Ask HN: Is any plastic being recycled? What's an alternative?

Yes, plastic that contains food needs to be washed before recycling. I wash our yogurt containers, and the plastic fruit cups from my kid, and a dozen other things.

The real tragedy in my mind is that cleaned plastics might not make a difference anyway - because it turns out plastic isn’t very recyclable to begin with and it doesn’t recycle well anyway.

It is possible to avoid a lot of plastics, but it often means changing one’s lifestyle. There are a few places you can take your own containers and fill up from bulk bins. Whole Foods, for instance, sell some items in glass rather than plastic.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...

5% of plastic is recycled. Yes, the economic incentives of single use drive this at scale.

As toast0 mentions in a sibling comment, incineration is likely the solution (or rather, plasma gasification, which is more energy intensive but results in a cleaner process byproduct stream).

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/04/us-recycling...

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...

The solution to plastic is to put is in a landfill. Burning it is bad because it's effectively a fossil fuel, but pumping oil to make plastic isn't inherently bad and the Earth has enough oil left that we'll essentially never run out if all we use it for is plastic.

Plastic in a landfill, when properly managed, doesn't have any negative impact on the environment. The real problem is places that don't have effective garbage disposal, so the plastic ends up in rivers/oceans. A good start to fixing this problem is to ban exporting plastic waste.

We should stop pretending that paper and plastic can be recycled, and save our recycling stream for high-value materials like glass and metal.

After the couple of economically/resourcesensible plastics are sorted out, the remaining plastic waste should be incinerated for electricity production. Plenty of other solid waste could also be incinerated.

As long as you do an ok job of emissions control, you're probably saving fuel by not tranporting the plastic waste as far, and by reducing the amount of other fuels you need to transport because the trash fire power plant offsets some demand. May be hard to modulate output power though, so might not be great for grid stability.