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How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled

687 points by everybodyknows 6y ago

bagacrap 6y ago
Highly recommend Netflix's Broken episode on this topic ("Recycling Sham").
- yyyuutt 6y ago
  https://www.netflix.com/title/81002391 https://www.netflix.com/title/81002391
ZeroGravitas 6y ago
Recycling, like wearing a mask during a pandemic, is just too boring a solution for most of America. They'd rather put the effort into coming up with a story that makes everything someone else's fault even as they pay the price for their own idiocy.
- dylan604 6y ago
  Sadly, I would agree with this. People expect BigPharma to come up with a pill to make Covid a non-issue even if they think it is a hoax. Some of these same "hoaxers" are people that have told me recycling is a scam as well. I've even countered that the homeless people collecting cans/bottles from trashcans aren't doing it because it's fun. Once, one of these conversations actually came with "evidence". I was provided a link to a story about a waste disposal company from some other city taking their collected recycling to the same city dump as the regular trash. Logically, all recycling is handled this way in their mind.
x87678r 6y ago
I can't remember where I read it but there was the view that recycling allows people to think they're environmentally responsible when they aren't. eg the typical family has multiple cars, lives in a big suburban house, has heating/ac buys loads of stuff but recycles their cardboard/glass so thinks their environmental impact is small.
- schoen 6y ago
  Every time I took a German course, my textbook had a section something like "was machen Sie für die Umwelt?" ('what do you do for the environment?'), and the first example answer in dialogues was always "Müll trennen" (sorting kinds of trash for recycling). It was amazing what a cultural force this habit seems to have for many Germans. I still remember that one of the textbooks even started an answer with "natürlich trenne ich Müll" ('well, of course I sort my trash...'). (Of course, there were other things in the dialogues such as cycling and taking the train, so it's not like recycling is the only ecological measure in German society.)
  - yodsanklai 6y ago
    > It was amazing what a cultural force this habit seems to have for many Germans. I'm not asking maliciously, but I wonder how Germans reconcile their seemingly environmental awareness with their high CO2 emissions and big cars culture.
    - mc32 6y ago
      They also had a recycling scandal when it was exposed all the tidy sorting at home hit all dumped at the refuse center and either dumped or shipped off but mostly not recycled.
      - quercusa 6y ago
        I got suspicious when Portland moved from sorted recycling (four bins, I think) to 'combined recycling'. How could it make economic sense to then sort it back out?
        gumby 6y ago
        The theory given is that it increases recycling by reducing the cognitive load. Whether that is true or not is left as an exercise for the reader.
ardy42 6y ago
I wonder if sorting could be made feasible by mandating color-coding of different types of plastic? Like PET has to be clear, HDPE white, PP green, etc.? Marketers and package designers may not like it, but whatever. The tiny little recycling symbols seem pretty useless, unless you force consumers to hand-sort their recyclables according to them.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  > The tiny little recycling symbols seem pretty useless, unless you force consumers to hand-sort their recyclables according to them. It gets worse: in King County, WA (Seattle metro area) where WM has most of the contracts we received leaflets from WM telling us to ignore the plastic recycling symbols entirely and to use only WM's "what we can / can't recycle" picture chart - which includes things I didn't think were recyclable (stained pizza boxes) and excludes things that I'd think were recyclable (plastic films). ...and the list varies within the county too: some cities' leaflets say not to put any pizza boxes in recycling (even completely clean ones). Aieeee.
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    Plastic films can be recycled in theory, they just can't be put into sorting machines, as they tend to gum up the works. If you had a big box of just PLA films, you could recycle it just like any other hunk of PLA, but getting to the big box of PLA films is not feasible.
    - dragontamer 6y ago
      Another issue with film is that its too lightweight to be worth the hassle. The economics of recycling is that objects are paid per pound. 1lb of steel is pretty easy to collect. In contrast: 1lb of plastic film, even if its theoretically recyclable, is infeasible to sort and recycle with an economic profit. Aluminum foil is another one: my local recycling does NOT accept Aluminum foil. Aluminum is one of the "best recycling" materials too, but foil is just too small and lightweight to be worth the hassle.
cribbles 6y ago
This article makes it sound like the main bottleneck in the first-run recycling process is sorting. Could anyone with knowledge around ML, robotics and the like chime in on napkin math around novel labor-reducing approaches to improving the operating economics here? From the sound of it, this is not really a solvable problem short of some leapfrog technological advance. Even then, you don’t want to spend more energy on sorting automation than you get back from the recycling. And this would only make sense if the diminishing returns after the first or second recycle made it reasonable to be issuing so many consumer plastics in the first place.
- David 6y ago
  A friend and former boss of mine founded CleanRobotics which makes the TrashBot, a trash can that sorts trash from recyclables: https://cleanrobotics.com/trashbot/ https://cleanrobotics.com/trashbot/ I haven't seen the output so I can't comment on how well they work firsthand, but the idea is pretty cool. As far as I know (which is not far) they don't attempt to sort recyclables by material, unfortunately.
  - mulmen 6y ago
    If this is possible why not just have a "plastic" bin and then transport everything mixed and sort at the recycling facility? What's the benefit to deploying all these sorting machines everywhere? Do they go to different locations?
- thu2111 6y ago
  There are quite a few companies doing that, but the ones I've seen are for industrial waste streams. e.g. https://youtu.be/QbKA9uNgzYQ?t=41 https://youtu.be/QbKA9uNgzYQ?t=41
fmajid 6y ago
Yes, it’s a scam. Only aluminum actually gets recycled. It’s time to tax plastic so companies start using paper products (even if they go to landfill, they will at least sequester carbon there) or aluminum.
- newacct583 6y ago
  Also glass and steel. Rare earth materials like batteries are very productively recycled. Paper recycling isn't awful either, but more of a wash than a win. Really, it's thermoplastic disposables that are the real problem here. Those don't recycle (except some very specific items), and frankly never really did. The straw bans are just the tip of the iceberg here. We need to be talking about banning all plastic disposables.
  - dmurray 6y ago
    Paper/cardboard can be quite worthwhile. This article [0] was discussed on HN not so long ago. And some plastics too (I used to work for a firm that sold its waste PVC). The real discrepancy is between consumers and businesses recycling. Businesses can have a clean, unadulterated stream of waste, likely trivial for them to sort at scale. Most consumer recycling is useful for awareness at best and distraction at worst, like California shaming people into fixing their leaky taps during droughts when a billion times as much water is diverted to almond farming. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51420503 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51420503
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      All consumer waste streams should be filtered for metals and then shoveled into a plasma gasifier. You’re not going to break even on the energy input (source renewables to cover anything above what you generate from burning the syngas byproduct), but you’re going to break everything down into something that be trivially landfilled or used as aggregate for asphalt repaving (slag) and burn the syngas for power.
      - 6y ago
hangonhn 6y ago
Planet Money goes into this in a 2-parts series: https://www.npr.org/2019/07/09/739893511/episode-925-a-mob-boss-a-garbage-boat-and-why-we-recycle https://www.npr.org/2019/07/09/739893511/episode-925-a-mob-b...
pfdietz 6y ago
What problem was recycling supposed to be solving? Understanding just what the negative of plastic is supposed to be would inform how it is to be dealt with.
- kxrm 6y ago
