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Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve

• JudasGoat 8y ago
  If we can't robotically seperate the different types of plastic presently, could we tag new plastics with something machine readable? Bar codes seem impracticle for some uses. So just invent a micro tag, I guess.
• doggydogs94 8y ago
  I have seen lots of gripes here about corporate America in these comments, but very little in the way of realistic solutions.
• chiefalchemist 8y ago
  While the marketers will cry, if more packaging was more standardized then reuse would be easier and ideally less expensive. The standardization of shipping containers made the movement of goods more effective and less expensive. It's time to do the same for packaging. As a side note: perhaps less disposable is appropriate at times as well. Those 16.9 oz water bottles are purposely one-and-done. It's 2018. Certainly someone can find a way to make them so they can be reused.
• oldcynic 8y ago
  A remarkably accurate summary of the mess we've brought upon ourselves. It very much is a game, or recycling theatre.
• 0xcafecafe 8y ago
  Hence it is always important to remember: reduce, reuse and recycle, in that order. You don't have to recycle if you can reuse.
  • protonimitate 8y ago
    While I agree with that order of operations so to speak, I'm not sure why the responsibility is pushed onto consumers. It's hard to make a choice when it comes down to plastic, plastic, or plastic. What is being/can be done to get companies to stop using plastic in packaging? I understand that it is necessary for a lot of modern conveniences, but surely there is something that can be done to curb the production and use on the manufacturing side.
    • gambiting 8y ago
      The problem is that companies use a stupidly ridiculous amount of plastic. The other week I bought some dessert which had a non-recyclable box, then each portion was in a non-recyclable plastic cup, held in place by a non-recyclable plastic tray with a non-recyclable plastic lid on each cup. Absolutely insane.
      • narag 8y ago
        That's the place for regulation. Let's forbid the damned thing or at least tax it heavily. Anything not reusable? Make them pay for externalities.
        • deleted 8y ago
          [deleted]
    • idoh 8y ago
      It is completely possible to orient purchases away from plastic. In fact if someone believes that plastic is bad then they should have some stake in it by making those decisions themselves. I went through reducing my plastic use myself, it was not difficult to reduce my plastic use by 50% or more: A: look at my trash before I move it to the curb to see what plastic things were in there B: find substitute for the obvious things, like using water bottles, buying vegetables using reusable bags instead of buying them in packages, switching to a non-plastic dental floss, etc ... and that is all. Companies respond to consumer demand. You can play a part in it by orienting your demand to non plastic items.
      • protonimitate 8y ago
        I'm all for personal responsibility but I don't think that there is a critical mass to invoke production changes. (Anecdotally) for every one person I know taking the time to be conscious, I know two that couldn't care less. I believe most people fall into the 'not my problem' bucket.
        • 8y ago
  • kevin_b_er 8y ago
    Then we need to reduce the amount of garbage produced. "Plastics make it possible" to be wasteful.
  • peterwwillis 8y ago
    Yes! And you can extend it to five R's: Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose, and Recycle. You don't have to buy or accept products that can harm you, your company or the environment. Vote with your dollar. Refuse non-recyclable giveaways/swag; plastic bags; toxic chemical solvents; items with unnecessary packaging; single use plastic; phone books. Use less. Think about what you use and buy. Reduce junk mail, mailed bills; acquisition of unnecessary toys and tools; the amount of energy you use; water and wastewater; waste in manufacturing processes; acquisition of cheap products that may not last long. Why buy something twice when you can buy it once and reuse it over and over again, such as cloth grocery and produce bags; water bottles/travel mugs; packable metal cutlery set; glass jars from pickles, jellies, and salsa; bring old takeout containers for restaurant doggy bags; a normal mop head rather than a disposable; washable dish cloths rather than paper towels; refurbished or used clothes, electronics, cars, etc; building materials from home improvement donation centers; rechargeable batteries; shoes and boots that can be resoled or re-glued; sewing for minor tears in clothes; borrow or rent rather than purchasing for one use; food scraps as flavoring for stocks and soups; food waste as composte; leftover plastic bags as waste containers or for organizing. Take something and use it for something else. Repurpose junk mail envelopes as scrap paper; cereal bag liners, for handling/storing foods or organizing home goods; torn or worn clothes as rags; donate unneeded items rather than throwing away; tires as wall insulation or boat fenders; glass bottles for glass walls; plastic drums as floats, feed troughs, compost bins, rain barrels. If the above 4 options won’t work (refer to this guide as well http://thegreeningofwestford.com/2012/02/how-to-recycle-everything.html http://thegreeningofwestford.com/2012/02/how-to-recycle-ever...) recycle paper, plastic, metal, and glass; fabrics and textiles, including ripped or stained; electronics, accepted at some electronics stores and special recycling centers; wine corks, accepted at some wine and food stores; home good and building materials, to re-stores and habitat for humanity; books, home goods, clothing, and other items to thrift stores.
• Reedx 8y ago
  It's way past time to start pricing in externalities. More of a push to "reduce and reuse".
  • r00fus 8y ago
    Lets start with the supply chain. Don't just dump this on consumers. I want to see less individually plastic wrapped/boxed fruit.
    • organsnyder 8y ago
      Consumers are at fault there, too. If people didn't buy it, companies wouldn't produce it. Consumers need to be disincentivized from purchasing such wasteful products.
      • r00fus 8y ago
        Consumers are limited because suppliers (in aggregate) often control the market. If all the stores supply wasteful products, what are your options. If you're a store and you have limited options on what you can sell (because all the suppliers have wasteful packaging) what are your options? The problem (plastic junk) comes from the supply-side. It doesn't really help consumers for the most part - heck I think most would prefer fruit that was local (all else being equal).
        • Reedx 8y ago
          Granted, it should be attacked from all sides, but how much of that do consumers actually need? It's possible (not easy, nor very practical let's say) to have almost zero waste if you're really dedicated. This is 4 years worth of trash that fits in a mason jar: https://youtu.be/BxKfpt70rLI?t=30s https://youtu.be/BxKfpt70rLI?t=30s So making a pretty sizable reduction even as things are should be doable.
