This is Bad, but China and India actually recycle plastic. I have heard from those who have seen the process.

I also know that the USA majorly depended upon China to take their trash but since China has refused to take everybody's trash, the Australia, USA and some other Europian Countries have no option other than burning or dumping it. The amount of plastic waste is generated by America is overwhelming in comparison to the amount of land it can give to Dumping Grounds and same is for others too.

Interesting/horrifying video... Thanks for sharing.

In other news, while most Western companies are selling their recycling/garbage to third world countries black markets, Sweden is just ... burning it. And in fact, importing recycling materials to burn...

The world is fucking insane. Every. Fucking. Government. Is. Lying. To. Our. Faces.

Not only that. "We" (meaning Canada in general) are very much shipping "waste", including recycling, overseas to black markets (i.e., criminal enterprises) in developing nations. The Philippines and Malaysia, for example. These nations don't have the resources to police it. These "smugglers" process what they can to produce plastic pellets for reuse, and the rest is just burned just as it would be in Canada, except instead of affecting Canadian pollution rates it is applied to the foreign nation. That's simply unfair and completely corrupt for our governments to allow to happen. It just goes to show you how fucking corrupt the system is. The regulations stop at the line for international waters. Once it leaves Canada we stop caring about what happens to it, which is a real shame. Private enterprises complete the circle of crime and pollution. Alas, much of this "recycled" material is never recycled, and instead gets burned or just fills up land in these developing nations, essentially polluting developing nations that lack resources to handle it with the waste of wealthy nations. It's sickening (literally and figuratively).

Our society is becoming overly dependent on "convenience". We can do without a lot of this single-use plastic.

Plastic bags at retailers can just be replaced with reusable bags. You didn't come with bags to carry your shit out? The law says go fuck yourself. And certain stores would stock reusable bags, at a premium to ensure we reuse them. That would eliminate one mess.

Bottled water is bad for you. The plastic is bad, and the water is generally municipal source at a 100x markup or it's stolen from natural streams and things which are impacted from the extraction, and the corporations doing it don't "own" the streams. They merely own property alongside it. They have no more right to capture and charge a premium on it than any other cottage owner. In a similar vein, most plastic bottled beverages are bad for you, and the ones that aren't are expensive and less sought after so less of a problem, but we could just outlaw plastic bottles and require the industry to revert back to glass and use deposit based recycling programs to control it, or just outright stop convenient single-use beverage containers. Whatever is needed.

The worst plastic that I can think of is just packaging. Most of it is obnoxious. Like those plastic "cases" that most electronics and other similar items are wrapped in. The only way to "open" the packaging is to destroy it. Good luck returning that to the store. Typically larger corporations like Walmart take them back, but either the packaging is taped back together and looks unsaleable, or they must commission brand new single-use plastic to wrap it in. The government could outlaw that, and require different packaging methods. Granted, it will likely be far less protective and far more expensive, but we do have limited means here if we intend for our species to live indefinitely.

Most plastic seems to be a convenience more than a necessity. It's cheap, and it's unregulated, so it's used. Regulate it and prices will go up. Boo, hoo. The price is already going up, but we're just not seeing it yet. It's going to be a fucking shock when the bottom line is finally drawn and we see what all this convenience really cost us.

Of course, most of the conveniences are really poisons ultimately hurting us or the world around us anyway. It might be the best thing that ever happened to just draw a hard line and say no. We'll have to adjust back to an older way of life, but I think a lot of us will find more value from it in the long run, and it should help to ensure there's a valuable life to be had for our descendents too.

After I watched your first video about Australia I sort of went on a binge trying to find other relevant videos about this. Not only did I find the evidence that Canada is doing the same thing, but I stumbled across the a video that documented Sweden's practices. Apparently/allegedly in Sweden, they have setup big incineration factories that literally burn garbage to produce energy. They are such an "innovator" at it that they actually also import garbage, including "recycling" materials, from other Western nations, to burn.

This sounds extremely alarming and wrong at face value. I don't know if an unbiased analysis has been done on the harm done to the environment as a result.

On the other hand, apparently some cities are setup with hot water systems used to heat homes in the city with the combustion of the garbage at the centralized plants... I think it's unlikely that the benefits outweigh the damage to the environment, but I haven't attempted to corroborate the practice at all (see Mozilla broke Firefox and is taking its precious time to fix it thread).

