Apple AirTags Track 'Recycled' Plastic to Unprocessed Piles in an Open-Air Lot (tomshardware.com) 114
"Houston resident Brandy Deason put an Apple AirTag in her recycling to see where her plastic trash was going," writes Tom's Hardware.
"While many might expect the city would drop the recyclables off at a recycling center, Deason instead found her trash sitting in an open-air lot alongside millions of other pieces of trash at Wright Waste Management." Wright Waste Management did not allow CBS News to enter and inspect its premises. Still, the news team's drone camera discovered that all the trash picked up from the Houston Recycling Collaboration (HRC) was apparently just sitting there on its premises, stacked more than 10 feet high. This came as a shock, as the HRC was meant to revolutionize the city's recycling program, allowing it to process all kinds of plastic. Instead, we see all the collected waste sitting idle in open-air lots waiting for the right technology to appear.
That's because [Exxon-funded] Cyclix International, one of the partners in the HRC, has yet to open its massive factory to scale up its plastic recycling operation. The company said that it recycles all kinds of plastic and has even already set aside a sprawling space big enough to accommodate nine football fields. However, the current facility is just an empty husk without a single piece of machinery in sight.
Deason included 12 airtags in bags of recycling — and nine of them ended up at the HRC facility (with another one going to the local dump). In a video report, CBS News asked Deason what they thought about household recycling ended up in massive piles of plastic. "I thought it was kind of strange, because if you store plastic outside in the heat, it's a fire problem." In fact, that facility has already failed three fire-safety inspections by the county, according to CBS News. And while the facility has "applied" for approval to store plastic waste, that application has not yet been approved.
CBS asked a Cyclix project manager about the piles of unprocessed plastic sitting in the sun. "We need a huge supply of plastics to get ready for startup here," a spokesperson answered, "And we want to start that now in order to get ahead of it."
CBS's interviewer also raised another issue: the facility's plan is to recycle some of the plastic products into fuel. "So if you turn plastic waste into fuel that is then burned and creates greenhouse gas emissions, that's just another environmental problem."
Cyclix Project Manager: "Plastic waste is the challenge. So if we have the ability to take plastic waste and convert it to new products — that's what we're trying to do!"
CBS News points out that turning plastics into burn-able fuel is considered "recycling" by 25 states...
"While many might expect the city would drop the recyclables off at a recycling center, Deason instead found her trash sitting in an open-air lot alongside millions of other pieces of trash at Wright Waste Management." Wright Waste Management did not allow CBS News to enter and inspect its premises. Still, the news team's drone camera discovered that all the trash picked up from the Houston Recycling Collaboration (HRC) was apparently just sitting there on its premises, stacked more than 10 feet high. This came as a shock, as the HRC was meant to revolutionize the city's recycling program, allowing it to process all kinds of plastic. Instead, we see all the collected waste sitting idle in open-air lots waiting for the right technology to appear.
That's because [Exxon-funded] Cyclix International, one of the partners in the HRC, has yet to open its massive factory to scale up its plastic recycling operation. The company said that it recycles all kinds of plastic and has even already set aside a sprawling space big enough to accommodate nine football fields. However, the current facility is just an empty husk without a single piece of machinery in sight.
Deason included 12 airtags in bags of recycling — and nine of them ended up at the HRC facility (with another one going to the local dump). In a video report, CBS News asked Deason what they thought about household recycling ended up in massive piles of plastic. "I thought it was kind of strange, because if you store plastic outside in the heat, it's a fire problem." In fact, that facility has already failed three fire-safety inspections by the county, according to CBS News. And while the facility has "applied" for approval to store plastic waste, that application has not yet been approved.
CBS asked a Cyclix project manager about the piles of unprocessed plastic sitting in the sun. "We need a huge supply of plastics to get ready for startup here," a spokesperson answered, "And we want to start that now in order to get ahead of it."
CBS's interviewer also raised another issue: the facility's plan is to recycle some of the plastic products into fuel. "So if you turn plastic waste into fuel that is then burned and creates greenhouse gas emissions, that's just another environmental problem."
