Tackling Plastic Pollution: 'We Can't Recycle Our Way Out of This' (france24.com) 70
An anonymous reader quotes a report from France 24: The scale of plastic pollution is growing, relentlessly. The world is producing twice as much plastic waste as two decades ago, reaching 353 million tonnes in 2019, according to OECD figures. The vast majority goes into landfills, gets incinerated or is "mismanaged," meaning left as litter or not correctly disposed of. Just 9 percent of plastic waste is recycled. Ramping up plastic recycling might seem like a logical way to transform waste into a resource. But recent studies suggest that recycling plastic poses its own environmental and health risks, including the high levels of microplastics and harmful toxins produced by the recycling process that can be dangerous for people, animals and the environment. [...]
The share of plastic waste that is recycled globally is expected to rise to 17 percent by 2060, according to figures from the OECD. But recycling more will not address a major issue: after being recycled once or twice, most plastics come to a dead end. "There's a myth with plastic recycling that if the quality is good enough the plastics can be recycled back into plastic bottles," says Natalie Fee, the founder of City to Sea, a UK-based environmental charity. "But as it goes through the system, it becomes lower- and lower-grade plastic. It's down-cycled into things like drain pipes or sometimes fleece clothing. But those items can't be recycled afterwards."
It is therefore difficult to make the case that recycled plastic is a sustainable material, said Graham Forbes, Global Plastics Campaign leader at Greenpeace USA, in a statement this week. "Plastics have no place in a circular economy. It's clear that the only real solution to ending plastic pollution is to massively reduce plastic production." And it is impossible for increased recycling to keep pace with the amount of plastic waste being produced -- which is expected to almost triple by 2060. "There's no way that we can recycle our way out of this," added [Therese Karlsson, science and technical adviser at the International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN)]. "Not as it works today. Because today, plastic recycling is not working." "More than two-thirds of UN member states agreed in March last year to develop a legally binding agreement on plastic pollution by 2024, and the second round of meetings to draw up the treaty began on Monday in Paris and will run through Friday," notes the report. "UN Environment Program (UNEP), which is hosting the talks, released a roadmap to reduce plastic waste by 80 percent by 2040."
Karlsson is attending the talks, and she sees reason for hope. "The plastics treaty is an incredible opportunity to protect human health and the environment from plastic pollution. Doing that would mean phasing out toxic chemicals from plastics, ensuring transparency across the plastic life cycle and also decreasing plastic production."
The share of plastic waste that is recycled globally is expected to rise to 17 percent by 2060, according to figures from the OECD. But recycling more will not address a major issue: after being recycled once or twice, most plastics come to a dead end. "There's a myth with plastic recycling that if the quality is good enough the plastics can be recycled back into plastic bottles," says Natalie Fee, the founder of City to Sea, a UK-based environmental charity. "But as it goes through the system, it becomes lower- and lower-grade plastic. It's down-cycled into things like drain pipes or sometimes fleece clothing. But those items can't be recycled afterwards."
It is therefore difficult to make the case that recycled plastic is a sustainable material, said Graham Forbes, Global Plastics Campaign leader at Greenpeace USA, in a statement this week. "Plastics have no place in a circular economy. It's clear that the only real solution to ending plastic pollution is to massively reduce plastic production." And it is impossible for increased recycling to keep pace with the amount of plastic waste being produced -- which is expected to almost triple by 2060. "There's no way that we can recycle our way out of this," added [Therese Karlsson, science and technical adviser at the International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN)]. "Not as it works today. Because today, plastic recycling is not working." "More than two-thirds of UN member states agreed in March last year to develop a legally binding agreement on plastic pollution by 2024, and the second round of meetings to draw up the treaty began on Monday in Paris and will run through Friday," notes the report. "UN Environment Program (UNEP), which is hosting the talks, released a roadmap to reduce plastic waste by 80 percent by 2040."
