Is Plastic Recycling a Myth? (nasdaq.com) 290
Last week California's Attorney General accused the fossil fuel/petrochemical industries of "perpetuating a myth that recycling can solve the plastics crisis," Reuters reports, and even launched an investigation into their role in "causing and exacerbating the global plastics pollution crisis."
And meanwhile, "The rate of plastic waste recycling in the United States fell to between 5%-6% in 2021, as some countries stopped accepting U.S. waste exports and as plastic waste generation surged to new highs, according to a report released on Wednesday." The report by environmental groups Last Beach Clean Up and Beyond Plastics shows the recycling rate has dropped from 8.7% in 2018, the last time the Environmental Protection Agency published recycling figures. The decline coincides with a sharp drop in plastic waste exports, which had counted as recycled plastic.... "The U.S. must take responsibility for managing its own plastic waste," said the report, which used 2018 EPA, 2021 export and recent industry data to estimate the 2021 recycling rate.....
"Recycling does not work, it never will work, and no amount of false advertising will change that," said report author Judith Enck [a former regional administrator at America's Environmental Protection Agency].
One sustainability site now even calls plastic recycling "a diversionary tactic preventing us from finding real solutions to our waste crisis," agreeing that it's being pushed by the plastics industry in "a clever, yet green-washed, ploy to maintain production by perpetuating a myth that all this plastic is destroyed. The sad truth is that it's not...."
"[T]he real problem is the ever-increasing amount of STUFF, particularly single-use plastic stuff, that's produced, consumed briefly, and then added to existing colossal piles of trash. Recycling can't solve this problem."
Or, as Cory Doctorow put it recently, "Recycling is puffery. Which is to say, recyling is bullshit...." In 1973, Exxon researchers told the company that there was no feasible way to recycle plastics, and that there likely never would be. Exxon sprang into action! They created a puffery campaign! They lobbied state legislatures to mandate the use of the recycling logo, three arrows pointing at each other, telling us that plastic was part of a new, "circular" economy. Oil is made into plastic, plastic is used, plastic is recycled. Everybody wins!
We — the "consumers" (ugh) — bought it. We bought the plastic, sure, but we bought the puffery, too. We sorted our plastic, washed it, set it out on the curb. 90% of it was never recycled. 90% of it never will be.
Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the link...
And meanwhile, "The rate of plastic waste recycling in the United States fell to between 5%-6% in 2021, as some countries stopped accepting U.S. waste exports and as plastic waste generation surged to new highs, according to a report released on Wednesday." The report by environmental groups Last Beach Clean Up and Beyond Plastics shows the recycling rate has dropped from 8.7% in 2018, the last time the Environmental Protection Agency published recycling figures. The decline coincides with a sharp drop in plastic waste exports, which had counted as recycled plastic.... "The U.S. must take responsibility for managing its own plastic waste," said the report, which used 2018 EPA, 2021 export and recent industry data to estimate the 2021 recycling rate.....
"Recycling does not work, it never will work, and no amount of false advertising will change that," said report author Judith Enck [a former regional administrator at America's Environmental Protection Agency].
One sustainability site now even calls plastic recycling "a diversionary tactic preventing us from finding real solutions to our waste crisis," agreeing that it's being pushed by the plastics industry in "a clever, yet green-washed, ploy to maintain production by perpetuating a myth that all this plastic is destroyed. The sad truth is that it's not...."
"[T]he real problem is the ever-increasing amount of STUFF, particularly single-use plastic stuff, that's produced, consumed briefly, and then added to existing colossal piles of trash. Recycling can't solve this problem."
Or, as Cory Doctorow put it recently, "Recycling is puffery. Which is to say, recyling is bullshit...." In 1973, Exxon researchers told the company that there was no feasible way to recycle plastics, and that there likely never would be. Exxon sprang into action! They created a puffery campaign! They lobbied state legislatures to mandate the use of the recycling logo, three arrows pointing at each other, telling us that plastic was part of a new, "circular" economy. Oil is made into plastic, plastic is used, plastic is recycled. Everybody wins!
We — the "consumers" (ugh) — bought it. We bought the plastic, sure, but we bought the puffery, too. We sorted our plastic, washed it, set it out on the curb. 90% of it was never recycled. 90% of it never will be.
Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the link...
Penn & Teller Bullshit! (Score:4, Interesting)
Penn & Teller had a Bullshit episode about recycling years ago. It still holds true today.
Re:Penn & Teller Bullshit! (Score:4, Interesting)
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Yep. It costs nothing for CocaCola to print "please recycle me!" on their bottles and place the onus on us.
The question is: How many products does CocaCola sell in recycled plastic?