Cyclix Project Manager: "Plastic waste is the challenge. So if we have the ability to take plastic waste and convert it to new products — that's what we're trying to do!"
CBS News points out that turning plastics into burn-able fuel is considered "recycling" by 25 states...
Boondoggle (Score:5, Interesting)
Leaving piles of plastic outside not only poses a fire hazard. The stuff also breaks into bits and blows all over the countryside.
If they are getting money for recycling, that money needs clawed back.
CBS News points out that burning plastics into burn-able fuel is considered "recycling" by 25 states...
It is better than letting it stand around, or dumping stuff in a landfill. At least you are getting energy from the plastic, instead of putting microplastics, PFAS and other lovely things into the environment.
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Low level wind erosion of most plastics takes centuries. You'd need some extreme winds to do it faster.
Like the hurricane and the derecho that hit Houston in the last 4 months?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Do you have constant winds of this nature, or is this a rare event?
Hint: erosion is about long term exposure.
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Oh, sorry, I did not realize that a short term event that distributes plastic rapidly that didn't fit in with your model of slow distribution. I'll try to ignore the larger problem of plastics being distributed over a large area and focus on the importance of sticking to the subject of just your method and limit the exception you stated to a timescale you alone determine.
Hint: the problem isn't the method, it's the plastic, and faster is worse.
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I would call them Luckyo.
Looking at the back end - go front end now (Score:1)
We should be lobbying the largest food retailers to use less plastic instead of focusing solely on the end result and recycling.
Kroger, for example, the largest supermarket in the USA is the third largest seller of food products in the world.
Lobbying Kroger's CEO and board to use their buying power to get food companies to use less plastic, ship things in cardboard boxes, not use plastic lined cans, etc. would do much more than focusing only on recycling.
Nearly all food products were shipped without plastic
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To be fair, your suggested measures would indeed temporarily reduce pollution.
Mainly through famine and mass death they would cause.
Then those who weren't stupid enough to mass genocide their own peoples will conquer you and put in a much less environmentally caring regime in, similar to what is done in most of the world. And people will cheer, as they'll once again have food, freedom of travel, and actually affordable goods made of plastics.
Slow turn to large ship (Score:2)
Simply reducing the packaging a small percentage, like to overrun the USA.
How would they rampage across the Atlantic pond?
Re: Looking at the back end - go front end now (Score:1)
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As I said, the steps could be done in small incremental measures. Some products may be done first which do not have negative effects of metal cans like acidic foods have.
One easy trick (Score:2)
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If it took "centuries", we wouldn't see microplastics proliferating in the environment within the decades which we have observed it to.
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Correct. Now we have two factually correct observations:
1. Wind erosion of plastics into microplastics under these conditions takes centuries.
2. There are microplastics in the environment.
What do these two factual observations tell you about microplastics that currently exist and their relationship to these dumps?
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I literally quoted the part that speaks about just that in my initial post. Everyone can read it themselves. It's quoted in the opener.
Most modern people have very real attention span problems, to the point where they can't make it through the first sentence of a post before hitting reply. You however failed to read beyond the topic. Which was... automatically generated.
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If the microplastics aren't coming off this pile, which pile are they coming from?
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From plastic food packaging (including single serving beverage containers), one of the biggest polluters, they simply get dumped, degrade & fragment in the sun, rivers, lakes, the seas, & t
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Sure, if you ignore things like plastic clothing being tumble dried while vented directly into the outside air
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"Centuries" if one is referring to "the whole pile of plastic turned to dust with nothing left".
Obviously, within the first decade or two, small pieces will start falling off while the majority of the pile is still there.
==
"It took 10,000 years for this canyon to form" does not mean "there was no sediment at the river mouth until year 10,001".
==
Obviously, it's a long-running process and lots of participants in this thread are interpreting it in different, weird ways to suit their argument.
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> IF you trust that technology is indeed coming soon. And land is free.
If you're honest about what you're doing, I can sort of see that.
But if you're telling people that you are recycling the plastic now, you're lying.
