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Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why

336 points by kevinrpope 7y ago

jokoon 7y ago
Before reading this, I thought that non-reusable plastics should be banned, and that only reusable packaging should be allowed, should it be high quality plastics, glass, stainless steel... Some plastic types should be banned, it would make recycling more viable... I'm really curious how much plastic China was importing, and what they were doing with it.
deleted 7y ago
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paultopia 7y ago
This is LUDICROUS. Recycling is harder than doing your taxes. We desperately need uniformity on this. "BEVERAGE BOTTLES Recyclable. Be sure to remove the plastic film label, which isn’t recyclable." FFS. Have you ever tried to remove one of those labels? It's impossible. "A bottle with a cap or an opening the same size or smaller than the base of the bottle is probably going to be recyclable." -- WTF does the size of the opening have to do with it? "The How2Recycle label is showing up on more products at the grocery store ... GreenBlue says that there are more than 2,500 variations of the label in circulation" 2500 different recycling rules?! This is not a consumer-level problem. It's completely ridiculous to expect millions of ordinary people to succeed at this kind of task on a daily or weekly basis. It needs to be solved further up the supply chain, or processors need to be centralized and standardized. Period.
- SapporoChris 7y ago
  Instead of raging against. Perhaps consider solutions. Example: In Japan, the plastic film label is perforated no glue is utilized. It is fairly easily removed. More difficult simply tossing a bottle, sure. Think for a moment instead of raging. 2500 variations does not mean 2500 different recycling rules. There are more than 2500 variations of your potential mate, that doesn't mean there's 2500 different ways to mate. It is a consumer problem, consumers will have to deal with the results.
  - benrbray 7y ago
    You just suggested a way that manufacturers can make it easier for consumers to recycle, did you not? You seem to be confirming the OP's point, which is that the current state of recycling is rage-inducing.
- spodek 7y ago
  I found a simple 80% solution for home plastic: I avoid packaged food in favor of fresh, unwrapped fruits, vegetables, and foods from bulk bins. Now I have a load of garbage to empty a little less than once a year and a load of metal and plastic recycling once or twice a year. Plus my food tastes better and costs less. Everyone is free to do what they want, and experience shows someone will have to tell me the solution doesn't work for someone, but I hope people do similar so the manufacturers' warehouses fill with plastic instead of the oceans and they stop producing it.
  - esotericn 7y ago
    Yep. Not only do you avoid plastic but you eat better too because you have hard lines that are not to be crossed. No more chocolate bars, ready meals, pot noodles, bags of crisps or whatever else. Even if you end up buying a bag of rice in plastic you're cutting down the waste by a huge amount because even a small one gives you ten or more servings.
    - Scoundreller 7y ago
      And larger containers have less surface area:volume —> less packaging. Which is why I really hate it when manufacturers reduce pack sizes.
      - esotericn 7y ago
        Small pack sizes are such a load of shite. Some small number of people are travelling. For the rest, 500g of rice is a pointlessly small amount. It lasts forever, is dense enough to stash, etc.
        Scoundreller 7y ago
        I’ve seen OJ go from 2L to 1.89, and now 1.75L. Pasta: 1kg to 908g. It’s bullshit.
        7y ago
- eloff 7y ago
  I've noticed that people aren't actually fully capable of just sorting the recycling correctly. There's always stuff in the wrong bins in my building despite an ongoing education effort to fix that and helpful illustrated rules above the bins. Rules about lids and labels is a joke.
  - paultopia 7y ago
    Since lids and labels and such seem to actually matter, the only sensible solution is for the governments of the world to legislate to mandate specific shapes and material compositions for things like drink containers. Standardize it all.
    - jgibson 7y ago
      I've been thinking about this more and more, and it just makes so much sense. No one cares what shape a beer bottle is, the label is enough to tell them apart. Marketing people will complain if they can't differentiate on packaging, but less of them isn't something to worry about either
      - flukus 7y ago
        > Marketing people will complain if they can't differentiate on packaging Cigarette companies have already fought and lost legal battles forcing them to use standard plain packaging, so complaining is about all they can do.
      - TaylorAlexander 7y ago
        I’m in total agreement. We give corporations a lot of freedom even when that freedom is unnecessary and leads to significant environmental and societal harm. We’ve got to get some power back for the people so we can say “no, you don’t get any shape. You have to agree to a limited number of shapes and they have to be totally recyclable.”
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - 7y ago
- TylerE 7y ago
  It's really pretty simple if you actually care about results. Is it aluminum? Recycle it. Is is not aluminum? Don't recycle it.
  - knowaveragejoe 7y ago
    Plastic bottles are pretty much all included according to this site. There's no reason not to include them too.
    - TylerE 7y ago
      It takes more energy to ship and reprocess them than you save. That's why you don't. If you do, it's explicitly because it makes you feel good - it's worse for the planet.
      - xugy 7y ago
        Source?
        csears 7y ago
        Thomas Kinnaman was interviewed on Planet Money recently and mentioned roughly this conclusion based on his 2014 study. More details here: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2019/07/15/why_its_probably_better_for_the_planet_to_throw_plastic_in_the_trash.html https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2019/07/15/why_its_pro...
        shkkmo 7y ago
        Plastic and Glass recycling can be borderline and it depends on the specific local implementation. Either way, the savings are never going to be massive and it is an open question if it is worth the effort. (Glass re-use is different) Aluminum is completely different. Prices for aluminum recycling per ton is an order of magnitude higher than other recyclables.
        TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
        This is what the big kerfuffle is all about. All we’ve been doing is paying the Chinese and Malaysians to feed our plastics to the dolphins for us. Now they won’t take it, and people here get upset if you feed the animals, we’re realise the whole deception for what it is. Edit to add sources: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/03/whale-dies-88-pounds-plastic-philippines/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/03/whale... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/29/malaysia-to-send-up-to-100-tonnes-of-plastic-waste-back-to-australia https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/29/malaysia-to-se... Self evident that if it were economically & environmentally sound to recycle we wouldn’t be shipping it around the planet to do so.
- darksaints 7y ago
  The sorting absolutely should be done downstream, ideally with robots doing the vast majority of the work.
  - baroffoos 7y ago
    It is done that way. Thats how you can put a aluminum can and cardboard in the same bin. But what does a robot do when a tictac container comes in with a Polyethylene body and a Polypropylene lid. Does it sit there with high precision fingers trying to pick the glued in lid off?
    - abraae 7y ago
      It uses its fricking lasers, obviously!
- aznpwnzor 7y ago
  reduce and reuse are much easier than doing taxes, but they're not in speculative shareholder corporate interest
- skybrian 7y ago
  Yes it's pretty bad. What it comes down to is: follow the local rules. If you don't know the local rules or are unsure, err on the side of keeping the recycling clean and throw it out. (Landfills are quite good at keeping plastic out of the environment. It's the stuff that doesn't make it into the landfill that you have to worry about.)
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Then keep checking, as local rules keep evolving so that products they used to consider acceptable stop being so. Sometimes new items become acceptable, but our experience is mostly of things being removed from recycling over the years. It's insane.
    - skybrian 7y ago
      Yes, someone needs to write a really good web app, like those that exist for transit.
      - TaylorAlexander 7y ago
        But also some regulations to keep the permutations down would be super helpful. Mandating that all the things are recyclable would be super helpful.
- oska 7y ago
  It's only ludicrous because the plastics industry wants to pretend that plastics are recyclable when, mostly, they're not (because it's impractical or uneconomic). The rules for recycling when you exclude all plastics are pretty simple.
- SECProto 7y ago
  > FFS. Have you ever tried to remove [beverage bottle] labels? It's impossible. As a consumer in North America, it's not easy. Japan has stronger national regulations, however, and beverage bottles universally have labels with either perforated strips or peel-up corners, to facilitate removal. Plastic caps are also easily removed from glass bottles - peel the cover back and it splits in half and releases from the bottle. So, agreed on your final point. It can be done easily, and not necessarily at additional cost. Manufacturers just haven't been motivated to do so.
  - masklinn 7y ago
    > As a consumer in North America, it's not easy. Japan has stronger national regulations, however, and beverage bottles universally have labels with either perforated strips or peel-up corners, to facilitate removal. Plastic caps are also easily removed from glass bottles - peel the cover back and it splits in half and releases from the bottle. OTOH Japan wraps pretty much everything in plastic, usually multiple times over.
    - SECProto 7y ago
      And they burn their garbage, turning thin-film plastics into fuel pretty much as cleanly as the stock used to make the plastic. I much prefer that to making a huge hill with poorly-compacted trash, covering with soil and claiming "problem solved". Their usage of plastic is higher in some specific instances (omiyage, cookie or snack packages, and convenience stores come to mind), but equivalent to North America in others (standard meat comes in a shrink-wrapped styrofoam tray, vegetables/fruit come loose or a single layer of packaging, grocery stores charge for plastic bags). Despite the meme, I don't think their plastic usage is all that significantly higher outside a few specific instances.
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  Hey, you should see how they do it in Japan (there are about 20 containers for recycling, everything must be disassembled). And...people actually do it.
