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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 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.
- 0xdde 6y ago
  > Recycling has been sold from the very beginning as being the option of last resort. Maybe in the most literal reading of that slogan, but a claim like this could really use some substantiation.
  - liability 6y ago
    That ordering is a key part of the waste hierarchy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_hierarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_hierarchy
- liability 6y ago
  The mantra should have included "... in that order!"
  - Alex3917 6y ago
    The logo on every recycling bin is literally arrows that explain the order.
- nilram 6y ago
  “Reduce, reuse” is part of the old saying but it was never heard, because it was never advertised. The entities that could afford advertising, or afford lobbying for it, have more riding on the recycle piece of that—-because reduce and reuse doesn’t pay their bills. Or their salaries and bonuses.
- toast0 6y ago
  I recall the message in the catchy jingle as "recycle, reduce, reuse" Realistically, it probably makes sense to reuse plastic waste as fuel, if it's not economical to recycle it. But burning plastic is frowned upon.
  - ShroudedNight 6y ago
    > I recall the message in the catchy jingle as "recycle, reduce, reuse" If it's the one I remember, resolving the words of the next line was surprisingly ambiguous, with the two popular options being "...and close the loop" or "...and don't pollute"
    - bladegash 6y ago
      This used to be a TV commercial during the 90s/early 00s (I think?). The jingle was definitely "Recycle, Reduce, Reuse...and close the loooooop", the loop being the little recycle triangle logo thing.
bit_logic 6y ago
Thinking about this more, wasn't there a time, maybe late 90s early 2000s when the message was that plastic is more environmental than paper? Something like at the supermarket checkout you should pick plastic over paper bags to save rain forest trees? Is my memory wrong or was this a widespread message at the time?
- gedy 6y ago
  It was in my circles, I remember some passionate eco types arguing I should use plastic bags because they were recyclable, and paper bags "killed trees".
  - rvense 6y ago
    I know paper right now doesn't have a great environmental footprint, but paper does seem like a pretty good way to trick capitalism into planting lots of trees.
    - petemir 6y ago
      Or to just use whatever trees are left and leave the next generation to worry about planting new ones...
    - ajnin 6y ago
      Eh, it's mostly replanting what has been destroyed previously, and with only a few fast growth species who don't make very useful wood for other purposes, while more varied forests are being destroyed to make room. It's pretty hard to "trick" capitalism into serving other interests than its own.
      - yostrovs 6y ago
        And yet, capitalist societies have stricter environmental regulations and the people living in capitalist societies tend to be more concerned about the environment. Look up the Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea for their environmental records and compare those to the US or Western Europe. Here's the US, page 7 please: https://www.fia.fs.fed.us/library/brochures/docs/2012/ForestFacts_1952-2012_English.pdf https://www.fia.fs.fed.us/library/brochures/docs/2012/Forest...
spodek 6y ago
> the focus should've been on producers not consumers on producers AND consumers. They're not exclusive. Producers have deceived, but consumers have been all too happy to suspend skepticism when buying things once the producer puts the word "recycle" on it somewhere. Consumers overwhelmingly skip the reduce part. Everyone I talk to about it, when they drop their defenses, says somewhere inside they knew they were participating but wanted to believe recycling was more benign than they knew it was. They just wanted their latte without thinking about it too much. I'm not removing responsibility from producers or government. Consumers have a lot of power. Single-use plastic at least isn't hard to avoid with practice, at least to drop 90 percent of it. Just avoiding packaged food, with a few years practice the last I emptied my garbage was December and I expect my next emptying in 2022.
- nkingsy 6y ago
  Maybe make some videos or something. My tiny California trash can is full to the brim every week, not for lack of trying. I’m fairly sure I’m in the top 10% of giving a f in my country. Culture has huge impact so I don’t want to discourage individual action, but this won’t change until conservation becomes the default.
  - spodek 6y ago
    I posted a video on my blog here: https://joshuaspodek.com/year-emptied-garbage https://joshuaspodek.com/year-emptied-garbage This post explains more: https://joshuaspodek.com/emptying-my-household-garbage-for-the-first-time-in-2019 https://joshuaspodek.com/emptying-my-household-garbage-for-t...
    - brunoff 6y ago
      There's someone with a nickname similar to yours (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:NYCJosh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:NYCJosh) that after reading the article, updated wikipedia's plastic recycling article - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_recycling#Deception_of_the_public https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_recycling#Deception_of.... I would like to thank him.
Aunche 6y ago
> But it was all just shipped to China and then dumped into the oceans. I've heard this a lot of times, but I've never seen any source that claimed the recycled material sent to China gets dumped in the ocean. As I recall, they had paid a small amount of money for it, so it doesn't make sense why they would just throw it away. I agree that landfills are underrated. It's much more effective to build landfills in poor countries than it is to try to sweep up plastic in the ocean, which may also hurt the environment.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Yes. They are paying for the material as well as the shipping costs of the material. China is a major source of ocean plastic, but I doubt it is because of widespread dumping of imported plastic into the ocean.
  - jokethrowaway 6y ago
    Estimates varies between 2/3 and 90% of all plastic dumping in the Ocean coming from Asian countries. We really don't have much hope in regulating that.
    - sumedh 6y ago
      > We really don't have much hope in regulating that. Western countries can stop sending plastic waste to Asian countries, that would be a start.
      - MattGaiser 6y ago
        Unless that is the waste they are dumping into the oceans, why would that matter?
        fuzzfactor 6y ago
        tl;dr: first & last sentences Wealth originates in natural resources. Here you've got bureaucracy, natural resources, value-added product, surplus, scrap, waste, storage, shipping, and business-as-usual being the primary elements interacting overall. It isn't profitable to send a shipload to a place where it isn't worth more money when it gets there. Price matters. Propylene gas is one of the fundamentally simplest hydrocarbon monomers, second only to ethylene gas in simplicity. Used as raw material to produce polypropylene and polyethylene plastics respectively. Very similar in volatility, flammability, and liquefication properties to propane, propylene can be handled using the same familiar tanks used by consumers for cooking and heating. And the same traditional LPG vessels or the modern refrigerated lower-pressure types. We're in a crisis but current prices still represent a somewhat functional market. Lets put them on the same basis in US dollars and look at the math. LPG can be considered a crude natural resource and it's quoted in liters across a broad spectrum of prices from 0.07 to 1.16 USD worldwide: -interestingly this data source does not include Mexico or the US, however North America is represented by Canada https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/lpg_prices/ https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/lpg_prices/ Propane is refined from LPG, quoted per gallon at 0.46 USD. So that's about 0.12 USD per liter for comparison to the LPG spectrum: https://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=propane https://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=propane Propylene is produced using propane as the raw material, quoted per metric tonne at about 870 USD, except on the US Gulf Coast where delivery without shipping is only about 20 USD per tonne. So that's about 0.53 USD per liter elsewhere for comparison to the LPG spectrum: https://www.fibre2fashion.com/market-intelligence/textile-market-watch/propylene-price-trends-industry-reports/17/ https://www.fibre2fashion.com/market-intelligence/textile-ma... Quite a bit of certain value added here in the step from propane to propylene but some people are still paying more for hydrocarbons to burn than others are paying for raw monomers for polymerization into plastic. And they all come in the same vessels when available. Made from the propylene monomer as raw material, solid plastic bulk polypropylene pellets on the same basis at 1170 USD per tonne can be seen to provide notable multiples of value added on the US Gulf Coast. For the pellets that's a price about 0.72+ USD per liter of equivalent propylene monomer (ideally polymerized) to compare to LPG: https://www.fibre2fashion.com/market-intelligence/textile-market-watch/polypropylene-price-trends-industry-reports/20/ https://www.fibre2fashion.com/market-intelligence/textile-ma... Note that both charts from the last data source appear to have European prices quoted in Euros on an otherwise US dollar chart, so things are even more expensive over there than it looks. And the virgin polypropylene or polyethylene pellets might be under consideration to be shipped by the same solid-cargo vessels in competition with more diffucult-to-handle waste plastic. Actually if an overseas factory uses a liter equivalent of cheap plastic pellets to make consumable items for return export, their value added can be a bigger multiple than any of the preceeding members of the value-added chain. Like a few dollars rather than these sub-dollar amounts. Even within the same oil company, different degrees of environmental protection can be accomplished by different groups. Different incentives apply to different groups of bonus-seekers, the exploration, production, refining, petrochemicals, and polymers each have their own not-fully-aligned efforts. Sometimes bonuses can only be had by the most agressive growth operators at all costs, externalized or not. Then there's this from 2013: HN link to: One of the largest polypropylene production facilities opens in Siberia [2013] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24458335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24458335 And since that's not enough for consumers, now there's this from Thursday: HN link to: Launch of New World Class Polypropylene Production Line in La Porte, Texas https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24458348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24458348 Remember, some businesspeople will never be satisfied unless every dollar is greedily extracted at each possible point in a chain, often preferring it to be done to someone else's extreme disadvantage if possible. To be financially sustainable; It takes a lot of surplus to save from destruction, distribute, deploy, repair and/or reuse. It takes a whole lot more scrap to recover the valuable components from. You can only imagine how much tonnage it would take once there are no more financially valuable components. Now both the surplus & scrap have always been under pressure from virgin raw materials and manufacturing to begin with, and so surplus & scrap are still often included with and regarded as _waste_. Some people hate anything old anyway. Actually makes the waste seem to be more valuable if it's not just plain plastic too. There's not supposed to be any level of imagination that can conceive of a scale so vast that handling plain plastic waste would be financially feasible. So the waste doesn't have a chance, there's fundamentally not a promising financial market that can develop around a liability. Unless maybe you promise to do something but you don't actually do it. The only market can be among those willing to pay to discharge a liability. A big city, company, or community can easily attach no remaining value to more dumpster loads of stuff the more wasteful and consumer-oriented the society. It can't be economically handled, stored or shipped, and the more of these efforts that are incurred they increase the depth of the liability, so the incentive can arise to make it the sooner the discharge the better. When the only remaining real value is as scrap for recycling or fuel for energy recovery, but both are uneconomical compared to virgin material, the final incentive falls to incidental accumulators whose economics are not quite prohibitive, but on too small a scale to make a major impact, or on a too-imaginative scale of accumulation which often fails to have a positive outcome. Surplus, scrap, and waste operators have always had their warehouses, scrapyards, and dumps under pressure to discharge at the same average rate as accumulation. Lots of them are always _almost_ full. Seems to me once an overseas business like this is established, there will be times when it will make economic sense for someone to discharge a low-value cargo into the ocean even if they were to continue the voyage all the way to the intended recycling port afterward. If the receiving dump was still anticipated to be full upon the vessel's ETA, the cargo could not be accepted anyway, and a procedure could be developed to handle it with creative paperwork, even routinely without any changes to established office systems. So everyone continues to make money because they're being paid to get rid of the waste, not because someone actually thinks they can add value to the waste if delivered. Maybe extract a little more value, but not add anything, and further value removal can be a costly maybe still leaving most of the bulk left over anyway, and there may be _greener_ pastures. When there's no market to rescue a marginal asset which quickly turns into a vast liability during a voyage, there can be no rescue to hold out for. Fundamentally a shipload of waste is worth less than a shipload of crude oil except for a few days each century wben crude goes below zero. The rest of the time crude oil is higher, sometimes fluctuating wildly while still providing a cheaper source of virgin plastic than recycled plastic can compete with. Waste plastic never rises significantly above zero, and is always on the decline. There could be incentive to ocean dump just because the asset is so marginal, to prevent further cost of handling and storage, and eliminate risk of turning into a liability through time. Actually voyaging nowhere near an overseas port. Covering this with paperwork could be the most profitable business niche in the declining-value chain. Mountains of garbage might have more slippery slopes than you think, and people end up under the table. Returning an unburnt fraction of the vast produced resource to the earth offshore to where much of it originated, but not to the subsurface. In a value-extracted-while-declining way comparable to just spilling the oil intentionally. Similar to the way at the other end a pipeline thief might make more money per barrel than the oil company would from the oil they are stealing as it comes from the earth. I don't know if anyone seriously insures these waste cargoes against losses to begin with. >Here you've got bureaucracy, natural resources, value-added product, surplus, scrap, waste, storage, shipping, and business-as-usual being the primary elements interacting overall. Same elements as the Beirut explosion where the impact may or may not be as large on the environment as many shiploads of waste plastic, but after a period of complacency both raise their ugly head in their own way. In Beirut that was just one shipment and the human failures had an instantaneously undeniable effect after the delay. Shipments which are of marginal value don't have a mainstream re-entry point because they compete with shipments having full value. It wouldn't be so bad without all the dishonesty & greed.
ummonk 6y ago
We also just have the ability to incinerate trash, generating electricity and avoiding having to create landfills.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
zozbot234 6y ago
Come on, everyone knows that the "recycling" trucks all go to the landfill anyways. "Recycling" was a Big Government socialist conspiracy to train the citizenry into obeying arbitrary rules like mindless drones and forfeiting their God-given freedom.
- kurthr 6y ago
  You mean the for profit government of regulatory capturing socialists?
11235813213455 6y ago
I think the actions should go on both producers and consumers. Taxes, and also mentality changes, in my case, I produce almost no garbage, because I eat fruit foraged outside, and other local organic food. My only garbage in a year is: 10 rice plastic bag (5kg bags), a toothpaste tube and a toothbrush, a few soap bars plastic wrappings. That's all. That yearly volume you see, that's what most people produce in one day in developed countries
- faitswulff 6y ago
  This kind of lifestyle is probably impossible in low-income food deserts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
- mkl 6y ago
  So you only buy second hand electronic devices? And you never receive packages or letters? Never have anything that wears out? I believe I produce very little waste, and put my rubbish and recycling bins out for collection every few months, rather than every two weeks, but I find it hard to see how I could get from where I am to what you describe.
- carstenhag 6y ago
  It's maybe doable, but just about every fresh food/ingredient ist wrapped in plastic. I can get lentils, rice, bread, maybe milk etc without packaging (Unverpackt-Läden in Germany) but not butter, eggs, cheese, spices and so on.
  - BlueTemplar 6y ago
    Aren't your eggs wrapped in a form of cardboard ?
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    Before the thing came along we were starting to see shops popup in the UK selling loose items. You could take your containers and fill them with milk, rice, washing up liquid, etc. Some of the supermarkets have started experimenting with it.
andrewjl 6y ago
I think govt subsidy on compostable biodegradable plastics would be good too. Especially if the subsidy was not just on the bags themselves, but the research and process engineering to make them more cost-competitive. In the US at least, cities can also get creative, such as exempting compostable items from sales taxes.