      • glenneroo 8y ago
        Easy if there were more alternatives. Most products are packaged in plastic with no alternatives. I recently saw a shop which is committed to selling everything in open crates (fruits/veggies - bring your own bags) or using only 100% recyclable materials (glass, paper or biodegradable plastic).
• blang 8y ago
  I used to live in central New Jersey, where the people of Waste Management would send out quarterly fliers telling people "When in doubt throw it out"[0] I now live in Seattle, and when I tell people this campaign, they get extremely preachy and judgmental. Then when I try to explain that no, it's actually better for the environment, things really go no where. I should probably just give up on that. [0] http://www.hamiltonnj.com/filestorage/228309/252258/Calendar_Middle_Insert_Section_2016_How_Do_I_Get_Rid_Of_Page_Full_Document.pdf http://www.hamiltonnj.com/filestorage/228309/252258/Calendar...
  • leeter 8y ago
    We used to have separate stream recycling here... it was actually easier, you put glass and metal in one bin, I believe 1&2s in the next and 3s in the third, everything else was tossed.
  • retbull 8y ago
    I've had this fight with my roommate here in Seattle as well. He obsesses over which thing goes into our recycle bin. Trashing it fixes a lot of the overhead and you can always recycle glass/metal easily.
    • dboreham 8y ago
      If you are forced to haul your own trash 10 miles to town as we are, you really want to separate the recycling because it significantly reduces the volume of trash (which can't be stored for long) vs recycling (which can). Also bears aren't interested in recycling material.
  • hinkley 8y ago
    Method cleaning products was usually a little understated about their environmental bent. One particular time they got loud was when they created a non-recyclable package for refills for their hand soap and dish soap dispensers. From memory, they looked at the net recovery rate for the material they were considering, and it was something like 30% after inputs. But they could engineer a durable water tight material that was less than 20% of the thickness of the recyclable version, and which packed better meaning lower shipping costs (and resources). And given that these were for refills (Reuse!), they felt fully justified in making disposable packaging. But apparently a little defensive...
• Glyptodon 8y ago
  I think I could handle one bin for plastic, one bin for metal+glass, one bin for paper. Anything more complicated I don't really trust myself do right without a lot of vigilance. And I've heard that things as typical as staples in the cardboard/paper stream ruin everything cost-wise, which makes it all seem sort of lost-cause-ish.
  • DisruptiveDave 8y ago
    At one point in NYC we had to use four - FOUR - different bins. In a tiny ass apartment. And still, there were so many damn edge cases that I gave up. Sorry, but I have a full time job and plenty to do outside of work. Make the recycling process easy on my end and I'll do it. Make it ridiculously complicated and I won't. Honest question - at what point do my tax dollars cap out and the onus gets put back on me? Might be naive, but I always wanted to know the answer.
• idbehold 8y ago
  Perhaps we should start doing something like what Taiwan did with their trash: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/separation-anxiety/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/separation-anxiety/ > The trucks only accept trash bags officially sanctioned by the government of Taiwan which come in a distinctive blue color, complete with an official seal. The bags range in price and size, from 3 liters to 120 liters. The most popular bag is 25 liters (similar to a tiny bathroom wastebasket liner), which costs about $5 for a pack of 20. This effectively makes a pay-as-you-waste model, incentivizing citizens to recycle and compost as much as possible since those services are offered for free. The musical garbage trucks are tailed by a recycling truck, where workers help the residents sort their recyclables and compost into thirteen distinct bins. Should people fail to sort their materials properly, the government will fine them up to $200.
  • oldcynic 8y ago
    Targets the wrong place. It may reduce contamination of recycling streams, but does nothing to encourage less production. Perhaps a combination approach: $5 for a pack of small bin liners, or return your waste to the shop for free. If Tesco were filled with piles of consumer waste given back to them I posit the problem would be on the way to being solved within weeks.
    • kwhitefoot 8y ago
      > If Tesco were filled with piles of consumer waste given back to them I vaguely remember seeing something about this happening in Germany where households are charged by the amount of rubbish that has to be collected. So people unwrap things in the shop and leave the packaging behind.
      • ryandrake 8y ago
        Honestly, companies really ought to be charged for the disposal of all that packaging they choke their products with. There seems to be no back pressure stopping manufacturers from wrapping a 10g USB stick in 400g of plastic packaging/advertising.
    • 8y ago
• wlesieutre 8y ago
  I have single stream recycling and the shit that people put into it is ridiculous sometimes. Greasy pizza boxes are a popular one.
  • aaron_oxenrider 8y ago
    Our recycle company specifically told us to throw pizza boxes in the recycling. I'm told there are some ways to still use it just not in making paper again.
    • vkou 8y ago
      They can probably be composted.
      • yourapostasy 8y ago
        There could be concerns over potential toxins arising from the breakdown of the inks and adhesives used in making the boxes entering the food stream?
    • StudentStuff 8y ago
      Can't you just compost it?
  • pwenzel 8y ago
    In Minneapolis, greasy pizza boxes specifically go in organics recycling (aka "municipal compost"). Chicken bones and dairy products too - It's amazing what you can put in there. http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/solid-waste/organics/index.htm http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/solid-waste/organics/index.h...
    • wlesieutre 8y ago
      Huh, everywhere I've lived has specifically excluded pizza boxes. I just checked our website again, and the flyer I remember seeing is gone, replaced with one that says pizza boxes are recyclable now. "No food residue. No liner." Accompanied by a picture of a clearly never used pizza box. So now I'm not sure. Is oil soaked into it OK as long as you scrape every last bit of solid food out of it? Do you need no food residue (literally impossible), or is a small amount acceptable? I'm more informed than when I started, but still uncertain. Apparently we can't recycle shredded paper, that's news to me. This list is now standardized across all of Connecticut. You can search an item and see what to do with it. http://www.recyclect.com/ http://www.recyclect.com/ >You can put your pizza box in recycling if it does not contain food residue. The liner should go in the trash.
• jaggederest 8y ago
  I'm always confused why we aren't pyrolyzing refuse and reusing the hydrocarbons in them. It's energetically and monetarily expensive, but both costs are more or less paid for by the output products and input products, as far as I am aware. And you get out fairly high quality fuels.