  - kalleboo 7y ago
    In Japan like anywhere else, recycling depends on the municipality. Where I live, we have like 6 different containers (PET bottles, other plastic, glass+cans, cardboard/paper, burnable garbage, unburnable garbage). Coming from Sweden, it's actually a bit easier here (e.g. in Sweden cans, clear glass, colored glass were all separate, and aluminum drink cans had a deposit so you took them to the supermarket)
- simonebrunozzi 7y ago
  Absolutely 100% what you said. But now the question is: why pretty much NO government has ever succeeded in this? My view is that the only hope is an EU-wide requirement to change packaging, etc to be able to still sell to the EU. That would be a big enough market for every single company to comply.
  - Tharkun 7y ago
    Belgium allegedly had an 85+% recycling rate, though I have no idea what all this stuff gets recycled to, and I suspect it gets downcycled to useless garbage.
- tzs 7y ago
  > "The How2Recycle label is showing up on more products at the grocery store ... GreenBlue says that there are more than 2,500 variations of the label in circulation" 2500 different recycling rules?! I don't think 2500 variations is actually excessive, when you look at how the labels actually work. The label has four parts [1]: • One part tells what preparation is needed, such as whether you need to rinse the item before recycling, whether you need to remove the label, and things like that. There are 13 possible options for this part. • The next part tells you if the item is widely recycled, not yet recycled, requires store drop off, or varies from place to place. There are 4 possible options for this part. • The next part lists the type of material the item is made from, such as paper or glass. There are 6 options. • Finally, the last part tells what part of the item the label applies to. Values include bottle, tray, insert, and 6 others, for a total of 9 options. 13 x 4 x 6 x 9 = 2808. Also, a given product can have more than one label. E.g., a frozen entree might have a label for the plastic tray it is in, another label for the plastic film that covers the tray, and a third label for the box that the tray is sold in. [1] https://www.how2recycle.info/labels https://www.how2recycle.info/labels
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    It's still ridiculous to make this a problem of every individual, though. > last part tells what part of the item the label applies to (...) given product can have more than one label. E.g., a frozen entree might have a label for the plastic tray it is in, another label for the plastic film that covers the tray, and a third label for the box that the tray is sold in. This alone cuts down on amount of useful/correct sorting done. The worst is packaging you actually have to disassemble yourself - e.g. something that looks like cardboard (but probably has a thin layer of plastic on top of it; you can't easily tell), but has inserts of thin transparent plastic. > whether you need to rinse the item before recycling And this, I believe, essentially kills of recycling as an idea. Not only most people won't bother (and it's a coin toss whether they'll throw the dirty container into general/non-recyclable or recyclable bin), individuals cleaning plastic packaging is a ridiculously inefficient use of water, energy for heating that water, and likely detergent too. I don't have numbers on it, but I wouldn't be surprised if the resource use delta between individuals cleaning and doing the cleaning at recycling plant is actually greater than recycling process itself saves.
- itronitron 7y ago
  regarding the size of the bottle opening, my understanding is that the automatic sorting machines at the recyclery 'work better' on bottles with a narrow opening because they are easier to push around with jets of air, but they could also be concerned that other items will get trapped inside a wide mouth plastic container and confound the sorting machine...
- benj111 7y ago
  "Recycling is harder than doing your taxes" Living in a country where the majority, including me doesnt have to deal with their taxes, I cant help thinking maybe that's the solution. Whether the onus is put on manufacturers to make things trivially recyclable, or on recyclers to sort of a big bag of mixed waste, or some combination I don't know. Does seem silly for everyone to have to become domain experts in recycling though.
deleted 7y ago
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swframe2 7y ago
I was wondering if we should put "seller unique rfids" on everything so the trash can be sorted and returned to the seller. Then we just add the cost of recycling to the cost of the product. Alternatively, add a "recycler unique rfid" and every seller has to partner with a recycler in order to sell a product.
- nightfly 7y ago
  Now you've got to ship everything back to the seller, and then the seller has to ship the waste to their actual processor. Plus the added cost/waste of the RFID tag.
  - cj 7y ago
    > Now you’ve got to ship everything back to the seller, and then the seller has to ship the waste to their actual processor That’s actually an interesting idea. If it actually worked that way, there would be an amazingly high incentive for sellers to minimize packaging waste. It would also have a side effect of making high-waste packaged goods much more expensive than low-waste packaged food, promoting the purchase of eco-friendly packaging. I wonder if there’s a less radical way to implement these kind of market incentives.
    - thereisnospork 7y ago
      >If it actually worked that way, there would be an amazingly high incentive for sellers to minimize packaging waste. But why? Adding a nonsense convoluted disincentive is inane. Landfills are cheap and plentiful and filling them with plastic doesn't hurt anything (and can be billed to either supplier or consumer) If something is worth recycling the market will sort it.
    - Nasrudith 7y ago
      Well if it was some sort of "bounty" that involves handling it the solution could be more logistically sane. No sense adding in needless shipping. Say that packaging comes with a N cost tax stamp deposit. If it doesn't wind up processed in an acceptable way then it is forfeit. If anyone reprocesses it in an acceptable way (recycling to a valueable material, trash to steam) the manufacturer gets some portion of the value back and the recycler gets some just to ensure that they do the proper paperwork to ensure the system is working correctly. A company can also be their own recycler to get a full refund.
modo_ 7y ago
I toured the Recology recycling facility a few months ago. The sorting technology is impressive, but the amount of material that they remove and send to the landfill had me questioning the efficacy of the program. It sucks to push the packaging crimes of businesses onto consumers, but I think improving the public's understanding of what can and cannot be recycled can still have a massive impact on the effectiveness of recycling programs. San Francisco has a great website to help you figure out what goes in which bin: https://sfrecycles.org/ https://sfrecycles.org/ (Note that you can recycle fabrics -- this isn't possible through most recycling programs!)
- lyjackal 7y ago
  Public awareness at the unrecyle-ability of the majority of products should hopefully upstream business packaging change.
  - baroffoos 7y ago
    Hopefully. Recycling almost feels like it has been a trick by corporations "Don't worry, you can consume as much as you want and as long as you put it in the recycling bin its all good"
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      It was a trick, and by politicians and people themselves, who wanted to be seen as being environmentally conscious. The only solution has always been to reduce consumption, but deep down, everyone wants to consume more and more, while at the same time feel better about and blissfully ignore that they are destroying the environment.
      - 5040 7y ago
        >The only solution has always been to reduce consumption, but deep down, everyone wants to consume more and more, while at the same time feel better about and blissfully ignore that they are destroying the environment. Maybe I'm only thinking of this because I've been reading Tocqueville, but might not religion be the thing to encourage restraint here?
mc32 7y ago
Someone has run the numbers and figure out energy cost and total tonnage and figure out what makes sense to streamline. Plastics is a term which applies to thousands of different polymers. Some it makes sense to recycle, some don’t. We can then begin to whittle down on the plastics we allow on the items which make most sense. For example we don’t needs tends of different plastics just because one vendor prefers the aesthetics of one over the other. Give them a select choice rather than an infinite choice. Then label the packaging simply with simple easy to understand labels which are clearly visible. Avoid mixing incompatible plastics.
- maxerickson 7y ago
  There's a few plastics that are used for most packaging, the type is labeled on most such packaging. It can be hard to see. https://www.greenlivingtips.com/articles/recycling-by-the-numbers.html https://www.greenlivingtips.com/articles/recycling-by-the-nu...
- 5040 7y ago
  >Someone has run the numbers and figure out energy cost and total tonnage and figure out what makes sense to streamline. Prices are dynamic though. Some things make sense to recycle today, but may not tomorrow, and some things may not make sense to recycle today, but may tomorrow.
leggomylibro 7y ago
You can recycle polyethylene pretty easily on its own, and a lot of those plastic wraps that the article says aren't recycled are made out of LDPE. HDPE and LDPE are great materials for a lot of things that you might otherwise make out of wood or 3D-print. It's easy to machine, and it can be very strong and rigid for its weight. Basically, you just shred the donor plastic, heat it to 300-350F, press the air out, and let it cool. With LDPE plastic wrap, you can fold and stack it instead of shredding it. You can also get cool tie-dye effects by using multiple colors in the same batch. You can use plywood for the walls of your molds, and a toaster oven that you don't plan on cooking with ever again can be a reasonable furnace. To compress the hot plastic, try making a loose-fitting lid and tamping or clamping it down while the plastic heats. But make sure that it is polyethylene - some plastics, like PVC, release highly toxic fumes. And others, like polypropylene, are often mixed with plasticizers which evaporate into nasty fumes and reduce the quality of the recycled plastic.
- userbinator 7y ago
  Notably, plastic bags are a plentiful source of nearly pure polyethylene, which being composed entirely of only hydrogen and carbon essentially in the form of a petroleum wax, is also one of the safest plastics to work with. The decomposition products of fluoro/chloropolymers can be deadly.
- pixl97 7y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpXq6mnbCus& https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpXq6mnbCus& >How To Recycle HDPE Bottle Lids Into Flawless Flat Sheet Material Decent video on how to make HDPE into new materials
