9 ms·

National Sword

189 points by danso 8y ago

jihadjihad 8y ago
Interesting story, I did not know about that documentary. A nice companion piece with lots of good info is this article here [0]. There needs to be more public education on recycling, as there are many local differences and frequently people think something is recyclable when it will actually end up in a landfill. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfills-plastic-papers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfil...
skybrian 8y ago
Or maybe put more things in the trash? It seems like recycling being good is such an article of faith now that we lost track of why properly-run landfills are bad. Edit: to be clear, I'm asking this because I'm actually curious about the answer. A quick Google search doesn't find anything particularly convincing.
- ravedave5 8y ago
  I can't speak to other materials but aluminum recycling is incredibly less energy intensive than refining from ore. It takes an incredible amount of energy to convert aluminum oxide into aluminum and not much to melt aluminum once it's in that state.
  - FreeFull 8y ago
    The same goes for glass, although the energy difference isn't as big as with aluminium. The main problem with glass is that coloured glass can't easily be made into clear glass, so it gets used for making green/brown glass. Glass is also very suitable for reuse, so it doesn't necessarily have to be recycled unless the glass item has broken.
  - skybrian 8y ago
    Sure, yes, clean glass and aluminum are often easy cases. I don't think there is that much trouble with compost either? The problem seems to be with many of the other things that are allegedly recyclable. Just because someone somewhere can recycle it doesn't mean your local recycling facility can do anything with it.
    - henrikschroder 8y ago
      Another insanity is that companies that produce certain waste are required to offer to recycle it. That's fair in most circumstances, in others, not so much. I live in Hawaii, and I usually buy local eggs. They come in a polystyrene container, and polystyrene is something that shouldn't end up in landfills. So the company graciously offers to recycle the container for me, the only thing I have to do is mail it to Washington State. From Hawaii. (Thankfully, Hawaii incinerates most trash, so that goes straight in the trash!)
      - jogjayr 8y ago
        Your example of the egg company is insane. I wonder why they don't simply use cardboard containers instead.
        henrikschroder 8y ago
        My best guess is that Hawaii doesn't have a wood pulp industry at all, so cardboard containers have to be imported. But Hawaii imports a ton of oil already, so having a local factory that makes plastic packaging out of oil is probably cheaper.
      - jpatokal 8y ago
        Out of curiosity, why do your eggs come in polystyrene containers? Most of world uses cardboard.
        henrikschroder 8y ago
        The polystyrene containers are clearly in the minority of the brands that I can buy here, it's just that the ones I prefer come in it. If you buy eggs that come in cardboard at my local Safeway they're usually mainland eggs. It would be interesting to know if the environmental impact of the plastic containers for the local eggs offset the environmental impact of transporting mainland eggs to Hawaii. Hawaii has a high percentage of oil-powered electricity, and it burns all trash, so me throwing the plastic container in the trash should offset some oil, which drastically reduces the impact of the plastic container per se. So the polystyrene containers might be the better option. Figuring out the actual best environmental option is really really hard. And the exercise above is just for god damn egg cartons. Then again, there's plenty of low-hanging fruit to solve before my choice of eggs start to count. If you live in a place that has landfills, that should be the number one priority to fix. Landfills are terrible, burn the trash instead, it allows you to recover a lot of energy.
- henrikschroder 8y ago
  That depends on what you do with the trash. If you burn it for heat and electricity, this is actually an excellent use for it. As long as your region has oil- or coal-powered plants, burning plastic waste means that you got more use out of the oil than if you had burned it directly. You are absolutely correct in that recycling is an unquestioned good, everyone "knows" you should recycle, but noone thinks about what it means and what actually happens with the stuff that gets recycled, or how it is recycled, or if it makes economic or environmental sense to recycle a material. In Sweden, which doesn't really have landfills, and where recycling is also elevated to some kind of saintly status, there was an article published by some environmental agency a couple of decades ago which challenged this. They basically got labeled heretics, but the points they made were actually good: 1) Aluminium should absolutely be recycled, the energy costs of converting bauxite into aluminium are astronomical, compared to recycling used aluminium containers. 2) Glass should be recycled for the same reasons, it's cheaper and easier to do than to make new ones. 3) Newspaper, cardboard, and similar low-plastic paper products should be recycled, you can easily make new newspaper or cardboard out of it, saves you some trees. 4) The rest - fuck it - burn it all. Recycling plastic is hard, you can't turn it into high-value plastic products such as clear plastic packaging, you can only make low-value plastic products, and then you might as well burn it, and offset your oil-powered plants.