  • pmiller2 8y ago
    My guess is that you may end up with more than just hydrocarbons, and then you have to dispose of those waste byproducts. You certainly wouldn't do this to electronic waste, but, perhaps, if you could guarantee a pure stream of plastics, you could make it work.
    • jaggederest 8y ago
      Well, one of the major problems is that if you pyrolyze PVC you get hydrochloric acid as a byproduct, but you can extract that by washing. These are known, operating plants, they just aren't operational here, for whatever reason.
  • supertrope 8y ago
    Air pollution is worse than landfills. Incineration increases our exposure to heavy metals and dioxins. Burning plastic is a fairly nasty process and can only be done "cleanly" at very high temperatures. Trash also contains stuff like batteries that explode when burned.
    • jaggederest 8y ago
      Not incineration. Pyrolysis, in an anoxic environment. It's the same process by which syngas is produced, except that the results are longer chain carbons and thus just have to be cracked and distilled rather than Fischer-Tropsch'd into usable feedstocks. You use about 30% of the input mass of organics to power the process (usually the lightest fraction that is equivalent to syngas), and the result is about 10% waste material and 60% usable mass fractions in the fuel-to-wax range, just like a normal oil refinery.
• Pica_soO 8y ago
  Its always just cooperations, solving their tax-worthy public problems by dividing and conquering it as challenge for the individual.
• colechristensen 8y ago
  I'm not sure I want to live in a world where people are allowed to vote and drive cars and own guns who can't figure out which bin their garbage belongs inside. I have never lived in a place where the instructions weren't provided and clear. Here are some instructions from Sweden. There are 10 categories. I think there could be more. https://www.affarsverken.se/Documents/Renhallning/Sorteringsguiden/Sorteringsguide_engelsk.pdf https://www.affarsverken.se/Documents/Renhallning/Sorterings...
  • jdavis703 8y ago
    I've worked at many tech companies (arguably dealing with the smarter side of humanity), and have had to re-educate many people including software engineers on what's garbage, recycling or trash. The problem isn't that people are too dumb to recycle, it's that they don't care.
    • vmarshall23 8y ago
      So someone still has to sort it. Raise taxes. Hire sorters. Save time and money by having software engineers spend more time learning software engineering, not whether a corn-based plastic spoon should go in compost or recycling.
  • bayfullofrays 8y ago
    This is a problem with capitalism. A sense of social responsibility is traded for personal satisfaction what I am assuming is some form of subtle aggression to those in non-western cultures knowing that their garbage will be sent to poorer and brown communities to live with.
• dboreham 8y ago
  The underlying problem is that manufacturers of things we buy have been permitted to "externalize" part of their supply chain cost (onto the rest of us). So the fix would be to un-do that : if you sell something, you have to take back all the waste and packaging. Probably not going to happen, but this is the real problem.
  • c22 8y ago
    Or just charge manufacturers a "packaging tax" based on weight and composition of any materials included with a product but not part of said product. You could use the money to pay for better sorting of the waste stream.
• rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
  I think the basic problem is that there is no feedback mechanism for recycling. For example, I could judge an eaten-but-not-entirely-washed-out plastic container of hummus to be clean enough for recycling, but I will never know if it is ultimately recycled or thrown away once it leaves the green bin. Machine learning could help consumers by leaps and bounds by being able to say with a picture or two whether a given item is recyclable. I don’t know how you would incentivize people to use such an app, but I imagine options such as redeemable points or discounts (like paying less for coffee in a reusable container at most coffee shops) or public shaming (like when the power company tells you how much you spend on electricity versus your neighbors) could help make recycling more efficient. Aside from that, though, I’m not sure how to do much more on the consumer side of things. As others have mentioned here, the choices are often plastic, plastic, and plastic.
  • emodendroket 8y ago
    Well, in Japan the trash all has labels telling you what category it is and they're much more fine-grained (you might have to peel off one part and throw it away separately from the rest, for instance).
• samatman 8y ago
  Startup I will never get around to: A store which sells only bulk and fresh food, and durable containers: mesh bags, Mason jars, glass bottles. Every container, dispenser, and display has a scale, and unlocks with a nearfield chip. Enter the store, tap phone or insert chip card, get a card. Fill up your cart, stick the card back into the slot, get charged, done. One customer service kiosk for buying back clean containers at 80% of retail cost.
  • gascan 8y ago
    Depending on where you live, it might already (mostly) exist, minus the NFC part. Grocery co-op in my area has a big back room of bulk goods, sells durable containers too, run by hippies and has been around for decades. The real hurdles with selling bulk & having customers reuse containers is handling tare smoothly and getting customers to remember to bring their containers.
    • searchhay 8y ago
      There was a zero-waste grocer in Austin, but they recently went out of business. http://austin.culturemap.com/news/restaurants-bars/04-25-18-ingredients-grocery-store-closing-zero-waste-east-austi/ http://austin.culturemap.com/news/restaurants-bars/04-25-18-...
  • jcoffland 8y ago
    So the exact opposite if Blue Apron?
  • musage 8y ago
    There's a store in Berlin selling food without packaging: https://original-unverpackt.de/ https://original-unverpackt.de/
  • athenot 8y ago
    There's a network of those in France, called "Day by Day". Most items are sold without packaging. Apparently they started in 2013. http://daybyday-shop.com http://daybyday-shop.com
• toss1 8y ago
  I try to reuse some significant parts of our packaging stream, such as 1Kg yogurt containers, bringing them to the shop to use for mixing epoxy instead of buying mix cups. Since I thought of recycling as having a high reuse rate (so having the hope that each bit of plastic might get used more than 2x), I used to think that this was a poor substitute and felt a bit bad about it. Since reading a number of articles like this, I feel much better about it, since this material is at least getting 200% of the original use, which seems considerably greater than the actual recycling re-use rates. So, reuse > recycling, yay!
