Plastic Recycling Doesn't Work (theatlantic.com) 242
Judith Enck, a former EPA regional administrator, the president of Beyond Plastics, and a visiting professor at Bennington College, and Jan Dell, a chemical engineer and the founder of the Last Beach Cleanup, write in a piece: Americans support recycling. We do too. But although some materials can be effectively recycled and safely made from recycled content, plastics cannot. Plastic recycling does not work and will never work. The United States in 2021 had a dismal recycling rate of about 5 percent for post-consumer plastic waste, down from a high of 9.5 percent in 2014, when the U.S. exported millions of tons of plastic waste to China and counted it as recycled -- even though much of it wasn't. Recycling in general can be an effective way to reclaim natural material resources. The U.S.'s high recycling rate of paper, 68 percent, proves this point. The problem with recycling plastic lies not with the concept or process but with the material itself. The first problem is that there are thousands of different plastics, each with its own composition and characteristics. They all include different chemical additives and colorants that cannot be recycled together, making it impossible to sort the trillions of pieces of plastics into separate types for processing.
For example, polyethylene terephthalate (PET#1) bottles cannot be recycled with PET#1 clamshells, which are a different PET#1 material, and green PET#1 bottles cannot be recycled with clear PET#1 bottles (which is why South Korea has outlawed colored PET#1 bottles.) High-density polyethylene (HDPE#2), polyvinyl chloride (PVC#3), low-density polyethylene (LDPE#4), polypropylene (PP#5), and polystyrene (PS#6) all must be separated for recycling. Just one fast-food meal can involve many different types of single-use plastic, including PET#1, HDPE#2, LDPE#4, PP#5, and PS#6 cups, lids, clamshells, trays, bags, and cutlery, which cannot be recycled together. This is one of several reasons why plastic fast-food service items cannot be legitimately claimed as recyclable in the U.S. Another problem is that the reprocessing of plastic waste -- when possible at all -- is wasteful. Plastic is flammable, and the risk of fires at plastic-recycling facilities affects neighboring communities -- many of which are located in low-income communities or communities of color. Unlike metal and glass, plastics are not inert. Plastic products can include toxic additives and absorb chemicals, and are generally collected in curbside bins filled with possibly dangerous materials such as plastic pesticide containers. According to a report published by the Canadian government, toxicity risks in recycled plastic prohibit "the vast majority of plastic products and packaging produced" from being recycled into food-grade packaging.
For example, polyethylene terephthalate (PET#1) bottles cannot be recycled with PET#1 clamshells, which are a different PET#1 material, and green PET#1 bottles cannot be recycled with clear PET#1 bottles (which is why South Korea has outlawed colored PET#1 bottles.) High-density polyethylene (HDPE#2), polyvinyl chloride (PVC#3), low-density polyethylene (LDPE#4), polypropylene (PP#5), and polystyrene (PS#6) all must be separated for recycling. Just one fast-food meal can involve many different types of single-use plastic, including PET#1, HDPE#2, LDPE#4, PP#5, and PS#6 cups, lids, clamshells, trays, bags, and cutlery, which cannot be recycled together. This is one of several reasons why plastic fast-food service items cannot be legitimately claimed as recyclable in the U.S. Another problem is that the reprocessing of plastic waste -- when possible at all -- is wasteful. Plastic is flammable, and the risk of fires at plastic-recycling facilities affects neighboring communities -- many of which are located in low-income communities or communities of color. Unlike metal and glass, plastics are not inert. Plastic products can include toxic additives and absorb chemicals, and are generally collected in curbside bins filled with possibly dangerous materials such as plastic pesticide containers. According to a report published by the Canadian government, toxicity risks in recycled plastic prohibit "the vast majority of plastic products and packaging produced" from being recycled into food-grade packaging.
Ya know... (Score:3, Insightful)
...I remember vividly, quite a few years ago, when I said this exact thing and was shouted down as a science denier for it.
Ever since then, the claim of an idea being scientific holds very little value to me. Most people haven't the foggiest how science is supposed to work, what actually happens in real life (which is an non-ideal approximation of the scientific method) or how to make back of the envelope calculations to even see whether a concept has a ballpark chance of working out.
And yet, when someone in a lab coat (figuratively speaking) tells them it's science, don't you dare speak up!
I don't know if it was better when I was a kid but I get the distinct feeling virtue signalling has become a basic necessity for human existence.
Re:Ya know... (Score:5, Insightful)
...I remember vividly, quite a few years ago, when I said this exact thing and was shouted down as a science denier for it.
Well it's good to see you didn't let a single, stupid argument on the internet probably decades ago entirely affect your attitude.
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Ever since then, the claim of an idea being scientific holds very little value to me.
The claim itself should hold little value. Each idea has to be considered on its own merits. Anything else is a probable case of Ad Hominem.
I don't know if it was better when I was a kid but I get the distinct feeling virtue signalling has become a basic necessity for human existence.
