NPR recently came out with an article " How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled " and if you read it it should open your eyes to the fact most of that plastic you put in the recycle bin just ends up in a landfill.
You see plastic recycling is largely false as almost no one wants it! It's cheaper to produce new plastic as the main ingredient (oil) is cheaper then it is to collect, sort, melt down and re use plastic. Plastic unlike glass and some metals degrades really fast during recycling and becomes unusable after 1 or 2 breakdowns.
A list of what you can recycle can be found here . That symbol on the plastic with a number basically if the number is greater then 2 it's useless and trash.
As the first part of this points out most of the "recyclable" plastic still ends in the landfill as the economics just don't pan out. This became more pronounced when China stopped importing recyclable materials with contamination less then 99.5% (see here) several years ago.
So what can you do?
- Well simple instead of throwing plastic things out, find a new use for them (example yogurt container make great seedling pots).
- Stop buying so much plastic stuff (I know it's hard).
- Make things out of wood, metal or glass before using plastic.
A future post will deal with things to do with plastic trash instead of well... trashing it! meanwhile if you want to know about plastic in your environment a good starting article is at national geographic here.