If Evian sells its water in bottles made of 100% recycled plastic, that means 100% less plastic is entering the environment from Evian bottles than would otherwise.
I do disagree. I don’t believe a food giant such as Evian to tell the truth. I don’t believe McDonalds or Starbucks either. It’s only told for advertising purpose, at least since the 80s if not more.
That depends on the definition of "100% percent recycled plastic". What most people understandably think this means is "Made 100% from plastic that was used in some product and then thrown into a recycling bin". What the FTC defines as "recycled", for the purposes of advertising that your product is made of recycled content, can be found in section 260.13 of the FTC's "Green Guides": https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/press-re...
"Recycled content" is defined as:
> materials that have been recovered or otherwise diverted from the waste stream, either during the manufacturing process (pre-consumer), or after consumer use (post-consumer)
And they do not have to inform consumers of this distinction:
> Recycled content claims may – but do not have to – distinguish between pre-consumer and post-consumer materials.
> Recycled content includes recycled raw material, as well as used, reconditioned, and re-manufactured components ... The term “used” refers to parts that are not new and that have not undergone any re-manufacturing or reconditioning.
Well, taking what was previously waste in the plastic manufacturing process and turning it into more plastic is better(?) than nothing. But I think most people would think of this more as "making plastic manufacturing more efficient" than "recycling plastic". It makes plastic manufacturing margins more profitable, as now what was waste has value. It means that "100% recycled plastic" still relies heavily on the production of virgin plastic.
If people who would have not bought plastic bottled water DO buy it because it is "100% recycled", then the satisfaction of that additional demand requires the production of virgin plastic. Even if the number of people buying Evian bottles doesn't change, Evian is still buying the results of plastic production from plastic factories, which is likely to increase the amount of plastic in the world.
Again, it's better than nothing. But it certainly isn't a silver bullet, and many would argue that it is still not sustainable.
I might agree if it was actually zero sum, but as far as I know we still make new plastic from oil pumped out of the ground. Demand for recycled plastic is simply indirect demand for new plastic.
Even if all plastic was recycled, there is still the issue of microplastics polluting our water and food supply.
If a consumer is conscientious enough to recycle something, the counterfactual is that they put it in the trash rather than that they throw it into the nearest river. In a landfill, a plastic bottle will lock up its constituent carbon for hundreds of years. In that long we should either have learned to manage the amount of carbon in our biosphere. To the extent that the amount of carbon we pump out of the ground is inelastic, better it get locked up in landfills than that it get burned. Now actually it is fairly elastic but given how much worse carbon burned is than carbon stored for hundreds of years I think disposal is probably better for the climate than recycling.
I seem to recall that something 10% of the oil that's extracted is used to make plastics, while the rest is used for energy. Framed that way, it could be argued that it doesn't make much of a difference if it gets burned (especially if it's burned in lieu of burning some other fuel), but if it's burned there's no chance it will pollute a river or ocean.
Btw. audio compression is already doing most of the "stripping inaudible" stuff. You know, why wasting bits on something which is less likely to by picked up by the listener. It is done by assuming a model of human hearing.
Do you disagree?