Recycling

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Plastic vs. Glass vs. Aluminum | Earth911.com

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Beverage Container Showdown: Plastic vs. Glass vs. Aluminum | Earth911.com

I am opposed to glass bottles, because they frequently break and leave shards in the woods, potentially for a long period of times. Broken glass easily cuts hands and feet, punctures tires, and lead to severe injury. Not to mention that they are heavy. Aluminum (which is actually plastic coated with BPA or similiar less toxic resin to protect flavor), is probably my second favorite, especially with the bottle deposit laws taking back the cans. Aluminum also stays pretty cold in the coolers and is quite lightweight, although sometimes punctures and can tear and be a safety hazard with sharp edges. Aluminum cans can also last in the woods a long time. Plastic bottles I think get a bit of an unfair reputation -- they don't last as long in the woods as glass or metal, they aren't likely to cause cuts or injury (even if swallowed compared to metal or glass), they can be burned, and they are also recycable. Sure, plastic doesn't work for beer and certain other beverages, but it's the lightest, safest material out there.

NPR

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U.S. Recycling Industry Is Struggling To Figure Out A Future Without China : NPR

John Caturano of Nestle Waters North America, which makes bottled water, said plastic is getting a bad reputation. "The water bottle has in some ways become the mink coat or the pack of cigarettes. It's socially not very acceptable to the young folks, and that scares me," he said during a panel called Life After National Sword.

Sunil Bagaria, who runs recycling company GDB International, took his colleagues to task. "Forever, we have depended on shipping our scrap overseas," he bemoaned. "Let's stop that." European countries, he added, "are recycling 35% to 40% [of their plastic waste]. The U.S. only recycles 10%. How tragic is that?" 

After a couple of days of this, a woman named Kara Pochiro from the Association of Plastic Recyclers stood up and said not to panic. "Plastic recycling isn't dead, and it works, and it's important to protecting our environment, and it's essential to the circular economy," she reassured.

"Circular economy" is now a catchphrase that some say is a way out of the plastic mess. The idea is essentially this: Society needs plastic, but people need to recycle a lot more of it and use it again and again and again. That will eliminate a lot of waste and cut down on the avalanche of new plastic made every year.

The US Recycling System Is Garbage | Sierra Club

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The US Recycling System Is Garbage | Sierra Club

FOR NEARLY THREE DECADES your recycling bin contained a dirty secret: Half the plastic and much of the paper you put into it did not go to your local recycling center. Instead, it was stuffed onto giant container ships and sold to China. Around 1992, US cities and trash companies started offshoring their most contaminated, least valuable "recyclables" to a China that was desperate for raw materials. There, the dirty bales of mixed paper and plastic were processed under the laxest of environmental controls. Much of it was simply dumped, washing down rivers to feed the crisis of ocean plastic pollution. Meanwhile, America's once-robust capability to sort, clean, and recycle its own waste deteriorated. Why invest in expensive technology and labor when the mess could easily be bundled off to China?