As Red Lodge decides the fate of local recycling, perhaps plastic “recycling” should be abandoned, since only a tiny fraction of plastic is “recycled” (and, even then, it’s not really recycled), & people encouraged to just stop using plastic instead…

Recycling reduces the cost of Red Lodge’s solid waste management system, since less solid waste has to be hauled to the landfill when people are recycling. Plastics are killing the planet, though, so it’s best to encourage people to avoid plastic as much as possible instead of letting people think they can go ahead and use plastic since they’re “recycling” it (which they’re not, since plastic doesn’t truly get recycled, it just gets broken down into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic and, eventually, microplastics, which can end up in our bodies, with all the chemical microplastics contain). Good read here from, from phys.org:

https://phys.org/news/2022-10-plastic-recycling-myth-greenpeace.html

Big Oil loves to spread propaganda about plastic “recycling,” since Big Oil makes money making plastics, no matter how harmful plastics are