• VWrapper 8y ago
  -snip, self-censorship for safety-
  • ryandrake 8y ago
    This is a good point. I’m reminded of a thread from yesterday: [1]. There are tons of places where nobody gives a single crap about waste disposal. The sides of the roads are literal trash heaps. “The West” is not going to solve this global problem by making everyone sort their trash into 10 different bins. It needs to stop at the source: the companies producing all this waste (mostly discarded packaging). 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17403526 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17403526 EDIT: updated for the sensitive
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • dgacmu 8y ago
      small nit - the sorting of trash is not the exclusive domain of women. "by making people sort their trash". :-) (I say this as the household Ph.D. trash sorter...) Thanks for updating. --the sensitive.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    • billions 8y ago
      This. Visit Mumbai and tell one of the hundreds of million people that live on 50 cents a day to use their last ounce of energy to walk a piece of plastic to the trash can. I recycle gladly in California, but am realistic that problems at this scale MUST and WILL be solved by technology. Instead of finger wagging, readers of Hacker News may be the most qualified for building a machine that crawls dumpsites searching for plastic.
  • edgarvaldes 8y ago
    I get so angry when people throw trash from the car window.
• dougmwne 8y ago
  This is a classic externality problem. We can berate consumers all day long to be more diligent in their recycling, but all that finger wagging is for show meant to distract from the real source of the garbage, the manufacturers. Just like the classic "blame the user" mentality, the users were given an impossibly complex system with barely any incentive to get it right. Nothing about the interface is intuitive or discoverable. The creators of all this garbage do so because it's profitable. They can create disposable and single use items, in thousands of variations, out of materials that create hundreds of years of environmental impact, and none of that consequence comes back to their bottom line. They'll happily point the finger all day long at us stupid users and inept local governments and bad China, as long as it all distracts from their culpability. If we forced all producers of trash to account for its safe reuse, recycling or disposal as part of the cost of doing business, this problem would disappear quickly. Because here's the thing, the bill always comes due. If we let them skip out on it, then we will be the ones who pay.
  • tonyedgecombe 8y ago
    Some times you need pioneers to show that bringing a reusable cup or riding a bike isn't the same as going back to Dickensian times. You need people onboard to pressure politicians into changing laws.
  • magduf 8y ago
    >If we forced all producers of trash to account for its safe reuse, recycling or disposal as part of the cost of doing business, this problem would disappear quickly. Because here's the thing, the bill always comes due. If we let them skip out on it, then we will be the ones who pay. There's no easy way to do that, as long as we don't have a single planetary government, and as long as we have trade. The producers are in one country, the consumers in other countries, and there's no easy way to implement policies like those you advocate. You'd have to implement insanely complex treaties, which the producer countries aren't going to sign on to. Much easier is for consumer countries to figure out on their own how to deal with the waste effectively. That might require tariffs, but that's something a single county can easily implement. In the end, I see this as a technical problem. It's entirely possible to create mostly-automated plants which can process waste and recycle it. We already have such plants: you can see them on YouTube. We just need to build a lot more of them.
• njarboe 8y ago
  Comment from a similar recent thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17359807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17359807) Modern dumps are sealed very well and can hold huge amounts. At $50 a ton we will never run out of space. Put everything in the dump. Plastic, green waste, garbage, paper, electronics, etc. Sort out pure metals like steel and aluminum. Do methane recovery on the pile and burn it for power. This will sequester a lot of carbon and at some point these dumps are likely to be mined as ore bodies. People can compost at their home if they like, but moving all this green waste around is costly and causes many plant diseases to spread much more quickly. Not to mention how horrible it is to get a load of chipped wood to put on your yard that has poison oak mixed in. We don't really need this little ritual of recycling to cleanse us of our consumerism sins. If we are really trying to help the environment, reduce, repair, and reuse is much more effective. Buy high quality stuff that lasts a long time. Edit: Another bonus is that you and your neighbors only have to be woken up early once a week by the one garbage truck that comes by instead of three times with the current separate garbage, recycling, green waste trucks.
  • dang 8y ago
    Please don't recycle comments from previous threads. It's a fine comment, but HN threads are supposed to be conversations and we're trying to avoid repetition.
    • jcoffland 8y ago
      I think that's an example of reuse, which is better than recycling.
      • dang 8y ago
        Ah yes. I was carried away by the title.
    • njarboe 8y ago
      Ok. With China not taking in trash anymore, I imagine these kind of stories will continue to be on the front page for awhile. I think it is worth while for people to be exposed to this possible alternative to the current recycling system. I guess a custom response to someone else's comment is more what you are hoping for?
• lkbm 8y ago
  > While there ought to be a fine for the carcasses and Christmas lights... Maybe, but I can tell you that passers-by put non-recyclable materials in my bins every chance they get.
• jcoffland 8y ago
  It's incredible that corporations are allowed to pump out massive quantities of single use plastic and then we blame the consumer for not recycling it. The idea that the solution is to change the habits of billions of people rather than enforce some rules on a few thousand companies is just crazy.
  • gfosco 8y ago
    It's the same with drought conditions in California, asking millions of people who collectively use like 7% of the water supply to sacrifice, with no attention to the small number of agriculture/industry companies using 93% of the water.
  • schiffern 8y ago
    >The idea that the solution is to change the habits of billions of people rather than enforce some rules on a few thousand companies is just crazy. It's an idea that those companies themselves invented and promulgated. https://web.archive.org/web/20050401192355/http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/21651/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050401192355/http://www.altern... (edit: archive to unbreak formatting) As always, follow the money.
  • astrodust 8y ago
    The entire packaging industry is ridiculous. For example: Why do garbage bags come in boxes or bags when they could be stored inside a garbage bag that's folded up properly to contain them?
    • gfosco 8y ago
      Marketing and shelf space reasons.
    • ascorbic 8y ago
      I'm confused. Don't they come on rolls? The most packaging I've known for garbage bags is a paper label holding the roll together.
      • 8y ago
• politician 8y ago
  I suspect that separating a stream of trash is simpler if the stream is younger and lower volume. Suppose we created a "Recycler" -- a mandatory household appliance like "Dishwasher" and "Dryer" and "Oven". This fantasy device has a few holes on top for common use cases, it beeps at the user if they screw up or when full, and it compacts the waste into small blocks. A cross between a paper shredder and trash compactor. Since it integrates with your household Nest devices, you can link the device to the city waste department to receive sweet rebates on the electricity you wasted to power it. Rebates that the city pays for with the money they receive from taxes levied on manufacturers. The entire scheme is far more wasteful than requiring manufacturers to pay for disposal of their packaging, but since it pushes even more burden onto the consumer I think it's a winner.
