Plastics Industry Pushed 'Advanced Recycling' Despite Knowing Problems (theguardian.com) 45
Plastic producers have pushed "advanced recycling" as a salve to the plastic waste crisis despite knowing for years that it is not a technically or economically feasible solution, a new report argues. The Guardian: Advanced recycling, also known as chemical recycling, refers to a variety of processes used to break plastics into their constituent molecules. The industry has increasingly promoted these technologies, as public concern about the environmental and health effects of plastic pollution has grown. Yet the rollout of these technologies has been plagued by problems, according to a new analysis from the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), a fossil-fuel accountability advocacy group.
"The companies make it sound like it's pretty great, like it's something we should pursue," said Davis Allen, investigative researcher at the CCI and author of the report. "But they know the problems, the limitations." The new analysis follows a 2024 CCI report which alleged that plastic producers concealed the problems with traditional recycling, and argued that they could face legal ramifications for doing so. That earlier research was cited in a September lawsuit filed by California's attorney general, Rob Bonta, against ExxonMobil for its role in the plastic pollution crisis. "The new report focuses on this modern deception with advanced recycling, which has become a real focus for the industry in recent years," said Davis.
"The companies make it sound like it's pretty great, like it's something we should pursue," said Davis Allen, investigative researcher at the CCI and author of the report. "But they know the problems, the limitations." The new analysis follows a 2024 CCI report which alleged that plastic producers concealed the problems with traditional recycling, and argued that they could face legal ramifications for doing so. That earlier research was cited in a September lawsuit filed by California's attorney general, Rob Bonta, against ExxonMobil for its role in the plastic pollution crisis. "The new report focuses on this modern deception with advanced recycling, which has become a real focus for the industry in recent years," said Davis.
Reduce! (Score:5, Interesting)
Reduce. THEN Reuse. THEN Recycle. In that order.
A waste-to-energy incinerator works in some situations where landfills aren't practical, but only in regions where air quality problems aren't likely.
Capturing carbon by burying your plastic in a landfill is a reasonable compromise. Best is not to pump the oil out of the ground at all.
On the flip side of incineration is open burning of plastic, which is one of the biggest causes of air pollution in the world, and that needs to stop. But nations that need a proper incinerator don't have the money to build one. And their landfills are too large, sprawling, and are poorly managed.
As long as we continue to consume oil, we will have cheap carbon for making plastic. Recycling plastic is just not worth the cost, ans the resulting product is generally worse than virgin plastic. Not just worse material properties, but recycled plastic tends to degrade into microplastics more easily. Best to just bury it or burn it.
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This is the right answer, and plastic recycling is basically a scam.
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This is the right answer, and plastic recycling is basically a scam.
There's a lot of scamminess around plastic recycling but not all of it as a scam. See here for example:
https://www.letsrecycle.com/pr... [letsrecycle.com]
(free but login-walled).
You can see what the price per tonne for various plastics out of the MRF (industry lingo: material recovery facility, i.e. the plant that takes in DMR (dry mixed recyclables) and outputs bales of various materials at various grades of purity).
Natural HDPE (which is almost always milk
Re:Reduce! (Score:5, Insightful)
Reduce. THEN Reuse. THEN Recycle. In that order.
I agree but unfortunately, this runs counter to our system of woefully unbalanced capitalism. I say this because under the current system, producers have a disincentive to reduce production, have a disincentive to make things reusable, and almost no incentive to make things recyclable.
In order to balance the economics of the equation we need to make producers financially responsible for the cost of recycling that which they produce. The result of this is an incentive to reduce the amount produced (to reduce overall recycling costs), an incentive to ensure products are more reusable (to reduce the amount needing to be recycled), and an incentive to make it easy to recycle (since they have to pay for it).
Some people point to economic systems as being the problem but really it's lack of responsibility that is the problem.
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That's the role of the state, to balance the equation, provide incentives where the market will not naturally create them. This can be as simple as taxes or as heavy as legal regulations.
Capitalism isn't good or bad, it just is. It's a system that does not exist in nature, humans made it up and since we created it we can decide what outcomes we want it to produce.
Re:Reduce! (Score:4, Interesting)
That's the role of the state, to balance the equation, provide incentives where the market will not naturally create them.
Regulation?! *faints*
Unfortunately, this is the kind of reaction you can expect from most politicians in office. I'm fully aware of how the system can be corrected and I know there are a lot of ideologues who would rather let people die than do anything to fix it. This of course is by design as they are the result of selection bias, being promoted by corporations and the wealthy. Yet again, another system they desire to keep broken. The powerful do not care for an effective government, merely one on a leash.
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Yeah I hate the phrase "picking winners and losers" because the government does that all. the. time and it always has, it can't not do that.