gregable 7y ago
Worth noting for anyone who thinks "why bother recycling", this is specifically about plastics. If you have metal, aluminum especially is a very valuable recyclable, so definitely keep recycling that.
- skybrian 7y ago
  Even then, your curbside recycling probably can't deal with random scrap metal. The one at our house only wants aluminum and tin containers. Anything else, you should probably give to a scrap metal recycler. It doesn't matter what is theoretically recyclable. All that matters is what the recycler can handle. So the rule of thumb is: there is no rule of thumb. Follow the local rules.
  - Scoundreller 7y ago
    Dépends on your area. Around here, scrappers roam around on garbage day and pickup the scrap metal or anything salvageable.
gregable 7y ago
I've sort of wondered if recycling plastics is actually maybe bad from a CO2 angle. It seems that using mined virgin oil for plastics that gets tossed in a landfill means that at least a little more of the oil we are mining ends up not getting burned and emitted as CO2. In this way, we're creating non-global warming demand for oil which competes with the energy demand in the market. I don't know if this is a reasonable way of thinking about it. Of course, the energy required to haul a bottle of water hundreds of miles is huge, so I'm not arguing for buying more plastic waste, just not sure how recycling existing plastic waste affects global warming in particular.
- esotericn 7y ago
  The amount of oil in the ground is effectively infinite with regard to any sane carbon budget, so this could only really make sense in the short term. Ultimately in time I suppose you could consider plastics recycling as a way to extract less oil. If, for example, you could recycle 80%, then you only need to extract 20% of the oil, which is likely to be far better for the environment (less fracking etc). On geological timescales a lot of the stuff we are doing is bonkers. It looks sort of OK now because we've 'only' had 100 years of it.
  - gregable 7y ago
    That's a good point. It's not as though adding a little demand is likely to do anything other than increase supply in this case.
wlesieutre 7y ago
I live in New Haven and saw on our handy recycling flyer [0] that pizza boxes are listed, with no caveat, as being a single stream curbside recyclable item. Which is great, because pizza is a whole thing in this town. We eat a lot of it. So I was surprised to learn, if you go poking around and find the RecycleCT website [1] and hover your mouse over the pizza box, up pops this note. "No food residue. No liner." Never in my life have I had a pizza box without grease soaked through it. Maybe they've just given up, and knowing it won't be recycled anyway, they don't bother to make a fuss about what can go in the bin? Is this flyer just there to make us feel better about our waste? Because otherwise that's a pretty major note to forget to mention. Pizza boxes are recyclable, just as long as there's never been any pizza in it. [0] https://www.newhavenct.gov/civicax/filebank/blobdload.aspx?blobid=31946 https://www.newhavenct.gov/civicax/filebank/blobdload.aspx?b... [1] https://www.recyclect.com https://www.recyclect.com
- esotericn 7y ago
  Shouldn't a pizza box be compostable anyway? It's mostly cardboard?
  - yawz 7y ago
    AFAIK composting or compost collection is not available everywhere.
    - wlesieutre 7y ago
      Correct, no city compost here and I'm in an apartment building so I can't put a pile of it in the backyard
- yawz 7y ago
  A used pizza box can almost always only be composted.
- secabeen 7y ago
  You can tear the top off and recycle that, and discard the greasy bottom. While some pizzas will also soil the top of the box, you sometimes get one that's pristine.
ohiovr 7y ago
nearly everything we acquire ends up in a landfill eventually, plastic or not. Plastic unlike metals can never be restored as good as new. The recycled plastic will always be inferior. Metals do not have that problem.
- chmaynard 7y ago
  Interesting, four statements in a row that are obviously false. Can you tell us anything that's true?
  - ohiovr 7y ago
    Someday you will have to sell an estate then you will understand.
Areading314 7y ago
The truth is that plastic generally can't be recycled, and we should stop pretending as such. Consequently it would make sense to tax it and generally discourage its use as much as possible. Polluters get away with overusing plastic packaging precisely because consumers stop caring when they think it can be recycled.
- ImprovedSilence 7y ago
  Agreed. Incentivize the correct materials.
  - 18pfsmt 7y ago
    One cannot coercively distort the market with government power and expect that life will not, "uh, uh, find a way." Great intentions do not always lead to great outcomes (often the opposite).
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      I know what you mean. You can still buy cheap incandescent bulbs where I live, despite EU-wide phaseout, because they're clearly labeled "not for domestic use"... But this shows that regulating the market is not a "fire and forget" deal, but an iterative process. First you make the main bad thing more expensive than good behavior. Then you look for "life finding a way", "clever entrepreneurs" abusing loopholes, and make those more expensive too, one by one. You end when you hit diminishing returns.
      - 18pfsmt 7y ago
        Eventually you create a black market like drug cartels and the Russian mob. Perhaps we should legalize narcotics and sell them in Walgreens and CVS instead of "subsidizing" SPECTRE. "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." -Princess Leia
        7y ago
supernova87a 7y ago
The plastics and chemicals industries -- as a chemistry professor used to put it -- are but a pimple on the butt of the petroleum fuels industry. They are a tiny portion of what's getting produced every day. And as long as petroleum keeps getting pumped out of the ground for dirt cheap and getting burned, plastics will be an inevitable byproduct. It just costs pretty much $0 to make new plastic from that stream of petroleum, versus recycling which takes human effort, more equipment, logistics, etc. Until we tax petroleum coming out of the ground for all the later problems it causes us, I too am disappointed but resigned to having recycling being a further waste of resources.
- Areading314 7y ago
  There are 2 separate externalities with different costs: * CO2 emissions through burning fossil fuel * plastic garbage with 1000 year lifetimes being littered around the planet While we should absolutely be addressing both, you have to target these 2 problems separately Edit: To clarify what I'd propose would be a tax on fossil fuel production, and then an additional, much higher tax on production of things like plastic bags
quickthrower2 7y ago
Coffee cups are a no too - https://envirobank.com.au/coffee-cups-recyclable-or-not/ https://envirobank.com.au/coffee-cups-recyclable-or-not/. You can't just split into lid and cup and chuck one in the paper bin and the other in the plastic bin.
nkurz 7y ago
Does anyone have a article that clearly shows the energy costs for different container options? Let's use a 12 oz / 330 mL container of soda as the example. What I'd like to see would be something like this: New Recycle Glass: GN Kwh GR Kwh Plastic: PN Kwh PR Kwh Aluminum: AN Kwh AR Kwh That is, rather than seeing statistics that say a recycled aluminum can uses only 5% of the energy needed to create a new can (AN vs AR), I'd like to see how that 5% compares to the energy to create a new plastic bottle (AR vs PN), or to recycle a plastic bottle (AR vs PR). And I'd love for it to be units that make sense. My searching hasn't turned up much.
- reilly3000 7y ago
  I think that is brilliant. Just extend existing labeling rules to add a couple extra figures.
- dkbrk 7y ago
  It's kWh not Kwh SI prefixes and units are case sensitive. "k" is the prefix for kilo; "K" is Kelvin. Similarly, "W" is Watt. "w", as far as I'm aware, doesn't mean anything. "h" is the accepted symbol for the use of hour with the SI.
runn1ng 7y ago
oh so it seems my strategy “put everything that has some plastic in it, maybe, who knows, it looks plasticky” to the yellow bins is actually harmful
alanbernstein 7y ago
Why can't we just package more food items in aluminum? Every time I read about the mess that is recycling, I am reassured that aluminum is the absolute best case material. Why are we only using it for soda cans?
- jacobolus 7y ago
  A cylinder full of liquid can be made with very thin walls and still be pretty strong. I would guess that most other kinds of foods need other shapes of packages, for which aluminum is likely to be more expensive than e.g. plastic. Aluminum production takes a ton of energy.
- masklinn 7y ago
  It is somewhat common, but usually as a sub-packaging rather than the main e.g. chocolates are commonly individually wrapped in aluminium foil, it's also commonly used for meal trays (but I guess has become less common due to microwaves?). Sealed packets are also commonly foiled though mixed with plastic (for e.g. quick-close bits). Dunno how that works out for recycling, just burn out the plastic?
- JTbane 7y ago
  Soda can designs have to be under pressure to be strong.
  - alanbernstein 7y ago
    Thanks, that does answer my second question, and implicitly my first - other containers would need to be thicker and more expensive. What I mean to ask is, why don't we incentivize manufacturers to use more expensive aluminum packaging? It seems reasonable that the cost of manufacturing aluminum may be less than the sum of all costs of using plastic. It also seems that no companies will choose to do this without incentives.
ciconia 7y ago
Just stop buying things in plastic . There are alternatives - stores that sell products in bulk, growing your own food, reusing containers. The solutions are there.
- pixl97 7y ago
  I'm not sure if you've bought much at the store, but trying to eliminate plastic from your purchases sounds like a great way to spend a lot more money currently. You are limited to a tiny number of options. Also when it comes to products that present contamination risks, plastic is an excellent barrier to prevent the spread of microbes.
teekert 7y ago
Be carefull with this info, much depends on the factory. In the Netherlands we separate plastic and much cannot be recycled but new techniques and factories are being developed as a results of the constant stream of (at the moment!) worthless plastics. [0] [0] https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2018/06/18/weg-met-plastic-in-laagjes-dat-is-niet-te-recyclen-a1607033 https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2018/06/18/weg-met-plastic-in-laag...
- 18pfsmt 7y ago
  Polyethylene is rather inert, but our ability to further utilize it beyond a single use is imperative. I grew up with paper grocery bags and glass bottled soda, and plastic was seen as the "green" solution at that time.
- masklinn 7y ago
