fantastic PLASTIC
We all know that recycling is good,
and that not recycling is second
only to torturing kittens in the list of
unforgivable sins. But why?
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Well, it’s actually a no-brainer.
Everything we use, especially
packaging, has to be made from
something – and that something
requires energy, water and resources
to manufacture and to transport.
Worse, once we throw it away, it
sits in landfill using up land and can
leach harmful chemicals into the soil
and ultimately into the groundwater.
Plastic bags in landfills tend not to
stay there – especially in windy places
like Cape Town. They blow away in the
southeaster and end up in the sea,
where they pretend to be jellyfish
and get eaten by turtles, who then
die. Or they break down into smaller
and smaller pieces and float around
for ever, eventually joining a gyre.
it doesn’t get eaten by a turtle or a
dolphin first – ending up in one of
the five gyres: North Atlantic, South
Atlantic, North Pacific (the biggest),
South Pacific and Indian Ocean. You
can’t see it, it doesn’t show up in
satellite photos – it’s just that the
ocean is turning into a soup of tiny
suspended plastic particles.
So recycling is good. But some
things are more easily recycled than
others. Paper is pretty easy, glass is
a snap and metal recycling has been
going on since the beginning of the
Iron Age – actually, make that the
Bronze Age. But plastic recycling
is the one that people seem to
struggle with, and that’s because a
lot of the things we “know” about
plastic recycling are actually wildly
outdated. Take, for example, the
“fact” that it takes more energy to
recycle plastic than to make new
plastic, so you’re wasting your
You’ve probably heard about these time even bothering. If you believe
“floating islands.” The term “floating that, you’ll also believe that laws
island” is phenomenally mis