We would all be plagued by a a giant beetle called the chewnifax that would drag children into the acid lake at night at random. The beetle would be so enormous and its armor so sturdy that any and all attempts to kill it fail, and it would remake the world, creating canyons and deep rivers and lakes as it made its way around the world, with the previously mentioned acid like increasing in size as it played with the bones of our children in its depth.

We would live in giant mushrooms and communicate with tin cans on strings, and the world would no long be spherical but instead it would be a perfect cube.

Recycling is a fraud. It was invented by the oil and plastic industry to pass the blame to consumers and shield themselves from repercussions. While some plastics CAN be recycled, its only numbers 1-3, every other plastic cannot be recycled or its so expensive that companies had no incentive to do it, and this still doesn’t include paper that also has a limit on what it can be recycled to.

Unless industry is using the raw material produced from recycling, we’ll never get to 100% recycling. People throwing stuff in the blue bag or green bin, whatever it is in your region, that’s only the first step. We are a long way off from 100%. We have countries who have refused to accept shipments of recycled products because there’s no market for that material.

A robot would climb up your bum to steal your poo while you sleep

Cleaner

Recycling doesn’t work unless you have a respectful and intelligent society like Japan or South Korea. Americans would never follow the rules. 🤣

Germany: okayyy here is how you properly recicle a tea bag

That would require a world without platic and where we dont make cheap things but quality that can be repaired

You technically didn’t ask for them, but presumably this goes hand-in-hand with reduce and reuse as first steps, which would have perhaps a more visible impact.

Reduce means to cut back on the amount of products we produce in the first place, particularly also the trash being used for packaging.
This would require:

• More craftsmanship. Instead of buying a new jeans when your pants have a hole, you’d sew them.
• More robust, repairable products. Don’t need to throw away the whole phone due to a broken screen when it doesn’t break in the first place or if you can get the screen replaced.
• More sharing. Not every household needs their own car or toolbox or whatever, if you can share them with your neighbors.
• There would be more shops that sell products unpackaged, where you bring your own containers to fill.

Reuse means to sell products in glass jars, metal boxes or similar, which can be washed out and filled anew.
This would require:

• Some container-deposit system, so that you can bring your emptied glass jars etc. back to the shops and the shop sends it back to the producer.
• In that vein, there would need to be a tax on non-reusable packaging to finance the recycling or safe deposition of it.
• Some products would probably be sold in larger quantities or not anymore, because they just aren’t sustainable, if you make them pay their environmental costs.

As for recycling, i.e. breaking the thing down and creating a new thing, it’s unlikely that we would ever reach 100% with it alone, at the very least because it’s more effort than reduce and reuse.
But to improve our rates, there is a whole load of products currently being sold in plastic, which could be sold in paper or wood, if glass jars or metal boxes don’t work there.

In a hypothetical world, where we could have 100% effective recycling without giving a toss about reduce and reuse, then I guess, we’d have a garbage disposal system which funnels right back into a massive 3D printer.

Everything would be a bit more efficient, a bit more interchangeable nine Ted. Landfills would fill a bit more slowly.

A useful step to reduce the growth of environmental damage, but not enough

Well, we’d have Soylent Green food bars…

deleted by creator