Until these companies use recycled plastic in their packaging then it's all Bullshit.
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In Europe they are forced to recycle it since decades ...
Re:Penn & Teller Bullshit! (Score:5, Interesting)
Really? I'm not seeing it here in Spain.
In Germany they refill the bottles. The exact same ones. No "recycling" necessary. When you buy a bottle of soda in Germany you can see it's a bit scratched up from the machines.
Same goes for pizza, etc. When you order a pizza in Germany they bring it to your house in a metal box and and tip it onto one of your plates for you. No garbage generated.
Re:Penn & Teller Bullshit! (Score:5, Interesting)
Really? I'm not seeing it here in Spain.
In Germany they refill the bottles.
It used to be that way in the Midwest US when I was younger; I'd guess up until the early 1990s. I think that's the way to go, but I'm sure it's a decision more based on profit, not for the environment.
I've heard people complain that glass is heavier and increases energy for shipping for recycling, but, if true, I think this higher energy use (getting "greener" all the time) is better than the entire process of creating plastic from scratch, and spreading the resultant chemicals all over the planet.
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But in order to push the price of paying for the externalities of their operations onto others, manufacturers pushed a whole campaign in which failures to recycle are your fault, consumer.
PSA: cardboard and aluminum recycling are real (Score:4, Interesting)
I also think incineration should count as recycling if it is offsetting additional fossil fuels being pumped from the ground.
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Post-consumer cardboard is rarely recycled; the contamination factor is too high.
Where I live about 6-7 years ago they admitted that it is better for them to burn waste (waste to energy) than attempt to recycle it. Sadly even glass was only even barely attempted to be removed from the stream because it clogged the trash burning boiler.
Landfilling costs are very rarely reported accurately, and a huge part of it is just how much stupid crap we throw away every day. We started composting household waste at h
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My friend that works in an adjacent field (more knowledgeable than average but not an expert) says cardboard boxes and mail/letters are high grade materials are the best paper products to recycle.
Furthermore, in many poorer parts of the world, some people collect used boxes to earn a little money. The fact that they are able to sell it to recyclers is strong proof they are gainfully recycled. Of course this "proof" is region-specific.
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And about composting--worms are great for apartment dwellers. A small compost bucket may not get hot enough to work in any reasonable time, and without leaves and leaf clippings it may have too much nitrogen for proper composting. The solution to all these problems is putting worms in the compost bucket. However, DO NOT let them get outside as they are an invasive species that eliminates the organic matter on forest floors. The vermicompost should be used for indoor potted plants only, or for a region that
Re:PSA: cardboard and aluminum recycling are real (Score:4, Funny)
So, I need to find "illegal alien" worms to do the work that the local worms won't do?
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I can tell you are arguing something you haven't researched, so I'll briefly share some facts. Some people live in apartments or have HOAAs and can't compost on the ground outdoors. Some worm species breed very slowly and are thus inefficient at ramping up. Some species are territorial so they work in a solitary fashion, which is also inefficient. Some species need to burrow way down to survive seasonal cold or heat.
Your way will work. Indeed compost works, all on its own. But forgive me for wanting to do i
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We can't even put the compost to good use!!
A lot of landfills eventually end up as parks. Just sayin.
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And glass, steel is recycled.
It's just post-consumer plastic recycling that is a scam.
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Yep. I'll believe plastic recycling exists when I see bottled water, soda, etc. being sold in recycled plastic bottles.
Until then it's all lies.
How come we default to off-loading? (Score:3)
Surely we can do our own recycling? Easy way to pay too - If it don't fully bio-degrade then have the makers pay for full recycling costs. Same as with appliance packaging.
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Because plastics are very heavy on sorting and cleaning if you actually want to recycle them. They're also uneconomical and anti-environmentalist to recycle if you need to do as much as wash them with hot water before recycling them, due to energy costs. I.e. "what is the environmental impact of recycling vs the impact of burning it". Most people forget that recycling also requires significant resources, and if those resources are greater than what you save by recycling, it's the environmentally destructive
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All solved easily by the product makers footing the bill. Same as for appliance packaging. No-brainer really.
Re: How come we default to off-loading? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. It would make a lot more sense for recyclers to do the washing at scale with recycled water not necessarily of potable grade, and large solar water heaters, for example, rather than having consumers do it and spend time and their water bill and water heating costs doing so. Especially if 95% of it still isn't going to get recycled.
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It would make a lot more sense to reuse rather than recycle.
Years ago drinks used to come in glass bottles for instance, which you returned to the store to be cleaned and refilled.
