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Rulecycling
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this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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recycling plastic releases even more microplastics. ban plastic
Okay, just fucking leave the litter in the street then. 🙄
yea this is a logical fallacy, because nowhere did I say this guy does something that is worse than littering. reducing plastic usage is the most effective way of combating plastic pollution and I would like to see anyone claim we dont use plastic redundantly because it is cheap and convenient.
Huh?
Certainly sounds like you're saying people shouldn't collect litter.
Look, I get it. Plastics suck. Plastic companies are bullshit and twist shit around to make the consumer out to be the bad guy. But when you said recycling releases even more microplastics in response to someone saying they collected over 2000 pieces of trash it sounds like you're saying they shouldn't do that. That isn't a logical fallacy, that is how communication works. An activity was mentioned and you criticized the activity. It is reasonable to assume you mean they shouldn't have done the activity.
If that's not what you intend then you should say something like "collecting litter is good, ..." to make it clear that you aren't saying they shouldn't have collected litter.
Ok, what I meant is it releases even more plastic on top of (maybe more than) producing it. Recycling plastic is not the magical solution it was once presented to us. Yes we all have recycling engrained to our spinal cords since primary education but unfortunately it is not the solution, it is a bandaid that is having difficulty covering up for the horrible consumption habits.
We already know a ridiculous amount of microplastics is accumulating in human brain tissue:
"Brain samples, all derived from the frontal cortex, exhibited substantially higher concentrations of MNPs than liver or kidney (two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), P < 0.0001), but comparable to recently published Py-GC/MS data from carotid plaques4, with a median of 3345 µg g−1 (25–75%: 1,267–5,213 µg g−1) in 2016 samples and 4917 µg g−1 (25–75%: 4,026–5,608 µg g−1) in 2024 samples"
doi: 10.1038/s41591-024-03453-1
If it turns out to be damaging to internal organs as well, we may have lost too much time on not impactful enough practices like recycling and soon pass the point of no return (given an exponential growth of microplastic pollution). So I don't have any patience for "recycle your plastic to save the world and win great prizes" type feel good stories.
I think you're fundamentally missing my point. Litter exists. Someone cleaned it. When you respond by criticizing it, you're just making it sound like you'd rather them leave the litter where it is. I am 100% aware plastics are a problem. You don't need to share sources. I told you I was on the same page with regards to that.
I think we can all agree
littering << not recycling < recycling << reducing plastic usage
and all the first message is a strongly worded reminder of the last two relations, it is not meant to claim recycling ~ littering or recycling<littering.
Why would I criticise someone picking litter from the streets, that does not make any sense. It is a parallel thread on the topic of recycling. Take this message as a correction to the first message if you will.
Plastic is just the next stage of evolution. Once our brains are replaced entirely with plastic we'll enter a new era, no longer inhibited by our disgusting flesh.
Just fucking upload my consciousness to a hard drive and yeet me into space already (put an off switch though).
I think I read that no matter who you are and what you've done, only about 10% - 15% of all plastic you've recycled actually gets recycled. The vast majority ends up on barges being shipped overseas or to landfills.
This isn't to say stop recycling, if it compiles plastic into places instead of just distributing across the globe, then maybe later when people get off their ass and realize we're in trouble, they might make some kind of bacterial-world-ending-zombie-plague type solution for breaking down plastic waste, at least the plasti-zombie-plague will be isolated to particular regions and countries.
I really would like to know how you came to that conclusion. The OP is from Germany and is collecting abandoned bottles in the street and there are closed loop recycling programs in place. You return the bottle to the store, you get your 25 cents back, the bottle gets crushed and recycled into a new one. That kind of does work. Multiuse bottles are better, but I really struggle to understand how "Picking up discarded plastic bottles" releases more microplastics than letting those bottles out in the environment where they will become 100% microplastic
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/23/recycling-can-release-huge-quantities-of-microplastics-study-finds
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2772416623000803
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0269749124005694
This really seems like the kind of situation where you fix one crack and another one pops elsewhere.
Not to mention, car tyres are possibly also one of the highest contributers to microplastics so we might as well be fucked.
edit: maybe my initial post was worded in a confusing way read my update above if you are interested
Not to mention, the production takes petroleum. It's also not recyclable multiple times.