Even in the case where we are talking regulations of plastics and other waste; the simple bottle deposit in many states. There's no incentive to "recycle" or put that empty bottle where it's supposed to (other than social pressure) so we provide a minor incentive and bingo, people return their bottles and cans.
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I'm fully aware of how the system can be corrected and I know there are a lot of ideologues who would rather let people die than do anything to fix it.
To be fair, on the opposite side of the equation there are also the "if it saves just one life" people. Well meaning I'm sure but not a realistic way to operate a regulatory regime.
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"[W]ould rather let people die" was merely an illustration of how immovable they are, it was not literal in regard to life-saving regulation. Take your nonsense and be gone.
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"[W]ould rather let people die" was merely an illustration of how immovable they are
Ditto.
all lies all the time (Score:1, Troll)
Capitalists are criminals who've convinced the law they're on it's side. I cannot fathom what's wrong with all the dolts that cannot plainly see this now, but it's everywhere, in every industry. They're literally playing a game of brinksmanship to see which collapses first, them or society, and they don't care what harm they do to win that race, in fact they're legally required not to since they're publicly traded and the stock market legally requires them not to endanger their bottom line for any reason.
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Do you own anything? Trade your time or goods/services for money? Or similar? You're a capitalist. Go to jail!
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1: a person who has capital especially invested in business; broadly: a person of wealth: Plutocrat
2: a person who favors capitalism
There are venture capitalists. Apparently there are also some venture socialists and venture communists.
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That is a horrid description. Anyone who owns property freely and buys/sells/trades is a capitalist.
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learn what words mean, idiot
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I know exactly what it means. Everyone from sole propieters to business moguls are capitalist. You are not a capitalist if you have ceded your right to own property to some oligarchy or liege lord. Which historically have been the impediments to capitalism, at least among their subjects.
In other words, unless you're a serf serving a lord or a citizen trapped in a socialist hell hole, you're some kind of capitalist. Or I guess someone living off the land in isolation would also not be a capitalist.
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You are conflating Commerce with Capitalism.
Under even the most strict and Authoritarian ideology of Authoritarian Communism an individual that has fulfilled their appropriately allocated work in support of the collective would be able to proffer their skills in manufacturing practical or artistic items or forms of service to others in exchange for currency, items of value, or reciprocal services at a rate of exchange of their own choosing. If they set that rate too high then fewer people will opt to make t
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Commerce *is* capitalism! One requires the other.
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No. You are simply wrong in this belief.
Commerce is a prerequisite for capitalism, but it is not capitalism.
All Capitalist transactions are commerce, but not all commerce is capitalistic.
Capitalism requires that there is a Capitalist that owns the means of production and uses that ownership to extract all of the surplus value created by the workers for themselves from the transaction. Commerce is an equitable exchange of value between workers and customers.
A person is not a Capitalist unless they extract va
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this is not trolling, but tagging it such is. You'll figure it out the hard way soon enough. Too bad the church won and america's retarded again. (also the real truth and not trolling)
shouldn't have let reagan fuck your education system in the ass
So we've known for decades (Score:5, Insightful)
Once in industry is entrenched it's not going to allow itself to be removed even if it's harmful. History is filled with extremely profitable industries that did terrible things to everyone and everything around them and spend a good chunk of money covering that up.
One of the greatest innovations in modern propaganda was learning that just because the truth is actually out there doesn't mean anything. Alternative facts have been around for a while and while they were perfected by the current American Presidents administration and the right wing noise machine they're nothing new.
Re:So we've known for decades (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly! It's been said many times that one of the only items that makes any economic sense to recycle is aluminum. Aluminum cans are cheaper to recycle than the cost of mining for more aluminum ore and refining it.
I bet if the truth was told, most of your city-wide recycling programs count on capturing those aluminum cans as the main/only item that makes the program profitable on their books?
Most other material I see going into recycling bins are glass or paper/cardboard items, plus your random plastic containers that likely don't get recycled at all but people mistakenly believe they do so they toss them in. (Laundry soap jugs, etc.)
I know at one time, they claimed they made money selling the recycled cardboard and paper after compressing it into bales. But most of that went overseas, before other nations stopped accepting more of them from us in the U.S. Anyone who ever lived near a paper mill can attest to the horrible stench it gives off from the chemicals needed to process the pulp into paper products. Recycled paper/cardboard is of a lesser grade than fresh lumber so it has limited uses and demand. It's fine to make more cardboard shipping boxes, but does you no good for making a good quality greeting card. If you're dealing with nasty polluting chemicals to process paper either way? You usually may as well make higher grade paper instead of low grade stuff from recyclables, while you're at it. The big environmental impact is from the processing; not the fact you had to use fresh cut trees instead of scrap paper/cardboard. The trees are a renewable resource.
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I feel like if my county recycling program was profitable they wouldn't have to force me to do it and charge me for the pleasure. The fact they charge me for it tells me it's a jobs program more than a profit center.