  Anecdotally, when I was younger (80s) the concern was biodegradability. There were a lot of fears of plastics never really being re-absorbed into the environment. So the idea that your yogurt cup would live on unhindered for centuries was a common fear. This lead to movements to reconsider plastics as large food industry providers were switching away from more expensive glass (which was incentivized to be reused back then). So not a lot has changed, it's the same problem but instead of overflowing landfills of plastic, we are seeing it in the ocean instead.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    I don't see how that justifies recycling, since getting the stuff into landfills (or burning it) removes it from the environment too.
    - closeparen 6y ago
      There is no “beyond the environment.” Landfills count too.
      - pfdietz 6y ago
        Releasing plastics into the larger environment, especially microplastics, and confining them to landfills, are most definitely not the same thing.
        Qwertious 6y ago
        Stuff often leaks out of landfills and into the environment. As an above comment said, landfills can be done correctly so this doesn't happen, but often aren't.
worker767424 6y ago
I'm sympathetic to litter concern, especially in the ocean, and some of the chemicals involved like BPA are a little worrying, but overall, the emissions involved just aren't that significant compared to other parts of modern life, and disposal is mostly a political problem. Developed countries that aren't Sweden aren't excited about burning trash, and countries like the US with tons of land somehow aren't that interested in burying trash.
- samatman 6y ago
  Germany is seriously gung-ho about trash incineration, to the point where they import trash from neighboring countries to keep the generators on.
mark-r 6y ago
The ironic part is that recycling bins are almost always made of plastic.
- coronadisaster 6y ago
  but my last bins lasted more then 10 years and got re-used weekly
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bit_logic 6y ago
The whole recycling scam makes me upset. For decades the message was to recycle for the environment. But it was all just shipped to China and then dumped into the oceans. It actually would've been better if it went to landfills, at least then it's safely contained. Another lie was that we're running out of landfill space, there's so much land out there. Like most environmental issues, the focus should've been on producers not consumers. Tax plastic usage and producers will use less of it.
- Alex3917 6y ago
  > For decades the message was to recycle for the environment. The message is and has been "reduce, reuse, recycle." Recycling has been sold from the very beginning as being the option of last resort.
  - KeepFlying 6y ago
    That may have been the intent, but that wasn't the result. Even though recycling is supposed to be the last resort, it was treated as an effective solution on its own instead. Less attention was paid to "reduce" and "reuse" and most of the attention was focused on "recycle"
    - mason55 6y ago
      Because “recycling” is easy if you just ship it to China and then they dump it in the ocean. Reducing and reusing take real effort and change in behavior. If people had to recycle for real it would be more challenging and then reduce and reuse would be considered more often.
      - kbutler 6y ago
        Post-consumer recycling also takes real effort, most of it from individuals. It just turns out to be largely wasted effort.
  - koolba 6y ago
    Nobody wants to reduce their own consumption and the disposable, single use, “it’s not clean if it doesn’t come shrink wrapped in a plastic wrapper” mindset has all but destroyed “reuse”. All that’s left is lying to the public that recycling will make up the difference.
bondolo 6y ago
I am hopeful that the initiative which uses waste stream plastics as a component of asphalt will allow us to finally get some decent alternative to landfill for plastics. The best part about it was that the plastics didn't need to be sorted or clean; it is just going to be melted, pelletized and then mixed with hot tar to make asphalt. Since asphalt is now nearly infinitely recycled the plastics will be kept in use for a very long time with only minor amounts escaping in to the environment.
- zamadatix 6y ago
  I'm not as optimistic spreading plastics all over the ground to drive on is going to lead to less plastics escaping into the environment vs putting them in a landfill and covering them.
  - Jarwain 6y ago
    I think y'all are thinking on different scales of "plastic escaping". One scale being large plastics like bags or packing materials which could conceivably be blown away from a landfill or otherwise just left to rot. The other scale being microplastics leaking into the ground & our groundwater. I'm not really sure whether the asphalt thing helps with microplastics
    - hinkley 6y ago
      It does not. We were just talking the other day about the particulate pollution from asphalt. If it’s made of plastic, then the dust is micro plastic.
- jillesvangurp 6y ago
  Actually there are two dominant sources of micro plastics in the oceans: tires and asphalt. There are other sources as well but those are the big ones. If you think about it, roads need regular up keep because they erode away. Same for tires, which need replacing regularly. Where does that material go? Well it all gets ground into small particles as cars and trucks use the roads. Car tires get warm when you use them because of friction. That friction inevitably wears out the roads and the tires. So you end up with fine dust and particles that eventually washes away when it rains and ends up in rivers and eventually our oceans. So, converting plastic bags to asphalt is a great way of ensuring a lot of it ends up in our oceans. The challenge with plastics is not necessarily recycling them but figuring out what is what so you can recycle them properly. Household trash is full of a wide variety of plastics. Sorting these and processing them is not impossible but a bit of a challenge if it's all mixed up. There are some startups innovating in this space and it's not completely hopeless at this point. Also there are new materials that degrade better/more predictably, certain bacteria have been discovered that actually eat plastics, and we're figuring out cleaner ways of producing source materials in ways that don't involve using fossil oil. But maybe converting oil to plastics for 1 use products or packaging should just not be that cheap as it is currently. The attitude of "it's not our problem" for both producers and consumers is the core issue. Make it their problem and it's suddenly a lot less attractive to use plastic because cost goes up when you do that.
momokoko 6y ago
Any thoughts about adding an automated flag for articles with a title that includes “Big Something”? Generally the discussions are fairly low quality.
GhostVII 6y ago
I'm not convinced that it's actually a bad thing to dump plastic and paper into a landfill. You just cover it up with dirt and plants every 20 years and build a new one, pretty low impact as long as you have it properly sealed off. Even gets rid of some CO2. Probably better than putting lots of energy into recycling when it isn't actually efficient to do so.
- cwbrandsma 6y ago
  Paper isn’t bad because it breaks down quickly. Plastic has this bad habit of sticking around for 10,000 years (and longer).
  - stickfigure 6y ago
    Is that so bad? I mean, it was oil in the ground and now it is plastic in the ground. It seems like a kind of carbon sequestration, where 10,000 years is a feature, no? Honestly curious.
    - pedalpete 6y ago
      As oil it was trapped under shale or in sands where it had no effect on the water table and didn't get into the water or food supply. As plastics it is "broken down" into microplastics, and gets into things and areas it was never intended to be. It is then consumed and builds up in the systems of animals, and even eventually by us. Even your local landfill, is part of a management system, but will it really last 3,000 years? We can't just keep adding and adding to it, we can't cover the planet in landfills of plastic, we aren't putting the "oils" back to where they came from. In Canada, I remember being taught "give a hoot, don't pollute", and to us, as kids, that meant "don't create trash" as much as "clean up your trash".
      - Dylan16807 6y ago
        Can microplastics escape landfills, or is that an issue for trash that didn't get into a landfill? > We can't just keep adding and adding to it, we can't cover the planet in landfills of plastic, we aren't putting the "oils" back to where they came from. Why does it matter if it's the same spot? More importantly there's only so much oil and putting it all in landfills would not cover the planet.
gwbrooks 6y ago