I don't know if it was better around you when you were a kid either, maybe it just didn't affect you as much. Virtue signaling has been a thing throughout history. Cancel culture is nothing compared to the inquisition. There are all kinds of cultural expressions about the risk of being unusual, like the one about the nail that sticks up getting hammered down. But I susp
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When people complain about virtue signalling, I often think of this one
https://www.smbc-comics.com/co... [smbc-comics.com]
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The problem is people get the idea that something is good or bad and don't listen to all the arguments/evidence that shows that there are other "truths" and you need to
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I doubt anyone accused you of being a science denier for skepticism about plastic recycling, this has been a widespread concept pretty much since the onset, that plastic recycling is so problematic
Or if they did, they weren't speaking with any sort of awareness of scientific consensus on that front (though the viability of recycling for a material seems a bit more specifically an engineering discipline).
The straw man about society blindly acceding to anyone figuratively wearing lab coats is simply not true.
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Science Reporting targeting towards the average person, is often extremely poorly presented.
We have some people who will push X is true, because of Science! Because they saw it in the Science News a few months ago. However X was only a hypothesis where after some more experiments had found X to not be true.
Then you have the other person who See X being True then False using this as an argument the Science is just a load of BS. Because what was stated as an absolute truth one day is a lie the next day. So
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If you can't make the difference between a payed shill in a lab coat and a peer reviewed scientific study, then you're part of the problem.
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All online communities include idiots. They compensate for ignorance with volume. They mod you troll if your post challenges their beliefs, no matter how well-written, well-supported, and respectful it was. Some of them are paid to do this, and others do it for free.
So, the ones shouting you down aren't representative of the majority. They just make a lot of noise to create that illusion.
Science isn't to blame (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that plastic can be recycled is a scientific fact. The fact that it is in many cases not practical to do so is a logistics/economics fact. Both things are true. Using this "contradiction" to justify rejecting other scientific facts makes you an idiot.
Re:Ya know... (Score:5, Informative)
Disclaimer: I work in the recycling industry.
They all include different chemical additives and colorants that cannot be recycled together, making it impossible to sort the trillions of pieces of plastics into separate types for processing.
This is not true. I should know, because the machines I build, and my company sells, do just that. We make sorters that can separate different kinds of plastics at the rate of tons per hour. The author of the article is clearly not aware of what is going on in the recycling industry right now, nor of the fact that we're using AI and other techniques to do what he claims impossible.
The sorters I help build can in fact separate containers not only by their plastic type - PET, HDPE, PP, etc.. but also differentiate between different colored containers of the same plastic type. Furthermore, we can recognize the form - we can separate plastics in a film form from those in a container form. AI has achieved remarkable success in being able to quickly identify object types simply by looking at them.
It is a bit disappointing to see someone as well credentialed as the author so unaware of the progress in recycling that has happened in the past 20 years, particularly with respect to advances in computer vision and AI.
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These are deployed throughout the US and Europe. While we still have a long way to go before every major municipal area uses them, we've made significant progress in the US. I can't tell you the exact numbers (I don't actually know), but we're selling machines as fast as we can make them.
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It's not a science issue. The summary explains it - there are different types of plastics and they need to be separated to recycle them effectively.
If we leant on manufacturers to only use one type of plastic, like say clear PET for bottles, no green PET, and the cap has to be the same stuff too, we could make this work. In fact, that's what they have done in Japan. The bottles are all made of the same stuff, with a label that is designed to come away easily. That makes it much easier to re-use the bottles,
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Plastic bags solved that problem.
I think the funniest irony of the last decade is grocery bags. As you say, started with paper, then moved to the tissue thin single-use plastic bags (which I got a second use as trash liners and pet poop bags for maybe 20% of mine). Then we banned them and went to reusable bags, which we promptly banned when COVID hit. Now we're back to plastic bags for hygiene but they're much heavier plastic. Still single use: I don't know anyone who re-uses them. But since we banned the single use bags, no one makes them
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I don't think plastic bags were *ever* held up as a more environmental option
As compared to paper bags? Oh yes, they absolutely were [independent.co.uk]. There was definitely PR about them using less water and other resources to produce per bag than paper, and how they could be recycled. I don't remember if there were claims about recycling them into more bags, but that's another argument really.
Unfortunately what anyone who thought they would be environmentally friendly forgot was that a percentage of humans just shit all over everything, and if the shit is made out of plastic then it doesn't biodegra
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These days people who are dismissive of Scientific research are more often than not making a cargo cult of propaganda from those who will not benefit from it. Welcome to the Idiocracy as well.
Just because you oppose the ideas of someone who is wrong, or doesn't have a rational reason for their beliefs it doesn't make you right.
If you are actually a smart person, if you hear some science which you don't understand, you should ask a scientist studying that topic for clarification, in today's day and time it
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Notice how the article spends so much time talking about separation.
