Ideal Bite

Its true obesity kills but if we fight back and take care then we can kill obesity and live a happy life mate.

Okay, I don't like to lecture, but plastic recycling is not actually 'recycling'. The loop is not closed on that material. 'Plastic recycling' as the plastics industry has greenwashed it is actually a matter of 'plastics collecting' at the curbside, and at drop-off recycling centers. Read that sentence again, it's very important. So what's the problem? Despite PET beverage bottles having a cash redemption value, and the very robust recovery rate for that particular resin, there is LITTLE TO NO post-consumer PET in the PET bottle you're chugging your beverage from. Bottles are still being made from virgin resin. There's a miniscule amount of post-consumer resin in there because the Grassroots Recycling Network, among other activist groups, shamed beverage companies like Coca Cola and PepsiCo, but it is a joke. That PET which is collected curbside or at recycling drop-offs is shipped to Asia (think about the carbon footprint, guys) to be Someone Else's Problem, where it is reprocessed into NON-recyclable items like canvas, carpeting, plastic lumber that performs poorly against the elements, etc. That's just a description of what happens with PET. It's a process which culminates in delaying the PET from its ultimate resting place, the landfill, by about a generation. I love reading IdealBite because you guys always have good info, but I wish you had researched plastic a little more before promulgating the myth that 1-7 is recyclable. It really is not. It's not a recyclable material in the classic way that glass, metals, and paper fibers are. And we are consuming it at a lightning speed clip which completely outpaces attempts to collect it. The plastics industry does what it can to gloss over and greenwash this very simple fact. The greater problem is one of consumption itself. Don't buy in plastic if you can possibly avoid it. At all.

Dangit, my comment was supposed to go on the piece about looking for the number on plastic containers... Can someone fix where I placed it, pretty please? I intended to post it here: http://www.idealbite.com/tiplibrary/today Under Plastics Recycling, July 7 2008 I'm a little passionate about this topic and got carried away, seeing I was replying to the wrong topic after posting.

When I went to the mall recently to purchase moisturizer, I was elated to found out that Aveda recycles those hard container caps! Since I avoid the mall as much as possible, I am saving them for my next trip so I can drop them off to be recycled.

I tend to agree with Obesity on this tip. This particular Ideal Bite on recycling could have been better. The topic of recycling plastics is confusing! I see too often people tossing items which the local recycler does not accept. The City of Denver is only now considering recycling plastics #4-#7. My local recycler will only accept plastics #1 and #2 (the most recyclable of all plastics) if the items are BOTTLES where the bottom is larger than the mouth of the bottle. As an additional tip,prescription containers are not recyclable, but nursing homes and homeless shelters may take them. Homeless shelters sometimes use them for shampoo and other necessities for their residents.

Kris- Aveda only collects them. They don't claim to recycle them. They can't recycle something that is not recyclable. It looks like a sham to boost a green image and create awareness about their products. You turn in 25 caps and get a free sample.

I'll admit I become a victim of greenwashing more often than I'd like, but I think there is some truth to the Aveda piece. Their webpage on it - http://aveda.aveda.com/aboutaveda/caps.asp - specifically says recycling. I believe the first piece I read on it said they'd recycle the ones they can to create bottles for a new line of products. They're probably the same caps that a regular recycling center could recycle, but the one near where I live takes very little plastic as there is no market for it (#1 & #2 with a neck, that's it), so if they have the market, then it at least has the chance to end up somewhere useful as opposed to my recycler that will throw it.

i'm glad sara brought this up, because i am curious about this whole plastic recycling thing. i wasn't aware that plastic was so minimally recycled, but i had heard that all the 'recycling' was done in third world countries with no environmental rules, because anything you do with plastic basically requires melting it down, which will obviously be tremendously gross for the environment. so then, what? don't recycle it, just throw it away? best advice ever: don't buy it. it's not as hard as it sounds, it just requires a little bit of planning ahead and careful thought. instead of buying a plastic bottle of water, buy a glass bottle of perrier or something, or carry your own bottle with you to refill. use a travel coffee cup for your iced drinks from cafes, too. carry one of those teensy fold-up shopping bags in your car or purse, so you never have to take a shopping bag. reuse produce bags, or use those net ones. i've really enjoyed the life change and urge anyone to try it. whether plastic is recyclable or not is beside the point. it's made of things that are bad, harmful, unnatural, so just buy as little of it as possible, for the health of you and the earth. okay, rant done.

It is green-washing, yes. Aveda was also found to have synthetic aromachemicals in a number of its all-natural perfumes in the last year. Whoops. There's a lot of hype at stake here. The plastics industry has a dedicated a lot of time and energy to convincing us that reclaimed plastic is a valuable resource, but when's the last time you saw someone harvesting the plastic patch in the Pacific for source material? Anyway, caps... The state of California (some others, too) will pay scrap value for plastics, not just cash redemption. Which means that if you have a quantity of odd plastics that are not bottle-shaped, you can pawn them off on a recycler who will accept them, and then that recycler reports the tonnage on plastics collected, and gets money from the state. That's the Cliff Notes version. It's disgusting, because reprocessing does not even figure into the exchange. I have yet to see a plastic item which was manufactured from plastic bottle caps. I'm not saying it isn't done, but when I was researching recycling of #4 and #5 containers in recent months, I could not find a processor on the west coast that did much of anything with caps. That being said, Stoneyfield Farm has that program where you're welcome to waste carbon on shipping your empty yogurt tubs to them, and then they waste carbon to ship them to Recycline in MA, who manufactures them into razor and toothbrush handles. Yeah, I'm being snarky. It really is ridiculous how conservation simply does not figure into the plastics game as it is currently played, however. [/snark]

Another comment on recycling - the catchy saying is REDUCE-REUSE-RECYCLE. There's a reason it's in that order. The best way to help the environment is to reduce the waste to begin with (like not buying things packaged in huge plastic packages), reuse as much as possible (shopping bags for example), and recycle what you can after a product's useful life. Did you know that only 1% of the 100 BILLION plastic bags Americans use each year ever get recycled?? That's unacceptable! There are several cute reusable bags now available in all price ranges so there's no excuse to not buy and use them. I just bought some fun but inexpensive ones online by a company called Ecologie Bags.