  > Be carefull with this info, much depends on the factory. Indeed, recently we were looking into getting bio-degradable / compostable cups for an event, however: * you need "industrial" (high-temperature) composting, your garden's compost pile is not going to work (it will probably degrade over time but very slowly) * the average collection center can't easily differentiate between bio-degradable and regular plastic (you have to check each cup individually) so they just reject everything
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    The bio-degradable items won't degrade at the expected rate, as you say it's an industrial composting facility that's needed, but they _will_ degrade far, far, more readily and won't leave the environment strewn with microplastics. That's what we seek. I've tested composting a couple of compostable nappies (aka diapers) in my under-used, low temperature, domestic compost bin. After about 3 years we emptied it out and there was no sign of the nappies at all. If an animal eats the corn-starch (or whatever compostable type it is) cup then it's not going to be especially harmful to them. Moreover, it appears from what I've seen that the compostable materials will not retain mechanical integrity after a small time of exposure to weather, this is good too. It's not all sunbeams though, we had a fairtrade chocolate bar for sale in our store that was wrapped entirely in compostable wrapping (with vegetable dye printing, etc.), the compostable "cellophane" wrap was incredible. Completely transparent, flexible, shiny. But [I believe] the humidity was too high and the wrap grew sticky before the shelf life of the chocolate [<1y] had come. It mightn't be perfect but it's a good way better.
tasty_freeze 7y ago
Considering the success of neural network image classifiers, it seems garbage sorting would be a slam dunk application for these reasons: (1) the training data is readily available. there are human sorters who already are classifying everything in real-time as they pick stuff off the conveyor and move the item to the right bin. train cameras on the conveyor belt and the analyze which items are picked out and which bin they get tossed in. (2) the NN doesn't have to be anywhere near as accurate as, say, a self-driving car. tune the classifier to minimize false positives. If the resulting NN can classify only 70% of the items, but accurately, that means 70% of the garbage stream can be automated and run 24/7. Humans can still go through the remaining 30% if it economically makes sense.
vfc1 7y ago
The US actually sends a lot of its unrecyclable plastic trash in boats across the world to Asia (in return ships that delivered goods), but it's coming back more and more. Here is a cool video that explains this - Asian Nations Reject Western Trash - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-htnUTN4mH0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-htnUTN4mH0 For example, for recycling plastic bottles, we are supposed to take the plastic lid off, and even remove the attachment of the lid and separate it from the main plastic body. Otherwise, the bottle can't actually be recycled. Single use plastics are everywhere where I live and more prevalent than ever: you want to buy 4 peaches at the supermarket? They come in a small plastic box wrapped in a plastic sheet. The only way is going to be to make it illegal and force people to use paper bags or reusable bags, not only for carrying the groceries but also to separate fruit, use reusable containers for grains, etc. But it has to be mandatory for everyone in order to make any significant difference.
- kalleboo 7y ago
  > For example, for recycling plastic bottles, we are supposed to take the plastic lid off, and even remove the attachment of the lid and separate it from the main plastic body. Otherwise, the bottle can't actually be recycled This will vary depending on the recycling facility, but where I live in Japan, you're supposed to separate the plastic label and the screwcap. According to a documentary about the recycling facilities here, the machines are able to automatically separate out the different kinds of plastic on PET bottles (bottle/cap/label), but the more there is that gets separated off, the more it slows down the process. So if one person forgets to separate their bottle's components, it's fine, the machine handles it, but if nobody separates, then the process takes too long and they can't keep up and have to divert unprocessed plastic to the incinerators.
- pjc50 7y ago
  > force people Force companies. Individuals don't get to choose what the packaging is made of. And making it too inconvenient for end users is going to get pushback we don't need. I'm wondering if there should be a mandatory deposit scheme on all packaging as there currently is on glass bottles in some place. Give people a few cents for returning a plastic bottle, and make it the manufacturer's problem to recycle or dispose of it. If your deposit-return system scans the barcode, it knows what product it is and which recycling stream to put it into ...
mschuster91 7y ago
What I don't see anywhere is chemical-based recycling. Many plastics can be dissolved in acetone, for example. Shred it all to flakes, put it in a vat of acetone, burn the stuff that isn't dissolvable and then take the raw materials out of the acetone? Or is the dissolving-into-acetone part a non-reversible operation and one ends up with a boatload of contaminated acetone?
alexisread 7y ago
I think taxing packaging along with a country-wide standard for recycling AND for standardised containers (as per other posts here) would be the best option - win-win for governments. Non-homogeneous packaging eg. Cardboard food containers with plastic windows would be taxed heavily. Taxing packaging by weight and type would theoretically work to minimise packaging and encourage eg. Bringing a tupperware container to the shops. The standardised (countrywide) container types would mean you could eg. Put your standard coffebean container under the supermarket dispenser and do away with packaging. The taxation would apply to manufacturers (import) 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.
martin-adams 7y ago
Maybe a solution is the same with cigarettes in the UK. Any packaging which is non-recyclable must be a standard color (i.e. red), and may not contain any creative branding on it. If advertisers want to market their products and make them look attractive on the shelves, they'll find creative solutions to using recyclable packaging.
- joshspankit 7y ago
  I have been thinking that it could also work to force all material which is not in direct contact with food to be single-process recyclable. No layers, made from a select number of materials, and no extra labels. Just drop the package in the recycle and it can be re-used as-is.
  - ianai 7y ago
    I wonder whether a standardized product container could gain market share. One option, make containers that consumers can purchase and then refill with standard disbursement containers at stores. Maybe the disbursement container would label the container with the usual store label. Another would be to strictly enforce containment options for different form factors ala the other comments here.
- geniium 7y ago
  nice idea :)
- coldtea 7y ago
  >If advertisers want to market their products and make them look attractive on the shelves, they'll find creative solutions to using recyclable packaging. The real problem is recycling is itself a charade. Most of what is "recycled" just ends up in landfills in the developing world. The idea however is nice: I'd say let's make all packaging of any product a standard color (we could also allow a picture of the product as is). Less crap to falsely differentiate a product from another, less visual clutter, less messing with our brains to consume! Products would have to be attractive for what they are!
sokoloff 7y ago
We have an all-generation family vacation each year in TN (lots of food and drink). Coming from MA, we are used to recycling and so would collect recyclables and take them to the grocery store collection point (curbside was garbage only). This year, we did the same and noticed the recycling collection bins were gone. Went inside to inquire and were proudly told, “Oh, we got a big new landfill opened up with plenty of space; we don’t have to recycle anymore!” Ugh.
drizze 7y ago
Does anyone have this info in a nice info graphic? I would love to hang this in my kitchen as a quick reference.
dh-g 7y ago
Lately I've been playing around with melting down and reforming plastics that aren't recyclable in my area. It has been enjoyable and I've made a few usable things already. The https://preciousplastic.com/ https://preciousplastic.com/ project takes this much further.
np_tedious 7y ago
Something I've wondered about but never been able to find a clear answer: what is the cost of putting a non recyclable item in the recycling? I'm sure there's a lot of "it depends" in this answer, just as there is for most parts of this article. Still, even a ballpark answer would really help with the applied question of how much confidence in an item's recyclability one should have before putting it in the bin. If I'm 95% sure then I'll do it. If I think the odds are 10% I won't. But where is the line? This depends on the cost of being wrong in terms of processing effort/energy, potential to ruin surrounding goods items, etc
ummonk 7y ago
We all know recycling is a scam. Packaging should all be compostable, not recyclable.
- 693471 7y ago
  I think the packaging waste would be more than the actual food waste and ruin the compost balance if we just tried to blindly mix it all. I compost my food waste and I definitely have more packaging waste each week than food waste.
daveslash 7y ago
I like the "wishcycle" term - have never heard that before. Where I life in Southern California we have "single stream recycling" -- you throw all of your recyclables into one bin. I used to have a roommate who I had to continually remind "leftover burritos and hair extensions are not recyclable". Her attitude was "I just throw everything in there... they'll pick out what they don't want." Some days I really wonder how effective such a recycling system is at recycling vs. how much it only serves to make us feel good about ourselves.
gwbas1c 7y ago
I always joke that we'll have robots that take care of this problem before we have self-driving cars. On a more serious note: This is far too confusing, and most of this burden belongs to the recycling processor, not the consumer.
remarkEon 7y ago
Recently I got some 9V batteries from Amazon (for the smoke detector). They all came individualy shrink wrapped in plastic - all 8 of them - despite coming in a box that was surely strong enough to protect them from damage on the short trip from the fulfillment center. Why? Protect from corrosion? This is probably a poor example, as I'm sure there must be some reason to do this with batteries, but so many things we buy online now come with mountains of non-recyclable plastics that just create more waste. I'm with other commenters here: tax the hell out of this stuff and force retailers, especially ones with clout like Amazon, to develop different packaging technologies that don't overuse plastics for literally everything.