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I should clarify that I say "sort of", because I don't entirely share your faith that new technology is necessarily going to do what you *think* it's going to do. I'm fairly confident that new technologies will continue to emerge, but I don't know what they're going to be, and I'm pretty sure you don't either.
(And yes, I'm aware that "you" and "your" here are not the original poster, so much as a hypothetical person. I don't think this
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We are recycling plastic now. The requirement for it to make sense is:
1. Homogenous well identified type and color of plastic.
2. Pre-sorted.
3. Either pre-cleaned or impurities so low that they are acceptable.
PET bottle recycling systems are a good example of this. We identify which specific plastic type and color it is by the bar code, same as at checkout. That enables machine taking them to pre-sort them, and ensure they're right shape. And recyling station will have a complex reused water system cleaning
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Probably. I'm an old school environmentalist, in that I value pragmatism and practicality of applications and expect environmentalism to improve quality of life for humanity.
To me, current form of plastic "recycling" outside PET bottles is a crime against environment. They should be burned in place of fossil fuels instead. That is the most environmental thing we can do with them.
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Re:Boondoggle (Score:4, Insightful)
It allows companies to stick with fossil fuel through greenwashed plastics and kills real (mechanical) recycling. It's better immediately, but it slows the transition to sustainability eventually.
Here in the EU something similar is happening with mass balance accounting.
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PS. assuming for a minute we ever make it to a decent level of sustainability without collapse of industrial civilization.
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PS. assuming for a minute we ever make it to a decent level of sustainability without collapse of industrial civilization.
Damn, I wish I had mod points - what you said is what I keep trying to hammer home to people. Our way of life is balanced on the edge of a cliff. Yet we're arguing about a) how we got here, b) whether it's really a cliff or just a conspiracy theory, and c) how little inconvenience we can get away with while we pretend to do something about it.
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Landfill = Carbon Sequestration (Score:3)
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I hope you enjoy drinking PFAS then.
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It's common for even properly sealed landfills to fail and start leaching. It's happened time and time again. The assumption is that if it's in a landfill it's guaranteed to leach at some point because nothing lasts forever.
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It's common for even properly sealed landfills to fail and start leaching. It's happened time and time again. The assumption is that if it's in a landfill it's guaranteed to leach at some point because nothing lasts forever.
Couldn't we just use some of that "forever" plastic to seal the landfill sites? Oh, wait...
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pfas get through any landfill seal over time, even high density polyethylene.
the only known way to not polute with pfas is not to create them in the first place.
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No landfill is sealed off for millennia.
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Burying it in a landfill is actually better.
Yep.
Maybe forcing everybody to put it in special bins just to do this crap with it wasn't such a good idea after all.
Burning Plastic = Cancer (Score:2)
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Yet may countries safely incinerate their plastic waste, generating electricity from it. Since we're already burning gas to generate electricity, this is at least not worse than that. Sweden is one country that incinerates their plastic waste. It gets burned cleanly and completely enough that fumes are not a concern.
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Re:Boondoggle (Score:4, Informative)
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At least you are getting energy from the plastic, instead of putting microplastics, PFAS and other lovely things into the environment.
Burning plastic does not eliminate microplastic generation from burned plastic. https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
Thanks for sharing that article. It says that the microplastics are concentrated in the bottom ash from the incinerators. So as long as that ash is disposed of properly, it seems like incineration is still viable.
Sometimes I wish I was unconscionable and ruthless (Score:2, Insightful)
so that I could get a lot money by doing shit like this.
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The actual reality is that a lot of political drive was put in ability for new development to actually recycle uncleaned, unseparated plastic. Things like machine vision and modern robotics to do separation cheaply.
It just didn't materialize. And due to the way political/bureaucratic/commercial apparatus works together to diffuse ultimate responsibility, there is no one to point fingers at.
It's become a common way to handle this sort of "environmentalism" after incredible success with wind and solar push. W
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hat's because [Exxon-funded] Cyclix International, one of the partners in the HRC, has yet to open its massive factory
I think it's probably paid off quite well for Exxon, they're one of the major causes of the problem and now they've greenwashed their way out of it. If they played their cards right they'll even have made a profit off subsidies and tax benefits and whatnot.
