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The other side of it is that single use plastics are reasonably well accounted for in North America, so many parts of the bans are more emotional than pragmatic
by microcolonel 6y ago
The other side of it is that single use plastics are reasonably well accounted for in North America, so many parts of the bans are more emotional than pragmatic.
- maxerickson 6y agoI get frustrated with the attention that gets paid to trifling amounts of plastic consumption, relative to consumption of other petroleum products. Gasoline weighs ~6 pounds a gallon. How many pounds of plastic does a moderately conscientious person place into waste streams in a month? How many miles do they drive?
- kijin 6y agoGasoline doesn't get tossed in the ocean and break down into ever smaller particles. It gets burned up in the atmosphere, creating a completely different kind of problem but at least it doesn't leave visible trash for people to rally around.
- maxerickson 6y agoNeither does plastic that I put in the trash. It goes into a well managed landfill. I can't be certain about what happens to plastic I recycle (but it's sorted and marketed, so I think it ends up in products that use recycled plastics).
- beerandt 6y agoOr it gets shipped to Asia, where it's manually sorted outdoors, at in-situ, un-regulated dumps by what is essentially slave labor. And then the unwanted low value stuff (most of it) is left to end up wherever the weather may take it.
- maxerickson 6y agoI don't understand why they would buy it from the recycling center, ship it to Asia and then dump most of it in the environment. When I say it is sorted and marketed, I mean they bale up plastic by type and sell the bales. There's some possibility that the bales, which are 99% the same material, are then shipped to China and sorted for value, but not really.
- beerandt 6y agoWhat you describe is the exception, and not the norm. It's also what usually gets shown as an example in the media, but isn't entirely honest. Some industry with uniform waste streams (zero net waste plants, etc) might do what you describe, but it's not common for municipal programs, who might have 2-4 different bins for dozens of different plastics. And keep in mind, for most materials, and especially plastic, the recycling center pays for someone to take the material. Metals used to be a big exception, and could be used to offset the cost of recycling the other materials, but even they have greatly decreased in extractable value recently. And even bales like you describe might need to be re-sorted for cleanliness, color, type of contaminate, or anything else. Most municipal programs are not producing "ready-to-recycle" bundles of plastic, unless it's being used solely as a filler. With that in mind, dumping the stuff of lower value in Asia makes sense, where people can pick out individual things of value, or things that might have value after getting washed in the local river.
- maxerickson 6y agoMy description is of a small municipal recycling center. I've seen the baling done. I know the person that markets their output. The recycling center gets paid for the output. If they don't get paid for something, it goes in the landfill they are located at.
- mantap 6y agoThere is an indirect benefit to plastic bans. Countries that are the real sources of ocean plastic pollution see them, and hopefully copy them.
- microcolonel 6y agoAmerica invented water treatment over a hundred years ago and we still haven't convinced Mexico to stop dumping raw sewage into the ocean.
- petre 6y agoYup, they get exported to poorer countries and fall off ships during a storm or 'accidentally'.