336 points by kevinrpope 7y ago

Before reading this, I thought that non-reusable plastics should be banned, and that only reusable packaging should be allowed, should it be high quality plastics, glass, stainless steel... Some plastic types should be banned, it would make recycling more viable... I'm really curious how much plastic China was importing, and what they were doing with it.

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paultopia 7y ago

This is LUDICROUS. Recycling is harder than doing your taxes. We desperately need uniformity on this. "BEVERAGE BOTTLES Recyclable. Be sure to remove the plastic film label, which isn’t recyclable." FFS. Have you ever tried to remove one of those labels? It's impossible. "A bottle with a cap or an opening the same size or smaller than the base of the bottle is probably going to be recyclable." -- WTF does the size of the opening have to do with it? "The How2Recycle label is showing up on more products at the grocery store ... GreenBlue says that there are more than 2,500 variations of the label in circulation" 2500 different recycling rules?! This is not a consumer-level problem. It's completely ridiculous to expect millions of ordinary people to succeed at this kind of task on a daily or weekly basis. It needs to be solved further up the supply chain, or processors need to be centralized and standardized. Period.

SapporoChris 7y ago
Instead of raging against. Perhaps consider solutions. Example: In Japan, the plastic film label is perforated no glue is utilized. It is fairly easily removed. More difficult simply tossing a bottle, sure. Think for a moment instead of raging. 2500 variations does not mean 2500 different recycling rules. There are more than 2500 variations of your potential mate, that doesn't mean there's 2500 different ways to mate. It is a consumer problem, consumers will have to deal with the results.
- benrbray 7y ago
  You just suggested a way that manufacturers can make it easier for consumers to recycle, did you not? You seem to be confirming the OP's point, which is that the current state of recycling is rage-inducing.
spodek 7y ago
I found a simple 80% solution for home plastic: I avoid packaged food in favor of fresh, unwrapped fruits, vegetables, and foods from bulk bins. Now I have a load of garbage to empty a little less than once a year and a load of metal and plastic recycling once or twice a year. Plus my food tastes better and costs less. Everyone is free to do what they want, and experience shows someone will have to tell me the solution doesn't work for someone, but I hope people do similar so the manufacturers' warehouses fill with plastic instead of the oceans and they stop producing it.
- esotericn 7y ago
  Yep. Not only do you avoid plastic but you eat better too because you have hard lines that are not to be crossed. No more chocolate bars, ready meals, pot noodles, bags of crisps or whatever else. Even if you end up buying a bag of rice in plastic you're cutting down the waste by a huge amount because even a small one gives you ten or more servings.
  - Scoundreller 7y ago
    And larger containers have less surface area:volume —> less packaging. Which is why I really hate it when manufacturers reduce pack sizes.
    - esotericn 7y ago
      Small pack sizes are such a load of shite. Some small number of people are travelling. For the rest, 500g of rice is a pointlessly small amount. It lasts forever, is dense enough to stash, etc.
      - Scoundreller 7y ago
        I’ve seen OJ go from 2L to 1.89, and now 1.75L. Pasta: 1kg to 908g. It’s bullshit.
        7y ago
eloff 7y ago
I've noticed that people aren't actually fully capable of just sorting the recycling correctly. There's always stuff in the wrong bins in my building despite an ongoing education effort to fix that and helpful illustrated rules above the bins. Rules about lids and labels is a joke.
- paultopia 7y ago
  Since lids and labels and such seem to actually matter, the only sensible solution is for the governments of the world to legislate to mandate specific shapes and material compositions for things like drink containers. Standardize it all.
  - jgibson 7y ago
    I've been thinking about this more and more, and it just makes so much sense. No one cares what shape a beer bottle is, the label is enough to tell them apart. Marketing people will complain if they can't differentiate on packaging, but less of them isn't something to worry about either
    - flukus 7y ago
      > Marketing people will complain if they can't differentiate on packaging Cigarette companies have already fought and lost legal battles forcing them to use standard plain packaging, so complaining is about all they can do.
    - TaylorAlexander 7y ago
      I’m in total agreement. We give corporations a lot of freedom even when that freedom is unnecessary and leads to significant environmental and societal harm. We’ve got to get some power back for the people so we can say “no, you don’t get any shape. You have to agree to a limited number of shapes and they have to be totally recyclable.”
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - 7y ago
TylerE 7y ago
It's really pretty simple if you actually care about results. Is it aluminum? Recycle it. Is is not aluminum? Don't recycle it.
- knowaveragejoe 7y ago
  Plastic bottles are pretty much all included according to this site. There's no reason not to include them too.
  - TylerE 7y ago
    It takes more energy to ship and reprocess them than you save. That's why you don't. If you do, it's explicitly because it makes you feel good - it's worse for the planet.
    - xugy 7y ago
      Source?
      - csears 7y ago
        Thomas Kinnaman was interviewed on Planet Money recently and mentioned roughly this conclusion based on his 2014 study. More details here: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2019/07/15/why_its_probably_better_for_the_planet_to_throw_plastic_in_the_trash.html https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2019/07/15/why_its_pro...
      - shkkmo 7y ago
        Plastic and Glass recycling can be borderline and it depends on the specific local implementation. Either way, the savings are never going to be massive and it is an open question if it is worth the effort. (Glass re-use is different) Aluminum is completely different. Prices for aluminum recycling per ton is an order of magnitude higher than other recyclables.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
        This is what the big kerfuffle is all about. All we’ve been doing is paying the Chinese and Malaysians to feed our plastics to the dolphins for us. Now they won’t take it, and people here get upset if you feed the animals, we’re realise the whole deception for what it is. Edit to add sources: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/03/whale-dies-88-pounds-plastic-philippines/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/03/whale... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/29/malaysia-to-send-up-to-100-tonnes-of-plastic-waste-back-to-australia https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/29/malaysia-to-se... Self evident that if it were economically & environmentally sound to recycle we wouldn’t be shipping it around the planet to do so.
darksaints 7y ago
The sorting absolutely should be done downstream, ideally with robots doing the vast majority of the work.
- baroffoos 7y ago
  It is done that way. Thats how you can put a aluminum can and cardboard in the same bin. But what does a robot do when a tictac container comes in with a Polyethylene body and a Polypropylene lid. Does it sit there with high precision fingers trying to pick the glued in lid off?
  - abraae 7y ago
    It uses its fricking lasers, obviously!
aznpwnzor 7y ago
reduce and reuse are much easier than doing taxes, but they're not in speculative shareholder corporate interest
skybrian 7y ago
Yes it's pretty bad. What it comes down to is: follow the local rules. If you don't know the local rules or are unsure, err on the side of keeping the recycling clean and throw it out. (Landfills are quite good at keeping plastic out of the environment. It's the stuff that doesn't make it into the landfill that you have to worry about.)
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Then keep checking, as local rules keep evolving so that products they used to consider acceptable stop being so. Sometimes new items become acceptable, but our experience is mostly of things being removed from recycling over the years. It's insane.
  - skybrian 7y ago
    Yes, someone needs to write a really good web app, like those that exist for transit.
    - TaylorAlexander 7y ago
      But also some regulations to keep the permutations down would be super helpful. Mandating that all the things are recyclable would be super helpful.
oska 7y ago
It's only ludicrous because the plastics industry wants to pretend that plastics are recyclable when, mostly, they're not (because it's impractical or uneconomic). The rules for recycling when you exclude all plastics are pretty simple.
SECProto 7y ago
> FFS. Have you ever tried to remove [beverage bottle] labels? It's impossible. As a consumer in North America, it's not easy. Japan has stronger national regulations, however, and beverage bottles universally have labels with either perforated strips or peel-up corners, to facilitate removal. Plastic caps are also easily removed from glass bottles - peel the cover back and it splits in half and releases from the bottle. So, agreed on your final point. It can be done easily, and not necessarily at additional cost. Manufacturers just haven't been motivated to do so.
- masklinn 7y ago
  > As a consumer in North America, it's not easy. Japan has stronger national regulations, however, and beverage bottles universally have labels with either perforated strips or peel-up corners, to facilitate removal. Plastic caps are also easily removed from glass bottles - peel the cover back and it splits in half and releases from the bottle. OTOH Japan wraps pretty much everything in plastic, usually multiple times over.
  - SECProto 7y ago
    And they burn their garbage, turning thin-film plastics into fuel pretty much as cleanly as the stock used to make the plastic. I much prefer that to making a huge hill with poorly-compacted trash, covering with soil and claiming "problem solved". Their usage of plastic is higher in some specific instances (omiyage, cookie or snack packages, and convenience stores come to mind), but equivalent to North America in others (standard meat comes in a shrink-wrapped styrofoam tray, vegetables/fruit come loose or a single layer of packaging, grocery stores charge for plastic bags). Despite the meme, I don't think their plastic usage is all that significantly higher outside a few specific instances.
seanmcdirmid 7y ago
Hey, you should see how they do it in Japan (there are about 20 containers for recycling, everything must be disassembled). And...people actually do it.
- kalleboo 7y ago
  In Japan like anywhere else, recycling depends on the municipality. Where I live, we have like 6 different containers (PET bottles, other plastic, glass+cans, cardboard/paper, burnable garbage, unburnable garbage). Coming from Sweden, it's actually a bit easier here (e.g. in Sweden cans, clear glass, colored glass were all separate, and aluminum drink cans had a deposit so you took them to the supermarket)
simonebrunozzi 7y ago
Absolutely 100% what you said. But now the question is: why pretty much NO government has ever succeeded in this? My view is that the only hope is an EU-wide requirement to change packaging, etc to be able to still sell to the EU. That would be a big enough market for every single company to comply.
- Tharkun 7y ago
  Belgium allegedly had an 85+% recycling rate, though I have no idea what all this stuff gets recycled to, and I suspect it gets downcycled to useless garbage.
tzs 7y ago
> "The How2Recycle label is showing up on more products at the grocery store ... GreenBlue says that there are more than 2,500 variations of the label in circulation" 2500 different recycling rules?! I don't think 2500 variations is actually excessive, when you look at how the labels actually work. The label has four parts [1]: • One part tells what preparation is needed, such as whether you need to rinse the item before recycling, whether you need to remove the label, and things like that. There are 13 possible options for this part. • The next part tells you if the item is widely recycled, not yet recycled, requires store drop off, or varies from place to place. There are 4 possible options for this part. • The next part lists the type of material the item is made from, such as paper or glass. There are 6 options. • Finally, the last part tells what part of the item the label applies to. Values include bottle, tray, insert, and 6 others, for a total of 9 options. 13 x 4 x 6 x 9 = 2808. Also, a given product can have more than one label. E.g., a frozen entree might have a label for the plastic tray it is in, another label for the plastic film that covers the tray, and a third label for the box that the tray is sold in. [1] https://www.how2recycle.info/labels https://www.how2recycle.info/labels
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  It's still ridiculous to make this a problem of every individual, though. > last part tells what part of the item the label applies to (...) given product can have more than one label. E.g., a frozen entree might have a label for the plastic tray it is in, another label for the plastic film that covers the tray, and a third label for the box that the tray is sold in. This alone cuts down on amount of useful/correct sorting done. The worst is packaging you actually have to disassemble yourself - e.g. something that looks like cardboard (but probably has a thin layer of plastic on top of it; you can't easily tell), but has inserts of thin transparent plastic. > whether you need to rinse the item before recycling And this, I believe, essentially kills of recycling as an idea. Not only most people won't bother (and it's a coin toss whether they'll throw the dirty container into general/non-recyclable or recyclable bin), individuals cleaning plastic packaging is a ridiculously inefficient use of water, energy for heating that water, and likely detergent too. I don't have numbers on it, but I wouldn't be surprised if the resource use delta between individuals cleaning and doing the cleaning at recycling plant is actually greater than recycling process itself saves.
itronitron 7y ago
regarding the size of the bottle opening, my understanding is that the automatic sorting machines at the recyclery 'work better' on bottles with a narrow opening because they are easier to push around with jets of air, but they could also be concerned that other items will get trapped inside a wide mouth plastic container and confound the sorting machine...
benj111 7y ago
"Recycling is harder than doing your taxes" Living in a country where the majority, including me doesnt have to deal with their taxes, I cant help thinking maybe that's the solution. Whether the onus is put on manufacturers to make things trivially recyclable, or on recyclers to sort of a big bag of mixed waste, or some combination I don't know. Does seem silly for everyone to have to become domain experts in recycling though.