Re:Sometimes I wish I was unconscionable and ruthl (Score:5, Insightful)
Plastics are the single greatest reason for human flourishing today.
It's more like we're stuck with cheap plastic crap nowadays. Old metal appliances used to last for decades, they had to if one was going to spend that type of money on buying them. They would also get repaired due to their cost which offered good employment for some folks. Nowadays I feel lucky if an appliance lasts a decade, it's all disposable crap.
Plastic certainly has its virtues but the above combined with the issues with pollution definitely puts them in the "mixed blessing" category and they certainly arent the "single greatest reason for human flourishing today". Humanity was doing just fine in the 60's when most things were still made without plastic.
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Humanity was doing just fine in the 60's
Depends on who counts as humanity. If you were at the Braddock pool party in the 60s lecturing recent grands on a career in 'plastics' sure you were doing just fine. Yet in the 60s food insecurity, as in actually not being able to obtain enough calories and nutrients was still a very real problem right here in America. Propaganda aside the reality today is quite different, you are not staving in America unless there are serious confounding issues present, ie mental illness (wont take care of yourself), s
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Johnson's War on Poverty had far greater effect on food insecurity than plastic ever has. I work corporate for a small chain of grocery stores and I've seen how we get our produce. Outside of berries, the chopped fruit we do ourselves, and a few other things there isn't much plastic going on in our produce back rooms.
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Totally illustrates my point. Just try any part of food production today without modern plastics. Hell even try getting a fish out of the water.
Its all cheap and affordable because of plastic. Your imagination is limited entirely to your own experience like most lefty. Anyone whose life does not look like yours does not exist or to the degree you do acknowledge them they just ignorant heathens that need to be brought your religion.
Johnson by the way was precisely this. His war on poverty was as much (an
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>Old metal appliances used to last for decades
And were unaffordable for overwhelming majority of humanity. Today you need to work a small fraction of time to get the same appliance, which not only means you can buy way more of these appliances, but that a lot of people that couldn't afford them can now.
The point of progress is not to make halo products that only a few can buy that are super durable. The point is to make products just sufficiently durable for needs of the expected customer base.
Absolutely
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And were unaffordable for overwhelming majority of humanity. Today you need to work a small fraction of time to get the same appliance, which not only means you can buy way more of these appliances, but that a lot of people that couldn't afford them can now.
The problem here is the math doesn't work like you're saying it does. If you held on to an old 60's metal appliance for it's full life time you would be finishing ahead on money relative to having to buy a new cheap but poorly made one every 5-10 years. So in the long run, one is much better off money wise with the expensive but wellade stuff of of yesteryear
So basically, a cheap appliance might be a boon to someone without much money in the short term, in the long term they're finishing behind in terms of
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> finishing ahead on money relative to having to buy a new cheap but poorly
> made one every 5-10 years. So in the long run, one is much better off money
> wise with the expensive but wellade stuff of of yesteryear
You're assuming that most people live in basically the same socioeconomic bracket for their entire lives. This is very much not the case. A hundred dollars was worth more to me when I was twenty, than a
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Yes, we used to wrap meat in wax paper instead of vacuum seal it in plastic; the plastic is more effective. We line our cans with plastic and have almost no cases of botulism now.
Appliances failing has little to do with plastic; usually it's the metal components failing (eg corroded copper on the circuit board; modern motors are more efficient but have narrow tolerance). If you lift a modern vs an ancient appliance, you might notice the modern one weighs almost nothing.
Overall plastic is a wonder material,
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Microplastic pollution and macroplastic pollution do damage the environment differently, but microplastics also harm the environment in observable ways. For example, they damage fish gills and livers [sciencedirect.com].
Given your characterisation of microplastics I anticipate the objection that that's not what you were talking about. Maybe the term "microplastics" is too broad to be useful, although the counterargument might be that no detailed taxonomy of small plastic fragments will be universally applicable because new res
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Two sentences earlier:
I don't have institutional access to the full article, but I do trust journal editors not to allow the abstract to completely misrepresent the paper.