We're supposed to be upset because an economically-interested party talked only about features and benefits that helped move its product? It's almost like NPR constantly promoting the value of the news and not bringing up that only one story in a dozen (if that) relies on multiple sources with different viewpoints.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
> And there are more documents, echoing decades of this knowledge, including one analysis from a top official at the industry's most powerful trade group. "The costs of separating plastics ... are high," he tells colleagues, before noting that the cost of using oil to make plastic is so low that recycling plastic waste "can't yet be justified economically." I bet if you went back 40 years, there are all sorts of negative documents you can find about all sorts of tech. Think about solar. I bet if we went back, we could find experts talking about how it is is infeasible due to being too expensive or that rare earth minerals to too environmentally damaging to mine, or that it fluctuates too much. Not saying what Big Plastic did was good, but using archives to find dissenting opinions about feasibility seems more like a gotcha fishing expedition.
atarian 6y ago
There is a grassroots effort to recycle plastic into new things. The plans for creating the machinery are all open-source: https://preciousplastic.com/solutions/machines/overview.html https://preciousplastic.com/solutions/machines/overview.html
bamboozled 6y ago
"It didn't get recycled because the system wasn't up to par," he says. "We hadn't invested in the ability to sort it and there hadn't been market signals that companies were willing to buy it, and both of those things exist today." Don’t trust this guy, he is supposed to sell oil, recycling is in direct conflict with selling more oil. There’s no reason we should fall for this twice.
- demosito666 6y ago
  Only 5% of the oil we consume is used for plastic production. I don't think shifting this one or two percent will affect anyone's profit significantly.
ninkendo 6y ago
I’ve read about the infeasibility of plastic recycling for years now, and I’m wondering what others are doing at this point. Should I even bother putting plastic in the blue bin any more? Or should I just toss it? What are the folks reading this doing?
- SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
  #1 and #2, blue bin. Everything else, basically trash can. PETE and HDPE do recycle well, wether yours will be recycled or not even if you bin it is an unknown.
pedalpete 6y ago
I feel like this is scapegoating "Big Oil" a bit. They made a product, we know it's bad for the environment, as a consumer it is up to you to make the choice not to buy/use it, or limit your use. We've known that recycling was a bad/underutilized solution for a lone time. When I'm buying most products, I'll look for (and often pay a dollar or so more) for glass with metal lid. Unfortunately there are SO many products that you can't get without plastic. It is everywhere. But we need to get the message out that step 1 is to not use plastic, which I think was missed in most education. Also note, I believe most of the education came from governments trying to reduce landfill, not from "Big Oil" themselves.
- newen 6y ago
  If everything was left up to consumer choice, we’d be driving gas guzzlers and the ozone layer would be already gone.
- sumedh 6y ago
  > as a consumer it is up to you to make the choice not to buy > Unfortunately there are SO many products that you can't get without plastic. Which is precisely why you cannot say consumers have a choice not to buy.
chmod600 6y ago
Is there some value to sorting even if it doesn't get recycled? Like, if we're going to bury it all, maybe it's better sorted than all mixed together?
trickstra 6y ago
They are doing the same about hydrogen right now. Notice that hydrogen is promoted as green fuel by oil companies. Why? Because 95% of our hydrogen is produced from natural gas. But they always talk about electrolysis, just like they used to talk about recyclability. Producing all the hydrogen we need by electrolysis would be way too inefficient, there are too many losses and we would be much better off if we just stored all the required electricity in batteries. Oil companies are promoting hydrogen because they know it will allow them to keep drilling oil and gas. It's like "Thank you for smoking" all over again.
octoberfranklin 6y ago
> Smith allowed people to put two plastic items in their bins: soda bottles and milk jugs. He lost money on them, he says, but the aluminum, paper and steel from his regular business helped offset the costs. Wait, what?! He should've just said "aluminum paper and steel only" and earned greater profits. It's not like people have a choice of recycling providers. The plastic recycling catastrophe wasn't caused by advertising. It was caused by entities irrationally subsidizing plastic disposal, for political reasons. Like this guy at a municipal waste facility. And like China. People get finite-sized trash bins, and they must pay if they want a larger size. Make them put the plastic in the trash bin and they will get annoyed by plastic packaging. I know I do.
- lrem 6y ago
  I pay 1.5CHF per 35l trash bag ($1.65 per 9.2 gallons) and recycling does not accept plastic other than bottles. Still have no way to evade plastic packaging.
  - octoberfranklin 6y ago
    If the proportion of plastic-packaged goods in your life hasn't reduced then you (unlike most people) clearly don't buy stuff on amazon. Or from big-box retailers. The other day I bought a product from Home Depot that had a glued-in-plastic window in a cardboard package (this makes the cardboard unrecycleable). It looked so alien. I hadn't seen packaging like that from a major retailer in years. Evade? Never. Reduce? Already in progress. Adjust your focus.
    - lrem 6y ago
      Amazon does not have a shop in three out of the four European countries I lived in, including the current one. Edit: technically, it operates in two of them, having both some warehouses and R&D offices, but does not have a storefront for them.
octoberfranklin 6y ago
> oil and plastics executives began a quiet campaign to lobby almost 40 states to mandate that the symbol appear on all plastic Yeah, but this was a really good thing (probably the only good thing the oil+plastic lobby has ever done). Those symbols are a godsend for DIYers; before we had them you could never know if a piece of plastic could be glued to (and if so, with what glue) or what kind of chemicals it could safely hold (as demonstrated in _Breaking Bad_!) Everything else they did was evil. But not this.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  Aren't they talking about a different symbol?
mohankumar246 6y ago
2050 headline: How Social Media companies Misled the Public into Believing They were only connecting the society
daxfohl 6y ago
Though I'm curious if the "reusable" trend is more of the same. Are single-use bags and straws really that bad for the environment, and do reusables get reused enough times to make a difference, or is a reusable straw just another thing to make money on? (Not that I imagine reusable straws is a lucrative enough industry to be worthy of dedicated political lobbying teams, but who knows).
- yourapostasy 6y ago
  It depends upon the Cradle to Cradle context of how the reusable term is used. A 316 grade stainless steel or aluminum straw that is appropriately marked for automated material identification (a very big gap in our current industrial culture) is easy to send back through a foundry to re-melt and reuse when broken beyond repair (likely by accident, as such a straw could conceivably last centuries when well taken care of). Same straw except made out of silicone, and unmarked, will still slowly (slower than say PET, but still minutely) leach polymers as microplastics into the environment. Better than a single-use straw, but we can choose better. I'm very partial to materials that can be fed as the sole feedstock into industrial processes without adding virgin feedstock. It is amazingly difficult as a consumer to find out these materials in the end products. Right To Repair is a part of this picture as well: you want to be able to repair the smallest piece possible to keep the overall artifact in use for as long as possible, and send back the smallest possible piece into the feedstock stream. There could be a Second Industrial Revolution built around standing up an infrastructure that emphasizes the agile manufacturing of reusable, cradle-to-cradle-recyclable, repairable artifacts, deliberately serving an S-curve sales chart because the artifacts last so long, and rapidly switching the majority of the manufacturing line into different, adjacent artifacts, and leaving behind only a smaller line that addresses marginal demand from population growth and parts supply. It could be the first step towards a proto-post-scarcity infrastructure.
  - jimmySixDOF 6y ago