Re: So we've known for decades (Score:3)
Steel is also worth recycling. It doesn't save you any energy to speak of, but it does reduce mining. Same for glass, it doesn't save any energy in production itself, but you didn't have to go get more sand.
Some plastics are recyclable, some not so much. But that doesn't mean it's not worth recycling what we can just to avoid landfilling it.
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But with glass, you can get plenty of sand with very little effort along any beach or in a desert.... I don't see how there's much savings if you're driving around big, inefficient garbage collection trucks to get used glass from recycling bins and then having to have people sort it out to ready it for re-use?
For all the talk of landfills being some kind of "last resort"? I remember one statistic saying the entire nation's garbage disposal needs for 100 years being able to be handled by putting it all in
Re: So we've known for decades (Score:2)
If you could reasonably put all the waste in one area it might take up that little land. But you reasonably have to have zones around them that you're not using for anything else. It's also not just the space, it's the shipping and sorting and processing.
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Isn't colored glass the main problem with glass recycling? Once there's any color in it, you have to keep it away from clear and other colors. Most people are stupid enough that they would likely spoil the feedstock if they bothered to recycle glass.
Anyhow, I at least make an effort for aluminum (I get a free lunch or so worth of cash for three bins), and steel cans (city recycling). I will also put out big metal junk on the curb during bulk collection weeks, and it disappears before collection, as expecte
Re: So we've known for decades (Score:2)
You can sort the glass with automation now though, so the big problem with glass is really breakage. The broken glass could however be mixed, it would produce a lower quality brown glass but no doubt we could find a use for that.
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Some consumer grade plastic like milk bottles or PET/soda bottles can be recycled, BUT a lot of recycling is single stream where it all gets dumped into one bin so it's not worth the cost of sorting out the other crap to extract them for recycling.
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and why (Score:3)
Why would the plastics industry push any kind of recycling? Because they were under INTENSE pressure, that's why. Don't expect the truth when you apply torture.
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Recently, the admins of the Gobekli Tepe archaeological site in Turkey felt "forced" to cave to public pressure about the olive trees archaeology routinely uses to protect sites it does not have plans to dig immediately. Olive trees have a very shallow root system, excepting a dowsing root which runs deep looking for water (and so, is not capable of harming the archaeology, stone being a lousy drink)
They felt they had to remove the trees because some youtube conspiritard got too big for his britches and pe
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Why would the plastics industry push any kind of recycling? Because they were under INTENSE pressure, that's why. Don't expect the truth when you apply torture.
I think we should give the public a choice, but make them abide by that choice: live with the plastic trash waste, or go back to glass to a great extent (which is truly recyclable).
Here are the choices, here are those consequences. Choose. Then live with it.
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Glass is great for reuse, but that takes a lot more effort and organization than chucking it into a common bin. Glass recycling is just about as energy intensive as making new glass, and it's not like there's any shortage of raw material. Aluminum, cardboard, and precious metals are the only things that make sense to recycle with current technology and economics.
This is (almost certainly) not correct.
Quite apart from the fact that recycling glass saves on raw materials, the broken up 'old' glass, known in the industry as cullet, reduces the energy required to melt those raw materials by lowering their melting point, resulting in energy and cost savings of ~40%. It also has the added advantage that, for all bar 'speciality' glass, the chemical composition already matches that of the finished product. There are, for sure, efficiencies of scale when it comes to the so
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"Clean plastic." Recycling fans expect me to wash my garbage. I think not.
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"Clean plastic." Recycling fans expect me to wash my garbage. I think not.
There are no easy answers, however, for people's ignorance and apathy...
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Glass is also better as a container for food products, as it's much more inert than plastic.
This reminds me of my chemistry professor (Score:2, Interesting)
This reminds me of my chemistry professor at university taking a few minutes of lecture time to speak in favor of the city proposing a waste-to-energy power plant. This power plant would not explicitly burn plastics for energy that was implied. The professor pointed out the energy costs of recycling plastics versus burning them for energy.
There is no point in recycling plastics, we should simply burn them in waste to energy power plants. This could likely be applied to all manner of municipal waste.
I hav
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Feasibility Doesn't Matter (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't matter if it's feasible or economical or even practical.
What matters is if the public can be persuaded that it's good.
Just like carbon sequestration (Score:3)
pushed by oil companies
Start with packaging (Score:1)
No plastic tape to seal boxes. Use paper tape.
No plastic bag for nonperishable goods. Use paper or no bag.
No plastic shrink wrap. Paper tape is great if you need to seal a box.
No plastic bubbles for filler. Use paper or corn starch foam.
No plastic straps. Metal straps or cardboard hole grips work fine.
Glass or metal jars only for preserved foods like peanut butter and jelly.
Paper with wax lining for milk, or glass containers.
Right there, you've taken an immense amount of plastic waste out of the system