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And in some EU countries you pay a "deposit" for plastic or glass bottles, which you then get back when you return them. The glass bottles are probably washed and reused, plastic bottles are crushed though (but it better be in perfect condition when you return it).
Interesting in that at least in my country, nobody wants glass jars. You can throw them in a glass waste container to be recycled, but nobody reuses them.
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Depends on the plastic bottle, aka vendor.
If they are very thin plastic, the plastic is melted and recycled.
Thick bottles are treated like glass bottles: cleaned and reused several times before they get recycled. (You see that on the "usage marks" on the surface of the bottles)
Re: How come we default to off-loading? (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to think like this until I read the explanation on my nation's bottling recycling authority, which shifted from glass to PET bottles about two decades ago. They actually explained why in great detail, and it was a decision to consume less environmental resources.
The reason here is the total consumption of each recycling process. Reusing glass bottles is actually very complex. You need to clean them to such a degree that whatever residue is left is completely gone. Washing them is in fact a very energy intensive process, which uses a fairly significant amount of heated water at high pressure. Other costs are extensive scanning hardware which does everything from optical to smell testing to figure out if bottle is clean enough, fairly high loss rate due to breakage as glass tends to shatter, and finally weight that needs to be transported around when shipping empty bottles to be washed.
PET bottles are simply crushed, melted, pelletised and reformulated into the same bottles, which means they require much less weight and volume carrying ability for empties, require less energy to be remade than it takes to wash glass bottles thoroughly enough for them to be reused (water is much more energy dense compared to PET and there's a lot less PET than water in the recycling process by volume per bottle), and are lighter in transport at every following stage. Finally, they break much less, which results in less waste while in the hands of the customer.
So using glass bottles in a well functioning recycling system that gets >90% of all bottles back to recycle is more environmentally damaging than using PET bottles.
Washed it? No, we didn't. (Score:2)
We, by and large, did not actually wash or sort the plastic to be recycled, and that's the primary reason China cited for no longer accepting it from us.
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If you did all the hard work yourself when it comes to recycling plastics, it would likely be more destructive to environment than simply burning it. Remember that recycling processes also require things like energy to happen.
Re: Washed it? No, we didn't. (Score:2)
Those recycling processes can and should use renewable energy sources, though.
Penn & Teller called it years ago (Score:4, Informative)
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When I volunteered for a few garbage collection dives while on a holiday, they always told us to collect the plastic and metal trash, but leave the glass bottles because:
1. They're heavy, and you're better off spending your energy collecting as much plastic/metal/etc as possible.
2. Glass bottles turn back into "sand" in the long run anyway.
These guys are VERY liberal and not afraid to call BS when they see it.
Fixed that for you.
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In my country, when you buy a drink that comes in a glass or plastic bottle, you have to pay 0.1EUR "deposit" for it. When you return the bottle, you get the money back (plastic bottles are crushed, while I think glass bottles are reused). This dramatically reduced the amount of trash on the streets - even if you do not care about the 0.1EUR, someone poor can earn money by picking up all the intact bottles.
Recycling is hard. (Score:5, Informative)
Plastics can be recycled, but it's a hard problem. For recycling to be feasible, discarded items need to be both clean and sorted by the type of plastic they're composed of. Clean in this case means that all non-plastic debris has been removed. That covers not just washing off food residue but also removing the cardboard inserts from plastic packaging. Since very very few consumers bother cleaning their plastic items before discarding them, the recyclers would have to bear that cost and it's non-trivial for the volumes they deal with. Consumers also don't sort plastics by type, another cost the recyclers have to bear. Combined those costs are enough to make it just not profitable to handle plastics for recycling.
On top of that, there's bulk vs. weight. Most plastic items have a lot of empty interior volume. It takes up much more room in collection bins than it's weight would suggest it should, which makes it expensive to collect compared to it's value. Some common forms, like expanded polystyrene, are even worse to the point where, despite polystyrene being a very high-value plastic for recyclers, it's just not worth it to collect and compact it.
If we want plastics recycling to actually work, we need some sort of process that can take in unsorted, dirty/contaminated plastic and turn it into clean, compacted material either of a single type or automatically sorted by type, and which can be scaled down to the point where it can be installed in a home or business. There's lots of processes that can handle reducing plastics to basic hydrocarbons and that can deal with the waste products (for instance cardboard contains enough carbon that the right process can convert those cardboard inserts into the same hydrocarbons it's going to reduce the plastics to, reducing the waste stream in the process). Getting them to fit in a small enough package for a home at a price people can afford is the problem they haven't solved yet (mainly, I think, because it wouldn't benefit the big oil companies who're the owners of the big manufacturers of raw plastics).