Because apparently, this is one of the big challenges for profitably and effectively recycling. You have a point, though, even if perfectly separated, I don't know which plastics can be profitably recycled. If it's cheaper, easier, and better to justs make new, recycling will be a tough sell.
If its profitably recyclable, then the recycler will gladly separate those bottles. The reality is that the force of law is ALWAYS USED to make YOU do the recyclers sorting job FOR them.
Sort of, I guess. As a counterexample, I have one big recycling bin. Everything go in it and the trash people separate glass, papers, metals, and plastics. I'm sure I eventually pay for that in my monthly trash fee. So
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These one-bin systems are an incredible waste of paper. You separate your paper, keep it clean, dry etc. Then it all goes in one bin, which gets dumped in a truck and is thoroughly mixed, covered with rotten tuna and a lot of water/juice, broken glass and bits of plastic.
We could be recycling our paper into paper. Instead all it will ever be used for is packing materials.
And we consume a LOT of paper.
China stopped taking paper from waste management because WM couldn't provide bales of paper which were al
Then burn it (Score:2)
The ancients solely used clay for good reason. (Score:2)
You mean like microplastics that pollute the entire ecosystem from the bottom to the top, including the food we eat and our own internal organs? Too late.
Re:The ancients solely used clay for good reason. (Score:5, Interesting)
burning it doesn't result in microplastics in the environment. Burning it properly (with carbon recapture and further oxidization of the carbon) converts it into energy and leaves you with a fine ash that can actually be used as fertilizer.
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Burning it properly (with carbon recapture and further oxidization of the carbon)
What? We don't want further oxidization of the carbon, that's what creates more CO and CO2 emissions. What we want is to make carbon fiber, industrial diamonds, or similar. And also a ride to candy land on a unicorn. But seriously, carbon capture is always going to cost more energy than not emitting the carbon in the first place.
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https://www.co.marion.or.us/PW/ES/disposal/Pages/mcwef.aspx [marion.or.us] - significantly less carbon than burning coal, significantly cheaper than nuclear.
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True enough, that's why I said proper burning- when done correctly, the last step separates the carbon from the oxygen in the fly ash, combines it with the bottom ash, and then uses the carbon to produce a fertilizer product for farmers, which while that does release the carbon back into the environment- feeds it to plants, bringing it back into the non-fossil carbon cycle.
I too think thought that granulating it and encasing it in concrete is safer for the environment in the long run..
Solutions (Score:5, Informative)
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Waste-to-energy is a solution to plastic waste I didn't see in the article. Sure, it's essentially fossil grid power where the fuel gets used as a bottle or food container first, but it's better than filling up landfills and ocean garbage patches with the stuff. Maybe a CCS system could be attached to it too?
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Better than filling up landfills? Says who? Where is the science?
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Here is a comparison of direct waste-to-energy vs. capturing and combusting landfill gases. If you don't capture those landfill gases, they just contribute to atmospheric methane levels:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.10... [acs.org]
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Thanks for the very interesting reference. I think we agree that any landfill should be properly managed, which includes capturing gases.
However, if direct waste-to-energy makes more economic sense, I am all for it. But, market forces should decide these things, not recycling for the sake of recycling, by government fiat.
Re:Solutions (Score:4)
Do you want the rivers to be on fire? Because leaving things up to market forces is how rivers catch fire.
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Waste-to-energy is a solution to plastic waste I didn't see in the article.
If you look at their website you will see they are against more waste incinerators
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Not too surprising. (Score:5, Interesting)
a) Consumers don't recognise most of the common polymers well enough to sort them effectively. They're all just "plastic"
b) Even sorted polymers contain fillers, colours, and other impurities which make them difficult to reuse. EPS is difficult to recycle anyway.
c) It's even more difficult to make money recycling plastics. Most manufacturing processes are designed to work with 'virgin' polymers not impure recycled materials. So the recovered plastics do not attract a high price
As long as 'virgin' oil derived plastics are only one or two dollars per pound (https://www.plasticportal.eu/en/cenove-reporty?year=2022&week=15) it's going to be really difficult to make recycling work. There's just not enough money in it.
As usual, the solution is... (Score:2)
a carbon tax, applied at extraction from the ground.
I recall a cost slide from a Vox explainer on plastic recycling (minimally biased, pretty good actually) that bottomed out in recycled plastic as raw material costing about twice as much as plastic from virgin polymer.
So, if we make the virgin raw material cost about twice as much as it does now, plastic recycling becomes cost-effective.
Re:As usual, the solution is... (Score:4, Insightful)
Mostly yes, but also some no (Score:5, Insightful)
although some materials can be effectively recycled and safely made from recycled content, plastics cannot. Plastic recycling does not work and will never work
This is really not accurate. There are some plastics which can be "effectively recycled and safely made from recycled content" and some which cannot. I'm not fundamentally against eventually replacing all plastic packaging, but it's false to say that no plastics can successfully be recycled.
With that said, I think we ought to ban all the ones we can't reasonably recycle from being used as packaging, and soon.