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.
0xdde 6y ago
> Recycling has been sold from the very beginning as being the option of last resort. Maybe in the most literal reading of that slogan, but a claim like this could really use some substantiation.
- liability 6y ago
  That ordering is a key part of the waste hierarchy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_hierarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_hierarchy
liability 6y ago
The mantra should have included "... in that order!"
- Alex3917 6y ago
  The logo on every recycling bin is literally arrows that explain the order.
nilram 6y ago
“Reduce, reuse” is part of the old saying but it was never heard, because it was never advertised. The entities that could afford advertising, or afford lobbying for it, have more riding on the recycle piece of that—-because reduce and reuse doesn’t pay their bills. Or their salaries and bonuses.
toast0 6y ago
I recall the message in the catchy jingle as "recycle, reduce, reuse" Realistically, it probably makes sense to reuse plastic waste as fuel, if it's not economical to recycle it. But burning plastic is frowned upon.
- ShroudedNight 6y ago
  > I recall the message in the catchy jingle as "recycle, reduce, reuse" If it's the one I remember, resolving the words of the next line was surprisingly ambiguous, with the two popular options being "...and close the loop" or "...and don't pollute"
  - bladegash 6y ago
    This used to be a TV commercial during the 90s/early 00s (I think?). The jingle was definitely "Recycle, Reduce, Reuse...and close the loooooop", the loop being the little recycle triangle logo thing.