    +1 to that 100% We are right now in the process of borrowing money from future generations and so reinvesting it (for them) into building a connection between the production/sales and recovery/reuse cycles so we have a single business value chain is a much better long-term strategic return for everyone than whatever empty calorie derivative product wall st bets it all on these days at the moment. It ought to be illegal to sell me any product that you are not also required to take back when it's finished. Unilever & Walmart Et al. should own the garbage trucks, the landfills, and the responsibility to dispose of anything they sell me - and I bet they suddenly find creative ways to reduce, reuse, and recycle things we never thought to be possible.
imglorp 6y ago
They mention decreasing quality when recycling, but I wonder about less-chemical recycling opportunities. For example, composite decking (Trex et al) combines sawdust and resin. It can be used for picnic tables and such. Road surfaces use ground tires now. Someone makes large nesting blocks for low-stress construction instead of concrete. PET can be made into fleece for garments, how about using it for insulation or other applications? We should be embracing this stuff in new ways. https://www.alternativesjournal.ca/science-and-solutions/pop-couture-how-pet-plastic-bottles-are-spun-polar-fleece https://www.alternativesjournal.ca/science-and-solutions/pop...
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  That fleece is one of the major sources of microplastics. By abrasion during wearing and washing.
tim333 6y ago
They get sort of recycled - the hydrocarbons start in the ground, are brought up used and bit and then stuck back in a hole in the ground.
jjt-yn_t 6y ago
A nice article, but without having the time to read thru this thread, this headline demeans some in the oil and plastic industries who had good faith intentions, and there might be a better description than 'misled into...' which is more akin to one person or group singularly practicing a deception.
analog31 6y ago
This is probably an aside, but due to the lockdown, I've been doing hardware development at my house. It's mostly great, but it means that I receive a lot of packages. And the packaging, oh the packaging. I'm inundated with packing material. Let's say I order 10 different parts. Each part was made by a manufacturer and packaged in a little plastic bag. (If there are sub-parts such as attachments, screws, etc., they are in a sub-bag). Each of those bags is placed inside another bag, often a thick zip-loc, with a sticky label indicating the part number and sales order number plus other desiderata. A short (1 meter) USB cable was coiled up and secured with not one but two twist-ties, sub-bagged, and bagged. There were molded plastic caps on the ends. All of those bags are in a big bag, tied at the top. That goes in a box with packing material filling half the box. I end up knee deep in trash by the time I've unpacked an order. I keep a few of the nicer boxes, but everything else goes into the recycling bin. /rant
mschuster91 6y ago
It's the same crap that BP pulled in 1971: https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sham/?europe=true https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sh... Basically, both the plastics stuff ofthis submission as well as the co2 campaign of BP is shifting responsibility: from big industry/megacorps to individual consumers. The worst thing is: even if all consumers would religiously follow recycling and co2 saving guidelines, it would barely make a dent in the global view. And that is the reason why humanity is blowing through all environmental targets... and politicians can sit in front of the cameras and straight tell people that "we did all we could". Seriously fuck this. We need to get megacorps and fraudulent PR under control, and that soon.
fredgrott 6y ago
Look at any McDoandls place, no recycling of any of their plastic despite a message on every container to do so
heratyian 6y ago
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m463 6y ago
A friend - a chemical engineer - worked on a plastics recycling project years ago (90's) They worked on recycling plastic, but the problem was: - it was very expensive to clean the plastic - even when the plastic was cleaned, it could only be mixed with virgin plastic at a very small ratio - single digit percentages - even the small ratio would weaken the plastic considerably. Think laundry baskets which are flexible but break easily. in the end I think they made giant logs for playgrounds out of the plastic. He told me really the best idea was probably to burn the plastic cleanly.
- randcraw 6y ago
  It seems like it ought to be possible to 'refine' used plastics into a clean product. It just won't be as cheap as creating virgin plastic. But at a public policy level, who cares that recycling adds cost? So does NOT recycling, of course.
- imtringued 6y ago
  Burning the plastic will release CO2. Just bury it.
  - m463 6y ago
    Wouldn't that just be the same, just a different timescale? And then there's the energy expenditure of burying it. maybe there's a way to have your cake and eat it too. reuse it for fuel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification
andrewjl 6y ago
Wait until plastic becomes the sole source of petrochemical demand. Big Oil is getting ready. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/30/climate/oil-kenya-africa-plastics-trade.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/30/climate/oil-kenya-africa-...
- neolefty 6y ago
  Honestly I look forward to that. It's a big improvement over using fossil fuels for energy — combine it with landfilling, and you're just re-burying oil after some transportation and manufacturing. And it gives a softer landing to the petroleum industry. Over time we can replace petro-plastics with more sustainable materials. Bioplastics? Incineration-recycling, where you capture the CO2 and turn it back into plastic feedstock? Edit: Also I think composting cardboard and paper would be great.
  - andrewjl 6y ago
    The problem in this specific case isn't necessarily just in the net benefits of fossil fuels but instead in how the benefits and their associated costs are distributed. I'm certain that the profits of the MNCs pushing this will not remain in Kenya. Yet the pollution and its consequent financial/non-financial costs most certainly will.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
Did ‘Big Oil’ mislead, or is our media incompetent? None of this information was hidden. It reminds me of how CNN is blaming a ‘gender reveal’ party for the CA fires instead of talking about forest management challenges issues over the last decades. It seems like our media is actively out to disinform people.
Tiktaalik 6y ago
Don't believe anything giant corporations say. They don't care.
bladewolf47 6y ago
Reduce and reuse were always supposed to be precursors to recycle, all this excess was eventually going to end this way
peter303 6y ago
Its a similar situation with clothing and furniture donation. 90%+ goes to the dump or international rag merchants. If it doesnt appear to have immediate resale value- easy to unpack, in style, gently used, clean- they dont want it. I watched the back lot of a national donation chain beginning with the letter G. Most of donations are immediately chucked into a number of trash bins. At least it makes me feel less guilty in trying to recycle stuff.
randcraw 6y ago
It seems like we need to reimagine how we repurpose old plastics rather than recycling them. Conversion into park benches and decking won't consume enough material, but maybe building houses from old plastics will? https://www.curbed.com/2019/7/10/20688718/modern-house-hurricane-resistant-plastic-bottles-jd-composites https://www.curbed.com/2019/7/10/20688718/modern-house-hurri...
lorenzorhoades 6y ago
Controversial uninformed opinion: Recycling is a major cause to the Homeless epidemic. Roads, brakes, weight are major causes to pollution. Heavy cars (IE. Super dense lithium, nickel, cobalt) will cause more pollution.
- peterlk 6y ago
  Was this comment generated with GPT-3?
  - lorenzorhoades 6y ago
    No, but I kinda understand why I was downvoted.
SoylentOrange 6y ago
Question: I’ve previously read that recycling is economically viable in some EU countries (Germany, Austria, Netherlands). Some countries like Finland have figured out ways to recycle components that go into landfills in the US. How did they manage to do this? Was it through regulation on the type of plastics that are sold to consumers? Was it through government subsidies? Through a better sorting process? Something else?
nedt 6y ago
The takeaway of the article shouldn’t be that no plastic can be recycled. PET does get recycled into new bottles, bags etc. And it’s fully correct, that new plastic is cheaper. Only if trashing old plastic is cheap, which it isn’t, because it stays with us a long time. And a state should put a tax on plastic to make companies feel the difference in cost and either avoid or recycle plastic.

