It’s all just show, but I suspect we all knew that
I didn’t know for the longest time. As a kid, it made sense that, “obviously, what they are saying is what they’re doing. Why would people lie? Thats not ok, so they wouldn’t try any tricks.”–a naive optimistic child.
Absolutely nobody challenged the idea of recycling being effective as I grew up. It just was. No reason to look into it.
I didn’t learn about the smokescreen of recycling until my minimalist/zero-waste kick where that info naturally pops up. If I wasn’t curious, would I still be confident in recycling to this day?
I think most people don’t know. Assuming they do will harm any action to help.
I helped get a recycling program going at my first college. We did it correctly and it even made a little money but we only did paper, glass, and metal. We wanted to do plastic but could not get it to work. Later I saw the public recycling and at first the blue bin with everything grouped together did not seem right but at that time the trucks had multiple compartments and the driver actually sorted as it was picked up. Alright that makes sense. Then they stopped doing it and said it was sorted at a facility. Ok. Then the trucks they started using were just like the garbage truck. Smashing everything together under pressure. Um…???
The latest and greatest example is a Coca-Cola bottling plant that will suck carbon out of the air and use it to add bubbles to it’s soda!
A delicious example (pun intended) of what I call a technological antisolution
