11 ms·

Just 10% of U.S. plastic gets recycled. A new kind of plastic could change that

149 points by howard941 8y ago

newswriter99 8y ago
Petrochemical reporter here. The article fails to describe whether this plastic behaves like polyethylene, which can be pliable and flexible, or polypropylene, which is rigid and brittle. Or any of the other dozens of varieties of plastics, each with their own specific use in this modern world of ours. Every time I overhear someone at a party or gathering giving their half-baked description of a story like this I have to roll my eyes. There's no "cure-all" sustainable green plastic that can replace the variety we make from natural gas. There just isn't. And even if we were to switch to bioplastics derived from plants, it would still be too energy-intestive to be cost-effective.
- frankbreetz 8y ago
  Too expensive? How expensive is it? If a package cost an extra couple dollars to send we could make do. A big part of tackling all of these environmental issues is that certain things are going to be more expensive. If it cost 10$ to make certain a disposable water bottle makes it to the right place a bottle of water should cost about 11$. Same with packaging, this will of course change consumer habits, and make people think twice.
  - newswriter99 8y ago
    You have to consider the economies of scale. A few dollars multiplied over millions of manufacturing orders and shipping costs. And that's just cost. The reason I'm stressing about virgin plastic over recycled is also in consideration of the electricity you use to recycle, the water costs, transportation costs, human labor, ect. The same applies to glass and cardboard. That sand isn't coming from thin air. The cardboard wasn't made from hopes and dreams. These are physical commodities which are either as finite as natural gas (sand) or require space, water and nutrients to grow (trees for paper for cardboard). Yes, paper is biodegradable and plastic is not, but you're spending a LOT of time and energy to make something that could be better served quickly via plastic.
    - frankbreetz 8y ago
      You also have to consider the cost of disposal, which isn't currently done when creating plastics. Is it eventually going to have to be paid for by the taxpayers of some countries? By making cheap, quick plastic we are creating a very expensive problem. Might it be better to deal with this problem on the front end?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- black6 8y ago
  The new plastic appears to be a vitrimer, which is a class of thermoset, so not well suited as a replacement for the types of polymer plastics that tend to junk up the environment (thermosets, because of their durability, tend to have very long useable lifetimes -- I have milk crates I use for storage that are older than me!)
- Balgair 8y ago
  Aside: Since plastic fishing nets make up ~50% of the oceanic plastic [0], I'm hoping that this is of the more polyethylene form. [0] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/03/great-pacific-garbage-patch-plastics-environment/ https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/03/great-pacific-ga...
dpflan 8y ago
"""The next big question is whether manufacturers will use it and recycling plants will accept it. Because the new plastic’s byproducts are more valuable—and because recycling plants likely wouldn’t need a total overhaul to process it, this sustainable plastic could one day shift the global economics of plastic recycling.""" One question is what is the price to create this new plastic, sure the output "recyclable" is more valuable because it's more broken down - so the process of decomposition towards usable components is improved.
- newswriter99 8y ago
  "One question is what is the price to create this new plastic" You actually hit the nail on the head better than I did. Virgin resin is cheaper than recycled plastic. Which means that manufacturers have an incentive to buy fresh plastic pellets over more-costly recycled material (which is usually of inferior quality anyway). That's why lots of products you see will say "made from X% recycled parts". A bottle that's 100% recycled just sucks compared to a fresh one. (edited for punctuation)
- TheSoftwareGuy 8y ago
  Not just price, but what are its other physical characteristics? how easily does it melt (will it melt if I leave it in my car during the day), is it rigid or flexible, etc. There are thousands, maybe millions of different plastics in existance because they all fill a different niche, and price is just one variable in those equations. Although I guess the point is to replace single use plastics, but that still represents a large variety of things.
andrewstuart 8y ago
