Several US states have this program for glass and cans and yet both glass and cans are still found on the side of the road.

> blaming consumers

Why not blame consumers which would dispose their garbage wherever they want instead of a bin? I would rather criminalize this. It's so easy to put an empty plastic bottle in a bin yet they insist on throwing it on the ground.

ok, but visit a beach in a country where the people put the plastic in a bin, and then visit a beach in a country where the people don’t put the plastic in a bin.

Almost all of the waste plastic comes from the offering of cheap wrappings by cheap companies (i.e. super conglomerates) used by cheap people who simply do not care. Make it expensive and all these people will complain you are impinging on their freedoms.

The oil industries will complain The single use plastic purveyers will complain and the lazy consumers will complain, yet exactly like Germany, it must be done.

Some people think it's cool to burn money, while others purchase unneeded AI farms.

We, companies who make, companies who sell, and consumers who use as well as permissive governments all dilute responsibility, and a vast majority of plastics I pickup are simply the tops of plastic food containers.

How many are sealing reusable containers? Zero. how many straws? Thousands.

Make plastic straws the gold standard for recycling. worst offenders? The top fast food venders in food deserts. Cheap companies serving cheap lazy customers.

The poster is absolutely right.

How much of the decline in testosterone among young men may be attributed to the plastics?

https://www.urologytimes.com/view/testosterone-levels-show-s...

Using less of it and standardazing on what kinds of plastic can be used + burn the waste seems the only reasonable solution to me.

Nobody is telling you to bury them in your backyard, modern landfills take all this and much more into account.

Now of course an average 3rd world country doesn't have any of that, but if you would actually travel there you would see plastics everywhere, in the sea, on random land, in the mountains, in the rivers etc. While still leaking what you wrote but way more directly.

Not saying it is perfect, but modern landfills are sealed on the bottom.

> Modern landfills are completely sealed to reduce contamination of the nearby groundwater. First, the ground is lined with clay. A thin layer of flexible plastic is placed on top of the clay layer. That allows the collection of leachate, the liquid that passes through the landfill and may draw out toxins from the trash. The leachate is collected though a drainage system that passes this contaminated water through pipes to a pool where it can be treated to remove the toxins before being released back into the environment.

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/landfills/...

The BPA and other additives will leak into water. PVC will break into VC and that will leak and cause cancer. And so on. Plastic is bad, especially single-use plastic.

Yes, but what gas? Maybe the title should have said either "useful" or at least "harmless" gas. The gases that come from basic polymers could be comparable in those ways, to the original petroleum. They could even be reformed into new polymers, or used as fuel.

By way of contrast: Vaporizing lead or mercury compounds, not such a good idea.

Notably the easiest way to not run afoul of those rules is to not modify the title even if the original title is bad. You do have to squash titles down to the 80 char limit and the same way to do that is delete words, preferable noise words like “very” or “novel” and past that more complex transformations where you maybe change a passive construction into a shorter active construction.