Barely related, but a lot of people don’t know as much as they think they know about recycling. That symbol on the bottom of your plastic jugs, jars, etc that looks like the recycling symbol was the result of a campaign to intentionally mislead people into thinking that the containers are recyclable. Those symbols along with the number are identifiers for the types of plastic involved. Different recycling plants are equipped to process different materials, so I’m not saying that no plastic is recyclable, but you’re probably best off just assuming that your plant can’t handle your plastic. Why? Because if they can handle any plastic, it’s probably just one or two of them and you’d need to ask them to be sure, and you’d need to wash away all the food particles and remove labels and adhesive. I’ve heard that failing to do this can contaminate other material which renders that stuff unrecyclable as well, but I’m not sure that’s still true or ever was so don’t @ me on that point lol. I’m also not sure about sorting, but that could be necessary too. And after all that, it’s still very hard to recycle plastic, and you can probably only do it once or twice before it’s not usable anymore.

So what should we do with our plastic? Easy. Stop buying it. Okay, not so easy, but you can choose aluminum or glass containers instead wherever you have the choice. Any reduction is an improvement. Going a step further, see if you can’t reuse your plastic for something else before disposing. Once you’ve gotten a few uses out of it, then you can go through the process of recycling if it’s possible. I’m no genius for suggesting that, btw. That’s literally just what “reduce, reuse, recycle” is telling you to do. It’s in that order for a reason!

TED Talk complete. Hopefully most of you already knew this, but this was for the handful of people who didn’t know!