  - worldsayshi 8y ago
    > burn the plastic Sure but that could still mean that it makes sense to sort it? Can you burn plastic trash more efficiently than mixed burnable material I wonder..? Also, one big reason that we have less landfills (I'm pretty sure I've heard that we have at least some for some particular purposes) - is that we do a lot of incineration. We even import from neighbour countries.
    - henrikschroder 8y ago
      > Can you burn plastic trash more efficiently than mixed burnable material I wonder..? Sure, probably, but now you need a trash incineration plant and a plastic trash incineration plant... Screw it. Burn it all. Modern incineration plants are very good at their job.
- a1369209993 8y ago
  Speaking as someone who hates environmentalism on principle, I think the charitable interpretation is that properly-run landfills are bad because they inevitably become improperly-run landfills. Given how properly-run anything elses have fared, they do seem to have a point.
  - PascLeRasc 8y ago
    Ok, I'll bite. Why do you hate environmentalism on principle?
    - Sophistifunk 8y ago
      Not GP, but I'd guess because so much of it is really communism or plain-old anti-human self-loathing dressed up nice for public consumption.
- paleogizmo 8y ago
  I can't remember the source, but I think it relates to misinformation that 80s/90s kids were taught - that we were running out of landfill space. My understanding is that landfills don't use much land per capita and that their environmental impact really isn't bad in terms of poisoning ground water and such. My beef is that (at least the general US population) isn't aware of what the resources required to produce packaging vs. the packaged item are. Probably the plastic packing on that 1/2 pound of bacon has a small carbon footprint compared to the meat inside, but I can only guess.
abledon 8y ago
Why aren’t films like the one mentioned in the article “plastic china” free to watch? They seem like a great educational piece to use but I tried searching and I had to purchase it — I understand the creators need to make money off this to survive but I think government should subsidize these films so they are free for the public to view
- noir_lord 8y ago
  If the government funded them they'd immediately be accused of bias by whoever was the receiving end.
- tomcam 8y ago
  How much extra in taxes do you wish to pay for this? And what happens when the government chooses a subject you don't wish to support?
  - abledon 8y ago
    1. 1$ a year. 2. I accept that I lost a dollar
sandworm101 8y ago
>>> Consumers can make a difference by buying less, or buying products that can more easily be reused or recycled, but that’s only part of the equation. Countries, states and cities need to press producers to design more sustainable products and packaging, and develop more recycling infrastructure. What? No mention of corporations, of the many corporate interests that this material serves. I don't want plastic wrapping on everything. So long as the product gets where it needs to be nor does the manufacture really care. It is the middle men, the retail stores, that insist on the extra packaging. Lots of packaging is there for purely commercial interests such as to prevent easy theft or as space for advertising. I recently ordered some flashlights from china. They were made of aluminum and came in simple cardboard boxes. Nearly all of the order was recyclable. No inky labels, no bubble wrap, no silly nylon lanyards, no plastic beyond a tiny piece of tape to hold the box closed. Nothing was in those boxes except for the exact product I ordered. That's the progress we need.
- macintux 8y ago
  When I was young, there were still "true" generic items in grocery stores. Not store brands, but white packaging with a simple food label. Unsurprisingly, they weren't very popular. Customers have brand preferences, rational or not, and the word "generic" has strongly negative connotations. (Speaking for myself, I can say that real Pop Tarts taste much better than the store brand alternatives I've tried, which were edible but rather unpleasant.) For physical retail I don't think packaging is going to go anywhere, and I suspect manufacturers would rather package everything the same, whether it's going to physical stores or being sold online.