Karlsson is attending the talks, and she sees reason for hope. "The plastics treaty is an incredible opportunity to protect human health and the environment from plastic pollution. Doing that would mean phasing out toxic chemicals from plastics, ensuring transparency across the plastic life cycle and also decreasing plastic production."
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Let's start with your (grand)parents.
It's time we stopped putting up with disingenuous and insulting remarks like that. If someone is intelligent and well-informed enough to see that the world is grossly overpopulated, that doesn't mean they want to kill anyone. We are certainly in a deplorable position, but the only prospect of successful solutions is to start from where we are. It's no use bewailing what might have been if better decisions had been made in the past century - except inasmuch as we can learn lessons for the future.
First and fo
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I'm open minded to what you say. I'd often quote the 500m figure myself. Thing is, there are people who will argue the exact opposite. It's not so easy to simple call it a fact. Nature has created 8 billion and Nature is a technology far in advance of our understanding. Maybe bacteria figure out how to process it all. Who knows. And as it happens I don't have kids, so if the 500m figure is correct, then at least I've done my part.
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Is this not begging the question? How do you know that the planet can only sustain a maximum of 2 billion people? If that were the case and there are 4x as many of us as the planet can support, why are we not suffering from
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Yes, I agree that it is insulting and disingenuous to suggest that we need a "disease to spread quickly and cull the useless members of society. The weak, the old, the infirm, the mentally retarded."
That's exactly the kind of thinking that led to the Holocaust. Who are any of us here to decide who has value, and who is "useless"? Overpopulation may be a very real problem, and it doesn't take much intelligence at all to see that. It takes somewhat more intelligence to come up with real plan that doesn't
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That you'd defend that comment reflects somewhat poorly on you.
I didn't.
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OK, let me answer: The answer is "refilling" those bottles.
Want to cut plastic production in half? Use each plastic item twice. It's that easy.
It doesn't work with plastic (Score:3)
You have to use glass but glass costs more and is more expensive to ship and cleaning the bottles also costs money. Plastic is just way way cheaper.
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You have to use glass but glass costs more and is more expensive to ship and cleaning the bottles also costs money. Plastic is just way way cheaper.
And there you have it. We have to stop thinking "X is way cheaper" and letting that be the end of the matter.
Instead, some consideration of the harms done to others (and ourselves) is necessary. "How can that be done within our perfect free-market economy?" I hear you cry. Well, maybe it can't; in which case our social arrangements will have to be changed. Maybe we need to adopt a system closer to China's, in which the government plays a larger part in setting goals and priorities, and uses the free market
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Obviously we aren't paying the full cost of the plastic when we buy single-use plastic containers. We as a society are perfectly content with letting these corporations continue to ignore the externalized cost of slowing destroying the biosphere.
We shouldn't even let companies sell single use plastic bottles. Just buy a refillable container and use that for your water. It's about the easiest thing ever to fix and we can't even get THAT right. I've been using a steel water container for over a decade now. Yo
Re:Ok, sounds great (Score:5, Insightful)
Glass. It's actually recyclable and reusable. Sure, it weighs more and can break, but so can plastic containers. Somehow we did just fine with significantly more glass containers 25 years ago, and the population hasn't grown that much during that time period.
It's been done before. (Score:5, Insightful)
Glass is heavy, but it is also trivial to clean and re-use.
To this day, the glass beer bottles in The Netherlands are all the same color and shape, and are used across all the breweries, so only a paper label is needed to differentiate between beers. All the grocery stores have machines with laser scanners that will accept a crate of empty beer bottles, just shove it through the opening and onto the belt.
Milk men used to deliver and collect reusable glass milk bottles back in the day.
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The best way I've yet seen is by Union beer in Slovenia. Their beer comes in a plain glass bottle. No adhesive label to remove to reuse the bottle, they just put the plain bottle into a paper wrapper with the wrapper carrying the branding and information that normally goes onto the adhesive label.
Most of the glass beer bottles in Slovenia have a wear ring around them from repeated reuse and transport in crates.
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Most of the glass beer bottles in Slovenia have a wear ring around them from repeated reuse and transport in crates.