Highly recommend Netflix's Broken episode on this topic ("Recycling Sham").

yyyuutt 6y ago
https://www.netflix.com/title/81002391 https://www.netflix.com/title/81002391

Recycling, like wearing a mask during a pandemic, is just too boring a solution for most of America. They'd rather put the effort into coming up with a story that makes everything someone else's fault even as they pay the price for their own idiocy.

dylan604 6y ago
Sadly, I would agree with this. People expect BigPharma to come up with a pill to make Covid a non-issue even if they think it is a hoax. Some of these same "hoaxers" are people that have told me recycling is a scam as well. I've even countered that the homeless people collecting cans/bottles from trashcans aren't doing it because it's fun. Once, one of these conversations actually came with "evidence". I was provided a link to a story about a waste disposal company from some other city taking their collected recycling to the same city dump as the regular trash. Logically, all recycling is handled this way in their mind.

x87678r 6y ago

I can't remember where I read it but there was the view that recycling allows people to think they're environmentally responsible when they aren't. eg the typical family has multiple cars, lives in a big suburban house, has heating/ac buys loads of stuff but recycles their cardboard/glass so thinks their environmental impact is small.

schoen 6y ago
Every time I took a German course, my textbook had a section something like "was machen Sie für die Umwelt?" ('what do you do for the environment?'), and the first example answer in dialogues was always "Müll trennen" (sorting kinds of trash for recycling). It was amazing what a cultural force this habit seems to have for many Germans. I still remember that one of the textbooks even started an answer with "natürlich trenne ich Müll" ('well, of course I sort my trash...'). (Of course, there were other things in the dialogues such as cycling and taking the train, so it's not like recycling is the only ecological measure in German society.)
- yodsanklai 6y ago
  > It was amazing what a cultural force this habit seems to have for many Germans. I'm not asking maliciously, but I wonder how Germans reconcile their seemingly environmental awareness with their high CO2 emissions and big cars culture.
  - mc32 6y ago
    They also had a recycling scandal when it was exposed all the tidy sorting at home hit all dumped at the refuse center and either dumped or shipped off but mostly not recycled.
    - quercusa 6y ago
      I got suspicious when Portland moved from sorted recycling (four bins, I think) to 'combined recycling'. How could it make economic sense to then sort it back out?
      - gumby 6y ago
        The theory given is that it increases recycling by reducing the cognitive load. Whether that is true or not is left as an exercise for the reader.

ardy42 6y ago

I wonder if sorting could be made feasible by mandating color-coding of different types of plastic? Like PET has to be clear, HDPE white, PP green, etc.? Marketers and package designers may not like it, but whatever. The tiny little recycling symbols seem pretty useless, unless you force consumers to hand-sort their recyclables according to them.

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
> The tiny little recycling symbols seem pretty useless, unless you force consumers to hand-sort their recyclables according to them. It gets worse: in King County, WA (Seattle metro area) where WM has most of the contracts we received leaflets from WM telling us to ignore the plastic recycling symbols entirely and to use only WM's "what we can / can't recycle" picture chart - which includes things I didn't think were recyclable (stained pizza boxes) and excludes things that I'd think were recyclable (plastic films). ...and the list varies within the county too: some cities' leaflets say not to put any pizza boxes in recycling (even completely clean ones). Aieeee.
- aidenn0 6y ago
  Plastic films can be recycled in theory, they just can't be put into sorting machines, as they tend to gum up the works. If you had a big box of just PLA films, you could recycle it just like any other hunk of PLA, but getting to the big box of PLA films is not feasible.
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    Another issue with film is that its too lightweight to be worth the hassle. The economics of recycling is that objects are paid per pound. 1lb of steel is pretty easy to collect. In contrast: 1lb of plastic film, even if its theoretically recyclable, is infeasible to sort and recycle with an economic profit. Aluminum foil is another one: my local recycling does NOT accept Aluminum foil. Aluminum is one of the "best recycling" materials too, but foil is just too small and lightweight to be worth the hassle.

cribbles 6y ago

This article makes it sound like the main bottleneck in the first-run recycling process is sorting. Could anyone with knowledge around ML, robotics and the like chime in on napkin math around novel labor-reducing approaches to improving the operating economics here? From the sound of it, this is not really a solvable problem short of some leapfrog technological advance. Even then, you don’t want to spend more energy on sorting automation than you get back from the recycling. And this would only make sense if the diminishing returns after the first or second recycle made it reasonable to be issuing so many consumer plastics in the first place.

David 6y ago
A friend and former boss of mine founded CleanRobotics which makes the TrashBot, a trash can that sorts trash from recyclables: https://cleanrobotics.com/trashbot/ https://cleanrobotics.com/trashbot/ I haven't seen the output so I can't comment on how well they work firsthand, but the idea is pretty cool. As far as I know (which is not far) they don't attempt to sort recyclables by material, unfortunately.
- mulmen 6y ago
  If this is possible why not just have a "plastic" bin and then transport everything mixed and sort at the recycling facility? What's the benefit to deploying all these sorting machines everywhere? Do they go to different locations?
thu2111 6y ago
There are quite a few companies doing that, but the ones I've seen are for industrial waste streams. e.g. https://youtu.be/QbKA9uNgzYQ?t=41 https://youtu.be/QbKA9uNgzYQ?t=41

fmajid 6y ago

Yes, it’s a scam. Only aluminum actually gets recycled. It’s time to tax plastic so companies start using paper products (even if they go to landfill, they will at least sequester carbon there) or aluminum.

newacct583 6y ago
Also glass and steel. Rare earth materials like batteries are very productively recycled. Paper recycling isn't awful either, but more of a wash than a win. Really, it's thermoplastic disposables that are the real problem here. Those don't recycle (except some very specific items), and frankly never really did. The straw bans are just the tip of the iceberg here. We need to be talking about banning all plastic disposables.
- dmurray 6y ago
  Paper/cardboard can be quite worthwhile. This article [0] was discussed on HN not so long ago. And some plastics too (I used to work for a firm that sold its waste PVC). The real discrepancy is between consumers and businesses recycling. Businesses can have a clean, unadulterated stream of waste, likely trivial for them to sort at scale. Most consumer recycling is useful for awareness at best and distraction at worst, like California shaming people into fixing their leaky taps during droughts when a billion times as much water is diverted to almond farming. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51420503 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51420503
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    All consumer waste streams should be filtered for metals and then shoveled into a plasma gasifier. You’re not going to break even on the energy input (source renewables to cover anything above what you generate from burning the syngas byproduct), but you’re going to break everything down into something that be trivially landfilled or used as aggregate for asphalt repaving (slag) and burn the syngas for power.
    - 6y ago

hangonhn 6y ago

Planet Money goes into this in a 2-parts series: https://www.npr.org/2019/07/09/739893511/episode-925-a-mob-boss-a-garbage-boat-and-why-we-recycle https://www.npr.org/2019/07/09/739893511/episode-925-a-mob-b...

pfdietz 6y ago

What problem was recycling supposed to be solving? Understanding just what the negative of plastic is supposed to be would inform how it is to be dealt with.

