I’d like to think I’m wrong but I doubt it, most plastic is not recyclable, its just heaps of unmanageable crap, plain and simple and often is transported to another unseen country across the planet. Its too small its too jumbled and of too great a volume to be capable of micro-processed to any satisfactory level, the economics of it do just not work for an ethical outcome.
What really bugs me is endlessly there is never any mention of the profound difference between thermoplastics and thermo-setting plastics, the same difference as a vacuum formed food tray and a resin/phenolic based fibreglass component. Some will reform and some just char and become useless. This is day one hour one of any materials course at day release technical college or thirteen year old science / chemistry school lesson and is utterly fundamental to any consideration or understanding of how to recycle.
Not exactly the clearest explanation … https://www.difference.wiki/thermoplastics-vs-thermosetting-plastics/
Clearer … https://www.modorplastics.com/plastics-learning-center/thermoset-vs-thermoplastics/…
Its also fundamental we navigate away from short life throw away food and provisions that arrive in such small and tricky to recycle packaging. Its also endemic with pharmaceutical and say vetinary products, often over-designed and plastics technology gone mad. It is the smallness itself of the discarded parts being part of the problem. In my own lifetime I can remember Co-op blue paper bags for dry goods, filled as required when out shopping. In a sense our own disaster is written into the so-called present day solutions we have arrived at.
Food is over-packaged and too few people cook from scratch.
Here below is the article that prompted me to write this post … https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2019/07/01/for-the-sake-of-the-climate-we-must-stop-believing-magical-stories-about-plastics-and-recycling/
climate-change-briefing 