The problem is that plastic recycling in general just doesn't work that well. If you want to make any sort of difference then reducing the amount of plastic you use & throw away is essential.
I can't find it in the NYT article so maybe it was in the original paper, but I'm pretty sure the 7-minute workout was always meant to be repeated three times (although maybe not directly after another).
But even then you're left with compressed text. If you're concerned about the amount of data you're sending on the bit level, then you're throwin all that out the second you start pumping out JSON.
For me on Chrome, there seems to be some broken loop somewhere. It continually requests and then cancels those requests to certain sprite images. It still downloads at least part of them though, so you're getting maybe ~100kb/sec continually downloading for as long as you're on that site.