Recycling...
I am 100 percent for recycling. with that being said, we also need to do a few things as producers and consumers to make this work. The biggest part of it is on the producers end. the biggest impact we can have on garbage/ landfill/ big plastic pile in the middle of the pacific Ocean is to drastically cut down on packaging. Why does everything have to be in a freaking 3 layers of packaging and plastic? just about everything we buy (non food or drug related, we'll get to that in a bit) can be put on a shelf or display either without any packaging or seriously reduced packaging. what you buy for general merchandise does not need to be in a blister pack. Retail big box stores and even the smaller stores can get together with manufactures and producers to standardize the racks/ shelves to hold products. this racking would not need to be changed for several years or even decades to hold products that are in either no packaging or minimal packaging. if some kind of plastic packaging is needed to hang or display something, make it durable and the cashier would then remove it from the item being bought to reuse at the store (think the plastic hanging hook that is on individual sockets when you go replace that lost 10mm). Bags. why are we using plastic bags? Costco and Aldi's have it right. let the customers pick boxes from stocking the store to take their merchandise home. bring back paper bags. we do not have to remove old growth forest for groceries or shopping either. bring your own cloth bag in for groceries, pay a quarter for a new paper bag, make the paper bags out of pulp/ fiber from easily renewable plants such as hemp(oh noes, that is marijuana! no it isnt...)
Food and drug packaging... this would be the one area that would need some extra packaging for consumer safety, but not as much as it is now. toothpaste does not need a box around the tube. at most it needs a hanging hook built into the cap and a foil anti tamper covering. or the cap can be made bigger so that it can be stored standing up. drugs and vitamins do not need any boxes at all. pack it on the shelf as is. beauty supplies such as lipstick and nail polish. no boxes, put it on the shelf or a special designed display as is. soda/ beer/ milk etc... reusable bottles. glass. when I was a kid you got your coke or pepsi in 16 ounce tall glass bottles that you took back to the store and even got a refund back for bringing them in, and they would refund you some of the money for bringing them back. hell me and my friends would go out looking for these types of bottles to turn them in for a few bucks of change. change all forms of plastic bottling to glass. point is, plastic uses a crapload of our oil to produce, it is toxic to wildlife and most types of plastic are near impossible to recycle.
What packaging we have left over should be fiber or paper based that can easily be recycled which means no glossy ink or printing. there should be options in your area to either take the recycleables to or an extra trash bin for just recycleable items for pickup by your garbage men. a thought for you... for a month, put all the recycleable and plastics in their own container and trash that cannot be reused or recycled such as the styrofoam meat trays an used napkins and other stuff in its own container. iff you can eliminate half of that or more, how much less bags of trash would be put on the curb for trash pickup day?
As Bobby Walter mentioned, one of the ultimate forms of recycling is fixing and keeping your car instead of trading every 3 to 5 years. get used parts from a pull a part or auto recycler. that is less production of new parts (and the associated pollution and packaging in manufacturing them. As a country, we need to pass some solid "right to repair" laws that force manufactures of just about every electronic and machinery to create items that are easy to repair and provide consumers with replacement parts at reasonable price to do so. Apple is a horrible company in this regard, and John Deere is another example of a horrible company on fixing your own stuff. I will not go deeper into this as I could rant all day about this and "planned obsolescence
Just my thoughts.
AJ
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