• ChuckMcM 8y ago
  I think the article makes some good points but it keeps jarring me with the "impossible to recycle" statements. There is "recycling" as implied by the author of the article which is that the material is converted into feedstock to make the same material again, there is "recycling" which can be defined by "is used again", and their is "recycling" which is defined as "it didn't end up in a landfill or ocean." The nuance is important. For example, you can chemically break down plastic by exposing it to high heat in an oxygen free environment (like a nitrogen)[1]. For many polymers this will reduce it to essentially various long chain polymers, some water vapor, and some left over carbon. You can incinerate plastic in a closed loop exhaust system and extract net positive energy from it. You can mechanically decompose it (think shreedding) and then either ultrasonically or thermally bond into engineered materials (which are not yogurt cups but can provide structural insulation for example) I had thought at one time that using an engineered material approach you could make things like picnic tables for Forest Service campgrounds (they would be extremely durable, insect and weather immune, and difficult to burn) however in discussions with people who could advocate for such a program I learned that they often just re-used lumber they were clearing as part of the forest management mission for such things so their materials were "free" to begin with. Conceptually though I still like the idea. [1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/app.1974.070180314 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/app.1974.070...
• oomkiller 8y ago
  We should charge per unit of garbage generated (per liter or whatever), and have tracking on how much of it was actually recyclable, which would cause some percent of the price to be refunded (billed at a lower rate to encourage recycling). Otherwise we will be constantly drowning in trash. It blows my mind that we allow people to create as much trash as they want for a flat fee when there's such a negative externality affected on our environment and community, especially since it's a much less controversial and nebulous problem than something like climate change. Billing the consumer for trash affects the design of packaging and shipping of everything they consume.
• technofiend 8y ago
  Call me crazy but I'd love to see the next round of LEED certifications require any food establishment with seating for dining required to serve with reusable dinnerware and utensils, i.e. plates, forks, knives, spoons, cups and glasses. The amount of plastic wasted by people like me who get lunch from a food court, walk ten feet away to eat lunch and then toss single use items is astounding. Yet there's no other solution without restaurants moving back to reusable items: health code won't allow them to take my container for food nor should it.
  • c22 8y ago
    It's true you can't carry your own plate around and expect restaurants to serve your food on it, but unless you're eating soup this component is often the only one that can be made truly compostable without significant compromise. And you can always reject single-use utensils and rock your own fork.
  • fooblitzky 8y ago
    I'd love to see that too. I've seen a range of industrially-compostable products, such that I feel it ought to be possible to eliminate the recycling bin altogether (for plastics, I guess metals/glass/paper still work), and have cities/states mandate the use of compostable packaging. They'd save a ton on reducing landfill/plastics recycling, and also being able to sell the resulting compost.
• modzu 8y ago
  the last paragraph is key. even if we recycled 100% of the plastic it still inevitably leads to pollution (all this talk about sorting is irrelevant!). we need to be using better materials.
  • dahart 8y ago
    It's not helpful to throw up our arms and say nothing can be done just because pollution wasn't eliminated 100%. It is helpful to compare magnitude. If we can reduce pollution by 1% or 10% or 90%... any amount is better than no reduction. If sorting helps 10%, and it takes almost no effort, then it's very relevant. I agree that better materials is a good idea. Same goes for many other suggestions here, reducing demand, charging producers, new ways to reuse and recycle. It all helps. So don't give up before you start just because it can't be perfect. Nothing's perfect.
• ape4 8y ago
  Maybe because they are "consumers"
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• jccalhoun 8y ago
  I teach college and I see students throwing their empty recyclable bottles into the trash nearly every day when the recycling bin is literally right next to it.
• jefurii 8y ago
  Caltech used to have a great recycling facility with dumpsters for the various kinds of plastic. It was open to the community and always in use. It required more time and attention to get it right but it certainly wasn't onerous. But then they bulldozed the facility to build more student housing.
• the_mitsuhiko 8y ago
  The 70% landfill rate for Europe is probably true but if you look at countries individually it’s a completely different stories. The top 10 recycling countries in the EU have leas than 5% landfilled plastics. https://www.plasticseurope.org/application/files/5715/1717/4180/Plastics_the_facts_2017_FINAL_for_website_one_page.pdf https://www.plasticseurope.org/application/files/5715/1717/4...
• Debugreality 8y ago
  In one state in Australia they used to have a pay per container returned so for example 5c per bottle. If this buyback was paid for by the manufacturer it could incentivize recycling, create jobs and help pay for recycling and sorting.
• intrasight 8y ago
  Why not levy a very substantial tax on this damaging product - like with do for cigarettes? Regulate with economic incentives seems usually to be the right solution. Also, if the US could just get to European levels, that would cut US waste by almost half.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• kevin_b_er 8y ago
  This is the result of corporate greed combined with the tragedy of the commons. Corporate greed makes the waste, consumers act primary in self-interest and select for short-term cheapness, and politicians don't want to reign or regulate that greed or consumer selfishness.
• vmarshall23 8y ago
  This has long driven me crazy. I have a version of this argument with my wife every few weeks. I live in a city that has three bins: compost, landfill, and recycling, and overall the city (SF) does a really good job apparently of sorting trash. But if you want a system that doesn't break down if someone throws a handful of batteries in the compost bin, then someone or something somewhere still has to sort the trash stream. So, at best, you've used all the labor of everyone in SF to reduce the number of people/things/processes downstream to sort the trash properly. So, yes, the ball is ultimately in the manufacturer's court for a lot of this, but home recycling is at best a terrible use of labor/time/money. Raise taxes to hire more sorting capability, because if it requires 100 more trained humans sorting somewhere downstream that's surely less than all-the-people-in-SF-a-few-minutes-everyday to do a less-than-perfect job. Also, I think a lot of these laws also do another disservice in that they make people feel like they're doing something to help the situation which keeps them from actually solving the problem. Like the new plastic straws ban to keep plastic out of the ocean. If the problem is "keep plastic out of the ocean", then solve "why does plastic get in the ocean" problem. Banning plastic straws might be part of the solution, but what seems to happen so often is that we make one of these "feel-good" laws that keeps a negligible amount of plastic out of the ocean, and I have to drink out of a shitty straw, and people think that someone we've made substantive progress to a real solution.