kxrm 6y ago
Anecdotally, when I was younger (80s) the concern was biodegradability. There were a lot of fears of plastics never really being re-absorbed into the environment. So the idea that your yogurt cup would live on unhindered for centuries was a common fear. This lead to movements to reconsider plastics as large food industry providers were switching away from more expensive glass (which was incentivized to be reused back then). So not a lot has changed, it's the same problem but instead of overflowing landfills of plastic, we are seeing it in the ocean instead.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  I don't see how that justifies recycling, since getting the stuff into landfills (or burning it) removes it from the environment too.
  - closeparen 6y ago
    There is no “beyond the environment.” Landfills count too.
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      Releasing plastics into the larger environment, especially microplastics, and confining them to landfills, are most definitely not the same thing.
      - Qwertious 6y ago
        Stuff often leaks out of landfills and into the environment. As an above comment said, landfills can be done correctly so this doesn't happen, but often aren't.

worker767424 6y ago

I'm sympathetic to litter concern, especially in the ocean, and some of the chemicals involved like BPA are a little worrying, but overall, the emissions involved just aren't that significant compared to other parts of modern life, and disposal is mostly a political problem. Developed countries that aren't Sweden aren't excited about burning trash, and countries like the US with tons of land somehow aren't that interested in burying trash.

samatman 6y ago
Germany is seriously gung-ho about trash incineration, to the point where they import trash from neighboring countries to keep the generators on.

mark-r 6y ago

The ironic part is that recycling bins are almost always made of plastic.

coronadisaster 6y ago
but my last bins lasted more then 10 years and got re-used weekly

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

bit_logic 6y ago

The whole recycling scam makes me upset. For decades the message was to recycle for the environment. But it was all just shipped to China and then dumped into the oceans. It actually would've been better if it went to landfills, at least then it's safely contained. Another lie was that we're running out of landfill space, there's so much land out there. Like most environmental issues, the focus should've been on producers not consumers. Tax plastic usage and producers will use less of it.

Alex3917 6y ago
> For decades the message was to recycle for the environment. The message is and has been "reduce, reuse, recycle." Recycling has been sold from the very beginning as being the option of last resort.
- KeepFlying 6y ago
  That may have been the intent, but that wasn't the result. Even though recycling is supposed to be the last resort, it was treated as an effective solution on its own instead. Less attention was paid to "reduce" and "reuse" and most of the attention was focused on "recycle"
  - mason55 6y ago
    Because “recycling” is easy if you just ship it to China and then they dump it in the ocean. Reducing and reusing take real effort and change in behavior. If people had to recycle for real it would be more challenging and then reduce and reuse would be considered more often.
    - kbutler 6y ago
      Post-consumer recycling also takes real effort, most of it from individuals. It just turns out to be largely wasted effort.
- koolba 6y ago
  Nobody wants to reduce their own consumption and the disposable, single use, “it’s not clean if it doesn’t come shrink wrapped in a plastic wrapper” mindset has all but destroyed “reuse”. All that’s left is lying to the public that recycling will make up the difference.

bondolo 6y ago

I am hopeful that the initiative which uses waste stream plastics as a component of asphalt will allow us to finally get some decent alternative to landfill for plastics. The best part about it was that the plastics didn't need to be sorted or clean; it is just going to be melted, pelletized and then mixed with hot tar to make asphalt. Since asphalt is now nearly infinitely recycled the plastics will be kept in use for a very long time with only minor amounts escaping in to the environment.

zamadatix 6y ago
I'm not as optimistic spreading plastics all over the ground to drive on is going to lead to less plastics escaping into the environment vs putting them in a landfill and covering them.
- Jarwain 6y ago
  I think y'all are thinking on different scales of "plastic escaping". One scale being large plastics like bags or packing materials which could conceivably be blown away from a landfill or otherwise just left to rot. The other scale being microplastics leaking into the ground & our groundwater. I'm not really sure whether the asphalt thing helps with microplastics
  - hinkley 6y ago
    It does not. We were just talking the other day about the particulate pollution from asphalt. If it’s made of plastic, then the dust is micro plastic.
jillesvangurp 6y ago
Actually there are two dominant sources of micro plastics in the oceans: tires and asphalt. There are other sources as well but those are the big ones. If you think about it, roads need regular up keep because they erode away. Same for tires, which need replacing regularly. Where does that material go? Well it all gets ground into small particles as cars and trucks use the roads. Car tires get warm when you use them because of friction. That friction inevitably wears out the roads and the tires. So you end up with fine dust and particles that eventually washes away when it rains and ends up in rivers and eventually our oceans. So, converting plastic bags to asphalt is a great way of ensuring a lot of it ends up in our oceans. The challenge with plastics is not necessarily recycling them but figuring out what is what so you can recycle them properly. Household trash is full of a wide variety of plastics. Sorting these and processing them is not impossible but a bit of a challenge if it's all mixed up. There are some startups innovating in this space and it's not completely hopeless at this point. Also there are new materials that degrade better/more predictably, certain bacteria have been discovered that actually eat plastics, and we're figuring out cleaner ways of producing source materials in ways that don't involve using fossil oil. But maybe converting oil to plastics for 1 use products or packaging should just not be that cheap as it is currently. The attitude of "it's not our problem" for both producers and consumers is the core issue. Make it their problem and it's suddenly a lot less attractive to use plastic because cost goes up when you do that.

momokoko 6y ago

Any thoughts about adding an automated flag for articles with a title that includes “Big Something”? Generally the discussions are fairly low quality.

GhostVII 6y ago

I'm not convinced that it's actually a bad thing to dump plastic and paper into a landfill. You just cover it up with dirt and plants every 20 years and build a new one, pretty low impact as long as you have it properly sealed off. Even gets rid of some CO2. Probably better than putting lots of energy into recycling when it isn't actually efficient to do so.

cwbrandsma 6y ago
Paper isn’t bad because it breaks down quickly. Plastic has this bad habit of sticking around for 10,000 years (and longer).
- stickfigure 6y ago
  Is that so bad? I mean, it was oil in the ground and now it is plastic in the ground. It seems like a kind of carbon sequestration, where 10,000 years is a feature, no? Honestly curious.
  - pedalpete 6y ago
    As oil it was trapped under shale or in sands where it had no effect on the water table and didn't get into the water or food supply. As plastics it is "broken down" into microplastics, and gets into things and areas it was never intended to be. It is then consumed and builds up in the systems of animals, and even eventually by us. Even your local landfill, is part of a management system, but will it really last 3,000 years? We can't just keep adding and adding to it, we can't cover the planet in landfills of plastic, we aren't putting the "oils" back to where they came from. In Canada, I remember being taught "give a hoot, don't pollute", and to us, as kids, that meant "don't create trash" as much as "clean up your trash".
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      Can microplastics escape landfills, or is that an issue for trash that didn't get into a landfill? > We can't just keep adding and adding to it, we can't cover the planet in landfills of plastic, we aren't putting the "oils" back to where they came from. Why does it matter if it's the same spot? More importantly there's only so much oil and putting it all in landfills would not cover the planet.

gwbrooks 6y ago

We're supposed to be upset because an economically-interested party talked only about features and benefits that helped move its product? It's almost like NPR constantly promoting the value of the news and not bringing up that only one story in a dozen (if that) relies on multiple sources with different viewpoints.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