It's important to understand that the packaging industry, which we pay vast amounts of money to, floods the earth with never ending flow of single use plastic. That industry WANTS us to keep thinking about and talking about recycling. Don't be sucked in - recycling is the distraction that they want you to think about. Recycling is NOT the answer. The answer is to stop making the endless flow of single use plastic. If you want to fix this problem, start laying the blame at the feet of the "garbage brands" - the companies and brands that buy the single use plastic. We need to start with the big, obvious targets like Coca Cola, and we need to associate their precious logo and trademarked red swirl with ruined beaches and reefs and oceans. That's when change will happen - when those big brands come to be tightly associated with garbage.
- newswriter99 8y ago
  No you're right, we should go back to not having cheap, affordable packaging the world over. That way people in developed nations can go back to paying through the nose for shipping products, thus making products cost more, thus lowering the affordability of those products for the middle and working class. And as for the developing nations who have been increasing their middle class with affordable packaging and plastic products? Eh, screw 'em, right? /sarcasm I'm only using this to illustrate how you went right into the "industry bad, four legs good" mantra of the pro-green movement without regard to an alternative that would keep or raise the quality of living for people the world over. Fact of the matter is if it weren't for plastics, the everyday products that we all consume would either cost way more, or be so expensive that quite a few of us would never get to use them. Stew on that before you jump to "ban all plastics".
  - andrewstuart 8y ago
    I didn't say "ban all plastics". And I simply don't believe that it's not possible to create a highly standardised, reusable washable container system. These sorts of objections are what the packaging industry will scream till it's lungs fall out because the packaging industries profits and maybe existence depends on spewing out infinite garbage. That industry needs to say things like "well you're hurting the third world if you stop us spewing infinite garbage". I don't believe it.
franch 8y ago
As a European temporarily living in the US I am truly shocked by the amount of plastic used in packaging here. Moreover, the number of plastic bags that it's used in supermarkets is also shocking. Where I come from (Italy) we banned plastic bags 2 years ago in favour of compostable bags with no problems. Instead of creating a different kind of plastic, I think that we should really enforce at least a global ban on light plastic bags. EDIT: spelling
- petschge 8y ago
  To add on to this: The plastic bags in the supermarket are also typically too flimsy to be used as garbage bags, which was my standard way of using them when we still had plastic bags in Europe. Instead they are already full of holes by the time I get home and all I can do is throw them straight into the trash and by extra plastic bags just to take out the garbage.
- petschge 8y ago
  The other thing that is very obvious as an European currently living in the US is the insane amount of plastic associated with food. Hotel breakfast will be (even in relatively upscale hotels) on single-use styrofoam plates, with single-use plastic cutlery, plastic lined single-use "paper" cups and composed of tons of individually plastic packed items. Food in the cafeteria (I have seen the well hated name Aramak in a few places there) is served in single-use take-out containers, even if you explicitly tell them it is "for here" not "to go", because the cafeteria works have no (clean) plates at their stations. Cutlery is also plastic, since they removed the silverware a few weeks ago after too many complaints that it had been poorly cleaned. The disk washers are now busy taking out mountains of trash, instead of cleaning reusable items. Once dinner time comes around most of my colleagues eat take out, that is put in plastic lined paper in the best case and styrofoam in the typical case. And even if it is a single item, it will be in a plastic bag or two, along with a large handful of napkins, ten tiny sachets of bbq and hot sauce and three straws, even if no single drink is included.
  - ip26 8y ago
    This is America, where adding plastic always makes it better, and making it disposable is progress. Today I looked in the fridge at work and saw precooked hardboiled eggs in a plastic bag. - Sad American
redmattred 8y ago
This could be a good forcing function to encourage people to think about how to reuse and recycle locally. This open source project is interesting: http://www.metabolizer.org/ http://www.metabolizer.org/ - It uses biodegradable materials to create burnable gas - The has to run a generator - The generator to power a plastic shredder - The shredded plastic pieces are used by a 3D printer - The 3D printer (also powered by generator) can print materials out of recycled plastics
bananasbandanas 8y ago