And with that said, I want to point out that numerous organizations have claimed that they can recycle 100% of all plastics through fluidized bed pyrolysis. Some have even said they can do it without bleeding money. Nobody has said that they can make it profitable AFAIK, but that's not necessary, is it? Just charge anyone who wants to make stuff out of plastics that can't reasonably be recycled any other way enough to have them recycled in this fashion. If some other solution is cheaper, then they will use it.
Re:Mostly yes, but also some no (Score:4, Funny)
Just charge anyone who wants to make stuff out of plastics that can't reasonably be recycled any other way enough to have them recycled in this fashion. If some other solution is cheaper, then they will use it.
This. 100%. While informing people that plastic recycling does not work is not devoid of merit, nothing will change without a real alternative. The good news is that consumers do not have to find that alternative for manufacturers, they can and will do that all on their own when the cost to use non-recyclable/non-compostable materials is too high. You want to sell your product made of or contained within plastic, you'll need to pay for it's impact on our planet. It's also highly probable that large manufacturers already have greener alternatives waiting to be trotted out when those costs come.
Most people are unaware that the whole concept of recycling plastic came from the plastic industry. They knew it didn't work for all but a few plastics and pushed the concept anyway. They stole the 3-arrow recycling symbol and slapped it on all plastics regardless of their recyclability knowing people wouldn't think to look at that tiny little number in the center to make sure it was a 1 or a 2.
Now we all have plastic in our lungs. For money? You did this for money? Thanks, assholes.
...in the US (Score:3)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
South-Korea leads the list with 56.5%, Germany is on place 3.
Israel is last with 5.8%.
The US didn't make the list.
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Glass Coke bottles have always been heavy.
There are companies working on lighter glass bottles -- at this point they have 1/2 weight bottles for the same capacity.
Perhaps it might make economic sense for Coke to move back?
Plastic recycling works (in theory) (Score:2)
I'm in a particularly crotchety mood today.
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Perhaps some simple legislation this year which says all containers need a manufacturer mark on them.
Then a new law in two years which says all used containers should be returned to them.
To stack up. And smell.
Maybe we'd at least get to see a lot more reuse, as opposed to recycling.
Re: Plastic recycling works (in theory) (Score:2)
So separate it? (Score:2)
"Plastic recycling doesn't work" may be true, but arguing that plastics have to be separated first and somehow that's impossible is a bad reason for saying it doesn't work.
Plastic recycling can be made to work (Score:3, Interesting)
Plastic recycling can work in certain cultures, where high degree of consensus coupled with high agreeability and trust in authority that is returned in high respect of people by the authority. I.e. authority must be largely incorruptible and highly culturally primed to hear concerns of the people and people must be highly culturally primed to respect authority and obey the instructions provided, but also have a path to inform authority of problems with instructions. I.e. authority must have direct path and constant drive to improve even though it really doesn't need to.
This is simply a no-go in Anglo countries. This sort of relationship between the people and the authority is antithetical to Anglo cultures. And other places also have significant problems with trying something like this, either because of corruption or because of lack of mutual trust between people and authority or both.
The only places where this can realistically be made to work is Nordics, Japan and South Korea. And maybe to some extent Netherlands. The countries where you already have systems in place to do some of that recycling. The countries where you can trust people to do their own sorting exactly as instructed with extremely high reliability. I.e. no shoving things in a wrong bin by even one out of a hundred, spoiling the whole batch. No people who didn't read the instructions or didn't comprehend them properly and just put unwashed or wrong color plastic into the bin.
This is a problem with no technical solution in sight. It has to be human side solution. People need to care for real and not just because they want to mine social status among their peers. Social status miners are the people who'll post on their social media how great they are at sorting once a week, and then dump it where ever when no one is looking and they're just too tired, too stressed or in too much of a hurry that day.
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Right now it is doubling our local trash pickup fees. Which is a bad look.
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Plastic recycling can work in certain cultures,[...]This is simply a no-go in Anglo countries. [...] The only places where this can realistically be made to work is Nordics, Japan and South Korea. And maybe to some extent Netherlands.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The UK is lower middle of the pack, but not far off Finland and much better than Japan I think your assertion may be wrong.
Misleading title (Score:2)
It's not that plastic recycling doesn't work. It works. We have the technology to do it. It's really that people don't want to be bothered to do it. The author lost me at the mention of "low-income communities or communities of color" and made everything else he said suspect. His viewpoint is no more realistic than the non-hydrocarbon energy crowd that refuses to consider nuclear power.
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The problem is there's no downstream market for the recycled product. You can take some plastics and make them into other things, like carpets or playground mats. Ultimately if you make a "recyclable" product and label it as such, it should have some downstream use to create a market that isn't a landfill.
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> The author lost me at the mention of "low-income communities
Can't you see how there might be more trash fires in low-income communities
> or communities of color"
Oh.
Why are we reading this?