You're still thinking in terms of individuals (Score:5, Interesting)
Again the problem is we've all been conditioned to think first and foremost about individuals and not about the community as a whole and the businesses operating in that community. We're not thinking about externalized costs because we're not supposed to think about externalized costs. Otherwise the companies couldn't externalize those costs on to us like they have been doing for decades the great success and profit
Re: You're still thinking in terms of individuals (Score:2)
A better solution is of course not to drink soda at all, which solves all the bottle recycling problems, along with many others. But since that'll never happen, perhaps having standardized refillable containers, like we already do for things like small propane tanks, makes sense.
Now, back to my Pinot Grigoo that was bottled in Italy in a glass bottle, not made of plastic, which I'm sure poses no recycling problems whatsoever.
Re:You're still thinking in terms of individuals (Score:4, Interesting)
That's a completely different problem, however. You're talking about "How do we reduce the amount of stuff we need to recycle?" rather than "How do we make recycling feasible?". IMO your approach is a better one, making things more reusable so we don't need to recycle as much.
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You've been conditioned to put all the responsibility on the consumer and none of it on the business.
Actually, my analysis is the opposite. Businesses largely supply what people want, or they won't stay in business. If people want to buy stuff in fancy packaging, which they discard in the trash, then that is what suppliers will provide. There is some evidence that supermarkets are offering greener packaging, using cardboard instead of plastic, for example, but that is in response to what consumers, such as me, want to buy.
The problem very much comes down to the consumer. There was obviously considerable su
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This is grossly simplistic.
Consumers make choices for many reasons depending on the consumer. Some have no choice and buy the cheapest version of whatever they need/want. Others chose for aesthetics or brand. Others choose based on taste. Others choose on availability. Many, if not most choose based on advertising or propaganda.
For this reason sometimes you need to force users (and producers) to make the right choice because few of those lead you to what's best for society or the world in general.
Yes you're
Businesses don't give people what they want (Score:3)
Obviously there's the reality that consumers don't have all the information they need to make the best purchasing decisions, and advertising tries to muddy those waters.
Also, do some more reading on "externalized costs". The concept is that companies products cost their consu
Re:Recycling is hard. (Score:4, Insightful)
Plastics can be recycled
In my country, there's a sort-of working plastic recycling network. Multiple containers in each town to dispose your plastic. 'Clear' instructions which plastics are allowed and which not ('clear' because the list is so long, it's not clear at all).
The result? People indeed collect bin-bags full of plastics. A full bag weighs about 200-300 gram (half a pound). Then, in order to save the environment, people get in their car and drive a few km to recycle it. By doing so wasting more energy on fuel than that's ever contained in that bag.
Of course, this example is a bit over the top, and a lot of people walk or bicycle to recycle their plastics, but I've seen people doing it and then praising themselves for being so environmentally aware.
To me, the biggest challenge is not to recycle per-se, but to avoid plastic litter in our environment and oceans. That'd be a big win already. Daily life shows people are and stay ignorant as our town is being littered by plastic daily, and no amount of recycling won't solve that issue.
The best option is to simple reduce the use of plastics. As in, alternative packaging.
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The result? People indeed collect bin-bags full of plastics. A full bag weighs about 200-300 gram (half a pound). Then, in order to save the environment, people get in their car and drive a few km to recycle it. By doing so wasting more energy on fuel than that's ever contained in that bag.
Then the collection point is in a bad location. Either such points need to be close to where people live or they need to be close to stores (so that you can take the trash for recycling when you go shopping and would burn the fuel anyway).
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Then, in order to save the environment, people get in their car and drive a few km to recycle it. By doing so wasting more energy on fuel than that's ever contained in that bag.
That is nonsense. Considering the people would drive there anyway and buy some stuff. Why can they not take the plastic with them and hand it back for recycling?
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Plastics can be recycled, but it's a hard problem. For recycling to be feasible, discarded items need to be both clean and sorted by the type of plastic they're composed of.
This sorting is damn near impossible, even if consumers carefully sort plastic items into a separate waste container. You can't just melt it all down to make new plastic, unlike metals, for example. I came across this incompatible melting down with a product I designed, that had a fitting friction/melt welded to a plastic tube. The tube was polypropylene, and for the weld to work, the fitting had to be the same type of plastic. Unfortunately, the prototype was made of polyethylene by mistake, and the weld d
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Getting them to fit in a small enough package for a home at a price people can afford is the problem they haven't solved yet.
Wouldn't doing it in an industrial scale be more economical or efficient?
Who bought the puffery? (Score:3)
We — the "consumers" (ugh) — bought it. We bought the plastic, sure, but we bought the puffery, too. We sorted our plastic, washed it, set it out on the curb. 90% of it was never recycled. 90% of it never will be.