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Plastics are the single greatest reason for human flourishing today
They might scrape into the top ten, but sanitation, plentiful food, cheap energy, antibiotics and other medical advances (in particular pre and neonatal), contraception and widespread access to education, transport and democracy are surely all higher ranking than plastics.
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>but sanitation
Plastics played a key role in modern sanitation.
>plentiful food
Exists because of plastic packaging of everything from seeds to perishables
>cheap energy
Because plastics allowed for everything related to energy to become cheap. Everything from low pressure pipes to tyres on which cars drive. It's all about plastic.
>antibiotics
No longer expensive to distribute worldwide because... we pack them in single use plastics and just toss them in a pallet.
>other medical advances
Most of whi
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>but sanitation
Plastics played a key role in modern sanitation.
No, it didn't. The big revolution in sanitation was roughly 1850 to 1950. Plastics played essentially no part in it. You'd do well to go and read some history.
Exists because of plastic packaging
Wrong again. It's fertilizers and automation and pest and weed management.
your reply is ill-informed nonsense
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Contraceptives, both barrier and oral, traditionally came in foil. Foil is not a plastic.
Anyway, enough of your bizzarre nonsense.
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They're a blessing, and were hailed as such until the green PR campaign a few years ago, that mostly conflated microplastics (plastic particulates that are so tiny that they seem to move through all our tissues largely unimpeded and that are chemically inert so out metabolism doesn't care about them) and plastic garbage...
Say what? What the fuck are you talking about? I suggest that you check out https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov] - but to save some time I'll quote one of the relevant passages:
MPs can enter the human body through different exposure routes and then spread to various organs and tissues via the respiratory tract, digestive system, or blood circulation. It is crucial to note that the toxins present in the MPs can cause significant damage to the body’s functions (Figure 4) [65,204]. The different particle
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Things like machine vision and modern robotics to do separation cheaply. It just didn't materialize.
What "didn't materialize" are called MRFs (material recover facilities).
For example, here's my local one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
They do work pretty well and some do a good job of even separating PET drink bottles
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"MRF" is one of the acronyms for a combination of machine vision and robotics doing the handling.
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It's not either of those. Optical sorters used don't sort of ir laser spectroscopy and then an air puffer to sort.
It's also not what the acronym means. Some MRFs run almost entirely on human labor.
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Remember, the order is reuse - repair - recycle.
The Three Rs are "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle". Reduction is the most important thing, and it has the greatest benefit. Repair falls under the category of Reuse. Recycling is the least beneficial of the three - but it's the easiest to adopt, the easiest to game and cheat, and the least likely to lower profit. In fact, pretending to recycle has clearly become a profit centre.
That's why Recycling is trumpeted from corporate rooftops, while Reusing is undermined by planned obsolescence and Reducing is discouraged b
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While a fun rant, in reality technology to do it exists. Technology to do it in a way that is less destructive to environment than burning it doesn't
A critical difference to your examples, where neither generalized transmutation nor room temperature superconductors exist even at higher cost compared to what we do today. In plastics recycling, the main reason why it's hard is because plastics recycling is just not very good even in perfect conditions, like well organized pre-sorted PET bottle recycling syste
Re: Sometimes I wish I was unconscionable and ruth (Score:1)
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so that I could get a lot money by doing shit like this.
Maybe you could convince a government to force people to send you plastic, so you could participate in this.
Fuel (Score:1)
Yes, converting it into fuel is recycling because the stuff would probably be burnt anyway in an incinerator with the energy being wasted, so you might as well use it for fuel so saving on burning diesel/whatever instead. Its certainly better than burying it in landfill and making it another generations problem.
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Yes, converting it into fuel is recycling
No, it literally is not. Like, f'reals literally. Recycling is turning it back into another product again, it does not mean anything else*, and it certainly is not burning it. That is repurposing and it also has its own undesirable ecological impact.
Its certainly better than burying it in landfill and making it another generations problem.