  • ErikVandeWater 8y ago
    > If the problem is "keep plastic out of the ocean", then solve "why does plastic get in the ocean" problem. But then how can someone start a KickStarter so you have to carry a thick metal straw around with you all day and then have to think about cleaning every time you use it, and in between different drinks if you don't want to have your first drink contaminate the taste of the second? https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/908228738/finalstraw-the-worlds-first-collapsible-reusable-s https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/908228738/finalstraw-th...
    • donatj 8y ago
      I just stopped using straws a couple years ago when I got my tonsils out and couldn't use them – never went back. Just drink like you would from any other cup. You don't need a straw. And honest to god things taste better without a straw. You'll drink less sugary trash and appreciate it more.
• linkmotif 8y ago
  Until the issue is fixed, what’s wrong with landfills? What’s wrong with something taking a long time to decompose? My understanding is landfills done right are ok.
• gm-conspiracy 8y ago
  You could pay per item, so people would not recycle items that they won't get paid for...
• bayfullofrays 8y ago
  There is only one answer, ban all consumable plastics. Absolutely no reason to use them when alternatives exist in every application of them.
• destitude 8y ago
  Real solution is to move the cost up the chain such that there is a "plastic tax" like there is a carbon tax.
• learc83 8y ago
  What do modern plastic free food containers look like? Are they any good at keeping insects out? My mom tells me stories of how often candy bars had larvae in them back when they were just wrapped in paper.
• maxerickson 8y ago
  Whenever you think about plastic consumption, remember that gasoline weighs about 6 pounds a gallon. Especially remember this if you drive to the grocery store and are precious about plastic bags. I mean, please do make sure they end up in a properly managed waste stream, but maybe consider what to prioritize.
• sjg007 8y ago
  I preferred the 3 separate ones.. cans, plastic, paper. Made it easy to keep the food/water/residue crap off the paper.
• newswriter99 8y ago
  Let's look at some actual numbers without the hype. "91% of potentially recyclable plastic ends up in landfills, or worse, in oceans." So right there, no ratio. How much goes into the landfill and how much into the ocean? Because lets face it: Landfill>Ocean For comparison, 8m tonnes of plastic ends up in the ocean annually according to the cited 2015 UCSB study: http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2015/014985/ocean-plastic http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2015/014985/ocean-plastic That's 8m tonnes globally. The US makes about 30m tonnes a year. What's the US' share of plastic in the ocean? https://jambeck.engr.uga.edu/landplasticinput https://jambeck.engr.uga.edu/landplasticinput About 340 tonnes a year. Yeah, that's a lot, but that's 0.00425% of the total. We're in 20th place. China drops 2.4m tonnes a year. About 30% of all the plastic waste that goes into the ocean each year. Article does nothing to point out the plastic waste just getting chucked into rivers in India and Asia.
  • ryan-allen 8y ago
    My cynical take is that these kinds of articles are cooked up in major polluters PR departments. It's classic misdirection, and we seem to fall for it every time.
    • fraudsyndrome 8y ago
      Also how countries are still delivering their waste to there knowingly(!) that it has a high chance of reaching the ocean. They want to get rid of it for the lowest cost and then blame the other country for not following through.
  • fraudsyndrome 8y ago
    How much of that 2.4m tonnes comes from other countries though? And the other countries know that it's not getting recycled properly yet still send it over to offload their guilt. Also you can't just use raw numbers as the population numbers are completely different. Waste generated per capita (excluding and import/export) would be a more accurate metric.
    • newswriter99 8y ago
• hw 8y ago
  As much as I hate plastics, I find that it is here to stay. As consumers, what we can do is to reduce the plastics that we use. Re-use plastic bags. Re-use takeout containers (always have a bunch of them in my car). Reduce purchases of food items that are wrapped in plastic (they are mostly processed food anyway). Buy produce that isn't shrink-wrapped. Don't use a straw for drinks. Don't ask for plastic cutlery when getting takeout. I do think that some sort of tax on plastic use would help deter and reduce, but not completely eliminate plastic waste. Restaurants should be taxed on every plastic takeout container they use. Manufacturers, food producers should be taxed on plastic packaging. Blue Apron should be taxed for all the plastic containers that they send out to customers. Maybe Elon Musk would be the new China and ship the world's plastic waste to space. It would cost quite a bit of fuel though so maybe it's not as sustainable or eco-friendly.
  • undersuit 8y ago
    Someone pitch to Elon their bioreactor that converts plastic to rocket fuel. I mean wouldn't that be cool?
• a2tech 8y ago
  I get a ton of crap at work and other places for mentioning that consumer recycling is a giant farce and is nothing more than a distraction for the consumer so they can feel like they’re ‘doing somethkng’ while nothing that matters actually changes.
• ggm 8y ago
  During wartime, A significant difference to waste stream happened inside manufacturing, as a function of government directive. I believe its written up in quite a few places, my source is 'the peoples war' by Angus Calder. In principle, if manufacturing is obligated to handle waste stream better, the evidence is, it can.
• djsumdog 8y ago
  I've always thought the single bin was stupid. Remember when you at least separated paper, plastics and cans? It's way way easier, efficient and less labor intensive for a consumer to do that very basic sorting than getting a facility to do it. It's like data entry people who copy paper forms to a machine. Why not have a device the consumer can type their own data into? You'll get less mistakes and save a lot of time. Having four basic sort bins is a very low effort for the person throwing shit out. It also reduces the amount of contaminates and makes life easier for people who do have to sort through all that. American bottle deposits also suck pretty bad compared to our EU counterparts. At least in The Netherlands and Germany, every shop that sells glass has to take that glass back. Many have machines that scan the barcodes on the bottle and issue you a ticket you can use for purchases or cash. The bottles actually get reused too. Old German beer bottles often have physical have grooves on them from the plastic rollers in machines! They get reused that much!
