I work for a plastic recycling plant manufacturer, specifically for the sorting, shredding, cleaning and drying steps of plastic recycling (after that you usually have melting and extrusion before ending up with small plastic pellets that can be used to make other stuff).

I can confirm you, we have "cycling filtered grey water" cleaning. You don't need to clean up your plastic containers, just empty them. Also various chemicals will be used in the process, when necessary.

We also make de-labelers to remove the labels from plastic bottles, although this kind of label in the picture is extremely hard to remove and, afaik, either requires human labor (aka poor countries with labor conditions you don't want to think about) or just becomes waste. So yeah, this is some of the worst shit.

At least in Germany that step is not necessary as far as I know.

I'd be 100% ok if all containers were mason jars. Most of the time, I can't even reuse glass jars because of their stupid, non-standard lids!

Cereal should just come in a biodegradable plastic, no box.

But standardize everything. Never mind hassling consumers not to use plastic bags when companies are putting layer upon layer of plastic on their products. If a manufacturer can't use a standardized package, they shouldn't be allowed to sell the product without a massive environmental tax added onto their product.

We need both. We need companies to do more to make things out of easier to recycle or compost materials, and we need consumers to do more to separate things to make them easier to recycle. It's far too late to push responsibilities around, we all need to be responsible.

Most European countries I've visited have at least 3 bins/bags : paper, plastic, everything else. Most cities also separate glass and aluminium. Some townhalls offer bags/containers for bio trash, that's turned into compost.

I don't have different plastic recycling bins, but only one.
Where in Europe do you have different ones?
Never have encountered those, at least I didn't realize it (in Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland - although with some countries I'm maybe not completely up to date)

Why?! I dont get it. What kind of psychopath doesn't put the cap back on when empty. Who opens a bottle, throws the cap away, and chugs away?! How is this a problem? I'm just so baffled this was/is a problem.

The problem is plastic is great for food safety. The way it makes air and water-tight seals, that can easily be broken, is hard to replicate. If cans could open, on their own, the way sealed plastic bottles do, then we could have easier recycling via metal containers. But the self-open cans make sharp edges and nobody's invented a way around that yet.

Recycling only works when the price of the material is high enough to justify the reclamation process. It doesn't work for plastic because of the insane subsidies given to the petroleum industry. If we had a significant enough carbon tax, you'd start seeing more actual plastic recycling.

Recycling has always been a lie to make you feel good about consumption. If it’s not a valuable commodity, it just goes to the dump anyways.

It can be IF its

• clean
• dry
• its the same type of plastic
• its not a bag/foil/film
• all the other materials are clean and dry in the same lot.

Even after all that, it's really only useful in downcycling.

The plastic you're removing can't be recycled. if left on the bottle, some recycling centers (maybe most actually) just throw out the bottle because it's more cost effective then preparing the bottle for recycling.

Any and all plastic bottles experience this problem (plastic bottle caps are bad too). This is a company making it more likely your bottle will be recycled, by making it easier to remove the non recyclable materials.