we're burning our plastic bottles
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-eight years and a million words
Toronto, 2019.12.03
You know how you're so good about sorting plastic bottles from non-recyclable trash? It doesn't matter, they're being incinerated anyway. Or so says this article in the Atlantic from March.
I think we just have to stop buying plastic bottles altogether. The same article says that glass bottles are proving too hard to recycle in a price-effective way, so they're being dumped in landfill (frequently in an unrecoverable form - smashed). But bits of glass in a landfill are environmentally inert, whereas burning plastic is certainly not, according to MIT:
When plastic is burned, it releases dangerous chemicals such as hydrochloric acid, sulfur dioxide, dioxins, furans and heavy metals, as well as particulates. These emissions are known to cause respiratory ailments and stress human immune systems, and they’re potentially carcinogenic.