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All the plastic you can and cannot recycle
- emodendroket 8y agoYou're probably best off looking at the instructions from your town if you're in the US.
- stephengillie 8y agoMany can recycle "2 HDPE" but few recycle "5 PP". What about tetrapak boxes and milk boxes? Shirt bags from dry cleaning?
- ljcn 8y agoI believe (at least in the UK) that Tetrapak contribute to a recycling scheme (hence the Green Dot symbol - note it's NOT the regular recyclable symbol). With a bit of research I found a dedicated Tetrapak collection bin locally which we now take all our cartons to from time to time. Things might be different where you are in the world.
- lozenge 8y agoThey may collect it but Tetrapak is inherently barely recyclable - it contains plastic, paper and metal which can't be separated.
- noxToken 8y agoSecond this. Whoever collects your trash (municipal or commercial) will likely have instructions posted for what is and isn't recyclable. If you can't find it, call or email them. It's almost guaranteed that someone will give you a good response, because some items like plastic bags will actively jam or clutter sorting machinery. On that note, plastic bags from grocers (labeled carrier bags in the article) are almost never accepted by recycling centers for the above reason. However, there is likely a grocer nearby that will accept those bags for recycling. I think all Wal-Mart stores will accept these bags.
- ams6110 8y agoOur municipality will not accept plastic shopping bags because they say there is no market for them. Some of the supermarkets do take them but I have to suspect that they just truck them to a landfill.
- emodendroket 8y agoThere's a sticker right on my recycle bin with instructions.
- ryandrake 8y agoThis is a pain point. Every different place I have lived, worked, and visited has had different recycling rules. Municipalities need to get their shit together and agree on a country-wide (or at least state-wide) standard. Otherwise people are not going to bother. I’ve got a limited number of things to think about in a day, and “is this particular kind of plastic recyclable in this city” is not going to be one of them.
- poulsbohemian 8y agoI love this thinking, but it isn't clear how to incentivize the typical municipality. I live in a very typical 35,000 person city in middle(-ish) America. A $2.00/month charge was proposed to continue supporting weekly recycling. That didn't happen and recycling was cut to every-other-week because the cost was deemed too much of a burden on retirees (no joke, this was the argument). Then, as recycling shifted from being a revenue generator (because Chinese (?) recyclers were buying it) to a cost center, many other smaller towns in the area just caved in and stopped recycling altogether. Our city instead put in place a $3/month surcharge (oh the irony). Likewise, we are in the heart of our state's wine country. Wine comes in glass bottles. Our city has never (?) had glass recycling because it was deemed not-cost-effective, as the nearest glass recycler is a four hour drive away. Point is: it's the economic incentives/disincentives for municipalities, it's all they care about.
- emodendroket 8y agoCan't you take glass bottles to the grocery store?
- poulsbohemian 8y agoNo. Some grocery stores accepts plastic bags for recycling, but none accept bottles or cans here. Eight miles away across the state line in Oregon they do, but the state has set up a system that requires Oregon ID in order to use the collection machines.
- moneytide1 8y agoThere was a similar discussion on reddit yesterday morning: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9hee9n/what_makes_recycling_certain_plastics/?utm_source=reddit-android https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9hee9n/what_mak... Several different experts weighed in on the comment section. Plastics engineer, garbage collector, recycling machine salesman all had some thing to post. I've always tried to sort my trash, but now I realize that tossing every type of plastic in same bin may not be helping as much. Now I try to minimize plastic purchasing. Bulk dry food and produce without packaging seems to help, and it usually means learning to cook more which in turn saves money. I've been using the same $3 stainless steel liter canteen from Goodwill for the past year. Might last the rest of my life
- sevensor 8y agoThis reinforces my perception that plastics recycling is mostly a ploy by the plastics industry to make themselves appear less wasteful while shifting the burden and the blame to the customer. Some things we're encouraged to do, like carefully washing out plastic peanut butter jars, seem like they're probably a net waste of resources.
- ams6110 8y agoYeah I don't recycle anything that needs to be washed first. Quick rinse OK, but if I need hot water and soap it goes into the trash instead.
- noxxten 8y agoIt's exactly this mindset that creates such a huge plastic problem. You aren't wrong, and you shouldn't feel guilty either. People in charge of deciding packaging should be taking their end customer's ideas and habits in mind. Why are all my vegetables and fresh foods packaged on styrofoam trays, wrapped in plastic, and packed home in a plastic bag? At least the plastic bag can be reused, but the rest has zero hope of being reusable. It's also a huge problem to recycle plastics that have food waste on them. All in all, plastics are really not needed in most of the things we buy.