"We" didn't buy the puffery. Idiots in government bought the puffery and made laws that started the recycling industry to which we now are obligated to contribute.
Is any plastic recycled? Can it be? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with the articles linked is that they have no actual data or science. The only important fact I learned was that exporting plastics counted as recycling in the US, which is of course a stupid practice and shouldn't have happened.
So the first question is, does any of the recycling actually work? That 5-6% figure, does it have any actual recycling? If it does, what makes that particular recycling work? Can this recycling be extended to more plastic products? Because even if just half of that is true recycling it means billions of tons of plastic are recycled per year.
The second question is, can recycling become better? I often see science articles about plastic-eating bacteria and their potential to quickly decompose plastics. It suggests that there are solutions on the way, that recycling can become better.
tl;dr: Plastic recycling might currently not work or is far from sufficient, but if it can be made better, then that's a good direction to push for.
Re:Is any plastic recycled? Can it be? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes and yes. Just focusing on the extreme failings of the USA doesn't make the problem itself unsolvable.
Many countries do far better with plastic recycling. Even the previous "root of all evil" company covered here on Slashdot in the last plastic article provides Coke here in 100% recycled plastic bottles reprocessed here in Western Europe, collected here in Western Europe.
Plastic recycling can work just fine if you:
a) get people on board (expecting people to go out of their way to recycle is hard, telling people to read labels carefully is hard, it needs to be easy)
b) put the necessary infrastructure in place (telling someone to walk around looking for a recycling bin is hard, throwing it in the trash and building / operating trash sorting facilities is easy)
c) put the correct incentives in place for companies to use recycled plastic (they will otherwise gravitate to the cheapest option)
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does any of the recycling actually work?
My analysis, based on polymer chemistry and some dealings with the plastic moulding industry, is that there is very little scope for melting down discarded plastic to make new plastic items. If there is any impurity in the input, the result is useless.
It is worth contrasting this with how materials are recycled when an office building is demolished. I love a good demolition. First, the electrical and network cabling are stripped, and that stuff is valuable for its copper content. There may be some aluminium
Stop burying your trash (Score:2)
Build incinerators. Reclaim the energy and metals from your trash, destroy all those nasty chemicals.
Stuffing all your trash in a hole, leaving a time bomb for future generations to deal with is...trashy.
Plastic should be refined back to oil. (Score:2)
It's a simple process to pressure cook plastic waste back into fuel and oil.
Bury the plastic (Score:2)
The more plastic is not recycled and buried, the more oil would have to be converted into plastic instead of CO2-ing up the atmosphere by becoming fuel. Think of it as carbon sequestration.
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...carbon sequestration that's killing off the oceans and turning the entire planet into a pile of trash.
(just so we can drink water that's transported thousands of miles in tiny bottles and don't have to remember to take bags with us when we go shopping)
Da Ai Buddhist Centre recycles plastic very well (Score:5, Insightful)
https://www.plasticsnews.com/a... [plasticsnews.com]
i spent an entire day touring the centre in taipei, in absolute awe of the committment these people have to recycling.
because many taiwanese people are short they could not get safety shoes in small sizes, to protect themselves during humanitarian crises after hurricanes or earthquakes, so Da Ai Technology *designed and manufactured* puncture-resistant safety shoes for their volunteers.
PET bottles were assembled into tables and chairs for use as temporary furniture for refugees.
disaster relief blankets were spun from recycled PET.
recycling is done by hand entirely by volunteers, these are people who would otherwise be sitting at home in front of TV, stressing out and ending up dying of some "Western" style sedentary-induced ailment. volunteers feed the elderly volunteers a decent meal, basically keeping them alive by giving them company and purpose.
the quality of the recycled plastics, because it is sorted by hand, is so high that Gernan manufacturers actually prefer to source from the Da Ai Technology company than buy "new" from other places.
60% recycling in Taiwan, the highest in the world. waste food goes to farmers to feed pigs. plastics, metal and paper goes to Da Ai Centres: elderly and disabled volunteers sit there cutting out the white bits from the black bits, because the white bits need less bleaching.
you think "bullshit" on the whole western idea of not properly recycling? the bullshit goes *far* deeper: a laziness and total lack of responsibility that is symptomatic of the entire Western society and way of thinking, and I include myself in that - a British Citizen - just as much as America.
Britain has the worst recycling and highest consumption of plastic-wrapped "meals" in the world; America is 1/8th the world's population yet consumes 50% of the world's resources. 30 years ago i used to think Communists were bullshit-peddling propaganda with phrases "Decadence of the West". not any more. we have so much to answer for, it's unreal.