I genuinely find it hard to determine whether I should buy some products with or without plastic packaging. Is it better to buy produce without plastic wrapping, even though that means a bigger portion of it went bad and needed to be thrown away? Should I buy some sauce in a glass instead of plastic bottle, even though it made the transport less efficient? There are of course the obvious ones, like those flimsy bags for loose produce, and I try to avoid those. Any advice for the non-obvious cases though?
rayiner 8y ago
With the exception of metal and glass, recycling is largely a myth. Most paper and plastic that is “recycled” gets dumped in a landfill or sent overseas where it gets dumped in a landfill: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfills-plastic-papers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfil.... It’s getting worse now that China has stopped accepting US “recycling.” The meal kit industry is particularly insidious for that reason. They invoke environmental concerns heavily in their advertising, but those individually plastic wrapped ingredients obliterate whatever incremental environmental benefits there are from organic ingredients or substituting meat for vegetables.
- sb057 8y ago
  India has also stopped accepting plastic "recycling": https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/india-plastic-waste-ban-recycling-uk-china-a8811696.html https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/india-plastic-wast...
airstrike 8y ago
The main point I haven't mentally solved in my use of plastic is what to do with household trash. I live on the 30th floor of an apartment building in NYC and there's no other way to dispose of trash other than to throw it down the chute (though we do recycle what we can in separate bin). Curious to hear what others think / be enlightened. Even if I move to the suburbs, to my knowledge waste management companies rely on you packaging your trash nicely in plastic bags, so I'm not sure what to do...
- dahdum 8y ago
  I'm in the same situation, one chute, no recycling except cardboard. At least we can both rest easy that none of our garbage is being dumped in the ocean.
jayess 8y ago
I wish there was data out there on how much plastic actually gets recycled. It seems like no one can actually tell us. I'm suspecting more and more that recycling of plastic is nearly completely a scam.
newswriter99 8y ago
The amount of people posting how "plant-based plastics" are the solution goes to show just how out-of-touch most of us are with being poor or stuck in an underdeveloped nation. It's easy to spend more on "sustainable" alternatives to plastic when you have more disposable income than you know what to do with. But if you're a low-income working class family, commodities like single-use plastics are a godsend. I'm not saying pollution is not an issue. I'm not saying the plastics industries don't have an agenda to make more plastic. What I'm saying is, you're all blind to the solutions that plastics provide to people who ARE NOT rich white Americans.
eatbitseveryday 8y ago
When we discuss plastics developments, I believe we should focus on their decomposition properties, too, and whether they'll stay around forever as tiny particles now coined as 'microplastic' particles.
johnisgood 8y ago
Why do not we make plastic out of hemp? Is it because of the War on Drugs?
pfdietz 8y ago
Make plastic easy to burn. We'll need storable fuels for use even in a zero CO2 economy, and piles of packaging and other combustible trash could serve that purpose.
tracker1 8y ago
I think the issue is probably more towards the inappropriate disposal of a lot of things... I wouldn't mind seeing plastics heated and compressed into larger composite cubes as part of the landfill process, and contrasting see paper shredded and burried in layers. Right now, so much trash is being sent in unclosed containers all around increasing general and specifically ocean pollution. Microplastics are a problem and likely to become bigger over time. Not just the US, but a lot of places really need investment in trash infrastructure in general. That doesn't even touch on electronic waste. I'd love to see a law requiring unlocking codes for mobile devices that have active security flaws that have been fixed for over a year, without the update released to the device. At least then you could get a longer tail life out of a lot more devices. Isn't most plastic a byproduct of oil/gas use anyway? All the same, would love to see the disposable snack/beverage companies held more accountable to the litter and waste their packaging brings. The problem is that too many people don't care... and too many others are tired of hearing about it. Divisive conversations and politics doesn't help here.
jusob 8y ago
"Five Asian Countries Dump More Plastic Into Oceans Than Anyone Else Combined" [1] We should help these countries first to recycle and reduce their plastic usage if we want to make a real difference. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hannahleung/2018/04/21/five-asian-countries-dump-more-plastic-than-anyone-else-combined-how-you-can-help/#23d3bd0e1234 https://www.forbes.com/sites/hannahleung/2018/04/21/five-asi...