  - sandworm101 8y ago
    But the flashlights I bought were not generic. They were branded items that if bought in-store would have been in big plastic wrappings. I don't think they were illegitimate, just that they were shipped differently.
    - macintux 8y ago
      Understood. I’m speculating that, due to the importance of packaging in the physical world, that it will remain relatively uncommon in the online world, but that’s pure speculation.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
Lately I've become frustrated with the focus on recycling as a profit center. In particular, only recycling material that can be turned around into a product that consumers will buy. One of the things that I believe plastic waste would be good for would be large (say 3'(1m) x 3'(1m) x 6'(2m)) bricks, designed with three holes in them and a tongue and groove design such that they could be stacked on to recycled metal rods that had been pounded into the ground to form barriers. Not a bullet proof as concrete but certainly functional for things such as levy re-inforcement, keep out zones, and wind shelters.
- michaelbuckbee 8y ago
  This is a really interesting idea, a little googling found this project [1] which produced bricks formed from plastics in a "sungrill" which would also help to reduce the energy inputs 1 - https://www.dw.com/en/bricks-made-of-plastic-trash/a-18799557 https://www.dw.com/en/bricks-made-of-plastic-trash/a-1879955...
  - ChuckMcM 8y ago
    That is exactly the idea, with the added benefit of doing it with solar power so its transportable into places without any source of heat. Imagine those bricks scaled up by a factor of 10. Quite the R factor as well. It would take better solar ovens to melt them into bricks but that is a matter of resources not technology hurdles.
- lainga 8y ago
  I think you could also compact them loosely into a sort of aggregate and fill gabions with it
  - ChuckMcM 8y ago
    You could, but I would be concerned that it would not have quite the density one would want without heating and compacting.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
peterwwillis 8y ago
It's possible to purchase goods in such a way that there is no disposable plastic involved on the consumer end. The problem is the processing, packing, transportation and distribution. We need a revolution in these fields that prioritizes reusable materials and methods. After industry changes how we receive the goods, we can work on getting people into the habit of reusing materials rather than disposing of them.
- jay_kyburz 8y ago
  Australia recently banned single use plastic shopping bags. Next we should consider all plastic packaging.
carapace 8y ago
We should learn to live in harmony with Nature. Among other things, biomimetic technology should be preferred. However, Molten Salt Oxidation can handle pretty much anything non-metallic, including plastic (which is reduced to "synthesis gas"), and it's exothermic (you're basically burning stuff in a liquid salt bath). They use it to deal with chemical weapons and stuff. We have all the technology we need, we just have to be smarter about how we meet our needs.
cdolan 8y ago
As many comments here point out - you are seen as a heretic for going against the 'recycling gods' in many parts of the world. That is certainly true in parts of American industry as well. U.S. kids have been conditioned since the 90's to believe everything is recyclable, and you commit a public disservice if you throw things away. Slowly people are realizing that 'single stream' recycling just results in a lot of contaminants and ends up being thrown away anyways. Up until 6 months ago, one of my party tricks was to explain to people that glass is not commonly recycled, but actually ground up and used as 'daily cover' on a landfill (2-3" of material to help keep down odors, start the decomposition process, and provide long term stability to the pile of trash). The reactions ranged from "ha, I figured..." to jaw dropping denials. People are finally starting to realize that, hey... Maybe a bunch of 'recycled' (read: shattered) beer bottles of mixed colors (green, brown, clear) present much as much of an OSHA workplace hazard as they do an 'environmental benefit'.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  Since glass is just 'sand' essentially and can be broken down and doesn't seem to pose any kind of environmental issue a-la 'plastic oceans' - can you enlighten us as to the problem with glass? I mean - is it much more complicated than just 'grind it up somewhat and throw it into the a hole' ? Or where do the problems arise?
  - int_19h 8y ago
    The problem is that it's not recycling - but the people who put those bottles in their recycling bin did so on the assumption that it would, in fact, have been recycled.
    - sonnyblarney 8y ago