Again, this is another way in which the actual pollution output of some nations is swept under the rug and redistributed to other nations. Instead of the source country being held accountable for the pollutants released into the atmosphere as a result, it's redistributed back to Sweden. Which I can only assume either politically gives zero fucks or is a low enough contributor that they can afford to pay the price and still break even or thereabouts with embarrassingly wasteful nations like Canada and the US.

I think that's a practice that definitely needs to be addressed ASAP to both understand environmental damage properly, and to hold the worst offenders accountable. Despite Canada's relative size, apparently we're amonng the worst offenders, at least according to the available data. We might even be worse than the USA. Which is just embarrassing. I wouldn't be surprised if that was again just due to "loopholes" that skew the reality, but nevertheless Canada is obviously wasting way too much and some serious changes are needed.

It's really sickening that it's permitted, but I suppose you have to balance the bad from the "good" (e.g., coupons that "save you money"). That said, it would make better sense to distribute those kinds of "save you money" coupons simply as "come in this day and get this deal"... Why only "special" customers get the deal? It's silly. In the end, all of those products are bad for us anyway so it would probably work fine to just completely outlaw such mail. A good way to combat it might be a small to large group of volunteers that save all of that spam mail, and then on a coordinated day everybody shows up within 5 minutes to dump it all over the post office.

That's completely fucked for them to say that your mailbox doesn't belong to you. It just goes to show that the system works us, not for us.

We are about to start something similar here in Panama. Starting July I believe, all non biodegradable plastic bags will be banned from stores nation-wide.

Supermarkets and to lesser extend smaller shops have started campaigns to make people use their own reusable bags. It has been somewhat successful.

I never got into the habit of throwing plastic grocery bags away. I would collect them even into the hundreds and would use them slowly as wastebin liners, etc. When they began being collected for recycling, I offloaded most of them. Hefty's pilot program in a few cities (including mine) supposedly is converting such plastics into a synthetic diesel fuel.

I agree that reusable shopping bags are a good idea, but people need to be diligent about washing them as I've heard they become a food contamination hazard when neglected.

When I was a child in the 1970s you got your groceries in a paper bag. Worked like a charm.

It's difficult for some to imagine who have never known anything else, but it's really no big deal. Our chip bags back then were a combination of tinfoil with a paper lining and they were just fine. Your electronic housings were either metal or wood or a combination of the two. Our TV was a large wooden cabinet that looked quite nice. Our drinks were all in cans or glass bottles. Our cars were fricken tanks! Babies wore cloth diapers which were washed and reused.

There's something to be said about the older generation now that I think about it. I don't recall us throwing out a lot in the garbage to be honest.

I only ever needed to wash my cloth bag once when eggs broke in it. I don't have a lot of raw food just hanging out in the bag. If I did I would wash it.

I suppose this is progress at least:
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/442683-scientists-say-theyve-invented-recyclable-plastic

If the existing plastic is too hard to recycle, make a better plastic.

Our local grocery store recycles plastic bags. We just save them up then take back a bunch at a time. We have curbside recycling, but they don't take glass. Glass sucks.

The problem is the supply of plastic. It's just so damn cheap. More and more of it is biodegradable though, which is good, but still.

However, the majority of the waste generated even after recycling is still plastic. Wrappers, seals, packaging that isn't recyclable, etc...

We used to compost, but we don't have a vegetable garden anymore. I also used to collect the grass and leaves and compost them, but that's a lot of work.

However, there are literally islands of trash in the sea in places. They've invented some cool garbage collection pods though, can't remember the name now. They work 24/7 and just need to be emptied occassionally. Then there are things like giant sea vacuums that are like conveyor belts that just suck up the garbage.

Burning waste (plastic especially) produces toxic fumes. We (and other neighbors) used to suffer from not having garbage collection and so we burned our trash. Not only did it stink and pollute the air but I'm sure the plastic bags were not meant to be burned. We have since remedied the problem, and have curbside pickup now. It's so nice to be able to live in a neighborhood that doesn't smell like burning trash anymore.

I recycle as much as I can, but if my recycling is not actually being recycled, that's horrible. It should be a crime if you ask me, to dump materials meant to be recycled, or worse, to ship them somewhere else and burn them.

I shudder to think of all the mountains of electronic waste that gets shipped to places like India, where people get heavy metal poisoning trying to recycle the precious metals in the electronic parts. If my electronics aren't being recycled properly, that should be a crime as well.

YES! Happy Piccolo Day!

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Lovely. Heavy metals in the ground water. Thanks Neil!