- xefer 8y agoThere should be a better set of symbols focused on recyclablity. I'm sure people see a symbol with a group of arrows in a cycle and assume it must be recyclable.
- latch 8y agoThe problem, which is largely what the article is about, is that what's recyclable depends on where you are. They'd have to create council-specific packaging. I'm far left on this issue, but that seems like an unrealistic burden.
- latch 8y agoTo follow up with my own thoughts on what would help: the cost of plastic seems fully externalized. Companies that use plastic packaging should bear the brunt of the cost of recycling / disposing of plastic. Properly priced, we might see more innovation in the field.
- alexis_read 8y agoTbh the main issues in the UK are 2: Non-homogeneous packaging eg. Cardboard food containers with plastic windows - maybe a tax applied to this package type would help. Inconsistent disposal/recycling between boroughs/counties - there should be a countrywide mandate for recyclability types for the consumer, regardless of how those types are actually disposed of. Eg. Everyone has a food wastebin even if the council has to throw it with the rest (it doesn't have the facilities). Educating people to recycle is difficult enough without the inconsistencies. edit Taxing packaging by weight and type would theoretically work to minimise packaging and encourage eg. Bringing a tupperware container to the shops. You'd also need to (countrywide) standardise container types so then you could eg. Put your standard coffebean container under the supermarket dispenser and do away with packaging. The above is a thought experiment btw. Usual dicussions about personal freedom vs state apply, but the driving force there is valid :)
- alexis_read 8y agoAfter re-reading this, I realised I wasn't clear on the taxation - this would apply to manufacturers not consumers, thus incentivising them to advertise green credentials as a feature, and to cut down packaging or pass the cost on (at which point most customers would move to the cheaper product). As far as non-homogeneous packaging goes, if it takes longer than 5sec to separate each bit into homogeneous parts, then I'd class it as non-homogeneous.
- gwbas1c 8y agoSounds like a robot that sorts at the trash collection facility is a good startup idea! Seriously, with all the talk about automated cars, and robotic this-and-that, you'd think we'd just have robots do all the sorting.
- rebuilder 8y agoAFAIK, Zen robotics is doing exactly that.
- freeone3000 8y agohttps://zenrobotics.com/ https://zenrobotics.com/ has been doing this since 2007. Robots are large and expensive, humans are small and cheap.
- java-man 8y agounfortunately, this is true. but it may change in the future, hopefully.
- dmm 8y agoThe best thing of all would be having the cost of recycling included in the price of the product. Then manufacturers would be incentivized to make recycling as effective as possible.
- rootusrootus 8y agoAlso, expand the bottle bill to include all recyclable containers, not just beverage bottles.
- nimbius 8y agospeaking as an automotive engine mechanic, another problematic plastic youll encounter is stuff that goes in your car or light truck. these plastics are doped with chemicals to help them withstand rodents, cold weather, or excessive heat/UV. The panels from a 1993 Saturn, while revolutionary in their dent resistance, are landfill fodder. No one will touch them. Certain parts near the ECU will also come doped with electromagnetic shielding. The PHB's at BMW apparently got pretty fired up around fibre reinforced plastics around 2010 as well...so much so that most components like radiators, pumps and switches are all glass fibre reinforced polyplastics. These cant get recycled, even though they contain metal parts that often can.
- pixl97 8y ago>These cant get recycled, even though they contain metal parts that often can. Well, you can grind up the entire part and density separate the metal. Of course, you have ground up plastic stuff now.
- christophilus 8y agoI was just talking to my dad about this. He's in his 60s and says he can remember a time when plastics were relatively rare. As a kid, his milk came in glass bottles which were returned, sanitized, refilled, and re-delivered. There was no permanent waste in that process that he can recall. So, within one generation, we went from that to the average house on my street discarding a massive rolling trash-can worth of plastic every week (roughly). I try hard to reduce my family's contribution to the problem, but it's really tough. For example, we buy organic produce, and every single one has plastic stickers, rubber bands, and labels. It's pretty depressing.
- mverwijs 8y agoSo you're saying we can alter our complete structure within the space of one generation? That is pretty uplifting actually.
- fosco 8y agotechnically yes! but it requires business incentives. I think whole foods lead the way by giving 5 cent discounts for bringing your own bags - at least they used to - do not live near one anymore :( by making plastic more expensive either by taxation or by giving incentives to reuse would encourage businesses to take action
- fyfy18 8y agoMost EU countries have mandated charges for plastic carrier bags in supermarkets - but it doesn’t do anything to reduce the plastic packaging food already comes in.
