Recycled plastic also gets brittle as you recycle it. Nothing in this Plastic story is anywhere near as 'circular' as it is with glass or metal recycling.
A bottle from 100% recycled PET pettles has a deep dark grey colour because they cannot perfectly control plastic colouring in recycling. So those pristine transparent bottles are 100% guaranteed not from recycled pettles.
It really is a con through and through. We need to ban single-use plastic, everything else is noise.
The major blocker at the moment is the lack of recycled PET to use.
So all the people undermining the work by telling folk not to bother recycling their bottles isn't really helpful, unless you are trying to support the fossil fuel industry.
https://www.packaging-360.com/en/current-topics/coca-cola-in...
There is no 'work', plastic is cheap for the packager, expensive for our environment. The industry has setup a marketing compaign to divert attention away from all the externalized environmental costs of plastic.[0]
You are right that I want to undermine this effort because what I want is a full ban on single use-plastic outside medical/laboratory applications.
I highly recommend this PBS docu on the PR aspects around Plastic:
[0] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/plastic-wars/
It still seems like a good idea to keep separating plastic in recycling. At least some of it does get recycled, and having the plastic already available in a separate stream should make it easier to encourage additional programmes. However, the quoted numbers are probably very optimistic.
Local councils are often convinced that a lot is recycled, but it is mostly recycled on paper, not in practice.
Obviously this might not stretch to other towns and cities.
It's a shame that they do not link to the direct companies so you can trace the waste to completion but it looks like a good deal of it is not getting shipped outside of the UK.
I believe there are a couple of bills being proposed to also stop this practice completely, although I don't know how effective they will be.
The rest is correct though and it will most likely be down-cycled, my personal strategy I have been using without going crazy is:
Support policy change, if we can tax plastics (or any material) at the right level to include its waste and energy cost there are plenty of businesses waiting to be economically viable such as; collecting e-waste/batteries and retrieving gold, copper, lithium. Bioplastics for wrapping food, sauce packets.I am not an expert in this area, so would love other people to correct any mistakes, it's really hard to go zero-waste or think about the right way to solve this problem without getting overwhelmed.