much of what I have is recyclable material.

[ehrnst]

19. Which corporate lobbyists?

I don't use single use bottles for water or much else.

So no one is prohibiting me from doing that.

[BobTheSubgenius]

21. Depending on size and type, beverage deposits here reange from 5 to 20 cents.

You never see abandoned returnable bottles or cans lying around for long. Some homeless and poor people spend hours every day walking around, picking them up. I have a nodding and "How are you today?" relationship with some regulars in my area. There are several return depots around, and they recycle tens of thousands of containers a day.

Additionally, any business that sells beverages with a deposit on the container is obliged by law to refund that deposit on the item's return.

Curbside recycling was started over 2 decades ago, and some results are impressive. Each year, we're told, enough paper is recycled to save 500 acres of trees. The landfill had its usable life expectancy extended by at least 30 years, and that was before the local govt's instituted curbside pickup of compost recyclables, plus a free drive-in depot for larger loads. The parks departments use the compost to fertilize their landscapes.

The landfill harvests methane and uses it to power its operation. Not ideal, granted, but the methane is produced come hell or high water, so you might as well make use of it.

One of the most common comments I hear from visitors to the area is how clean the streets are. These programs are a large part of that.

[oldsoftie]

30. When i was a kid, i used to collect bottles for change. It was AMAZING to find one of the .25 ones!

Amazing for a 7 yr old anyway.
But those nickels added up, and it gave me some money for the movies or stuff like that

[matt819]

28. My little town

has the town dump - whoops, recycling center. Everyone calls it the dump, though.

Nice guys working there, and they really care about the job they're doing. But they are constrained by, well, reality.

Paper, for example. They don't have a baling machine, so they ship in industrial cartons - $40/ton to ship, $40 per ton to bale on the recycler's end. So, recycling paper is costing the town. Plus, they just stopped taking printed/coated boxes - like cereal boxes - because the recycler they sell to has no market for them.

Aluminum, cans, and bottles - They get paid for these. So all's good there, I think.

Plastic. They only take #1 and #2, and not all of them. The really thin #1 - I think that's the stuff that produce may come in, or items the grocery store prepares for sale, e.g., sandwiches. So, the garbage it is for those items. #2 is plastic bottles, I think, so that's good, except for the really, really thin ones, like the ones Poland Spring comes in. So, off to the compactor. And they don't take anything else.

The local food co-op does take all plastics, but they're not really set up for mass collection. Their bins are tiny and not placed in convenient spots. They mean well, and that's great - and I have started to bring all my plastic there - but it's a bit of a pain. And I have to trust them when they say they're recycling. They probably are, but at least the town recycling center has to provide its report to town showing costs and revenues, so you can pretty much be sure that they are doing what they say they are doing.

I haven't seen plastic recycling machines in grocery stores.

As for my little contribution. I no longer bag oranges or apples, and in the co-op I bag my stuff in paper or I bring jars. And I remember to bring in my carrier bags about 85% of the time. Same with shopping at hardware store, auto parts store, Staples, and such.

[oldsoftie]

29. Dont forget, 90% of ocean plastic waste comes from just 10 rivers in Africa & Asia.

We also need SOURCE control, to stop it from getting IN the oceans.
A deposit works fine for drink containers, but we have to also worry about all the OTHER plastic shit out there.

[rzemanfl]

39. K&R. n/t