[Saline9515]

It's not a myth, you can make new items using recycled plastics. Of course, the recycled plastic doesn't have the same properties, but it doesn't mean that it can't be useful to reduce plastic production. Most plastic items do not require pristine materials anyway.

It's the same for paper and cardboard, and it's much better to reuse it as much as possible to avoid cutting a tree. Letting it rot releases the same amount of CO2 than burning it, by the way.

https://plasticsrecycling.org/how-recycling-works/the-plasti...

[OkayPhysicist]

The vast majority of paper products made from farmed trees (because if you're pulping it anyway you can use really fast growing wood), meaning the CO2 you release from burning/composting paper straws is offset by the next tree planted to replace it.

Excess CO2 in the atmosphere is driven by burning fuels that aren't being actively produced via recaptured atmospheric CO2, such as petroleum.

And the fundamental issue with recycling plastic is that the raw ingredients for virgin plastic are basically free as a byproduct of fuel petroleum extraction. If I want octane, hexane, methane, propane, etc. for fuel, I'm also going to be pulling up and separating out ethane, which is a very quick steam crack and catalyzed polymerization away from polyethylene.

[Saline9515]

Tree farming has a major environmental impact and degrades natural environments, wildlife and soils. A tree farm is not a forest at all.

Some products such as cotton are even more destructive, which is why the cotton tote bag is an environmental absurdity and the plastic equivalent is much better.

[volemo]

I'd argue it's kinda a myth, because I used to believe we could create a perfectly closed loop (you know, like the one the recycling symbol suggests) if only we could cleanly separate the materials (which in my imagination requires consumers to vigilantly separate the waste into dozens of different bins). I'm beginning to think I was wrong.

[Saline9515]

If 1kg of "recycled" plastics allow to reduce the production of 1kg of pristine plastics, it's already a big win, even if it's downcycling. No need to throw away the baby with the bathwater.

[merelythere]

It is probably the only argument in favor of recycling. After the last six months exploring the recycling process what I get is this:

Reduce, reuse, recycle.

The order matter, recycling is useful but should be the last step when something has to be trashed away. In the case of our straws, buying a metal one would reduce and reuse much better than the two others solutions.

A problem is that we tend to only talk about recycling while forgetting the two others. It is easy to talk about how many tons has been recycled while it's very difficult to quantify the reduce reuse practice and not very appealing for sellers either.