Reuse. (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been saying this idea for years. Of the standard Reduce, Reuse, Recycle mantra, the one that has the highest impact is the middle option: Reuse.
Reusing a bottle, bag, container, whathaveyou only ONE TIME cuts the total consumption of that item by 50%. That's huge. Almost all bottles, bags, containers, whathaveyous can be reused once. Many can be reused more times. If you can reuse it three times total, then consumption of that item is now 1/4 of what it was.
For conservationists, that's wet-dream levels of reduction, and in many cases it comes with almost zero effort.
Recycling is good, and has its place (although with obvious difficulties for things like plastics; aluminum, steel, glass, and paper are the winners, here), but reusing is far more powerful.
Let's look at it in the other direction: take your favorite t-shirt. You get to wear it many dozens of times before it is no longer in good shape. Now imagine needing to buy a new version every time you wore it. Where would you find the time to do that much shopping? Where would you even put all the extra copies you'd need to store between shopping trips? How would you deal with all the waste you'd generate on a near daily basis? Reuse is the key to lower levels of consumption across the board.
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Let's look at it in the other direction: take your favorite t-shirt. You get to wear it many dozens of times before it is no longer in good shape.
My favorite T-shirt is polyester fast fashion from H&M, you insensitive clod!
Just a few short years ago I could still reliably get 100% cotton tees under $5 each, in multi-packs. Now it's hard to find even a poly one for that price. Peak cotton, baby!
"Renewlogy" - right (Score:3)
C'mon Dow - pyrolysis has been around a long time and is used many places in the world already. The challenges are known.
The trouble with plastic bags (plastic films) is they snarl the presorting equipment and prevent it from removing trapped air, thus making the chamber less economically efficient.
The trouble with mixing plastic types resulting in mixed output is well known too. I don't undertand what the big problem with mixed heavy oil is - it has to be further refined to be useful as diesel anyway. Mixed or not, all that hhe heavy oil can be burnt in a heavy-oil generator to generate electricity - such generators already exist. The heavy oil can be further refined to diesel, and it may be used directly for chemical/industrial purposes.
US Culture is Toxic (Score:2)
Go for easy wins (Score:2)
However there are some cases where you can get a large amount of one place plastic in one. The office I worked in had a receptacle near the coffee machine specifically for the coffee cups the vending machine used. Recycling large items like car dashboards could be made to w
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Recycling large items like car dashboards could be made to work by giving breakers sufficient incentives.
Most car dashboards are made of multiple materials bonded together with adhesives, so they're impractical to recycle. The automakers have to also be encouraged to make them more recyclable. That, or we have to just use pyrolysis and give up onj recycling them any other way.
Brought to you by American Glass and Can co. (Score:2)
Yes, plastic waste is a problem. The author forgets that the reason more plastics are being used, mostly in containers, is because manufacturers and consumers wanted more convenience. I grew up with glass bottles everywhere but they would be discarded, not recycled left broken in a street or alley for some innocent person to shred a tire in his car or a kid on a bike. Plastics are cheap, too cheap but even Aluminum isn't recycled as much as it should be. Plastics also give us a feeling of security by wrappi
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Put a higher tax on bottles and cans and use the money for recycling, but when this is tried manufacturers balk. So you'd have to get a big grassroots movement going before there will be change.
Of course it can work (Score:2)
All you need is a well balanced pyrolysis process. Works for all types of plastics. It is not very difficult and it is already being done at some scale by several startups. More about this: https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
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Separating the plastics from other garbage by people may be a problem but can be done fully automated. Putting it in the hands of individuals at the source is utter madness, as many start to realize.
A second truck picks up recycling every week. (Score:2)
Can we stop requiring recycling where it doesn't make any sense? Please?
scam (Score:3)
My local trash companies offer the bins, but chuck them in to the same trash truck as the trash.
My uni had bins but the "trash" and "recycling" holes went INTO THE SAME BAG.
Performative nonsense.
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Thank you for enlightening us with your evidence based on a sample size of one.
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Not ALL recycling is a scam. Usually, a corrupt system produces corrupt results, not just in recycling, but in everything.
Here's an example: My apartment building is owned by a huge corporation that owns dozens of other apartment complexes in my city. It has sacrificed several reserved/paid parking spaces (which would otherwise generate revenue) for recycling (containers and fibres) and organic (stinky stuff) bins. In return, the city picks up the dumpster used for regular, unsorted garbage for free. S
It's doesn't work, because we don't want it to! (Score:3)
Garbage and recycling should be combined and processed at the waste management facilities, they should do the sorting, because ultimately there's no way for an average end consumer to do the job properly, with all the rules. This idea that we should blame consumers who are not trying hard enough, or not putting forth enough effort is stupid at best, and insane in most cases. It shouldn't be my job to know what plastics can go in the recycling bin, or to even know what plastic material my drink bottle, cleaner bottle, or cutlery is made from.