Same thing in Germany, the Netherlands (as GP mentioned), I'm sure there are others. Sensible.
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Visit the antique store. (Score:2)
Yeah obviously it’s deliberately too big of a question to answer meaningfully and that’s deliberate on his part.
But a stroll through an antique store shows you what the world did before plastics took off. Lot of glass, lots of metal, both recycle well. Also wood and paper which are somewhat recyclable and at least biodegrade.
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One challenge is that much of the plastic that ends up littering nature is actually recyclable - polyethylene. Replacing that with glass just means that we have sharp glass shards everywhere. If I'm out in the woods and I see a piece of plastic or metal trash that is safe to remove, I might just do so. I'm much less inclined to pick glass shards out of the mud. The problem is that too many humans are selfish pricks, and that doesn't change by switching glass for plastic. Going to a shingle beach as a y
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The difference is, unlike plastics, that glass isn't particularly harmful to the environment. So who cares if it stays in the environment way longer?
Plus glass costs more so people are less likely to toss it away. Personally I'm still regularly reusing a "single use" plastic coke bottle from 2013, but since it's only worth a few cents a lot of people will just toss it.
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A plastic soda bottle in the soil isn't particularly harmful to its environment either. Also, much less likely to cause a forest fire than a glass bottle. Anyway, my point was the obvious place that we might choose to use glass over plastic doesn't really solve any problems.
The biggest pollution challenges with plastic now are in water and landfills. Much of the landfill plastic waste comes manufactured goods, home appliances, car parts, toys etc., that cannot easily be replaced by glass, and are general
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*This*
We use all glass containers at home for food storage.
I use a glass VOSS water bottle (or stainless steel if I'm out) and refill it from our home water filter every morning.
We store all our home made food in glass jars.
All our flour, nuts etc are in large glass containers.
Pity meat is so hard to buy not vacuum packed nowadays.
Glass is awesome!
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Glass. It's actually recyclable and reusable. Sure, it weighs more and can break, but so can plastic containers. Somehow we did just fine with significantly more glass containers 25 years ago, and the population hasn't grown that much during that time period.
I'm betraying my age here, but when I was a kid, glass bottles were the norm for soft drinks (and milk, if you had it delivered). As a kid, we'd go hunting for "pop bottles" to collect the reward for each one we returned (around a nickle a bottle, I seem to remember). I still remember the heavy metallic "CLANK!" when you'd buy a soda from a machine and have to wrestle it out from the grips of the beast you just dropped coins into. Small kids would have to grab with both hands, brace themselves, and yank.
For
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Please explain the economically viable alternative that will not disproportionately affect anyone.
Plastic comes from oil, and is part of the same problem as oil and coal pose: They're too cheap. We only count the cost of digging it up the oil, creating the plastics, burning the fuel, not the cost of throwing the resulting CO2 (and assorted nasties) into the air, pollute the environment, and so on. So the cost/benefit appraisal is skewed because it ignores the cost of cleanup.
So if a non-polluting solution (like the already-mentioned glass) is not economically viable, the economy is itself not viable. S
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Re:burn it for energy (Score:5, Interesting)
Plastic has to be burned at high temperatures to break it down into safe components, otherwise you get a bunch of nasty stuff released into the environment. It's a net negative energy process to do it correctly, and to the best of my knowledge the current state of the art (as in 'can be done in a lab under perfect conditions') gets you about 90% of the material recovered.
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It's not net negative if you use the heat for something.
Yes, burning plastic does require an after burner. And a scrubber after that. But heat is heat if you are generating steam to turn the turbine in the generator room.
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It's a net negative energy process to do it correctly
So what if it is? Any other solution is also a net negative energy process but by burning it we'd be rid of the plastic forever, as opposed to merely covering up the problem in a landfill.
I still remember my chemistry professor from university taking a bit of time out of lecture to explain how burning plastics was a good idea. This came up in lecture because at the time there was a debate about a municipal power plant that would be burning waste for energy. By burning the plastic in the city power plant
Re: burn it for energy (Score:2)
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Plastic has to be burned at high temperatures to break it down into safe components, otherwise you get a bunch of nasty stuff released into the environment.