149 points by howard941 8y ago

Petrochemical reporter here. The article fails to describe whether this plastic behaves like polyethylene, which can be pliable and flexible, or polypropylene, which is rigid and brittle. Or any of the other dozens of varieties of plastics, each with their own specific use in this modern world of ours. Every time I overhear someone at a party or gathering giving their half-baked description of a story like this I have to roll my eyes. There's no "cure-all" sustainable green plastic that can replace the variety we make from natural gas. There just isn't. And even if we were to switch to bioplastics derived from plants, it would still be too energy-intestive to be cost-effective.

frankbreetz 8y ago
Too expensive? How expensive is it? If a package cost an extra couple dollars to send we could make do. A big part of tackling all of these environmental issues is that certain things are going to be more expensive. If it cost 10$ to make certain a disposable water bottle makes it to the right place a bottle of water should cost about 11$. Same with packaging, this will of course change consumer habits, and make people think twice.
- newswriter99 8y ago
  You have to consider the economies of scale. A few dollars multiplied over millions of manufacturing orders and shipping costs. And that's just cost. The reason I'm stressing about virgin plastic over recycled is also in consideration of the electricity you use to recycle, the water costs, transportation costs, human labor, ect. The same applies to glass and cardboard. That sand isn't coming from thin air. The cardboard wasn't made from hopes and dreams. These are physical commodities which are either as finite as natural gas (sand) or require space, water and nutrients to grow (trees for paper for cardboard). Yes, paper is biodegradable and plastic is not, but you're spending a LOT of time and energy to make something that could be better served quickly via plastic.
  - frankbreetz 8y ago
    You also have to consider the cost of disposal, which isn't currently done when creating plastics. Is it eventually going to have to be paid for by the taxpayers of some countries? By making cheap, quick plastic we are creating a very expensive problem. Might it be better to deal with this problem on the front end?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
black6 8y ago
The new plastic appears to be a vitrimer, which is a class of thermoset, so not well suited as a replacement for the types of polymer plastics that tend to junk up the environment (thermosets, because of their durability, tend to have very long useable lifetimes -- I have milk crates I use for storage that are older than me!)
Balgair 8y ago
Aside: Since plastic fishing nets make up ~50% of the oceanic plastic [0], I'm hoping that this is of the more polyethylene form. [0] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/03/great-pacific-garbage-patch-plastics-environment/ https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/03/great-pacific-ga...

dpflan 8y ago

"""The next big question is whether manufacturers will use it and recycling plants will accept it. Because the new plastic’s byproducts are more valuable—and because recycling plants likely wouldn’t need a total overhaul to process it, this sustainable plastic could one day shift the global economics of plastic recycling.""" One question is what is the price to create this new plastic, sure the output "recyclable" is more valuable because it's more broken down - so the process of decomposition towards usable components is improved.

newswriter99 8y ago
"One question is what is the price to create this new plastic" You actually hit the nail on the head better than I did. Virgin resin is cheaper than recycled plastic. Which means that manufacturers have an incentive to buy fresh plastic pellets over more-costly recycled material (which is usually of inferior quality anyway). That's why lots of products you see will say "made from X% recycled parts". A bottle that's 100% recycled just sucks compared to a fresh one. (edited for punctuation)
TheSoftwareGuy 8y ago
Not just price, but what are its other physical characteristics? how easily does it melt (will it melt if I leave it in my car during the day), is it rigid or flexible, etc. There are thousands, maybe millions of different plastics in existance because they all fill a different niche, and price is just one variable in those equations. Although I guess the point is to replace single use plastics, but that still represents a large variety of things.

