Stories like this have been percolating for a long time, but Selwyn Duke at NewAmerican.com asks if we’ve reached the tipping point where people are realizing that plastic recycling is an expensive, inconvenient myth that’s finally unraveling.

https://thenewamerican.com/us/environment/is-the-myth-of-plastic-recycling-finally-being-exposed/

As he notes, John Stossel has been raising the alarm for a while now that only 5% of the plastic returned for recycling in the US is actually recycled. The rest is incinerated, dumped into landfills or sent to other nations – where it’s probably incinerated or dumped into landfills, which is still better than dumping it into the ocean, which also happens.

One problem is that plastic is “extremely inexpensive to produce while recycling is costly.” There are about 40,000 different manmade polymers that all have to be treated differently. And here’s another mindblower for the green crowd: Plastic is not only a better packaging material for foods than other alternatives like paper, but in 93% of cases, it does the least environmental damage.

But as people are finally waking up to the pointlessness of most plastic recycling, the result is predictable: The government, which has been promoting plastic recycling relentlessly for years and pressuring businesses to go along with it, is now accusing the companies they pressured of misleading the public. For instance, California is suing ExxonMobil, “alleging it falsely promoted the recyclability of plastic.”

Maybe the best thing for the Earth would be simply to use only as much plastic as we need, send it to the dump when we’re through with it, and send a whole lot of meddling but scientifically ignorant politicians to the dump along with it.