Someone write a PhD dissertation on the One Ring as a literary metaphor for our plastic-powered economy.
Just like at the Council Of Elrond:
Everyone agrees if we do nothing it will destroy us all.
Some argue we should keep it and reuse it for ourselves.
Some argue we should hide it deep in the earth or the ocean.
Some argue we should send it to the other side of the world to be someone else's problem.
Some say we must destroy it in a high-temp fire as energetic as the cumulative processes that went into its orig
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In many places, that's exactly what is done with trash. But there are two big problems with that as a strategy.
1. Lots of plastic doesn't go into the proper waste streams, resulting in microplastics getting into everything, among other problems.
2. Plastic comes from oil, which comes from carbon that has been sequestered since the Mesozoic age. Releasing that into the atmosphere is pushing our climate back towards that of the Mesozoic Era, which is not good.
Obvious solution (Score:2)
"But as it goes through the system, it becomes lower- and lower-grade plastic. It's down-cycled into things like drain pipes or sometimes fleece clothing. But those items can't be recycled afterwards."
Well, if we solved the problem of having to burn fossil fuels to power things, the amount of carbon released from properly incinerating unrecyclable waste plastics would be pretty negligible.
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"But as it goes through the system, it becomes lower- and lower-grade plastic. It's down-cycled into things like drain pipes or sometimes fleece clothing. But those items can't be recycled afterwards."
Well, if we solved the problem of having to burn fossil fuels to power things, the amount of carbon released from properly incinerating unrecyclable waste plastics would be pretty negligible.
I read earlier we're pushing ~37billion tons of CO2 annually into the atmosphere, so yes that 353million tons is only 1%. Nuts to think how much our energy generation is doing.
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I read earlier we're pushing ~37billion tons of CO2 annually into the atmosphere, so yes that 353million tons is only 1%. Nuts to think how much our energy generation is doing.
If the world population were 2 billion rather than 8 billion, you could divide all those numbers by at least 4.
eat our way out (Score:2)
The best solution to pollution is to turn it into food. Plant-based 'meat' seems to be popular. Pollution-based meat could be even better. Polymer-to-protein FTW!
Insane (Score:2)
The good news... (Score:5, Interesting)
Most plastic is dirt cheap because it is produced as a by-product of petroleum fuels. If the world keeps following the path of vehicular electrification, and reducing its use of oil in electricity production, there is a chance that the cost of plastics increases to make other materials more financially attractive.
Plastic is great at so many things, but not everything needs to be plastic. Engineers should be more discriminating our choice of when to use it.
PET reuse (Score:2)
Two or three decades ago I saw a promo video on not recycling, but reusing PET plastic bottles complete with washing/sanitizing and sniffers to reject those that had gasoline or other contaminants in them.
More durable but not as heavy/hazardous as glass, seemed brilliant to me, like the old days of returning bottles for soda/milk refill.
So rather than faking "recycling", sure it means less petrochemical production...
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It would be nice, but those bottles just aren't designed to be sanitized. I do think a return to glass bottles is probably the answer here.
I suggest using aluminum. Aluminum can be recycled an infinite number of times. Melting the aluminum down to make new cans means no chances of someone getting sick from improperly sterilized bottles, the molten metal will kill everything.
We went away from glass because it is heavy and difficult to cool quickly. That's a lot of energy wasted in moving glass around and cooling it down. Then is the problem of how easily glass cracks and breaks. I remember helping a high school friend do some work cleaning
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Aluminum containers look to be a better idea to me.
That's because your development was affected by toxics leached from plastics, like the ones that line Aluminum cans, but not glass bottles.
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It would be nice, but those bottles just aren't designed to be sanitized. I do think a return to glass bottles is probably the answer here.
You can make them reusable. Germany has a deposit on plastic bottles, you return them for a refund and they get re-used. I think the only difference is that they're slightly thicker than the usual disposable bottles.