• kohala 8y ago
  I have no affiliation with the company Renewlogy (formerly PK Clean) in Salt Lake City, but they have a very interesting method for turning plastic into diesel fuel that is in use today: https://www.deseretnews.com/article/900014582/utah-based-renewlogy-offers-solution-to-plastic-waste-problem.html https://www.deseretnews.com/article/900014582/utah-based-ren... The Chinese ban on plastics is not having a major impact in Salt Lake City, according to Sophia Nicholas, Salt Lake City sustainability department communications manager. Officials in both Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County say they are still picking up plastics from recycling bins as usual. By contract, none of that is ending up in landfills. Salt Lake City's contracts require the recycling vendors to accept and recycle plastics No. 1 through No. 7. “We know that there is a lot of a upheaval right now,” Nicholas said. “But the markets are dynamic and they’re finding other alternatives for that type of material.” The city of Boise, Idaho, recently banned plastics No. 3 through No. 7 in its recycling program and contracted with Renewlogy. Residents must separate those plastics into separate bags that now come to Salt Lake City.
  • pitaa 8y ago
    Unfortunately that article reads like a press release from "Renewlogy" and doesn't seem to have a complete basis in reality. In reality at present the area is facing a $900,000 increase in recycling costs largely because china isn't taking it anymore. https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2018/06/26/curbside-recycling-in-utah-and-elsewhere-is-at-risk-as-china-gets-more-picky-about-the-waste-it-imports/ https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2018/06/26/curbside-...
• cube4eva 8y ago
  The solution is charging people directly for trash pickup which creates more of an individual incentive to focus on product packaging. Also, you could offer incentives for collecting and (cleanly) burning plastic for energy (given its mostly petroleum based). Recycling programs today are a joke and often can’t breakeven
  • undersuit 8y ago
    Increasing the burden on the consumers is just going to make individuals more opposed to whatever you're making them do. People already burn and dump trash on their own with the relatively light taxation we levy on them to process their garbage.
• cube4eva 8y ago
  The solution is charging people directly for trash pickup which creates more of an individual incentive to focus on consumer packaging. Also, you could offer incentives for collecting and (cleanly) burning plastic for energy (given its mostly petroleum based)
• nukemandan 8y ago
  What does this mean? REDUCING and REUSING plastic use is critical. Solutions to the recycling problem are poor at best and innovation takes time. Don't just put it in the better looking bin and expect that someone will "figure it out".
• davesque 8y ago
  Doesn't better garbage sorting seem within reach of current machine learning tech and robotics?
• baxtr 8y ago
  Let’s not forget that this is also a cultural issue. When I compare living in Europe with living in the States for example I had to say that Americans use a lot more single use plastic than Europeans. Avoidance is possible. Maybe not to the same extent, but it definitely can play a role
• jimjimjim 8y ago
  unpopular opinion: Add a sales tax on everything that has plastic in it. If not using plastic increases the price then the majority of people just will not choose the more expensive option. Sure motivated people will see the benefit, but most people will see shrink-wrapped item at $5.99 vs 'better' item at $6.50 and will just pick the cheaper one. The app store pricing is an example of this. "$5 for a game is outrageous, i'm going to play this terrible one for $1 instead." well actually they are going to pick the free game with advertising, tracking, and all kinds of darkpatterns instead. but the idea is the same
• yourapostasy 8y ago
  Fast Company published a good article [1] about the Precious Plastic effort [2] to spread open source DIY machines that recycle plastic. I hope someone helps them publish plans for a limonene-based styrofoam recycler as well, as that is supposedly a fairly simple reaction. Then agree upon standardized sizes, and manufacture bricks of plastic-encased styrofoam insulation, where the plastic casing is designed to interlock into near-airtight joints. Then pump out insulation for the housing of the co-op members helping, 4-5 feet thick, and you start creating near PassivHaus-grade insulation. Use other plastics to create a mechanically interlocking building envelope perhaps, and thermal bridge isolation pieces, and you could drive ACH in the way building down. Other uses for recycled plastics that would help those who are short on capital but long on sweat equity might include really large fan blades for whole room ceiling fans, shelving, storage boxes, body weight equipment like traveling rings, and playground equipment. All of these don't need to be sophisticated, and confer allow the capital-constrained to avoid having to use as much capital. [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/40486883/these-diy-machines-let-anyone-recycle-plastic-into-new-products https://www.fastcompany.com/40486883/these-diy-machines-let-... [2] https://preciousplastic.com/en/index.html https://preciousplastic.com/en/index.html
• chiefalchemist 8y ago
  I'd like to add. At this point, when possibe buy food in glass. For example, apple sauce.
• kardos 8y ago
  I wonder how bad are the economics of going back to glass for product packaging, eg, like milk bottles. We still do it for beer so it mustn't be atrocious. Could we make inroads that way? I'm envisioning there'd be order 1-2 dozen standard bottle sizes to make recycling easy (cheap) to automate.
• andrewstuart 8y ago
  The plastics problem must be addressed by standardised, washable, refundable containers that manufacturers can package their products in and put a paper label on. The packaging industry is creating an infinite flow of garbage and recycling is just the distraction that this industry creates to stop us being enraged at the unstoppable flow of garbage that it creates. The idea of single use plastic wrappers for food or any other product must end. Also the idea of destroyable/recyclable non-standard container sizes must end.
• spullara 8y ago
  Thought experiment. Does it actually make any sense to recycle things now that are going to last 100s or 1000s of years? Shouldn't we just landfill them and later, when we need them, and the technology is orders of magnitude better just go dig it up and recycle it then? Why recycle now?