> And there are more documents, echoing decades of this knowledge, including one analysis from a top official at the industry's most powerful trade group. "The costs of separating plastics ... are high," he tells colleagues, before noting that the cost of using oil to make plastic is so low that recycling plastic waste "can't yet be justified economically." I bet if you went back 40 years, there are all sorts of negative documents you can find about all sorts of tech. Think about solar. I bet if we went back, we could find experts talking about how it is is infeasible due to being too expensive or that rare earth minerals to too environmentally damaging to mine, or that it fluctuates too much. Not saying what Big Plastic did was good, but using archives to find dissenting opinions about feasibility seems more like a gotcha fishing expedition.

atarian 6y ago

There is a grassroots effort to recycle plastic into new things. The plans for creating the machinery are all open-source: https://preciousplastic.com/solutions/machines/overview.html https://preciousplastic.com/solutions/machines/overview.html

bamboozled 6y ago

"It didn't get recycled because the system wasn't up to par," he says. "We hadn't invested in the ability to sort it and there hadn't been market signals that companies were willing to buy it, and both of those things exist today." Don’t trust this guy, he is supposed to sell oil, recycling is in direct conflict with selling more oil. There’s no reason we should fall for this twice.

demosito666 6y ago
Only 5% of the oil we consume is used for plastic production. I don't think shifting this one or two percent will affect anyone's profit significantly.

ninkendo 6y ago

I’ve read about the infeasibility of plastic recycling for years now, and I’m wondering what others are doing at this point. Should I even bother putting plastic in the blue bin any more? Or should I just toss it? What are the folks reading this doing?

SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
#1 and #2, blue bin. Everything else, basically trash can. PETE and HDPE do recycle well, wether yours will be recycled or not even if you bin it is an unknown.

pedalpete 6y ago

I feel like this is scapegoating "Big Oil" a bit. They made a product, we know it's bad for the environment, as a consumer it is up to you to make the choice not to buy/use it, or limit your use. We've known that recycling was a bad/underutilized solution for a lone time. When I'm buying most products, I'll look for (and often pay a dollar or so more) for glass with metal lid. Unfortunately there are SO many products that you can't get without plastic. It is everywhere. But we need to get the message out that step 1 is to not use plastic, which I think was missed in most education. Also note, I believe most of the education came from governments trying to reduce landfill, not from "Big Oil" themselves.

newen 6y ago
If everything was left up to consumer choice, we’d be driving gas guzzlers and the ozone layer would be already gone.
sumedh 6y ago
> as a consumer it is up to you to make the choice not to buy > Unfortunately there are SO many products that you can't get without plastic. Which is precisely why you cannot say consumers have a choice not to buy.

chmod600 6y ago

Is there some value to sorting even if it doesn't get recycled? Like, if we're going to bury it all, maybe it's better sorted than all mixed together?

trickstra 6y ago

They are doing the same about hydrogen right now. Notice that hydrogen is promoted as green fuel by oil companies. Why? Because 95% of our hydrogen is produced from natural gas. But they always talk about electrolysis, just like they used to talk about recyclability. Producing all the hydrogen we need by electrolysis would be way too inefficient, there are too many losses and we would be much better off if we just stored all the required electricity in batteries. Oil companies are promoting hydrogen because they know it will allow them to keep drilling oil and gas. It's like "Thank you for smoking" all over again.

octoberfranklin 6y ago

> Smith allowed people to put two plastic items in their bins: soda bottles and milk jugs. He lost money on them, he says, but the aluminum, paper and steel from his regular business helped offset the costs. Wait, what?! He should've just said "aluminum paper and steel only" and earned greater profits. It's not like people have a choice of recycling providers. The plastic recycling catastrophe wasn't caused by advertising. It was caused by entities irrationally subsidizing plastic disposal, for political reasons. Like this guy at a municipal waste facility. And like China. People get finite-sized trash bins, and they must pay if they want a larger size. Make them put the plastic in the trash bin and they will get annoyed by plastic packaging. I know I do.

lrem 6y ago
I pay 1.5CHF per 35l trash bag ($1.65 per 9.2 gallons) and recycling does not accept plastic other than bottles. Still have no way to evade plastic packaging.
- octoberfranklin 6y ago
  If the proportion of plastic-packaged goods in your life hasn't reduced then you (unlike most people) clearly don't buy stuff on amazon. Or from big-box retailers. The other day I bought a product from Home Depot that had a glued-in-plastic window in a cardboard package (this makes the cardboard unrecycleable). It looked so alien. I hadn't seen packaging like that from a major retailer in years. Evade? Never. Reduce? Already in progress. Adjust your focus.
  - lrem 6y ago
    Amazon does not have a shop in three out of the four European countries I lived in, including the current one. Edit: technically, it operates in two of them, having both some warehouses and R&D offices, but does not have a storefront for them.

octoberfranklin 6y ago

> oil and plastics executives began a quiet campaign to lobby almost 40 states to mandate that the symbol appear on all plastic Yeah, but this was a really good thing (probably the only good thing the oil+plastic lobby has ever done). Those symbols are a godsend for DIYers; before we had them you could never know if a piece of plastic could be glued to (and if so, with what glue) or what kind of chemicals it could safely hold (as demonstrated in _Breaking Bad_!) Everything else they did was evil. But not this.

BlueTemplar 6y ago
Aren't they talking about a different symbol?

mohankumar246 6y ago

2050 headline: How Social Media companies Misled the Public into Believing They were only connecting the society

daxfohl 6y ago

Though I'm curious if the "reusable" trend is more of the same. Are single-use bags and straws really that bad for the environment, and do reusables get reused enough times to make a difference, or is a reusable straw just another thing to make money on? (Not that I imagine reusable straws is a lucrative enough industry to be worthy of dedicated political lobbying teams, but who knows).

yourapostasy 6y ago
It depends upon the Cradle to Cradle context of how the reusable term is used. A 316 grade stainless steel or aluminum straw that is appropriately marked for automated material identification (a very big gap in our current industrial culture) is easy to send back through a foundry to re-melt and reuse when broken beyond repair (likely by accident, as such a straw could conceivably last centuries when well taken care of). Same straw except made out of silicone, and unmarked, will still slowly (slower than say PET, but still minutely) leach polymers as microplastics into the environment. Better than a single-use straw, but we can choose better. I'm very partial to materials that can be fed as the sole feedstock into industrial processes without adding virgin feedstock. It is amazingly difficult as a consumer to find out these materials in the end products. Right To Repair is a part of this picture as well: you want to be able to repair the smallest piece possible to keep the overall artifact in use for as long as possible, and send back the smallest possible piece into the feedstock stream. There could be a Second Industrial Revolution built around standing up an infrastructure that emphasizes the agile manufacturing of reusable, cradle-to-cradle-recyclable, repairable artifacts, deliberately serving an S-curve sales chart because the artifacts last so long, and rapidly switching the majority of the manufacturing line into different, adjacent artifacts, and leaving behind only a smaller line that addresses marginal demand from population growth and parts supply. It could be the first step towards a proto-post-scarcity infrastructure.
- jimmySixDOF 6y ago
  +1 to that 100% We are right now in the process of borrowing money from future generations and so reinvesting it (for them) into building a connection between the production/sales and recovery/reuse cycles so we have a single business value chain is a much better long-term strategic return for everyone than whatever empty calorie derivative product wall st bets it all on these days at the moment. It ought to be illegal to sell me any product that you are not also required to take back when it's finished. Unilever & Walmart Et al. should own the garbage trucks, the landfills, and the responsibility to dispose of anything they sell me - and I bet they suddenly find creative ways to reduce, reuse, and recycle things we never thought to be possible.

imglorp 6y ago

They mention decreasing quality when recycling, but I wonder about less-chemical recycling opportunities. For example, composite decking (Trex et al) combines sawdust and resin. It can be used for picnic tables and such. Road surfaces use ground tires now. Someone makes large nesting blocks for low-stress construction instead of concrete. PET can be made into fleece for garments, how about using it for insulation or other applications? We should be embracing this stuff in new ways. https://www.alternativesjournal.ca/science-and-solutions/pop-couture-how-pet-plastic-bottles-are-spun-polar-fleece https://www.alternativesjournal.ca/science-and-solutions/pop...