      Ah. I see. Well hopefully maybe instead of 'recycling' we can at least do more effective 'waste management' now that we're all programmed to separate things. This is one of many areas I wish YC would focus more on. So many 'big opportunities' in 'real world' businesses outside of SaaS etc..
blaze33 8y ago
Eventually, every product will need to be designed as easily and efficiently recyclable. Humanity modern history was essentially focused around growth. Now for any long-term survivability, I guess we better start using our immense capabilities to ensure some sustainability to our societies. Just look at the billion years of evolution and natural selection we stand on: everything works in cycles. Earth only gets sunlight in and heat out, entropy rules, that's all we have. Now, you can't build a new car out of pure sunlight, nor can you dispose of the old one as infrared light into space. Yet life flourished on our space rock. All past and present species who did well relied on cycles. Those who ate everything and shat all over the place? Died quickly. The current world economy is an unfinished work: produce > use > dispose, a perfectly linear system. Recycling closes the loop. I get we happen to prefer making, buying and using new things, inputs, over dealing with garbage. I recall instagram was once filled with food plates, not so much with whatever happens on the toilet 8 hours later. As much as we love to play elaborate games on who does/gets what/how much/how long, there's still no way to cheat the laws of physics to keep playing forever. If not now or not here, the universe doesn't care very much, see you on the next episode on that other planet to see how long an intelligent life can survive with limited ressources ;)
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  "every product will need to be designed as easily and efficiently recyclable" Yes, this is it. With some planning, regulation and 'sustainable' thinking around product design, it seems possible to me this could work. We currently put 0 effort into how packaging 'deconstructs' into something recyclable. Some work there could yield tremendous difference. Maybe even totally painless on the part of the consumer, i.e. 'it just works'.
keerthiko 8y ago
The best first step is definitely to minimize waste, by not ordering multiple small online shipments, individually wrapped foods, too much groceries that then go bad, etc and instead trying to buy more refill packs, bring your own bags to shop, etc etc. The next best form of "recycling" is in-home reuse, and if you do enough of it it's perfectly justifiable to just throw it into trash (aka recycling) after you're done. Re-use grocery store produce bags to portion food in the freezer or as lunch/sandwich bags (like zip loc bags), and later as kitchen trash containment to limit odors and fluid leakage in your trash. I also use them as trash bags in smaller bins around the house (bathrooms, bedroom, etc) instead of buying various sizes of trash bags. Use the backs of letter-sized mail and physical spam as scratch paper and for note-taking before discarding/recycling. Rip the flaps off cardboard boxes and use the boxes to sort items in your closets and pantries (and the flaps can be used as dividers too). I even use smaller delivery boxes to sort items in the fridge because it's easier to clean (by throwing out) than wiping fridge spills. I feel like most of these sorts of things are no-brainers, but the typical western consumerist household freely generates tons of trash and just buys even more things to fulfill these roles generating even more trash that it boggles my mind.
hiisukun 8y ago
When I was growing up, the mantra was "reduce, reuse, recycle". The order was important. It was one of those government promoted national sayings in Australia, along with 'slip slop slap'. Unfortunately my current impression is that there is a strange blindness to these first two: reducing waste in the first place seems ignored if the item is recycable. And if you couldn't avoid packaging, choosing to use that item again makes no difference - just recycle it! It is like 'recycle' has some ultimate environmental positive power on people's attitude. If something is recycled, or recyclable, we don't need to worry about anything else. Quite concerning.
csense 8y ago
Someone should build a recycling plant that ingests any possible waste, heats it hot enough to break apart all molecular bonds so there aren't any nasty complex byproducts, then uses temperature-controlled cooling to separately condense individual elements or simple standard molecules. My guess is that it's not against the laws of physics [1]. But it would be pretty far beyond any current technology to do it economically, or at the scale to handle a significant fraction of the waste output of a large country. And also pretty energy inefficient. If you have a grasp of the engineering issues (I sure don't), feel free to chime in on the (in)feasibility of this idea. [1] I'm no astrophysicist, but this is basically what happens to "recycle" planets or asteroids, if a star swallows them and then goes supernova.

