To think it's not worth recycling?

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Or saving plastic bags for reuse, or avoiding plastic-wrapped food?
When my grandchildren's toys are all plastic - the hard stuff that'll sit in landfill for ever. Plus they have mountains of this plastic crap.
Yes, I know this thread is verging on ' when I was young all I had to play with was a shoebox and a clothes peg' and I won't stop recycling as much as I can, but, with all our concerns about the environment, doesn't this seem strange to anyone else?

You're comparing single use plastic with a hard plastic toy that will get used many times over and then hopefully passed on for someone else to enjoy.

I recycle everything, but i don't believe in it. So long as products that take up landfill are allowed to be made i don't see how my recycling is really doing much more than pissing in the wind. I'm just shifting the crap about, it doesn't stop it being produced. But i recycle!

There are sometimes skips for hard plastic recycling at council tips.

I largely gave up recycling when the eco-mob started disrupting public transport a few years ago. I used to do it as a matter of course, but when people started gluing themselves to trains and so on I lost all sympathy for eco-friendly things like reducing waste.

In any case, waste is just archaeology for future generations. Much of our knowledge of ancient humans comes from the rubbish they left behind and it's wrong to deny future humans the ability to understand our civilization long after it collapses.

There is a logical flaw in your argument, OP. It’s like saying lots of people drop litter, so it makes no difference if I take mine home. I will just drop litter as well. Or India and China produce so much CO2, it’s not worth the UK trying to reduce emissions.
Every little helps, as the supermarket advert has it!
Yes, plastic toys last a long time, but they can be handed down to grandkids or donated to playgroups or charities. They don’t need to go to landfill for generations. By which time the science developing plastic eating bugs will be advanced enough to digest and recycle them. It already exists, it just needs to be scaled up and made economically viable.

This doesn't really make sense, the two are not linked. Why do your grandchildren's toys make you not want to reuse a bag?
Plenty of toys are wooden but plastic toys have their place, they look good to children, they are hardwearing, they are easy to clean and they usually have a pretty decent lifespan. My children play with lots of toys that have been used by countless other children over the years.

Is this some thinly veiled dig at a DIL's parenting?

It's having 'mountains' of crappy toys which is the problem here.

I'm not sure wooden and metal toys really decompose that much better in landfill conditions than plastic.

Good plastic toys eg Lego can be reused - maybe better than wood in some cases as more washable.

You realise that this is a daft attitude to take, right? Why would you lose sympathy for reducing your own personal waste because of some extremists?

I mean, you can disagree with the methods employed but the basic point of "we need to stop fucking the planet" is pretty much undeniable

In reality though a quick trip to the local tip will reveal the mountains of almost new looking plastic toys being thrown away. Used if they were lucky for a couple of months then tired off

Ideally they would of course be passed on but this very often doesn't happen.

Recycling is such a murky area. There needs to be much more transparency about how and what is actually recycled and the environmental cost of the recycling process itself. There also has to be a market for the recycled plastic which there often isn't.

It's a convenient excuse for being lazy, pretending it's about ' principle'. Old as the hills.

a lot of stuff you put in your recycling boxes (the ones the council collects) doesn’t get recycled anyway. Especially plastic that has been contaminated by food use. it’s put to landfill.

I’m not quite sure where to start with this

I recycle everything, but i don't believe in it.

I'm pretty much the same. You hear so many stories of British recycling ending up sold to poor Asian countries and then burned, that it makes me very dubious. Wasting fuel and then polluting somebody else's country, just to look good back here.

It kind of reminds me of the woodchip scam - where all the figures bang on about how much more eco-friendly it is to burn, but nobody ever mentions the little issue of all the fuel used to ship it over from Canada.

Deliberately making each litre of standard petrol 5% less efficient by 'watering' it down with less efficient materials (E10) - thus necessitating 5% more tankers on the roads to deliver the same fuel power - is also 'interesting' from a government that claims to care about the environment and reducing carbon emissions. A bit like a self-proclaimed art-lover deliberately burning down galleries. Coincidentally, it also increases their tax take by 5%, with VAT then added on top as well - but I'm SURE that wasn't their motivation at all...

Also large organisations that claim that ALL of their waste is sorted by robots and then all recyclables are recycled. When you see the boaksome mess that people throw into landfill-bound bins and skips, I simply can't believe this is not a lie. If they CAN fully separate out and recycle all appropriate items from all the nasty sludge, why on earth are we told that we have to wash out our jars and cans before we can put them in our home recycling bins?

In reality though a quick trip to the local tip will reveal the mountains of almost new looking plastic toys being thrown away. Used if they were lucky for a couple of months then tired off

I've no idea how they'd ever be able to enforce it, but I wish they could somehow make it illegal to take serviceable stuff to the tip - unless it's taken to the community re-use section that a lot of them have, of course.

The tip is for RUBBISH - it is NOT for good, perfectly useable items that you no longer want or need, but which clearly would be very much appreciated by somebody else. In the run-up to this Christmas, there will be people at tips up and down the country throwing into landfill far, far better-condition toys than those that poorer people would love to buy their kids second (or third, fourth) hand, but just cannot afford to.