This problem should not entirely rely on waste management facilities, governments and producers (including companies like Walmart, and Amazon), play a big part of the blame. Why do we allow plastic, except in certain circumstances, that can't be recycled? If you can't mix green bottle plastic, and clear bottle plastic, then pick one and stop using the other. If a take out meal has N plastics involved, then decide on one or two, and standardize them. If I buy a product from Amazon, don't use shipping materials that can't be recycled, and don't ship my product in a box that's 10x the size it needs to be.
Another major problem is that different counties don't accept the same bleeping plastics or materials, making this entire topic more absurd. I'm at my parents right now, and their system accepts different plastic, then where my house is located, and that information is not easily available or in a format for easy ingestion, yet none of the provincial candidates are talking about standardizing the systems.
The concept of recycling has been design to fail, it's been designed to not work, and cause problems. When a system is this cluster bleeped then it's the systems job to sort it out. When my garbage is picked up, then it should be sorted, because well I can try to the job correctly, the chances I mess it up is nearly 100%. It's time we stop making recycling the end consumers job, and put the effort, under government mandate, at the source and destination of the problem. Recycling can work when it's done properly, but since no end consumer can stand a chance of doing it properly, because of the bleeped up system, then stop asking us to make it work and give the extra effort.
Simple solution (Score:3)
Most of these problems can be traced back to private companies not giving a shit, since they don't have to deal with the problem. If private companies had to pay tax as percentage of revenue based on how what type and plastic they used for their products, you would instantly solve this problem.
Reduce, Reuse. (Score:2)
Should never have been Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Plastic recycling has always been an industry tool of making people more comfortable with single use plastics, and blaming individual consumers when plastics inevitably pile up in the environment (you littered! you didn't recycle! you bad consumer, you.)
When it comes to plastics, it's reduce, reuse. Period. Even for other materials, "recycle" is a distant third. "Use it then throw it away" was always a bad model.
We have the technology (Score:2)
Why doesn't someone use AI to sort these plastics, they should be detectable with different wavelengths of light? It seems like an achievable thing. There is probably no market for used plastics. We need to create a market for used plastics.
An extreme statement (Score:2)
People should be careful with words like never - forever is a long time. Someday robots will likely automate the tasks necessary for recycling plastics in a economically viable way. It could even be a century but eventually it will likely happen.
Why not ban single use plastics for all beverages? (Score:2)
Is there any reason why we can't just ban single use plastics for things like bottled water, sodas, etc?
'Boomer' here, but in my day beverages were in glass bottles with a deposit or aluminum cans. I understand the expense in transporting heavy bottles back and forth, as well as cleaning and sanitizing them, but why not aluminum cans?
I'm by no means up to date on the aluminum recycling process, but from what I understand it is far cheaper to recycle aluminum than to manufacture new aluminum. What is the r
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Ban everything!
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https://www.theguardian.com/su... [theguardian.com]
I say increase the deposit until it's unaffordable to not recycle the cans into cans.
Too many plastics to recycle? Then restrict them. (Score:5, Insightful)
PET#1 bottles cannot be recycled with PET#1 clamshells... and green PET#1 bottles cannot be recycled with clear PET#1 bottles (which is why South Korea has outlawed colored PET#1 bottles.) ... (HDPE#2), polyvinyl chloride (PVC#3), low-density polyethylene (LDPE#4), polypropylene (PP#5), and polystyrene (PS#6) all must be separated for recycling. Just one fast-food meal can involve many different types of single-use plastic, including PET#1, HDPE#2, LDPE#4, PP#5, and PS#6 cups, lids, clamshells, trays, bags, and cutlery, which cannot be recycled together.
which is why South Korea has outlawed colored PET#1 bottles.
So, what I'm seeing is that we use a bunch of different plastics for a bunch of different reasons. Let's just focus on food, though-
1. Choose ONE plastic for ALL beverage bottles (soda, water, whatever)
2. Choose ONE plastic for foods requiring semi-rigid plastics (containers/clamshells, trays, utensils, and straws)
3. Choose ONE plastic for hot food (containers)
4. User paper wherever possible (cups, straws)
5. Stop selling plastic grocery bags except at a price that then subsidizes plastic cleanup.
Is that wrong? Can we not simply mandate that specific plastics be used with specific sold food products? If we can, let's do so, make all plastics of certain types of the same color, and require LARGE LEGIBLE stamping of the designation for easy sorting.
1. Beverage bottles: Clear
2. Semi-Rigid: Blue
3. Pliable for hot food: Red
Why not limit types? (Score:2)
Do we really need 100+ types of plastics? Maybe narrow it down to a dozen via standardization and related markings, then sorting would be simplified.
Stupid process (Score:2)
Plastic recycling involves vast amounts of labor. It is absurd.
It should be done in a continuous industrial process. Plastics should be dissolved in solvents and fractionally distilled into their various monomers, much like how petroleum is distilled. The only problem is that that requires energy, but we have infinite energy available for almost free from renewables, so not a problem.