189 points by danso 8y ago

Interesting story, I did not know about that documentary. A nice companion piece with lots of good info is this article here [0]. There needs to be more public education on recycling, as there are many local differences and frequently people think something is recyclable when it will actually end up in a landfill. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfills-plastic-papers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfil...

skybrian 8y ago

Or maybe put more things in the trash? It seems like recycling being good is such an article of faith now that we lost track of why properly-run landfills are bad. Edit: to be clear, I'm asking this because I'm actually curious about the answer. A quick Google search doesn't find anything particularly convincing.

ravedave5 8y ago
I can't speak to other materials but aluminum recycling is incredibly less energy intensive than refining from ore. It takes an incredible amount of energy to convert aluminum oxide into aluminum and not much to melt aluminum once it's in that state.
- FreeFull 8y ago
  The same goes for glass, although the energy difference isn't as big as with aluminium. The main problem with glass is that coloured glass can't easily be made into clear glass, so it gets used for making green/brown glass. Glass is also very suitable for reuse, so it doesn't necessarily have to be recycled unless the glass item has broken.
- skybrian 8y ago
  Sure, yes, clean glass and aluminum are often easy cases. I don't think there is that much trouble with compost either? The problem seems to be with many of the other things that are allegedly recyclable. Just because someone somewhere can recycle it doesn't mean your local recycling facility can do anything with it.
  - henrikschroder 8y ago
    Another insanity is that companies that produce certain waste are required to offer to recycle it. That's fair in most circumstances, in others, not so much. I live in Hawaii, and I usually buy local eggs. They come in a polystyrene container, and polystyrene is something that shouldn't end up in landfills. So the company graciously offers to recycle the container for me, the only thing I have to do is mail it to Washington State. From Hawaii. (Thankfully, Hawaii incinerates most trash, so that goes straight in the trash!)
    - jogjayr 8y ago
      Your example of the egg company is insane. I wonder why they don't simply use cardboard containers instead.
      - henrikschroder 8y ago
        My best guess is that Hawaii doesn't have a wood pulp industry at all, so cardboard containers have to be imported. But Hawaii imports a ton of oil already, so having a local factory that makes plastic packaging out of oil is probably cheaper.
    - jpatokal 8y ago
      Out of curiosity, why do your eggs come in polystyrene containers? Most of world uses cardboard.
      - henrikschroder 8y ago
        The polystyrene containers are clearly in the minority of the brands that I can buy here, it's just that the ones I prefer come in it. If you buy eggs that come in cardboard at my local Safeway they're usually mainland eggs. It would be interesting to know if the environmental impact of the plastic containers for the local eggs offset the environmental impact of transporting mainland eggs to Hawaii. Hawaii has a high percentage of oil-powered electricity, and it burns all trash, so me throwing the plastic container in the trash should offset some oil, which drastically reduces the impact of the plastic container per se. So the polystyrene containers might be the better option. Figuring out the actual best environmental option is really really hard. And the exercise above is just for god damn egg cartons. Then again, there's plenty of low-hanging fruit to solve before my choice of eggs start to count. If you live in a place that has landfills, that should be the number one priority to fix. Landfills are terrible, burn the trash instead, it allows you to recover a lot of energy.
henrikschroder 8y ago
That depends on what you do with the trash. If you burn it for heat and electricity, this is actually an excellent use for it. As long as your region has oil- or coal-powered plants, burning plastic waste means that you got more use out of the oil than if you had burned it directly. You are absolutely correct in that recycling is an unquestioned good, everyone "knows" you should recycle, but noone thinks about what it means and what actually happens with the stuff that gets recycled, or how it is recycled, or if it makes economic or environmental sense to recycle a material. In Sweden, which doesn't really have landfills, and where recycling is also elevated to some kind of saintly status, there was an article published by some environmental agency a couple of decades ago which challenged this. They basically got labeled heretics, but the points they made were actually good: 1) Aluminium should absolutely be recycled, the energy costs of converting bauxite into aluminium are astronomical, compared to recycling used aluminium containers. 2) Glass should be recycled for the same reasons, it's cheaper and easier to do than to make new ones. 3) Newspaper, cardboard, and similar low-plastic paper products should be recycled, you can easily make new newspaper or cardboard out of it, saves you some trees. 4) The rest - fuck it - burn it all. Recycling plastic is hard, you can't turn it into high-value plastic products such as clear plastic packaging, you can only make low-value plastic products, and then you might as well burn it, and offset your oil-powered plants.
- worldsayshi 8y ago
  > burn the plastic Sure but that could still mean that it makes sense to sort it? Can you burn plastic trash more efficiently than mixed burnable material I wonder..? Also, one big reason that we have less landfills (I'm pretty sure I've heard that we have at least some for some particular purposes) - is that we do a lot of incineration. We even import from neighbour countries.
  - henrikschroder 8y ago
    > Can you burn plastic trash more efficiently than mixed burnable material I wonder..? Sure, probably, but now you need a trash incineration plant and a plastic trash incineration plant... Screw it. Burn it all. Modern incineration plants are very good at their job.
a1369209993 8y ago
Speaking as someone who hates environmentalism on principle, I think the charitable interpretation is that properly-run landfills are bad because they inevitably become improperly-run landfills. Given how properly-run anything elses have fared, they do seem to have a point.
- PascLeRasc 8y ago
  Ok, I'll bite. Why do you hate environmentalism on principle?
  - Sophistifunk 8y ago
    Not GP, but I'd guess because so much of it is really communism or plain-old anti-human self-loathing dressed up nice for public consumption.
paleogizmo 8y ago
I can't remember the source, but I think it relates to misinformation that 80s/90s kids were taught - that we were running out of landfill space. My understanding is that landfills don't use much land per capita and that their environmental impact really isn't bad in terms of poisoning ground water and such. My beef is that (at least the general US population) isn't aware of what the resources required to produce packaging vs. the packaged item are. Probably the plastic packing on that 1/2 pound of bacon has a small carbon footprint compared to the meat inside, but I can only guess.