No, I don't think that it is. The plastic is very stable when you bury it. Plastic is so stable that it's what we use to make liners for when we have to bury a bunch of other waste, to keep it from seeping. In fact, it's more stable than the oil was! What needs
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I agree that it is not recycling. It is destruction. So more like "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Roast"
If done correctly, that is a reasonable and great way to solve some problems. So the question is- can it and will it be done correctly? That means burning it in such a way that it doesn't release toxic gases. I know it CAN be done. I don't know if it is economically viable- can it produce enough energy to offset the cost of doing it correctly?
I have wondered for years if I am totally wasting my time carefu
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If done correctly, that is a reasonable and great way to solve some problems.
At the expense of everything. We are trying to reduce CO2 emissions, not increase them.
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>"At the expense of everything. We are trying to reduce CO2 emissions, not increase them."
If recycling isn't going to happen, you think that burying plastic is a better alternative? Plastics aren't going to go away. They are just way too valuable. We can work to reduce the amount of plastic (without being stupid, like virtue-signal focusing on straws and reusable bags), we can work to try and recycle (although we see how that has been going), but ultimately, we still have to dispose of plastics.
There
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If recycling isn't going to happen, you think that burying plastic is a better alternative?
Yes. Got any hard questions?
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"Recycling is turning it back into another product again"
What do you think diesel is if its not a product?
"The plastic is very stable when you bury it."
Not all plastics. Some become very brittle and break up, other leach plasticisers and other crap into the water table.
"it's what we use to make liners"
There's no such thing as "plastic" you dunce , there are hundreds of different types of polymers in use. Some are stable, some arn't.
"burying them is absolutely the least impactful thing you can do with them"
A
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Every single plastic is more stable than crude.
If you are concerned about the additives leaching into the soil, you should be concerned about them leaching while they are in use as well, and we should be changing out those additives.
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"Every single plastic is more stable than crude."
So what? We don't dump crude into landfill so its an irrelevant comparison.
"you should be concerned about them leaching while they are in use as well,"
I do worry about them leaching when in use particularly in food wrappings and drink bottles. Its well know that BPA leaches into food and drink.
Nobody feels funny about (Score:1)
Lithium in the AirTag CR2032 battery being left to burn with the plastic?
Also putting lithium in summer sun is probably more likely to set off piles of plastic..
Anyway I built a system to track garbage for a municipal plastic recycling company.
You do not want to go into a warehouse in the summer let me tell you. Flies.
Also, the garbage people are just after the money. And one of the ways to get rid of plastic is to burn it with paper in boilers as a fuel, that is "recycling" too for some definition of the w
Recycling Plastic Is a Dangerous Waste of Time (Score:1)
The Recyling Myth (Score:1)
I'm all for using this wonderful, cheap, unbreakable material that we call plastic ; but the documentary opened my eyes to what happens after use.
1. There seems to always be a "downgrade penalty" when plastic is actually recycled. You can't make a shiny new PET bottle from melting down used PET bottles. At best, you obtain a low
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Looks like it might still be available if you VPN from Norway.
https://tv.nrk.no/serie/hvorfo... [tv.nrk.no]
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I seen picnic tables (Score:2)
Recycling is a mostly green washing event. (Score:2)
I suspect that second truck roll is offsetting any environmental 'gains' from recycling. Recycling is a waste of resources just like the plastic itself.
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Disturbing prediction (Score:2)
No Air Tags Required (Score:3)
need to check other waste (Score:2)
I'm still waiting for the article where someone flushes an airtag down the toilet.
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Apple MicroplasticsPro (Score:2)
AirTags aren't recyclable, so ... (Score:2)
The AirTags she added technically made whatever she hid them in unrecyclable and that stuff typically goes to -- drum roll -- a landfill. The detection/sorting equipment could have simply sifted that out as normal processing.
Recylcing plastic is a producers' fueled lie (Score:2)
The only economically worthy and environmentally least damaging way to dispose of plastic, is with high temperature incineration, period!
High temperature incineration has a positive energy output suitable for heating water and producing electricity.
Incineration breaks down complex chemicals to (co2, water, nitrogen). The co2 output is limited to that contained in the plastic. Processing is self sustained. Logistic is limited to a single site.
Every other method has unsustainable drawbacks in term of energy u
Reuse (Score:2)