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oxford101 t1_itrdkya wrote

This may be the case in the USA but certainly not the case in Europe where extensive recycling g legislation has been in place since the 1990’s. If you want to recycle plastic you have to have the right legislation and subsidy in place to enable. If you just allow market forces to dictate recycling collection schemes it will fall over. The German subsidy in the 1990s was $1500 per tonne

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mirhagk t1_itrskl5 wrote

Do you have any statistics on the rates of recycling for EU or Germany? The reason USA is used is because of the EPA's extensive analysis. It's really hard to get good figures because a lot of reports very stupidly analyze collection rate rather than how much of it is actually recycled. The latter is a figure that has only recently gotten attention.

Here's some stats I've found which show that Germany is not actually recycling the vast majority of the plastic it's collecting, but it's still not the whole story.

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oxford101 t1_itry3wl wrote

Plastic packaging recycling rate in Germany in 2019 was 99.6%

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mirhagk t1_itrze4t wrote

That sounds like collection rather than how much ends up being used, but if you share your source I could tell better.

99.6% is a suspiciously high figure considering how much plastic breaks down and literally can't be recycled, and even for collection that's a rate that sounds like it has a very narrow definition for, like a "single-use plastics" type thing

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twack3r t1_ittr07k wrote

55.2% in 2019.

Source in German:

https://deutsche-recycling.de/blog/recyclingquote-deutschland-vergleich/

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mirhagk t1_ittrcfz wrote

Thanks! Yeah that looks like the right figure and matches up with what I've seen (which suggested about half was recycled).

That's a pretty good rate, definitely happy to see it. I suspect part of it is that North America had built their recycling programs based on the cheap return voyage to asia for container ships, and that fell apart. Germany wouldn't have designed around that.

But also do have to give props to Germany. They definitely do a lot of things really well, and glad to see this is one of them.

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oxford101 t1_itwkn8r wrote

Please note my stats refer to Plastic packaging the 55% refers to all Plastics recycled

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