Just stop usng them everywhere (Score:2)
Good efforts can be found (Score:2)
British Columbia has some very successful recycling stewardship programs, including plastic recycling. For example, over 71% of plastic beverage containers were recovered and processed for recycling in 2020. (Source: https://ar.return-it.ca/ar2020/environmental-impact.php [return-it.ca] )
Burn it (Score:2)
Back when I was in high school in the early 90s, I had to write a research paper for a science class. Mine was entitled "Why we should be burning Paper and Plastic instead of recycling it".
It pretty much stated that plastic recycling was an end sum game, since most plastics (and paper at the time) could not be recycled past 25-50% in the 90s and eventually all of the plastic made today (IE: the 90s) would eventually end up in a landfill (IE: Now), it would just take longer to get there. The solution given i
Re:suicide cult (Score:5, Informative)
This article isn't about recycling in general, but about plastic recycling, which does have a lot of problem. Other forms of recycling, do work. For example, aluminum recycling involves involves much less energy and environmental damage then making new aluminum. https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/12/20862775/aluminum-recycling-water-tech-plastic-manufacturing-cocacola-pepsi-apple [theverge.com]. Plastic has certain specific problems which make it harder to effectively recycle, as the summary notes, this closely connected to the wide varieties of plastic along with many of the other issues. We're working on improving plastic recycling, but it is a mistake to think that because it has problems that therefore there's a problem with recycling as a whole.
While we're at it, it is a mistake to label recycling as "communist" in any sense- it has nothing to do with any specific economic system, and to a large extent, a lot of the recycling that is done is done for the simple reason of commercial incentives. For example, asphalt is frequently recycled https://www.wolfpaving.com/blog/recycled-asphalt-learn-the-benefits-and-process-of-recycling-pavement [wolfpaving.com]. This isn't due to any legal requirements but because it is cheap and easy to do so it saves companies money. It is also a mistake to think that being communist has anything to do with unions. Communist or heavily socialist countries like the USSR generally disliked unions, seeing them as unnecessary since everything was controlled by the workers. And communist countries had terrible histories of environmental damage. The USSR's environmental record is in many respects far worse than the US one. So these comparisons really don't make sense at multiple different levels.
Re:suicide cult (Score:4, Funny)
Re: suicide cult (Score:4, Informative)
Re: suicide cult (Score:4, Insightful)
Except this is flat out wrong. So many products are made from recycled plastic. Everything from Rubbermaid bins to bowling balls, to boat fenders, to carpet and tee shirts are easily made from recycled plastic.
What I got from TFA is all those products account for at most 5% of the plastic we use. So while it seems like a lot, it's not really.
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So based on your first paragraph, you're saying is we need consistency in plastic products to solve the problem rather than just giving up with a defeatist attitude and throwing in the towel.
That's one approach. Problem is, there's a reason so many different types of plastics exist. People don't develop new materials and businesses for the fun of it, they do it because there's a big enough problem to make a specific solution worth the overhead. The plastic you use for a food clamshell needs different properties from the plastic used for a soda bottle.
It's no doubt possible to reduce the number of plastics (as TFA pointed, Japan survives with only clear soda bottles). I don't know we can reduce
Re:suicide cult (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people who use "communist" or "socialist" as a pejorative can be safely ignored since they use those terms to mean "something I have been told is bad, and I don't know enough to question it."
Re:suicide cult (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people who feel it's safe to ignore any negative feedback on "communists" or "socialists" likely have never lived under such regimes or have close family who did.
You said: "something I have been told is bad, and I don't know enough to question it."
Maybe you need to need to question the source of the information YOU got when questioning the negatives about communism and socialism...
My wife (and her family) were born and raised under socialism. Wife got here when she was 18 y/o. None of her family has anything positive to say about it.
"Socialist" regimes aren't socialist, in much the same way that many countries with "republic" in their names aren't republics. Rather, most "socialist" regimes are actually authoritarian fascist regimes, exhibiting only very limited aspects of socialism.
Most western European countries are more socialist than pretty much any country with "socialist" in its name.
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No doubt that current and historical attempts at socialism and communism have been train wrecks.
I'm not so sure this is true. I might agree that all attempt have fallen short of perfection. However, there are many instances of social programs that have some benefits mixed among some drawbacks. Take American Social Security for example. I'd venture to guess that most Americans that rail against socialism would be very angry if they didn't get their monthly payments. The truth is that their definitions are messed up. Socialism to them means "whatever I don't like." It has little to do with the te
Re:suicide cult (Score:5, Interesting)
Nah... the tipping point was when Americans (and Canadians, Australians, Europeans, etc) started sending their wholesale garbage to Asia instead of sorting anything.
Here's how recycling plastic can actually work.
1. All clean packaging MUST be returned to the store. (Soda bottles, medicine bottles, packaging)
2. Incentivize the stores and in turn, the manufacturers to use better packaging by requiring all packaging to be shipped back in the same logistics vehicles used to bring it to the store.