andrewstuart 8y ago

It's important to understand that the packaging industry, which we pay vast amounts of money to, floods the earth with never ending flow of single use plastic. That industry WANTS us to keep thinking about and talking about recycling. Don't be sucked in - recycling is the distraction that they want you to think about. Recycling is NOT the answer. The answer is to stop making the endless flow of single use plastic. If you want to fix this problem, start laying the blame at the feet of the "garbage brands" - the companies and brands that buy the single use plastic. We need to start with the big, obvious targets like Coca Cola, and we need to associate their precious logo and trademarked red swirl with ruined beaches and reefs and oceans. That's when change will happen - when those big brands come to be tightly associated with garbage.

newswriter99 8y ago
No you're right, we should go back to not having cheap, affordable packaging the world over. That way people in developed nations can go back to paying through the nose for shipping products, thus making products cost more, thus lowering the affordability of those products for the middle and working class. And as for the developing nations who have been increasing their middle class with affordable packaging and plastic products? Eh, screw 'em, right? /sarcasm I'm only using this to illustrate how you went right into the "industry bad, four legs good" mantra of the pro-green movement without regard to an alternative that would keep or raise the quality of living for people the world over. Fact of the matter is if it weren't for plastics, the everyday products that we all consume would either cost way more, or be so expensive that quite a few of us would never get to use them. Stew on that before you jump to "ban all plastics".
- andrewstuart 8y ago
  I didn't say "ban all plastics". And I simply don't believe that it's not possible to create a highly standardised, reusable washable container system. These sorts of objections are what the packaging industry will scream till it's lungs fall out because the packaging industries profits and maybe existence depends on spewing out infinite garbage. That industry needs to say things like "well you're hurting the third world if you stop us spewing infinite garbage". I don't believe it.

franch 8y ago

As a European temporarily living in the US I am truly shocked by the amount of plastic used in packaging here. Moreover, the number of plastic bags that it's used in supermarkets is also shocking. Where I come from (Italy) we banned plastic bags 2 years ago in favour of compostable bags with no problems. Instead of creating a different kind of plastic, I think that we should really enforce at least a global ban on light plastic bags. EDIT: spelling

petschge 8y ago
To add on to this: The plastic bags in the supermarket are also typically too flimsy to be used as garbage bags, which was my standard way of using them when we still had plastic bags in Europe. Instead they are already full of holes by the time I get home and all I can do is throw them straight into the trash and by extra plastic bags just to take out the garbage.
petschge 8y ago
The other thing that is very obvious as an European currently living in the US is the insane amount of plastic associated with food. Hotel breakfast will be (even in relatively upscale hotels) on single-use styrofoam plates, with single-use plastic cutlery, plastic lined single-use "paper" cups and composed of tons of individually plastic packed items. Food in the cafeteria (I have seen the well hated name Aramak in a few places there) is served in single-use take-out containers, even if you explicitly tell them it is "for here" not "to go", because the cafeteria works have no (clean) plates at their stations. Cutlery is also plastic, since they removed the silverware a few weeks ago after too many complaints that it had been poorly cleaned. The disk washers are now busy taking out mountains of trash, instead of cleaning reusable items. Once dinner time comes around most of my colleagues eat take out, that is put in plastic lined paper in the best case and styrofoam in the typical case. And even if it is a single item, it will be in a plastic bag or two, along with a large handful of napkins, ten tiny sachets of bbq and hot sauce and three straws, even if no single drink is included.
- ip26 8y ago
  This is America, where adding plastic always makes it better, and making it disposable is progress. Today I looked in the fridge at work and saw precooked hardboiled eggs in a plastic bag. - Sad American

redmattred 8y ago

This could be a good forcing function to encourage people to think about how to reuse and recycle locally. This open source project is interesting: http://www.metabolizer.org/ http://www.metabolizer.org/ - It uses biodegradable materials to create burnable gas - The has to run a generator - The generator to power a plastic shredder - The shredded plastic pieces are used by a 3D printer - The 3D printer (also powered by generator) can print materials out of recycled plastics

bananasbandanas 8y ago

I genuinely find it hard to determine whether I should buy some products with or without plastic packaging. Is it better to buy produce without plastic wrapping, even though that means a bigger portion of it went bad and needed to be thrown away? Should I buy some sauce in a glass instead of plastic bottle, even though it made the transport less efficient? There are of course the obvious ones, like those flimsy bags for loose produce, and I try to avoid those. Any advice for the non-obvious cases though?