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
That fleece is one of the major sources of microplastics. By abrasion during wearing and washing.

tim333 6y ago

They get sort of recycled - the hydrocarbons start in the ground, are brought up used and bit and then stuck back in a hole in the ground.

jjt-yn_t 6y ago

A nice article, but without having the time to read thru this thread, this headline demeans some in the oil and plastic industries who had good faith intentions, and there might be a better description than 'misled into...' which is more akin to one person or group singularly practicing a deception.

analog31 6y ago

This is probably an aside, but due to the lockdown, I've been doing hardware development at my house. It's mostly great, but it means that I receive a lot of packages. And the packaging, oh the packaging. I'm inundated with packing material. Let's say I order 10 different parts. Each part was made by a manufacturer and packaged in a little plastic bag. (If there are sub-parts such as attachments, screws, etc., they are in a sub-bag). Each of those bags is placed inside another bag, often a thick zip-loc, with a sticky label indicating the part number and sales order number plus other desiderata. A short (1 meter) USB cable was coiled up and secured with not one but two twist-ties, sub-bagged, and bagged. There were molded plastic caps on the ends. All of those bags are in a big bag, tied at the top. That goes in a box with packing material filling half the box. I end up knee deep in trash by the time I've unpacked an order. I keep a few of the nicer boxes, but everything else goes into the recycling bin. /rant

mschuster91 6y ago

It's the same crap that BP pulled in 1971: https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sham/?europe=true https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sh... Basically, both the plastics stuff ofthis submission as well as the co2 campaign of BP is shifting responsibility: from big industry/megacorps to individual consumers. The worst thing is: even if all consumers would religiously follow recycling and co2 saving guidelines, it would barely make a dent in the global view. And that is the reason why humanity is blowing through all environmental targets... and politicians can sit in front of the cameras and straight tell people that "we did all we could". Seriously fuck this. We need to get megacorps and fraudulent PR under control, and that soon.

fredgrott 6y ago

Look at any McDoandls place, no recycling of any of their plastic despite a message on every container to do so

heratyian 6y ago

We're doing some market research on plastic bags. Please take this short survey. Only takes a minute. Thank you! https://forms.gle/JZhuFN1CvTsJ2TCS9 https://forms.gle/JZhuFN1CvTsJ2TCS9

m463 6y ago

A friend - a chemical engineer - worked on a plastics recycling project years ago (90's) They worked on recycling plastic, but the problem was: - it was very expensive to clean the plastic - even when the plastic was cleaned, it could only be mixed with virgin plastic at a very small ratio - single digit percentages - even the small ratio would weaken the plastic considerably. Think laundry baskets which are flexible but break easily. in the end I think they made giant logs for playgrounds out of the plastic. He told me really the best idea was probably to burn the plastic cleanly.

randcraw 6y ago
It seems like it ought to be possible to 'refine' used plastics into a clean product. It just won't be as cheap as creating virgin plastic. But at a public policy level, who cares that recycling adds cost? So does NOT recycling, of course.
imtringued 6y ago
Burning the plastic will release CO2. Just bury it.
- m463 6y ago
  Wouldn't that just be the same, just a different timescale? And then there's the energy expenditure of burying it. maybe there's a way to have your cake and eat it too. reuse it for fuel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification

andrewjl 6y ago

Wait until plastic becomes the sole source of petrochemical demand. Big Oil is getting ready. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/30/climate/oil-kenya-africa-plastics-trade.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/30/climate/oil-kenya-africa-...

neolefty 6y ago
Honestly I look forward to that. It's a big improvement over using fossil fuels for energy — combine it with landfilling, and you're just re-burying oil after some transportation and manufacturing. And it gives a softer landing to the petroleum industry. Over time we can replace petro-plastics with more sustainable materials. Bioplastics? Incineration-recycling, where you capture the CO2 and turn it back into plastic feedstock? Edit: Also I think composting cardboard and paper would be great.
- andrewjl 6y ago
  The problem in this specific case isn't necessarily just in the net benefits of fossil fuels but instead in how the benefits and their associated costs are distributed. I'm certain that the profits of the MNCs pushing this will not remain in Kenya. Yet the pollution and its consequent financial/non-financial costs most certainly will.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

Did ‘Big Oil’ mislead, or is our media incompetent? None of this information was hidden. It reminds me of how CNN is blaming a ‘gender reveal’ party for the CA fires instead of talking about forest management challenges issues over the last decades. It seems like our media is actively out to disinform people.

Tiktaalik 6y ago

Don't believe anything giant corporations say. They don't care.

bladewolf47 6y ago

Reduce and reuse were always supposed to be precursors to recycle, all this excess was eventually going to end this way

peter303 6y ago

Its a similar situation with clothing and furniture donation. 90%+ goes to the dump or international rag merchants. If it doesnt appear to have immediate resale value- easy to unpack, in style, gently used, clean- they dont want it. I watched the back lot of a national donation chain beginning with the letter G. Most of donations are immediately chucked into a number of trash bins. At least it makes me feel less guilty in trying to recycle stuff.

randcraw 6y ago

It seems like we need to reimagine how we repurpose old plastics rather than recycling them. Conversion into park benches and decking won't consume enough material, but maybe building houses from old plastics will? https://www.curbed.com/2019/7/10/20688718/modern-house-hurricane-resistant-plastic-bottles-jd-composites https://www.curbed.com/2019/7/10/20688718/modern-house-hurri...

lorenzorhoades 6y ago

Controversial uninformed opinion: Recycling is a major cause to the Homeless epidemic. Roads, brakes, weight are major causes to pollution. Heavy cars (IE. Super dense lithium, nickel, cobalt) will cause more pollution.

peterlk 6y ago
Was this comment generated with GPT-3?
- lorenzorhoades 6y ago
  No, but I kinda understand why I was downvoted.

SoylentOrange 6y ago

Question: I’ve previously read that recycling is economically viable in some EU countries (Germany, Austria, Netherlands). Some countries like Finland have figured out ways to recycle components that go into landfills in the US. How did they manage to do this? Was it through regulation on the type of plastics that are sold to consumers? Was it through government subsidies? Through a better sorting process? Something else?

nedt 6y ago

The takeaway of the article shouldn’t be that no plastic can be recycled. PET does get recycled into new bottles, bags etc. And it’s fully correct, that new plastic is cheaper. Only if trashing old plastic is cheap, which it isn’t, because it stays with us a long time. And a state should put a tax on plastic to make companies feel the difference in cost and either avoid or recycle plastic.