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: a laziness and total lack of responsibility that is symptomatic of the entire Western society and way of thinking, and I include myself in that - a British Citizen - just as much as America.
Yes, but you won't change people. However, you can design a system that does not ignore human nature. Since I am not willing to work for free, I would rather pay (as tax on the item or whatever) for it. Probably the best way to do it would be to make the manufacturers pay for the recycling of the product (and packaging). Yes, they would push the costs down to the consumer, however, it would also incentivize them to make the product and packaging easier and cheaper to recycle (use some slightly more expensiv
Plastics can be recycled (Score:2)
I bet it can be used in many ways that dont harm the environment
Most is really downcycling ... (Score:2)
But there are ways of making recycling work. Use HDPE (which is almost always processed via blow molding, so all HDPE in the waste stream has very similar properties) and sort it by color, as is being done by Envision Plastics [envisionplastics.com]. The result is a purity of
Fianlly (Score:2)
I have been saying this for a while. Plastics should go into a landfill. Somewhere away, possibly in a desert, and buried for the next thousand years.
Basically:
- Glass
- Metal
- Paper
can be recycled. And with ease (and no, those greasy pizza boxes cannot be recycled. They contaminate other clean batches, don't)
Food:
Should be burned or composted. Either, we should prevent methane, could potentially use the compost, or the heat energy to actually run recycling plants.
Anything else:
Landfill. It is a downer, but
Exponential appetite (Score:3)
Garbage or CO2 (Score:2)
A lot of the case against plastic is that it accumulates. A lot of the case FOR plastics is that it's cheaper (meaning less costly (=energy intensive) to manufacture and transport).
Then, which is an easier problem to solve? CO2 accumulating in the environment and warming the earth, or little bits of plastic everywhere? Which is easier to deal with?
Yes and no (Score:5, Interesting)
For example Denmark has laws that beer & soft drinks must be sold in refillable containers and have a return deposit. The deposit for a small bottle of coke would be about 15 cents. It comes in a thick PET bottle that you return when empty to get your deposit back. Supermarkets have machines that collect empty bottles and print out refund slips so people get in the habit of returning their empties when they shop. The bottle is thick enough that it can be reused a number of times before requiring recycling. Denmark also has deposits on single use plastics, glass & metal so they also get returned to the store to be recycled. As a consequence the reuse/recycling rate is over 90%.
Compare and contrast with somewhere like the US where the recycle rate is something like 30%.
Still recycling here? (Score:3)
Our local recycle center still takes Plastics #1-4 and 6. No #5 which is unfortunate, but we manage.
Anyway, point being, some plastic can still be sold to recyclers profitably which is why our local center takes some types of it.
Every recycling Is a Myth. (Score:4, Insightful)
In the US.
Problems of segregating plastic waste (Score:4, Interesting)
What did you actually learn in school? Stupid americans
I actually learned some chemistry in school, and I am not an American.
You can melt down plastic to make new stuff, but you can't just chuck all plastics in a melting pot, and expect to get something useful out of the resulting gloop. I did actually try this when I was at school. As I see it, the big problem is segregating the waste. There is possibly some value in processing use-once drinks bottles made from PET, provided that the waste consists only of that material. Chuck in some polythene, and the batch is ruined. This really is different to recycling metals.
Here in Silicon Valley (Score:4, Interesting)
I tried to just call the company that handles my waste to find out what they do with the Plastic I so carefully prepare by cleaning and removing all but the one type of plastic that is the main container.
At first the office person said she thinks they just sell it to whoever they can find, when they can. Ever since then they have put me off with promises to call and of course the supervisor is never able to answer ever and never calls.
I recently dropped off some cardboard and then asked the lady that was there handling drop offs of things like bottles, cans, batteries, misc electronics, etc, and she kept deflecting my questions about where the plastic goes after they handle it. She did mention they have about a hundred people there sorting plastic and then it is compressed into bales.
Plastic recycling is way overrated ... (Score:4, Interesting)
... as a means to establish eco-balance. It's basically a scam to make you feel good. Plastic is an awesome material that is cheap to produce, but plastic products should always be produced for longevity, not throw-away. If humanity would change that little detail alone it would have a notable impact on our ecological footprint.
Re:Plastic is evil (Score:4, Insightful)
lasts hundreds of years
Glass lasts for millions of years. "Long-lasting" isn't necessarily a bad thing. Plastics are mostly carbon, so it is better sequestered than dumped into the atmosphere as CO2 or methane.
It's just another con from the petrochemical industry.
Maybe my memory is bad, but I recall recycling being pushed by greenies, not oil companies.
Also, why is the plastics situation suddenly a "crisis"?
