Could California’s model beverage container recycling program be in jeopardy of collapsing? According to a lawsuit brought by several local recycling companies, that’s exactly what will happen if the state doesn’t repay into the fund money previously borrowed for other expenses. This just shows the difficulty of recycling plastic economically when a state with the volume of plastic like California struggles to make it work.

If a government is going to commit to back the recycling of plastic, they better stay in the game. Without the local recyclers and the redemption fund as a subsidy, where will all that plastic go? Outside companies aren’t going to want to be involved because they would already face higher transportation costs and the prospect of not getting their money from the state. Arnold better think carefully about this issue or he could become really unpopular very fast.

You would think that with plants to handle plastic recycling located right in North Carolina, the state would have a very high plastic bottle recycling rate. However, this article states that less than 20% of the plastic bottles are recycled. I’m not dissing on North Carolina’s citizens at all, it’s simply a statement that getting people to recycle plastic is difficult, even when plants are located so close.

Some questions that came to my mind include what is the state doing to ensure that bottles don’t end up in the landfill? Does all trash in North Carolina go through a transfer station with sorters to keep the bottles out? Will more people just dump them illegally? Is the state providing some sort of bottle collection program to make it easy on consumers to recycle them?

The law certainly has merits and I hope it is successful at increasing the recycling rate. I also hope it doesn’t lead to illegal dumping or other such nonsense.

There has been a lot of pressure applied lately to begin the extinction of plastic grocery bags. A wide variety of bills and ordinances have come up across the nation as cities, counties and states have decided to try and do their part in plastic bag elimination. Of course, it wasn’t shocking at all to learn that Seattle, Washington was one of the first, passing a city ordinance imposing a $0.20 tax per bag. What is somewhat shocking is the recent vote to repeal this ordinance. It seems residents are more interested in recycling bags than doing away with them. It just goes to show how truly diverse opinions are about this subject. So where do you sit – get rid of the bags, recycle them, make them biodegradable?

This article does a pretty good job of describing some of the difficulties plastics recyclers have faced over the past several months. It also points out how much plastic scrap goes to India. Which raises the question of whether it is environmentally sound to send so much plastic so far away. Let’s hope so.

The use of degradable additives in PET packaging has seemed to some to be a dream come true. No longer would we have to worry about filling up the landfills with an item that would be there for very, very long time. Those that end up in a landfill would just decompose. Wonderful, right? Not so fast.

The National Association for PET Container Resources has recently called for restraint in moving forward with the introduction of degradeables due to insufficient data to support the claims of positive environmental impact. This article states the reasons for their call of warning. One that caught me was that degrading plastics don’t have any soil benefits. So, if it doesn’t benefit the soil, what happens? Is what’s left over completely inert, incapabale of causing any damage? Could be but until we kow better for sure, I agree that companies should approach this more slowly.