abledon 8y ago

Why aren’t films like the one mentioned in the article “plastic china” free to watch? They seem like a great educational piece to use but I tried searching and I had to purchase it — I understand the creators need to make money off this to survive but I think government should subsidize these films so they are free for the public to view

noir_lord 8y ago
If the government funded them they'd immediately be accused of bias by whoever was the receiving end.
tomcam 8y ago
How much extra in taxes do you wish to pay for this? And what happens when the government chooses a subject you don't wish to support?
- abledon 8y ago
  1. 1$ a year. 2. I accept that I lost a dollar

sandworm101 8y ago

>>> Consumers can make a difference by buying less, or buying products that can more easily be reused or recycled, but that’s only part of the equation. Countries, states and cities need to press producers to design more sustainable products and packaging, and develop more recycling infrastructure. What? No mention of corporations, of the many corporate interests that this material serves. I don't want plastic wrapping on everything. So long as the product gets where it needs to be nor does the manufacture really care. It is the middle men, the retail stores, that insist on the extra packaging. Lots of packaging is there for purely commercial interests such as to prevent easy theft or as space for advertising. I recently ordered some flashlights from china. They were made of aluminum and came in simple cardboard boxes. Nearly all of the order was recyclable. No inky labels, no bubble wrap, no silly nylon lanyards, no plastic beyond a tiny piece of tape to hold the box closed. Nothing was in those boxes except for the exact product I ordered. That's the progress we need.

macintux 8y ago
When I was young, there were still "true" generic items in grocery stores. Not store brands, but white packaging with a simple food label. Unsurprisingly, they weren't very popular. Customers have brand preferences, rational or not, and the word "generic" has strongly negative connotations. (Speaking for myself, I can say that real Pop Tarts taste much better than the store brand alternatives I've tried, which were edible but rather unpleasant.) For physical retail I don't think packaging is going to go anywhere, and I suspect manufacturers would rather package everything the same, whether it's going to physical stores or being sold online.
- sandworm101 8y ago
  But the flashlights I bought were not generic. They were branded items that if bought in-store would have been in big plastic wrappings. I don't think they were illegitimate, just that they were shipped differently.
  - macintux 8y ago
    Understood. I’m speculating that, due to the importance of packaging in the physical world, that it will remain relatively uncommon in the online world, but that’s pure speculation.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