deleted 7y ago

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swframe2 7y ago

I was wondering if we should put "seller unique rfids" on everything so the trash can be sorted and returned to the seller. Then we just add the cost of recycling to the cost of the product. Alternatively, add a "recycler unique rfid" and every seller has to partner with a recycler in order to sell a product.

nightfly 7y ago
Now you've got to ship everything back to the seller, and then the seller has to ship the waste to their actual processor. Plus the added cost/waste of the RFID tag.
- cj 7y ago
  > Now you’ve got to ship everything back to the seller, and then the seller has to ship the waste to their actual processor That’s actually an interesting idea. If it actually worked that way, there would be an amazingly high incentive for sellers to minimize packaging waste. It would also have a side effect of making high-waste packaged goods much more expensive than low-waste packaged food, promoting the purchase of eco-friendly packaging. I wonder if there’s a less radical way to implement these kind of market incentives.
  - thereisnospork 7y ago
    >If it actually worked that way, there would be an amazingly high incentive for sellers to minimize packaging waste. But why? Adding a nonsense convoluted disincentive is inane. Landfills are cheap and plentiful and filling them with plastic doesn't hurt anything (and can be billed to either supplier or consumer) If something is worth recycling the market will sort it.
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    Well if it was some sort of "bounty" that involves handling it the solution could be more logistically sane. No sense adding in needless shipping. Say that packaging comes with a N cost tax stamp deposit. If it doesn't wind up processed in an acceptable way then it is forfeit. If anyone reprocesses it in an acceptable way (recycling to a valueable material, trash to steam) the manufacturer gets some portion of the value back and the recycler gets some just to ensure that they do the proper paperwork to ensure the system is working correctly. A company can also be their own recycler to get a full refund.

modo_ 7y ago

I toured the Recology recycling facility a few months ago. The sorting technology is impressive, but the amount of material that they remove and send to the landfill had me questioning the efficacy of the program. It sucks to push the packaging crimes of businesses onto consumers, but I think improving the public's understanding of what can and cannot be recycled can still have a massive impact on the effectiveness of recycling programs. San Francisco has a great website to help you figure out what goes in which bin: https://sfrecycles.org/ https://sfrecycles.org/ (Note that you can recycle fabrics -- this isn't possible through most recycling programs!)

lyjackal 7y ago
Public awareness at the unrecyle-ability of the majority of products should hopefully upstream business packaging change.
- baroffoos 7y ago
  Hopefully. Recycling almost feels like it has been a trick by corporations "Don't worry, you can consume as much as you want and as long as you put it in the recycling bin its all good"
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    It was a trick, and by politicians and people themselves, who wanted to be seen as being environmentally conscious. The only solution has always been to reduce consumption, but deep down, everyone wants to consume more and more, while at the same time feel better about and blissfully ignore that they are destroying the environment.
    - 5040 7y ago
      >The only solution has always been to reduce consumption, but deep down, everyone wants to consume more and more, while at the same time feel better about and blissfully ignore that they are destroying the environment. Maybe I'm only thinking of this because I've been reading Tocqueville, but might not religion be the thing to encourage restraint here?

mc32 7y ago

Someone has run the numbers and figure out energy cost and total tonnage and figure out what makes sense to streamline. Plastics is a term which applies to thousands of different polymers. Some it makes sense to recycle, some don’t. We can then begin to whittle down on the plastics we allow on the items which make most sense. For example we don’t needs tends of different plastics just because one vendor prefers the aesthetics of one over the other. Give them a select choice rather than an infinite choice. Then label the packaging simply with simple easy to understand labels which are clearly visible. Avoid mixing incompatible plastics.

maxerickson 7y ago
There's a few plastics that are used for most packaging, the type is labeled on most such packaging. It can be hard to see. https://www.greenlivingtips.com/articles/recycling-by-the-numbers.html https://www.greenlivingtips.com/articles/recycling-by-the-nu...
5040 7y ago
>Someone has run the numbers and figure out energy cost and total tonnage and figure out what makes sense to streamline. Prices are dynamic though. Some things make sense to recycle today, but may not tomorrow, and some things may not make sense to recycle today, but may tomorrow.

leggomylibro 7y ago

You can recycle polyethylene pretty easily on its own, and a lot of those plastic wraps that the article says aren't recycled are made out of LDPE. HDPE and LDPE are great materials for a lot of things that you might otherwise make out of wood or 3D-print. It's easy to machine, and it can be very strong and rigid for its weight. Basically, you just shred the donor plastic, heat it to 300-350F, press the air out, and let it cool. With LDPE plastic wrap, you can fold and stack it instead of shredding it. You can also get cool tie-dye effects by using multiple colors in the same batch. You can use plywood for the walls of your molds, and a toaster oven that you don't plan on cooking with ever again can be a reasonable furnace. To compress the hot plastic, try making a loose-fitting lid and tamping or clamping it down while the plastic heats. But make sure that it is polyethylene - some plastics, like PVC, release highly toxic fumes. And others, like polypropylene, are often mixed with plasticizers which evaporate into nasty fumes and reduce the quality of the recycled plastic.

userbinator 7y ago
Notably, plastic bags are a plentiful source of nearly pure polyethylene, which being composed entirely of only hydrogen and carbon essentially in the form of a petroleum wax, is also one of the safest plastics to work with. The decomposition products of fluoro/chloropolymers can be deadly.
pixl97 7y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpXq6mnbCus& https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpXq6mnbCus& >How To Recycle HDPE Bottle Lids Into Flawless Flat Sheet Material Decent video on how to make HDPE into new materials

gregable 7y ago

Worth noting for anyone who thinks "why bother recycling", this is specifically about plastics. If you have metal, aluminum especially is a very valuable recyclable, so definitely keep recycling that.

