Myth Busters Weekend Marathon Part 9
Submitted by PlasticLess.com Blog
It’s time to wrap this thing up. Here are the last two pro-plastic bag arguments made by the plastic industry:
Myth #9:
Recycling plastic bags is too expensive.
Fact:
The price of not recycling them is high. Recycling can help save resources and minimize the amount of waste going to landfills. Also, recycling helps reduce litter, as bags are contained and stored. Its worth noting that it takes 91% less energy to recycle a pound of plastic than it takes to recycle a pound of paper.
Myth #10:
There’s no demand for recycled plastic.
Fact:
Today there is a growing market for recycled plastic that didn’t exist 15 years ago. It’s also cheaper now to use recycled plastic than to obtain new materials, increasing potential for more recycling of used plastic bags. Recycled plastic grocery and shopping bags are currently being made into new consumer products such as clean new plastic shopping bags, outdoor decking and railing products.
One bone I am going to pick here is the assertion that it is cheaper to use recycled plastic than to obtain new material. I don’t know if that ever was the case for any of the various types of plastic. While the actual industrial process of recycling plastic may have been cheaper than making new plastic up until recently, tax payers pay the bill for most of the costs of recycling such as labor and transportation.
The recycling business has been hit very hard by the recession. Plastics that were separated by consumers for recycling may end up in landfills in the UK, Canada, Australia and the United States.
Outsourcing recycling to Asian countries often means that the process will be carried out in unsafe, unethical a environmentally unfriendly ways.
Reducing and reusing are not given a lot of press because they are concepts that exist outside of what is defined as ‘the economy.’