Lately I've become frustrated with the focus on recycling as a profit center. In particular, only recycling material that can be turned around into a product that consumers will buy. One of the things that I believe plastic waste would be good for would be large (say 3'(1m) x 3'(1m) x 6'(2m)) bricks, designed with three holes in them and a tongue and groove design such that they could be stacked on to recycled metal rods that had been pounded into the ground to form barriers. Not a bullet proof as concrete but certainly functional for things such as levy re-inforcement, keep out zones, and wind shelters.

michaelbuckbee 8y ago
This is a really interesting idea, a little googling found this project [1] which produced bricks formed from plastics in a "sungrill" which would also help to reduce the energy inputs 1 - https://www.dw.com/en/bricks-made-of-plastic-trash/a-18799557 https://www.dw.com/en/bricks-made-of-plastic-trash/a-1879955...
- ChuckMcM 8y ago
  That is exactly the idea, with the added benefit of doing it with solar power so its transportable into places without any source of heat. Imagine those bricks scaled up by a factor of 10. Quite the R factor as well. It would take better solar ovens to melt them into bricks but that is a matter of resources not technology hurdles.
lainga 8y ago
I think you could also compact them loosely into a sort of aggregate and fill gabions with it
- ChuckMcM 8y ago
  You could, but I would be concerned that it would not have quite the density one would want without heating and compacting.
TeMPOraL 8y ago

peterwwillis 8y ago

It's possible to purchase goods in such a way that there is no disposable plastic involved on the consumer end. The problem is the processing, packing, transportation and distribution. We need a revolution in these fields that prioritizes reusable materials and methods. After industry changes how we receive the goods, we can work on getting people into the habit of reusing materials rather than disposing of them.

jay_kyburz 8y ago
Australia recently banned single use plastic shopping bags. Next we should consider all plastic packaging.

carapace 8y ago

We should learn to live in harmony with Nature. Among other things, biomimetic technology should be preferred. However, Molten Salt Oxidation can handle pretty much anything non-metallic, including plastic (which is reduced to "synthesis gas"), and it's exothermic (you're basically burning stuff in a liquid salt bath). They use it to deal with chemical weapons and stuff. We have all the technology we need, we just have to be smarter about how we meet our needs.

cdolan 8y ago

As many comments here point out - you are seen as a heretic for going against the 'recycling gods' in many parts of the world. That is certainly true in parts of American industry as well. U.S. kids have been conditioned since the 90's to believe everything is recyclable, and you commit a public disservice if you throw things away. Slowly people are realizing that 'single stream' recycling just results in a lot of contaminants and ends up being thrown away anyways. Up until 6 months ago, one of my party tricks was to explain to people that glass is not commonly recycled, but actually ground up and used as 'daily cover' on a landfill (2-3" of material to help keep down odors, start the decomposition process, and provide long term stability to the pile of trash). The reactions ranged from "ha, I figured..." to jaw dropping denials. People are finally starting to realize that, hey... Maybe a bunch of 'recycled' (read: shattered) beer bottles of mixed colors (green, brown, clear) present much as much of an OSHA workplace hazard as they do an 'environmental benefit'.

sonnyblarney 8y ago
Since glass is just 'sand' essentially and can be broken down and doesn't seem to pose any kind of environmental issue a-la 'plastic oceans' - can you enlighten us as to the problem with glass? I mean - is it much more complicated than just 'grind it up somewhat and throw it into the a hole' ? Or where do the problems arise?
- int_19h 8y ago
  The problem is that it's not recycling - but the people who put those bottles in their recycling bin did so on the assumption that it would, in fact, have been recycled.
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    Ah. I see. Well hopefully maybe instead of 'recycling' we can at least do more effective 'waste management' now that we're all programmed to separate things. This is one of many areas I wish YC would focus more on. So many 'big opportunities' in 'real world' businesses outside of SaaS etc..