Once these stores realize how much unrecyclable garbage they are generating and have to pay to dispose of, they will either pick better supplies or put pressure on the ones they have to not generate as much or take back the packaging themselves. This can come in the form of standardized packaging (eg all plastic containers are clear, 500ml, 1L, 2L, or 4L size PET) or anything under 500ml is clear GLASS or Aluminum.
Though ultimately the best way to solve this is to make logistics more JIT-to-the-consumer, rather than the store. If I order food for a week, a week in advance, then all that food should arrive the day before I need it, at 11am or 8pm. That way the warehouse only packages the food once per customer, instead of per-item.
Unfortunately it doesn't solve the other side of the equitation where JIT-to-the-consumer wastes a fair bit of energy/fuel if planned with more frequency than the customer would otherwise use to pick up groceries. Urban dwellers with no car, end up increasing their carbon footprint to that of those with a car.
Realistically, though impractical, every building should just have a "common kitchen". When your grocer delivers your food, they deliver it to your common "fridge" (basically a "cold mailbox") and then you pick up those items when you arrive home. Anything you don't want, you place in the "free" fridge, and anything left in that fridge the following day is taken back by the next grocery delivery vehicle to be dropped off at a food donation place on their route. If you order something, and you don't pick it up, it gets taken to be donated.
Ultimately, we should have just never started using plastic for anything containing food. If we can't make the plastic thick enough to be structurally better than glass, it shouldn't have replaced glass. Food should only be served in paper or glass containers.
Re: suicide cult (Score:2)
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Compared to those capitalist jobs, making products that people really don't want or need, and just hype them with advertising. And when the general population catches on and stops buying the product, they cry,
How many people are crying over Blockbuster or Sears? Companies go out of business all the time. No business I've worked at assumed any given product will last forever. We've always got a plan for what to replace it with.
More generally, I don't think you can name a single product that the buyers don't want. Seriously, try it. Not products that you personally don't buy, what product do you buy that you don't actually want? What product does your neighbor buy they s/he doesn't actually want? And I don't think
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It was the same way with trees. Once upon a time, there weren't any. And then, when there were, nothing could eat them. That made them a very successful form of plantlife that came to dominate most of the surface of the planet. Though they didn't biodegrade, again since nothing could eat them, so dead trees piled up and eventually became coal. [...] So, all that coal sat around for a very long time, taking up space, getting in the way, until eventually some really odd species found motivation to burn it in huge quantities.
In the interim, fungi evolved that could consume lignin, ensuring that there would never be coal or oil again. So if that really odd species fucks it up this time, there will never be all this ready energy available again to kickstart an industrialized economy.
Re:Hell of a century (Score:5, Insightful)
Plastic was and remains a medical miracle. Just the amount of deaths and horrible suffering from food poisoning that is prevented every day by using plastic packaging for food is incredible. That alone would easily justify using plastics on massive scales in packaging, even before the medical breakthroughs and massive savings on using much more valuable and much less durable materials like glass on the same things.
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Yes, the bad part is that it's just *too* cheap with waste costs being externalized, there's no incentive to focus on reusable plastic. If a plastic user had to be on the hook for full lifecycle, we'd probably see pretty commendable reusable plastic products. Highly standardized washable form factors for packaging and such.
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In Korea, you have to sort all your garbage. You pay for your trash, but all recycling is free. There are stiff fines and a lot of human-checking on where you're putting what.
Once all that's done, they still don't do a fantastic job of recycling plastic, but they are confronting the issue and have set up laws which are already impacting the plastic use problem.
But by making things hard and attaching dollar amounts to what flows into your house, this system has always pushed businesses to provide products
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Just the amount of deaths and horrible suffering from food poisoning that is prevented every day by using plastic packaging for food is incredible. That alone would easily justify using plastics on massive scales in packaging
...if you ignore the negative effects, like the number of deaths and horrible suffering from food poisoning which are enabled by plastics. The plastic packaging is used to support the processed food industry, which doesn't just include microwave burritos and the like but which also includes prewashed spinach. And it seems like every week or so there's a new recall of such product, because the centralized processing is an opportunity for food to be contaminated before it's placed in the plastic packaging.
Pla
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Plastic is a great material. It has lead to a lot of real advancements, we will also need plastics to help solve many of our environmental problems today. However... There are some applications which Plastic isn't ideal for, and we have or developing better alternatives, that help dismiss a lot of their tradeoffs.
There are fungus based materials, that can do the job of styrofoam which can hold its shape and offer impact protection for its expected life span, but biodegrade when left into the elements. So
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The conservative mantra "You tried and you failed, the lesson is to never try!"
Progress isn't a straight path, Creating Fire to cook our food, had helped us to prevent getting parasites that would kill us... However also by cooking our food we often cooked off extra nutrients that our body wanted so we would need to collect more food, as well the fire could burn down our homes, and the smoke could kill us too. Over time we found ways to dehydrate, ferment, pickle, candy, chill/freeze... food so we don't h