alt Hacker NewsI also still try. Before putting plastic packaging in the green bin, I clean and wash it to avoid contaminating the plastic but then my plastic waste gets mixed in with recyclables from my neighbours who aren’t co conscientious. Even if I assume that the plastic really will be recycled in East Asia, there is still a fair chance that I’m just wasting my time and unnecessarily using water by doing so. It’s the lack of transparency that really annoys me.
On the issue of transparency, most people think that the Green Dot symbol¹ means an item can be recycled. It was only about 10 years ago that I learned that this just means that “suppliers and producers have contributed financially to the recycling of packaging in Europe”². In Ireland, Repak is an industry-led NGO that was created as a form of green-washing regulatory capture and I presume other European countries have their own equivalent.
¹ https://repak.ie/images/uploads/icons/The_Green_Dot_Symbol.p...