It certainly seems to work in that there aren't many getting trashed, but I haven't looked into what effect this has over the whole lifecycle.
Recycling is in fact anti-help (Score:2)
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Ooohh noez! MiCrOpLaStIcS!!!! OMFG!!!
They aint dangerous, it's just money scammers trying to scam more money.
STFU with that bullshit.
We certainly can (Score:2)
We just can't have it for free, and I mean producers and consumers.
All for convenience. (Score:2)
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Look in your kitchen do you really think you can sanitize the bread bag, the meat tray, the frozen pea bag, the frozen pizza wrapper? It's hard enough cleaning the freezer bags I use for the strawberries. I can get three or four uses of a bag before it springs a leak. But eventually they all do.
Now, about the polyester carpet...
Re: All for convenience. (Score:2)
Bread in paper bags, (or slice a bread loaf and store in a cloth bread bag), butcher paper for meat, frozen peas in a cardboard carton, frozen pizza in a cardboard box.
You won't be able to visualise some things before buying. But it's workable
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The thing is that using plastics in food packaging increases shef life and reduces spoilage. Wasting food is also bad for the environment. The key is to not use plastics for where it's not really needed.
For example there could be a ban on using styrofoam for packaging where cardboard would do just as well.
Do we really need to put so much plastics in our textiles we use for regular clothing, rugs etc? For things like weatherproof jackets yes, for sweaters, not so much.
We need a global move away from single u
Opportunity? (Score:2)
2. Charge to have them collect the plastic.
3. And dump it over the edge. (Stupid round-earthers wouldn't even realize that was an option.)
4. Profit!
Just put it in landfills (Score:1)
and stop the tortured angst over a product that is only used one time.
Legislate away Multimodal packaging and the use of (Score:1)
Food packaging (UK at least) (Score:3)
I wonder when will the attitude change that it's a consumer problem ("please recycle!") rather than an industry problem.
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Supermarkets package EVERYTHING in plastic, which is ludicrous for ... apples, oranges, tomatoes, and every other fruit and vegetable.
I wonder when will the attitude change that it's a consumer problem ("please recycle!") rather than an industry problem.
The attitude will change away from consumers when consumers stop 99.999% of the time preferring the single-use multimodal lightweight plastic-everything packaging products and the products enabled by single-use multimodal lightweight plastic-everything transport/storage/display.
Supermarkets carry that one brand of plain brown cardboard box of eco-friendly laundry detergent.
And those sad dumpy boxes sit ignored next to the 50 different sizes and shapes of plastic bottles with their swooping contours and ergo
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Plastic packaging is prevalent because it's cheap. Make it expensive.
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Soft bigotry of low expectations (Score:2)
OF COURSE recycling can work. It may involve use of different plastics that are friendly to recycling or biodegradable. It may involve different container design optimized for reuse/recycling rather than disposal. It may involve use of other materials such as glass, metal, wood or paper as makes sense.
But it should not involve shaming individuals for using simple modern conveniences or often not even having other choices to get needed goods. It's bad enough that we were shamed for not recycling while recycl
Recycling as Propoganda (Score:1)
bogey man (Score:2)
For some reason in the US, we always need a bogey man for some monomania. How is plastic really any worse than all the other waste we generate in the world? Mining tailings, slag from making steel, broken glass. Every damn thing we use ends up somewhere. Plastic is actually easier -- in principle -- to recycle than most other stuff, because in most cases it can be dissolved in organic solvents and fractionally distilled into useful chemicals.
The problem is political (Score:2)
Today, we have machines which can sort plastics out of a municipal waste stream at the rate of tons per hour. To put this in perspective, it takes tens of thousands of 2 liter bottles to make a ton of plastic. Anyone who says that recycling can't be done, or that the plastics can't be reused, is simply uninformed. I should know, my company sells machines which sort municipal waste streams for recycling.
I have often wondered why municipalities, which are often Left leaning, would forego recycling progr