TL;DR: Recycling Isn’t the Hero We Thought It Was

• Recycling has been marketed as the silver bullet for sustainability, but it’s often a distraction from the real issues: overproduction, corporate irresponsibility, and lack of proper infrastructure.

• Companies like Tetra Pak, Coca-Cola, and BP have used slick marketing to shift the blame onto consumers while continuing unsustainable practices.

• Tetra Paks, despite their eco-friendly image, are rarely recycled and often end up in landfill or downcycled into short-lived products.

• The solution? Focus on reducing, reusing, and holding corporations accountable—not just tossing things into the “right” bin.

• Let’s stop treating recycling as our first move and start redesigning the system from the ground up.

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Recycling: The Great Green Illusion?

Right off...

With the news that soft plastics are now recyclable in Ireland I was left with a lot of questions. 

Firstly, when is my waste company going to let me know about these changes and what I need to do to segregate properly by their guidelines?

Can I start segregating soft plastic in my home bins today? 

Also, how is it now possible and how is this plastic going to be used? 

Whilst I welcome the news, I fear that it may now be used as a license to keep using plastic rather than reducing our dependence on it. 

When I looked for more information online, I found that 83% of recyclable material collected in Ireland is currently exported, including all cardboard, paper and plastic.  We are creating way more waste than our country waste management systems can deal with – should we be ok with this?  I think not.  Reduction should be the very thing we are doing. Starting today.

In 2018 data showed that Ireland generated approximately 264,000 tonnes of plastic and only recycled 82,000.  There ...

Prenote: I am not saying Recycling is a bad thing, but our current main stream systems of recycling have failed us.

In July 2019 The Guardian shared an article titled “Humans have made 8.3 billion metric tonnes of plastic since 1950” If you missed it the link is at the end of this blog.

The Current Situation

The article stated that up until then we had no idea how much plastic we had created and now that we know, the picture is not pretty.  8.3 billion metric tonnes of plastic has been created from 1950 to 2015, that is a terrifying statistic. It is the equivalent to the weight of 1 Billion elephants!

However the worst element of this, is that only 30% of the plastic created is still in use. The rest has been disposed of in three ways: 79% is in our landfills and environment, 12% has been incinerated and only 9% has been recycled. Amongst all this dismal data, what really got me thinking, is that half of the amount of plastic generated since 1950, was actually made in the last 15...