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My read on the situation is that the greenies were pawns of the oil companies. They were deceived, then propagated the lie.
The only newly discovered impact is that we find microplastics in everything, including our bodies. We don't know the long term effects of that, but it's unlikely to be good. Though I don't know if that comes from plastic bottles--I can see the microplastics floating in the air from fleece jackets, and plastic bags can be expected to break down into very small pieces. I'd be interested
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Microplastics have nothing to do with plastic trash. Please stop perpetuating stupid fake news by saying it does. Plastic trash comes from wide variety of large plastic garbage. Microplastics mainly come from clothing as it suffers wear and tear.
The problem with plastic garbage is that it's difficult to recycle, and when dumped en masse in developing countries tends to end up in large oceanic gyros. The problem with microplastics... we actually haven't found any yet. They seem to be biologically inert and t
Re:Plastic is evil (Score:4, Informative)
Wikipedia pretty much completely disagrees with you, though that doesn't necessarily mean you are wrong. (link [wikipedia.org])
Two classifications of microplastics are currently recognized. Primary microplastics include any plastic fragments or particles that are already 5.0 mm in size or less before entering the environment. These include microfibers from clothing, microbeads, and plastic pellets (also known as nurdles).[5][6][7] Secondary microplastics arise from the degradation (breakdown) of larger plastic products through natural weathering processes after entering the environment. Such sources of secondary microplastics include water and soda bottles, fishing nets, plastic bags, microwave containers, tea bags and tire wear.[8][7][9][10] Both types are recognized to persist in the environment at high levels, particularly in aquatic and marine ecosystems, where they cause water pollution.[11] 35% of all ocean microplastics come from textiles/clothing, primarily due to the erosion of polyester, acrylic, or nylon-based clothing, often during the washing process.[12]
And if you can't see dust in a beam of sunlight, you may need glasses. That's what I see when I put on or take off a low quality fleece jacket.
And while it's hard to quickly find a timeline of microplastics, this paper [geochemica...etters.org] suggests the current levels have only been around for a couple decades. It's too soon to rule out health effects. And the fact that it's inert is not a plus. Asbestos is totally inert and fiberglass is mostly inert.
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Unfortunately, wikipedia, like everything else, is an unreliable source of information about anything that is remotely political. I've found this from personal experience, when my very modest edits to remove bias are reversed within minutes.
Re: Plastic is evil (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Plastic is evil (Score:3)
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The only reason it's suddenly a crisis is because it can no longer be dumped on China to be properly greenwashed. Chinese stopped accepting it.
The most fucked up part is that it's perfect to be burned. But for reason of Green PR, that's done less now.
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Well, no, not perfect to burn. There are a lot of toxic air pollution biproducts: dioxins, furan, mercury, lead, acidic gasses (NOx, SOx, HCl, HBr, HI), particulate matter, etc. Yes, with sufficient scrubbers, careful temperature monitoring and process management (and with excellent regulatory controls) these can be minimised (not eliminated) - highly unlikely and sure hasn't happened to date. And then you are still left with the ash and fly ash, also with toxic components.
Not just green PR - I sure as he
Re:Plastic is evil (Score:4, Informative)
There is a waste incineration plant not far from me, at Tyseley in the city of Birmingham. I used to have an office/workshop near there, and I guess I got far more nasty pollution from smoking that I ever did from the waste disposal plant. I am well aware of the dangers of incomplete combustion of plastics. Though I am not a trained fire fighter, I have read that one of the major hazards in fires is toxic fumes. I presume that the Tyseley plant runs the incinerators at a sufficiently high temperature to ensure destruction of the organic nasties, such as dioxins and furans. I am not sure what they do about heavy metal pollutants and oxides of nitrogen. I expect they scrub them out of the exhaust. All known technology, already applied to coal fired power stations. There is a good reason why major cities such as London are not subject to toxic smog any more, though there is still progress to be made.
Re: Plastic is evil (Score:5, Interesting)
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That sounds good, but what actually happens to the plastic? Metals such as tin cans and drink cans can be extracted, and melted down to make new metal. Aluminium drink cans are well worth segregating, because making aluminium from ore is very energy intensive, compared to melting scrap. However, what nobody has answered in this discussion is how you melt down plastic waste in order to make new stuff, which I am pretty sure does not happen in practice.
There would appear to be only two ways of dealing with pl
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Glass lasts for millions of years.
Glass in the environment is not much different to rock. It does not float about in the sea and get into the guts of animals.
Plastics are mostly carbon
What a silly argument. Cyanide is mostly carbon, too. The problem with plastics is that they don't break down naturally, unlike, say, paper and cardboard.