• jmts 8y ago
  I was thinking about this issue recently. Surely part of this is a UI issue. How do I know what is recyclable and what isn't? Do I need to prepare it in some way before I put it in the bin? Governments have control over regulating a great number of things. Why not regulate packaging by requiring easy to identify recycling instructions? Standardise the bin colours across a large area - ideally an entire country - to make sure it is easy to provide 1-to-1 mappings between graphics and target bins, then require manufacturers provide clear labeling of how to dispose of the packaging. Surely the manufacturer knows without a doubt what it is making things out of. They should also know therefore how to recycle it. If some materials are more recyclable than others, regulate in favour of the more recyclable materials. Single material packaging should be favoured over multi-material packaging. Should it be rinsed before being added to a yellow bin? Have standardised graphics to show those two things. If governments provides some incentive/encouragement/regulation for businesses to produce packaging that is not only recyclable, but also easily sorted by consumers, surely that will solve a lot of contamination issues and promote better practices by consumers.
• CodeSheikh 8y ago
  Here's an idea, why not collect all the soda bottles and place them in front of respective corporate head quarters? I am sure Coca Cola will get a kick out of it and they might do something about creating a recycling program.
• olivermarks 8y ago
  I've often wondered about some kind of in home melting device for plastics, like a big pressure cooker. So much plastic recycling is actually empty containers. Heating and compressing would greatly reduce the footprint and might make reuse easier too? Would this be viable?
• nowarninglabel 8y ago
  I'm working with a plastic recycler in Kenya that may be solving issues in a novel way: https://make-it-initiative.org/africa/cpt_startup/gjenge-enterprises/ https://make-it-initiative.org/africa/cpt_startup/gjenge-ent... Contact me if you want an intro to them, they are seeking grant and equity funding to grow their ability to recycle plastic bottles into building blocks
• intended 8y ago
  My comment is late but it’s against the prevailing mood of the top comment - People are ignoring a very critical factor - “disposable culture” is the brother of cheap and convenient goods. This means that poor people can get cheap food in cheap packagaging with better safety levels than otherwise. This means - packets of Singl use detergent - affordable to people in poverty. It means less paper use - which means less pollution in the creation process. Mumbai has asked people to not use plastic - meat vendors are asking people to bring tins to carry meat. Those need to be cleaned which means an increase in water use. This is a much bigger problem than it seems.
• 11235813213455 8y ago
  > Curing the plastic problem is a lot like fighting cancer. Even if everyone stopped smoking, there would still be cancer. That analogy is so terrible, smoking increases cancer risk at least 20 times Reducing plastic pollution by even just 50% would already be fantastic
• woogiewonka 8y ago
  Why not ban manufacturing certain plastics that end up in consumers' hands?
• woogiewonka 8y ago
  I'm always impressed with how Japan handles recycling, despite being a heavy plastic user and producer. Last figure I read was 70% of all plastic recycled.
• dalbasal 8y ago
  It's quite typical that when somethung in the political realm fails, our instinctive diagnosis is moral. House prices rise? Its either corporate greed or NIMBYism. People got addicted to medicines? Pharmaceutical companies are cynical. Welfare system is full of mess? You just can't trust poor ___ people. King lost a war? Someone hasn't been pious enough. Pollution? Ecological degradation? Extinctions? No one cares any more. In the past, we lived in harmony with nature. We took no more than we needed. We had morals. Bollocks. Morality is just the easy answer. These are practical problems, not moral ones. What we need is more competence, not more righteousness. Anyway, I find this striking: "91 percent of potentially recyclable plastic in the U.S. ended up in landfills – or worse, in the oceans. (79% in Europe)" There is a massive difference between landfill and ocean. There is a massive difference between landfill 1 and landfill 2. Recycling has been idealised as some sort of moral goal. Garbage has been vilified as a moral failing. The practical impacts on the environment have a lot more to do with how much garbage makes it to landfill, and what they do with it there. Give me 0% recycling and 0% stray garbage and I think we'd have a big net win.
• sumang 8y ago
  One of the ways to solve this issue is to incentive or give rewards to customers who give back their plastic waste. In Germany and Scandinavia, its been in place for years.
• quipquopro 8y ago
  How is plastic waste ending up in landfills even a problem? If we don’t have the technology to efficiently recycle plastic waste now, we will in 50 years. Future landfill miners will praise us for our foresight. I’m having a hard time understanding the concern given the bigger environmental problems out there. Habitat loss, pollution, and climate change are less visible but more pressing problems.
• mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
  Is there a place where the world can provide ideas on how to solve complex global issues? Something that that curated the best ideas, forms pros and cons to approaches proposed and automatic weighs the risks? I guess what I imagine is some sort of machine learning solution that takes in account the knowledge of the internet and allows for weighing of various factors based on assigned trust scores. It seems weird that we live in this information rich society, a ton of ideas float around the web but they are never acted upon or formulated in ways that harness public support. Am I just envisioning a utopian idea or is this possible to build? There Must be a way to pull most prominent ideas into one place for public scrutiny without creating additional noise.
• dredmorbius 8y ago
  Annie Leonard has a great piece on the history of the "individual accountability" trash movement. TL;DR: it's an accountability avoidance maneuver by the drinks, beverages, and fast-food industries, principally. http://www.worldwatch.org/system/files/AlterNet-SOW13-AL-102013.pdf http://www.worldwatch.org/system/files/AlterNet-SOW13-AL-102... (Mostly the same material here: https://www.salon.com/2014/06/18/big_plastics_pr_disaster_why_it_cant_lie_its_way_around_microbeads_partner/ https://www.salon.com/2014/06/18/big_plastics_pr_disaster_wh...) Her book and project, The Story of Stuff, are highly recommended. https://storyofstuff.org/about/annie-leonard/ https://storyofstuff.org/about/annie-leonard/
• Cub3 8y ago
  I still don't understand why we don't have a general tax on using certain materials that are hard to recycle or cause waste, if you taxed plastic per gram and made it more expensive to use than cardboard or aluminium we would see a major switch.
• arendtio 8y ago
  TLDR: > 91 percent of potentially recyclable plastic in the U.S. ended up in landfills – or worse, in the oceans. > Yes, trash has become complicated > Even if consumer participation in recycling were 100 percent, we wouldn’t be close to recycling 100 percent of the material [...] > [...] nearly all current “recyclable” plastics [...] get a second life as a handbag or lawn chair [...]. They’re not really recycled so much as “downcycled.”