What happens to your recycling after it gets picked up? There’s a pretty good chance it is going to end up in the garbage.

While things like aluminum and glass can be fairly easy to recycle or reuse, plastic is not. The same can also be said about electronics. Your bottles and old cell phones aren’t getting reused. Instead, they are most likely headed to a landfill or incinerator in a distant, developing country.

Plastic recycling is more of a public relations win than pollution solution. The only thing plastic manufacturers have achieved is keeping empty water bottles and obsolete computers and the environmental damage they cause out of view in North American and Western European cities.

You can read all about this in the current issue of The Pennsylvania Gazette.