blaze33 8y ago

Eventually, every product will need to be designed as easily and efficiently recyclable. Humanity modern history was essentially focused around growth. Now for any long-term survivability, I guess we better start using our immense capabilities to ensure some sustainability to our societies. Just look at the billion years of evolution and natural selection we stand on: everything works in cycles. Earth only gets sunlight in and heat out, entropy rules, that's all we have. Now, you can't build a new car out of pure sunlight, nor can you dispose of the old one as infrared light into space. Yet life flourished on our space rock. All past and present species who did well relied on cycles. Those who ate everything and shat all over the place? Died quickly. The current world economy is an unfinished work: produce > use > dispose, a perfectly linear system. Recycling closes the loop. I get we happen to prefer making, buying and using new things, inputs, over dealing with garbage. I recall instagram was once filled with food plates, not so much with whatever happens on the toilet 8 hours later. As much as we love to play elaborate games on who does/gets what/how much/how long, there's still no way to cheat the laws of physics to keep playing forever. If not now or not here, the universe doesn't care very much, see you on the next episode on that other planet to see how long an intelligent life can survive with limited ressources ;)

sonnyblarney 8y ago
"every product will need to be designed as easily and efficiently recyclable" Yes, this is it. With some planning, regulation and 'sustainable' thinking around product design, it seems possible to me this could work. We currently put 0 effort into how packaging 'deconstructs' into something recyclable. Some work there could yield tremendous difference. Maybe even totally painless on the part of the consumer, i.e. 'it just works'.

keerthiko 8y ago

The best first step is definitely to minimize waste, by not ordering multiple small online shipments, individually wrapped foods, too much groceries that then go bad, etc and instead trying to buy more refill packs, bring your own bags to shop, etc etc. The next best form of "recycling" is in-home reuse, and if you do enough of it it's perfectly justifiable to just throw it into trash (aka recycling) after you're done. Re-use grocery store produce bags to portion food in the freezer or as lunch/sandwich bags (like zip loc bags), and later as kitchen trash containment to limit odors and fluid leakage in your trash. I also use them as trash bags in smaller bins around the house (bathrooms, bedroom, etc) instead of buying various sizes of trash bags. Use the backs of letter-sized mail and physical spam as scratch paper and for note-taking before discarding/recycling. Rip the flaps off cardboard boxes and use the boxes to sort items in your closets and pantries (and the flaps can be used as dividers too). I even use smaller delivery boxes to sort items in the fridge because it's easier to clean (by throwing out) than wiping fridge spills. I feel like most of these sorts of things are no-brainers, but the typical western consumerist household freely generates tons of trash and just buys even more things to fulfill these roles generating even more trash that it boggles my mind.

hiisukun 8y ago

When I was growing up, the mantra was "reduce, reuse, recycle". The order was important. It was one of those government promoted national sayings in Australia, along with 'slip slop slap'. Unfortunately my current impression is that there is a strange blindness to these first two: reducing waste in the first place seems ignored if the item is recycable. And if you couldn't avoid packaging, choosing to use that item again makes no difference - just recycle it! It is like 'recycle' has some ultimate environmental positive power on people's attitude. If something is recycled, or recyclable, we don't need to worry about anything else. Quite concerning.

csense 8y ago

Someone should build a recycling plant that ingests any possible waste, heats it hot enough to break apart all molecular bonds so there aren't any nasty complex byproducts, then uses temperature-controlled cooling to separately condense individual elements or simple standard molecules. My guess is that it's not against the laws of physics [1]. But it would be pretty far beyond any current technology to do it economically, or at the scale to handle a significant fraction of the waste output of a large country. And also pretty energy inefficient. If you have a grasp of the engineering issues (I sure don't), feel free to chime in on the (in)feasibility of this idea. [1] I'm no astrophysicist, but this is basically what happens to "recycle" planets or asteroids, if a star swallows them and then goes supernova.