Amsterdam's Genius Sustainability Plan 

I don't know how it's handled in Amsterdam, but I know that in Leiden they also removed the separation for plastic, because of new machinery at the waste processing plants. I suspect that Amsterdam has something similar. Apparently, these garbage separation machines can now filter out the plastic, and it's much more convenient in maintenance and transport if you collect everything first and separate it after...

@@jeffafa3096 , even if the plastic is separated from the organic waste after collection, at this point is quite contaminated. The lower quality means it cannot be recycled into food packaging or even other types of packaging. It is thus downgraded, and very likely a great part of it end up encinerated for energy recovery. If Amsterdam has a plan to become a circular city, it needs to prioritise higher quality recycling like bottle-to-bottle recycling.

Ultra-cheap consumer goods are often built on systems of mass theft and exploitation - both of other poor(er) people and the environment. As companies further optimize these systems, they figure out to how deliver as little of that stolen value to the end consumer as possible and extract more profit. Of course it feels good to buy a new TV for 100 euro or a new tshirt for 2 euro, but that product is almost certainly built with stolen labor (workers paid almost nothing), stolen raw inputs (environmentally destructive, just taken from the producing region), and stolen lifecycle cost (it is designed to break in 2 years and then becomes unprocessable trash that everyone else pays for). The extra costs of ethecially sourced goods don't just magically appear, it's how everyone/everything involved are fairly compensated. By definition a (true) circular economy can't be/isn't just for "rich" people. Buying a cheap pair of shoes produced 10000km away harms (higher quality) local jobs and wealth - the cost of those shoes essentially exits the local economy immediately, and never comes back. Those shoes (usually) don't support a small business. They will never be repaired by a cobbler. They'll wear out in a couple years, then get thrown in the trash. They'll be made from a conconction of dressed up oil-sludge, so there will be nothing to recycle. So yes the person buying the cheap shoes feels immediate benefit, but everyone around them suffers in the long run. It's the same for most "cheap" products - it's a temporary illusion of advancement.

Unfortunately recycling is less effective than most of us have been let to believe. Companies have promoted this to both move responsibilities from themselves to consumers and also buy time before they actually have to act. This doesn’t mean we should stop with recycling, but it’s only a small part in a bigger story.