- briHass 8y ago> There was no permanent waste in that process that he can recall. Except for the energy wasted to manufacture the glass bottle, clean it, transport it back to be cleaned, and the increased weight/fragility over a similar plastic container. For example, the reusable canvas shopping bag must be reused 170+ times to actually break even with the environmental impact of choosing it over plastic bags. By the way, that's without washing it.
- chadash 8y agoSome recycling practices I've come across: Michigan - All soft drinks (and similar beverages) carry a $0.10 fee a the point of sale that you recoup when you recycle them. A few states seem to do $0.05, but at $0.10 people seem to start to care a lot more. Growing up there, almost everyone kept a pile of cans in their garage that they would take in to recycle. Almost all supermarkets had machines that you can deposit your cans/bottles in to get refunds. After parties in college, students are meticulous to recycle the cans because it would mean 10% off the price of the next party. Cambridge, MA - Single stream recycling. Just throw everything in to the same recycling bin and the city sorts it. Makes it much easier to recycle but I'm sure this is expensive. Egypt - When I was there, a coca cola from a corner shop came in a glass bottle and cost about $0.25 (USD). But you had to drink it there so they could recycle the bottle. If you wanted to take it with you, you'd pay twice as much. Personally, I loved drinking it out of the glass bottles, which are also very easy to clean, sterilize and reuse. Miami, FL - Basically no one recycles. I've been in vegan cafes (not to stereotype, but the sorts of places you'd expect to see eco-consciousness) that don't have bottle recycling bins. My apartment building doesn't provide a means to recycle bottles, so if I wanted to do so, I'd need to drop them off somewhere (which I'm pretty sure isn't close by). As a result, I don't recycle plastic. Interestingly, more and more buildings in Miami are recycling boxes. What I recently learned is that because of online delivery, cardboard boxes have proliferated causing a whole industry of recycling companies for these. People will actually pay you (I think about $100/pallet) for used boxes, so all of the apartment/condo buildings are getting in on the action. In any case, I wish we would address the root cause of the problem, which is too much packaging. I've had Amazon packages with boxes inside of boxes inside of boxes. Every time I buy cereal, I'm buying a thick bag inside of a box. Our culture has too much packaging.
- blang 8y agoInterestingly it looks like the Michigan bottle bill was enacted in 1978 when $.10 was more like $.40 today
- toasterlovin 8y agoFWIW, I think 10 cents is probably sufficient. We have a 10 cent deposit here in Oregon. As a result, on the night before trash day in our neighborhood there is always a lady going through the recycling bins to pull out the cans and bottles with deposits. Growing up in Los Angeles, where they also have a deposit, it was common to see homeless people pushing trains of shopping carts down major thoroughfares filled with cans and bottles.
- writimov 8y agoReverse supply chain disassembly into raw resources for reuse is not being done in any meaningful way except for a glass, some chips, paper, precious metals and a few other things. We really need a large upgrade in the detection, cleaning, sorting, disassembly, prep for reuse and bulk source materials creation of human waste streams (garbage and recycling). It starts with detection and sorting robots (one example: https://www.amprobotics.com https://www.amprobotics.com). Add sensors to tell organic materials from plastics, sort into cleaning. Once cleaned use sensors to detect one type of plastic from another, then sort plastic types. If one type of plastic is bound to another with a metal screw, use a disassembly robot to get the screw out. Once sorted, use standard techniques to turn single plastic parts into bulk plastic materials ready for reuse. (Ex. of do-it-yourself version for HDPE https://www.instructables.com/id/Making-Blocks-out-of-HDPE-milk-jugs/ https://www.instructables.com/id/Making-Blocks-out-of-HDPE-m...) Using machine learning and the latest in robotics, this entire cascade could be accomplished but the business model is broken. The machinery would be too expensive to pay back with the value of the recycled materials. Instead we need to value the effort of keeping these pollutants out of the general environment. Carbon credits are a great example of how this value can be created. Create a plastics pollution credits marketplace where you get paid to keep plastics out of landfills. Now maybe the robots, sensors, and recycling technologies are cost effective.
- lozenge 8y agoIf there was actually political will for carbon credits or waste reduction I would much rather it go to a far more efficient target - reduce the amount of waste in the first place instead of making incredibly complicated recycling robots.