Just bury your trash

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/just-bury-your-trash/

The imperfect recycling process means that putting low-value plastics (such as plastic film, black plastic food trays, or small items like bottle caps and straws) into the recycling bin can sometimes be actively harmful. Since these items are hard to recycle and are often screened out and sent to landfill, they may actually add to the contamination rate (as well as the time and labor needed for processing) without ever becoming useful recycled material.

Many mid-value plastics, like the polypropylene used in plastic bottles or butter tubs, require intensive washing. This removes contaminants but also detaches potentially recyclable plastic fragments, meaning the resulting mulch must be filtered. After the washing, the plastic is melted and filtered for contaminants a second time before being turned into pellets. Yield losses can be as high as 45 percent.

While the environmental case can hold up for things like plastic soda bottles, where minimal processing is needed, it quickly drops off as you go down the quality scale. For mid-quality plastics like butter and margarine tubs, recycling one ton of plastic prevents the emission of 0.43 tons of carbon dioxide compared with using virgin material. At the same time, recycled tub-grade plastic typically costs hundreds of dollars more per ton than virgin plastic. This means that consumers are effectively paying over a thousand dollars to save one ton of carbon dioxide. By contrast, direct air capture, which removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, currently costs an average of $490 per ton, and area specialists hope to lower the cost to $100 per ton in the coming decades. Recycling has its virtues, but recycling plastic to save energy just doesn’t add up.