Recycling

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I hate Earth Days. Years ago I was in the Sierra Club, I went on many overnight hikes. I slept outdoors with a canopy of stars overhead as my blanket. The general rule was you always leave a campsite just like you found it. You never left litter. You left it in a pristine condition so that the next camper could appreciate the beauty of the natural world. For many years now, I have suffered through many Earth Days. When the children leave their protest areas. What do they leave behind - a virtual mountain of trash. If their hearts were really into conservation and leaving Earth as they found it, their protest areas would be pristine. It is all part of an indoctrination scheme. It is best described as virtue signaling - the action or practice of publicly expressing opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one's good character or the moral correctness of one's position on a particular issue. Earth Day is all hollow. It is a type of lie.

I also have a similar view of recycling. Recycling is the process of converting waste materials into new materials and objects. It is an alternative to "conventional" waste disposal. Recyclable materials include many kinds of glass, paper, cardboard, metal, plastic, tires, textiles, batteries, and electronics. Many people recycle. They store their trash in separate trash cans and this waste is then disposed of and recycled. Currently when you read the news, the oceans are filled with a high amount of plastic waste. That is quite real. It should not be! It is wrong but recycling is actually part of the problem. In many countries the plastic waste is collected and shipped overseas for processing where the labor rate is cheaper and where environmental restrictions and controls are lax. As a result, much of our recycled plastic waste finds its way from Europe and the U.S. to China and SouthEast Asia. And then much of this recycled waste enters the oceans at that point. The recycling industry is fraught with fraud and corruption. For example:
UK plastics recycling industry under investigation for fraud and corruption

A good description of the real problem with recycling is provided in the following report:
Saving the Oceans and the Plastic Recycling Crisis

So when I hear the media and radical environmentalist yell out Save the Oceans - Stop using plastic straws, stop using plastic shopping bags, etc. What I hear is virtue signaling. It is all hollow. There is no heart in the matter. It will not stop a problem. It is all like Earth Day with a mountain of trash left behind.

But something is in the wind. The UN is about to impose export restrictions for plastic waste. Instead of carting off all this waste overseas. The U.S. and Europe will have to deal with this material. Like the children in Earth Day protest, they will now have to pick up their trash at the end of their virtue signaling protest.

Last Friday, a total of 187 countries voted to add hard-to-recycle plastic waste to the Basel Convention, a UN-led treaty that controls the movement of hazardous waste from one country to another. Exporters will now be required to obtain consent from recipient countries before shipping plastic waste that cannot be readily recycled. It is a strategy designed to curb the overwhelming buildup of plastic waste in Global South nations, particularly in Southeast Asia.

After China banned the import of most plastic waste in 2018, developing countries such as Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia have received huge influxes of contaminated and mixed plastic waste that is difficult or even impossible to recycle. Norway’s proposed amendments to the Basel Convention provide countries with the right to refuse unwanted or unmanageable plastic waste.

The new restrictions will mean that exports of plastic consumer waste to developing countries will largely come to a halt and EU nations will “finally be left to face the reality” of a failed recycling system.

Source:Brace yourself: EU faces “massive flood of plastic waste” after UN export restrictions

Washington state (especially Seattle which might be the capital of virtue signalling) is out to ban as much plastic as possible. Also just about everywhere has separate bins for recycling, compost and garbage. One of those combos I know of boasts that the blue, black and green bins are made out of recycled milk jugs.

I largely agree with what you say, Jimmy. Much recycling would be moot if products didn't come wrapped in excessive packaging, there weren't the constant drive to upgrade consumer products, products were repairable rather than only replaceable, etc. A lot of the push for domestic recycling seems to me like just putting a sticking plaster on the problem to salve people's consciences, because people don't want to lose the "conveniences" that they're used to, and producers won't countenance losing the marketing power of fancy packaging, flashy upgrades, and pushing over-consumption in general.

The increase in the amount of waste that people throw out has been very noticeable over my lifetime - milk in plastic cartons instead of bottles washed/re-used by the dairy, cooking ingredients no longer sold by weighing-out from a bulk supply at the store into a paper bag, cars no longer kept on the road for decades by routine driver maintenance, etc. Yet, for all of this supposed "lifestyle convenience", I don't notice that the humans around me seem generally any happier than they used to be. Turning recycling into virtue-signalling domestic labour doesn't seem the best solution to me - especially, as you say, when there's so little regard for what happens once the garbage collectors have done their rounds.