skybrian 7y ago
Even then, your curbside recycling probably can't deal with random scrap metal. The one at our house only wants aluminum and tin containers. Anything else, you should probably give to a scrap metal recycler. It doesn't matter what is theoretically recyclable. All that matters is what the recycler can handle. So the rule of thumb is: there is no rule of thumb. Follow the local rules.
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  Dépends on your area. Around here, scrappers roam around on garbage day and pickup the scrap metal or anything salvageable.

gregable 7y ago

I've sort of wondered if recycling plastics is actually maybe bad from a CO2 angle. It seems that using mined virgin oil for plastics that gets tossed in a landfill means that at least a little more of the oil we are mining ends up not getting burned and emitted as CO2. In this way, we're creating non-global warming demand for oil which competes with the energy demand in the market. I don't know if this is a reasonable way of thinking about it. Of course, the energy required to haul a bottle of water hundreds of miles is huge, so I'm not arguing for buying more plastic waste, just not sure how recycling existing plastic waste affects global warming in particular.

esotericn 7y ago
The amount of oil in the ground is effectively infinite with regard to any sane carbon budget, so this could only really make sense in the short term. Ultimately in time I suppose you could consider plastics recycling as a way to extract less oil. If, for example, you could recycle 80%, then you only need to extract 20% of the oil, which is likely to be far better for the environment (less fracking etc). On geological timescales a lot of the stuff we are doing is bonkers. It looks sort of OK now because we've 'only' had 100 years of it.
- gregable 7y ago
  That's a good point. It's not as though adding a little demand is likely to do anything other than increase supply in this case.

wlesieutre 7y ago

I live in New Haven and saw on our handy recycling flyer [0] that pizza boxes are listed, with no caveat, as being a single stream curbside recyclable item. Which is great, because pizza is a whole thing in this town. We eat a lot of it. So I was surprised to learn, if you go poking around and find the RecycleCT website [1] and hover your mouse over the pizza box, up pops this note. "No food residue. No liner." Never in my life have I had a pizza box without grease soaked through it. Maybe they've just given up, and knowing it won't be recycled anyway, they don't bother to make a fuss about what can go in the bin? Is this flyer just there to make us feel better about our waste? Because otherwise that's a pretty major note to forget to mention. Pizza boxes are recyclable, just as long as there's never been any pizza in it. [0] https://www.newhavenct.gov/civicax/filebank/blobdload.aspx?blobid=31946 https://www.newhavenct.gov/civicax/filebank/blobdload.aspx?b... [1] https://www.recyclect.com https://www.recyclect.com

esotericn 7y ago
Shouldn't a pizza box be compostable anyway? It's mostly cardboard?
- yawz 7y ago
  AFAIK composting or compost collection is not available everywhere.
  - wlesieutre 7y ago
    Correct, no city compost here and I'm in an apartment building so I can't put a pile of it in the backyard
yawz 7y ago
A used pizza box can almost always only be composted.
secabeen 7y ago
You can tear the top off and recycle that, and discard the greasy bottom. While some pizzas will also soil the top of the box, you sometimes get one that's pristine.

ohiovr 7y ago

nearly everything we acquire ends up in a landfill eventually, plastic or not. Plastic unlike metals can never be restored as good as new. The recycled plastic will always be inferior. Metals do not have that problem.

chmaynard 7y ago
Interesting, four statements in a row that are obviously false. Can you tell us anything that's true?
- ohiovr 7y ago
  Someday you will have to sell an estate then you will understand.

Areading314 7y ago

The truth is that plastic generally can't be recycled, and we should stop pretending as such. Consequently it would make sense to tax it and generally discourage its use as much as possible. Polluters get away with overusing plastic packaging precisely because consumers stop caring when they think it can be recycled.

ImprovedSilence 7y ago
Agreed. Incentivize the correct materials.
- 18pfsmt 7y ago
  One cannot coercively distort the market with government power and expect that life will not, "uh, uh, find a way." Great intentions do not always lead to great outcomes (often the opposite).
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    I know what you mean. You can still buy cheap incandescent bulbs where I live, despite EU-wide phaseout, because they're clearly labeled "not for domestic use"... But this shows that regulating the market is not a "fire and forget" deal, but an iterative process. First you make the main bad thing more expensive than good behavior. Then you look for "life finding a way", "clever entrepreneurs" abusing loopholes, and make those more expensive too, one by one. You end when you hit diminishing returns.
    - 18pfsmt 7y ago
      Eventually you create a black market like drug cartels and the Russian mob. Perhaps we should legalize narcotics and sell them in Walgreens and CVS instead of "subsidizing" SPECTRE. "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." -Princess Leia
      - 7y ago

supernova87a 7y ago

The plastics and chemicals industries -- as a chemistry professor used to put it -- are but a pimple on the butt of the petroleum fuels industry. They are a tiny portion of what's getting produced every day. And as long as petroleum keeps getting pumped out of the ground for dirt cheap and getting burned, plastics will be an inevitable byproduct. It just costs pretty much $0 to make new plastic from that stream of petroleum, versus recycling which takes human effort, more equipment, logistics, etc. Until we tax petroleum coming out of the ground for all the later problems it causes us, I too am disappointed but resigned to having recycling being a further waste of resources.

Areading314 7y ago
There are 2 separate externalities with different costs: * CO2 emissions through burning fossil fuel * plastic garbage with 1000 year lifetimes being littered around the planet While we should absolutely be addressing both, you have to target these 2 problems separately Edit: To clarify what I'd propose would be a tax on fossil fuel production, and then an additional, much higher tax on production of things like plastic bags

quickthrower2 7y ago

Coffee cups are a no too - https://envirobank.com.au/coffee-cups-recyclable-or-not/ https://envirobank.com.au/coffee-cups-recyclable-or-not/. You can't just split into lid and cup and chuck one in the paper bin and the other in the plastic bin.

nkurz 7y ago

Does anyone have a article that clearly shows the energy costs for different container options? Let's use a 12 oz / 330 mL container of soda as the example. What I'd like to see would be something like this: New Recycle Glass: GN Kwh GR Kwh Plastic: PN Kwh PR Kwh Aluminum: AN Kwh AR Kwh That is, rather than seeing statistics that say a recycled aluminum can uses only 5% of the energy needed to create a new can (AN vs AR), I'd like to see how that 5% compares to the energy to create a new plastic bottle (AR vs PN), or to recycle a plastic bottle (AR vs PR). And I'd love for it to be units that make sense. My searching hasn't turned up much.

reilly3000 7y ago
I think that is brilliant. Just extend existing labeling rules to add a couple extra figures.
dkbrk 7y ago
It's kWh not Kwh SI prefixes and units are case sensitive. "k" is the prefix for kilo; "K" is Kelvin. Similarly, "W" is Watt. "w", as far as I'm aware, doesn't mean anything. "h" is the accepted symbol for the use of hour with the SI.

runn1ng 7y ago

oh so it seems my strategy “put everything that has some plastic in it, maybe, who knows, it looks plasticky” to the yellow bins is actually harmful

alanbernstein 7y ago

Why can't we just package more food items in aluminum? Every time I read about the mess that is recycling, I am reassured that aluminum is the absolute best case material. Why are we only using it for soda cans?

jacobolus 7y ago
A cylinder full of liquid can be made with very thin walls and still be pretty strong. I would guess that most other kinds of foods need other shapes of packages, for which aluminum is likely to be more expensive than e.g. plastic. Aluminum production takes a ton of energy.
masklinn 7y ago
It is somewhat common, but usually as a sub-packaging rather than the main e.g. chocolates are commonly individually wrapped in aluminium foil, it's also commonly used for meal trays (but I guess has become less common due to microwaves?). Sealed packets are also commonly foiled though mixed with plastic (for e.g. quick-close bits). Dunno how that works out for recycling, just burn out the plastic?
JTbane 7y ago
Soda can designs have to be under pressure to be strong.
- alanbernstein 7y ago
  Thanks, that does answer my second question, and implicitly my first - other containers would need to be thicker and more expensive. What I mean to ask is, why don't we incentivize manufacturers to use more expensive aluminum packaging? It seems reasonable that the cost of manufacturing aluminum may be less than the sum of all costs of using plastic. It also seems that no companies will choose to do this without incentives.

ciconia 7y ago

Just stop buying things in plastic . There are alternatives - stores that sell products in bulk, growing your own food, reusing containers. The solutions are there.

pixl97 7y ago
I'm not sure if you've bought much at the store, but trying to eliminate plastic from your purchases sounds like a great way to spend a lot more money currently. You are limited to a tiny number of options. Also when it comes to products that present contamination risks, plastic is an excellent barrier to prevent the spread of microbes.

teekert 7y ago

Be carefull with this info, much depends on the factory. In the Netherlands we separate plastic and much cannot be recycled but new techniques and factories are being developed as a results of the constant stream of (at the moment!) worthless plastics. [0] [0] https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2018/06/18/weg-met-plastic-in-laagjes-dat-is-niet-te-recyclen-a1607033 https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2018/06/18/weg-met-plastic-in-laag...