rayiner 8y ago

With the exception of metal and glass, recycling is largely a myth. Most paper and plastic that is “recycled” gets dumped in a landfill or sent overseas where it gets dumped in a landfill: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfills-plastic-papers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfil.... It’s getting worse now that China has stopped accepting US “recycling.” The meal kit industry is particularly insidious for that reason. They invoke environmental concerns heavily in their advertising, but those individually plastic wrapped ingredients obliterate whatever incremental environmental benefits there are from organic ingredients or substituting meat for vegetables.

sb057 8y ago
India has also stopped accepting plastic "recycling": https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/india-plastic-waste-ban-recycling-uk-china-a8811696.html https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/india-plastic-wast...

airstrike 8y ago

The main point I haven't mentally solved in my use of plastic is what to do with household trash. I live on the 30th floor of an apartment building in NYC and there's no other way to dispose of trash other than to throw it down the chute (though we do recycle what we can in separate bin). Curious to hear what others think / be enlightened. Even if I move to the suburbs, to my knowledge waste management companies rely on you packaging your trash nicely in plastic bags, so I'm not sure what to do...

dahdum 8y ago
I'm in the same situation, one chute, no recycling except cardboard. At least we can both rest easy that none of our garbage is being dumped in the ocean.

jayess 8y ago

I wish there was data out there on how much plastic actually gets recycled. It seems like no one can actually tell us. I'm suspecting more and more that recycling of plastic is nearly completely a scam.

newswriter99 8y ago

The amount of people posting how "plant-based plastics" are the solution goes to show just how out-of-touch most of us are with being poor or stuck in an underdeveloped nation. It's easy to spend more on "sustainable" alternatives to plastic when you have more disposable income than you know what to do with. But if you're a low-income working class family, commodities like single-use plastics are a godsend. I'm not saying pollution is not an issue. I'm not saying the plastics industries don't have an agenda to make more plastic. What I'm saying is, you're all blind to the solutions that plastics provide to people who ARE NOT rich white Americans.

eatbitseveryday 8y ago

When we discuss plastics developments, I believe we should focus on their decomposition properties, too, and whether they'll stay around forever as tiny particles now coined as 'microplastic' particles.

johnisgood 8y ago

Why do not we make plastic out of hemp? Is it because of the War on Drugs?

pfdietz 8y ago

Make plastic easy to burn. We'll need storable fuels for use even in a zero CO2 economy, and piles of packaging and other combustible trash could serve that purpose.

tracker1 8y ago

I think the issue is probably more towards the inappropriate disposal of a lot of things... I wouldn't mind seeing plastics heated and compressed into larger composite cubes as part of the landfill process, and contrasting see paper shredded and burried in layers. Right now, so much trash is being sent in unclosed containers all around increasing general and specifically ocean pollution. Microplastics are a problem and likely to become bigger over time. Not just the US, but a lot of places really need investment in trash infrastructure in general. That doesn't even touch on electronic waste. I'd love to see a law requiring unlocking codes for mobile devices that have active security flaws that have been fixed for over a year, without the update released to the device. At least then you could get a longer tail life out of a lot more devices. Isn't most plastic a byproduct of oil/gas use anyway? All the same, would love to see the disposable snack/beverage companies held more accountable to the litter and waste their packaging brings. The problem is that too many people don't care... and too many others are tired of hearing about it. Divisive conversations and politics doesn't help here.

jusob 8y ago

"Five Asian Countries Dump More Plastic Into Oceans Than Anyone Else Combined" [1] We should help these countries first to recycle and reduce their plastic usage if we want to make a real difference. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hannahleung/2018/04/21/five-asian-countries-dump-more-plastic-than-anyone-else-combined-how-you-can-help/#23d3bd0e1234 https://www.forbes.com/sites/hannahleung/2018/04/21/five-asi...