Also, why is the plastics situation suddenly a "crisis"?
Maybe because of the prevalence of microplastics in the oceans killing sea creatures, and upsetting vital ecosystems. You know, a mass extinction kind of crisis.
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Seriously?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/g... [forbes.com]
https://nonplasticbeach.com/bl... [nonplasticbeach.com]
https://www.ehn.org/plastic-en... [ehn.org]
https://www.theatlantic.com/sc... [theatlantic.com]
https://friendsoftheearth.uk/p... [friendsoftheearth.uk]
https://www.genevaenvironmentn... [genevaenvi...etwork.org]
Maybe you live under a rock. Plastic will get you there as well.
But then it is more evident you don't read the news as this kind of stuff has been presented for some time now.
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Everything is a crisis. Because it is a crisis, you must give me dictatorial power to "fix" it.
Re:Plastic is evil (Score:5, Funny)
It isn't "suddenly" a crisis. And maybe your memory is bad.
My memory is good enough that I remember plastic being promoted as an alternative to cutting down trees for paper based packaging.
I'm totally good with whatever though. Have at it.
So we don't need to cut down old growth forests (Score:3, Informative)
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For one thing reusable packaging works just fine. Large parts of Europe have started forcing even fast food restaurants like Burger King to use reusable packaging.
So I'm going to bring the packaging with me when I go shopping. I'll just keep a bunch in my car. LOL. Not feeling it.
Yes I know some people reuse the bags, I do. But I can't possibly reuse them all and I end up throwing some out. Honestly about half. They're usually too full of little holes for me to use to pick up dog poop with.
I'm fine with reusable shopping bags. Still requires me to buy bags for cat litter and kitchen waste when I used to get them for free, but again, whatever. Doing my part for the planet.
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So I'm going to bring the packaging with me when I go shopping. I'll just keep a bunch in my car. LOL. Not feeling it.
In Germany they just have machines which accept the returned packaging. You take a bunch of plastic bottles back with you, give them to the machine and it gives you back your deposit. It's really not a problem.
Re: So we don't need to cut down old growth forest (Score:3)
Re: So we don't need to cut down old growth fores (Score:4, Interesting)
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You might want to start with Germany having a deposit on plastic bottles and metal cans. To the average American that's a pretty alien concept.
Re: So we don't need to cut down old growth forest (Score:5, Informative)
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But even without all that we can just grow trees and this has been done for some time.
That only works to a certain level though. I mean. it's not as if they just grow on tr... ah.... hmm....
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Paper is not and probably has never been produced from old-growth forests. It is produced from farmed young trees.
The old-growth forests are used for premium lumber.
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Re: Plastic is evil (Score:2)
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Um, no, most glass can't be easily and simply re-smelted into a useful product.
This is not really accurate :
The global problem is more that glass is thrown away rather than collected but not recycled. Even in the EU, where recycling rates are the highest, only 80% of glass is collected for recycling.
But once collected, glass can be recycled endlessly. Even if not sorted by color, a considerable amount of unsorted cullet can be used to produce green or amber glass. Although today, machines capable of sorting cullet by color (and separating unwanted products such as metal, ceramic or he
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It isn't impossible to recycle. It's just more expensive to do than make fresh plastic out of ethane which costs almost nothing.
Re: Plastic is evil (Score:3)
Making processes more or less expensive than others is something than governments can influence though, for example through tax policy and subsidies. Whether this makes sense or there is political will to do so is another matter, of course.
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It can be done, and we have the ability to do so. Nuclear power, and thermal depolymerization can take any plastic and "boil" it down to short chain monomers. There is a lot of research that can be done on this topic to make the energy required not as bad. It just isn't done because it costs money.
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Come to think of it, plastic is pretty awesome stuff. It's a shame we didn't think about how to get rid of the garbage before we made so much throwaway stuff out of plastic.
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No, you're wrong. Nuclear weapon companies are evil. Nuclear weapons are just nuclear weapons.
Come to think of it, nuclear weapons are pretty awesome stuff. It's a shame we didn't think about how to get rid of post nuclear holocaust wasteland before we made so many deadly nuclear weapons.
Of course what matters is what people do, but what people do with plastic 99.9% of the time is absolutely awful for the future of humanity.
Re: Plastic is evil (Score:2)
Right, as opposed to the plastic industry, who is only bound by shareholders to make a profit, and would never lie in order to make a buck. Pick your poison - I know which one I choose.
Re: The biggest perk to recycling... (Score:2)
That you and I are of course footing the bill for.
Also, around here, the utility sends you nastygrams in the mail if regular trash ends up in the recycle bin, too. Clearly, they have a process in place to track this.