18pfsmt 7y ago
Polyethylene is rather inert, but our ability to further utilize it beyond a single use is imperative. I grew up with paper grocery bags and glass bottled soda, and plastic was seen as the "green" solution at that time.
masklinn 7y ago
> Be carefull with this info, much depends on the factory. Indeed, recently we were looking into getting bio-degradable / compostable cups for an event, however: * you need "industrial" (high-temperature) composting, your garden's compost pile is not going to work (it will probably degrade over time but very slowly) * the average collection center can't easily differentiate between bio-degradable and regular plastic (you have to check each cup individually) so they just reject everything
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  The bio-degradable items won't degrade at the expected rate, as you say it's an industrial composting facility that's needed, but they _will_ degrade far, far, more readily and won't leave the environment strewn with microplastics. That's what we seek. I've tested composting a couple of compostable nappies (aka diapers) in my under-used, low temperature, domestic compost bin. After about 3 years we emptied it out and there was no sign of the nappies at all. If an animal eats the corn-starch (or whatever compostable type it is) cup then it's not going to be especially harmful to them. Moreover, it appears from what I've seen that the compostable materials will not retain mechanical integrity after a small time of exposure to weather, this is good too. It's not all sunbeams though, we had a fairtrade chocolate bar for sale in our store that was wrapped entirely in compostable wrapping (with vegetable dye printing, etc.), the compostable "cellophane" wrap was incredible. Completely transparent, flexible, shiny. But [I believe] the humidity was too high and the wrap grew sticky before the shelf life of the chocolate [<1y] had come. It mightn't be perfect but it's a good way better.

tasty_freeze 7y ago

Considering the success of neural network image classifiers, it seems garbage sorting would be a slam dunk application for these reasons: (1) the training data is readily available. there are human sorters who already are classifying everything in real-time as they pick stuff off the conveyor and move the item to the right bin. train cameras on the conveyor belt and the analyze which items are picked out and which bin they get tossed in. (2) the NN doesn't have to be anywhere near as accurate as, say, a self-driving car. tune the classifier to minimize false positives. If the resulting NN can classify only 70% of the items, but accurately, that means 70% of the garbage stream can be automated and run 24/7. Humans can still go through the remaining 30% if it economically makes sense.

vfc1 7y ago

The US actually sends a lot of its unrecyclable plastic trash in boats across the world to Asia (in return ships that delivered goods), but it's coming back more and more. Here is a cool video that explains this - Asian Nations Reject Western Trash - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-htnUTN4mH0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-htnUTN4mH0 For example, for recycling plastic bottles, we are supposed to take the plastic lid off, and even remove the attachment of the lid and separate it from the main plastic body. Otherwise, the bottle can't actually be recycled. Single use plastics are everywhere where I live and more prevalent than ever: you want to buy 4 peaches at the supermarket? They come in a small plastic box wrapped in a plastic sheet. The only way is going to be to make it illegal and force people to use paper bags or reusable bags, not only for carrying the groceries but also to separate fruit, use reusable containers for grains, etc. But it has to be mandatory for everyone in order to make any significant difference.

kalleboo 7y ago
> For example, for recycling plastic bottles, we are supposed to take the plastic lid off, and even remove the attachment of the lid and separate it from the main plastic body. Otherwise, the bottle can't actually be recycled This will vary depending on the recycling facility, but where I live in Japan, you're supposed to separate the plastic label and the screwcap. According to a documentary about the recycling facilities here, the machines are able to automatically separate out the different kinds of plastic on PET bottles (bottle/cap/label), but the more there is that gets separated off, the more it slows down the process. So if one person forgets to separate their bottle's components, it's fine, the machine handles it, but if nobody separates, then the process takes too long and they can't keep up and have to divert unprocessed plastic to the incinerators.
pjc50 7y ago
> force people Force companies. Individuals don't get to choose what the packaging is made of. And making it too inconvenient for end users is going to get pushback we don't need. I'm wondering if there should be a mandatory deposit scheme on all packaging as there currently is on glass bottles in some place. Give people a few cents for returning a plastic bottle, and make it the manufacturer's problem to recycle or dispose of it. If your deposit-return system scans the barcode, it knows what product it is and which recycling stream to put it into ...

mschuster91 7y ago

What I don't see anywhere is chemical-based recycling. Many plastics can be dissolved in acetone, for example. Shred it all to flakes, put it in a vat of acetone, burn the stuff that isn't dissolvable and then take the raw materials out of the acetone? Or is the dissolving-into-acetone part a non-reversible operation and one ends up with a boatload of contaminated acetone?

alexisread 7y ago

I think taxing packaging along with a country-wide standard for recycling AND for standardised containers (as per other posts here) would be the best option - win-win for governments. Non-homogeneous packaging eg. Cardboard food containers with plastic windows would be taxed heavily. Taxing packaging by weight and type would theoretically work to minimise packaging and encourage eg. Bringing a tupperware container to the shops. The standardised (countrywide) container types would mean you could eg. Put your standard coffebean container under the supermarket dispenser and do away with packaging. The taxation would apply to manufacturers (import) 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.

martin-adams 7y ago

Maybe a solution is the same with cigarettes in the UK. Any packaging which is non-recyclable must be a standard color (i.e. red), and may not contain any creative branding on it. If advertisers want to market their products and make them look attractive on the shelves, they'll find creative solutions to using recyclable packaging.

joshspankit 7y ago
I have been thinking that it could also work to force all material which is not in direct contact with food to be single-process recyclable. No layers, made from a select number of materials, and no extra labels. Just drop the package in the recycle and it can be re-used as-is.
- ianai 7y ago
  I wonder whether a standardized product container could gain market share. One option, make containers that consumers can purchase and then refill with standard disbursement containers at stores. Maybe the disbursement container would label the container with the usual store label. Another would be to strictly enforce containment options for different form factors ala the other comments here.
geniium 7y ago
nice idea :)
coldtea 7y ago
>If advertisers want to market their products and make them look attractive on the shelves, they'll find creative solutions to using recyclable packaging. The real problem is recycling is itself a charade. Most of what is "recycled" just ends up in landfills in the developing world. The idea however is nice: I'd say let's make all packaging of any product a standard color (we could also allow a picture of the product as is). Less crap to falsely differentiate a product from another, less visual clutter, less messing with our brains to consume! Products would have to be attractive for what they are!

sokoloff 7y ago

We have an all-generation family vacation each year in TN (lots of food and drink). Coming from MA, we are used to recycling and so would collect recyclables and take them to the grocery store collection point (curbside was garbage only). This year, we did the same and noticed the recycling collection bins were gone. Went inside to inquire and were proudly told, “Oh, we got a big new landfill opened up with plenty of space; we don’t have to recycle anymore!” Ugh.

drizze 7y ago

Does anyone have this info in a nice info graphic? I would love to hang this in my kitchen as a quick reference.

dh-g 7y ago

Lately I've been playing around with melting down and reforming plastics that aren't recyclable in my area. It has been enjoyable and I've made a few usable things already. The https://preciousplastic.com/ https://preciousplastic.com/ project takes this much further.

np_tedious 7y ago

Something I've wondered about but never been able to find a clear answer: what is the cost of putting a non recyclable item in the recycling? I'm sure there's a lot of "it depends" in this answer, just as there is for most parts of this article. Still, even a ballpark answer would really help with the applied question of how much confidence in an item's recyclability one should have before putting it in the bin. If I'm 95% sure then I'll do it. If I think the odds are 10% I won't. But where is the line? This depends on the cost of being wrong in terms of processing effort/energy, potential to ruin surrounding goods items, etc

ummonk 7y ago

We all know recycling is a scam. Packaging should all be compostable, not recyclable.

693471 7y ago
I think the packaging waste would be more than the actual food waste and ruin the compost balance if we just tried to blindly mix it all. I compost my food waste and I definitely have more packaging waste each week than food waste.

daveslash 7y ago

I like the "wishcycle" term - have never heard that before. Where I life in Southern California we have "single stream recycling" -- you throw all of your recyclables into one bin. I used to have a roommate who I had to continually remind "leftover burritos and hair extensions are not recyclable". Her attitude was "I just throw everything in there... they'll pick out what they don't want." Some days I really wonder how effective such a recycling system is at recycling vs. how much it only serves to make us feel good about ourselves.

gwbas1c 7y ago

I always joke that we'll have robots that take care of this problem before we have self-driving cars. On a more serious note: This is far too confusing, and most of this burden belongs to the recycling processor, not the consumer.

remarkEon 7y ago

Recently I got some 9V batteries from Amazon (for the smoke detector). They all came individualy shrink wrapped in plastic - all 8 of them - despite coming in a box that was surely strong enough to protect them from damage on the short trip from the fulfillment center. Why? Protect from corrosion? This is probably a poor example, as I'm sure there must be some reason to do this with batteries, but so many things we buy online now come with mountains of non-recyclable plastics that just create more waste. I'm with other commenters here: tax the hell out of this stuff and force retailers, especially ones with clout like Amazon, to develop different packaging technologies that don't overuse plastics for literally everything.