bit_logic 6y ago

Thinking about this more, wasn't there a time, maybe late 90s early 2000s when the message was that plastic is more environmental than paper? Something like at the supermarket checkout you should pick plastic over paper bags to save rain forest trees? Is my memory wrong or was this a widespread message at the time?

gedy 6y ago
It was in my circles, I remember some passionate eco types arguing I should use plastic bags because they were recyclable, and paper bags "killed trees".
- rvense 6y ago
  I know paper right now doesn't have a great environmental footprint, but paper does seem like a pretty good way to trick capitalism into planting lots of trees.
  - petemir 6y ago
    Or to just use whatever trees are left and leave the next generation to worry about planting new ones...
  - ajnin 6y ago
    Eh, it's mostly replanting what has been destroyed previously, and with only a few fast growth species who don't make very useful wood for other purposes, while more varied forests are being destroyed to make room. It's pretty hard to "trick" capitalism into serving other interests than its own.
    - yostrovs 6y ago
      And yet, capitalist societies have stricter environmental regulations and the people living in capitalist societies tend to be more concerned about the environment. Look up the Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea for their environmental records and compare those to the US or Western Europe. Here's the US, page 7 please: https://www.fia.fs.fed.us/library/brochures/docs/2012/ForestFacts_1952-2012_English.pdf https://www.fia.fs.fed.us/library/brochures/docs/2012/Forest...

spodek 6y ago

> the focus should've been on producers not consumers on producers AND consumers. They're not exclusive. Producers have deceived, but consumers have been all too happy to suspend skepticism when buying things once the producer puts the word "recycle" on it somewhere. Consumers overwhelmingly skip the reduce part. Everyone I talk to about it, when they drop their defenses, says somewhere inside they knew they were participating but wanted to believe recycling was more benign than they knew it was. They just wanted their latte without thinking about it too much. I'm not removing responsibility from producers or government. Consumers have a lot of power. Single-use plastic at least isn't hard to avoid with practice, at least to drop 90 percent of it. Just avoiding packaged food, with a few years practice the last I emptied my garbage was December and I expect my next emptying in 2022.

nkingsy 6y ago
Maybe make some videos or something. My tiny California trash can is full to the brim every week, not for lack of trying. I’m fairly sure I’m in the top 10% of giving a f in my country. Culture has huge impact so I don’t want to discourage individual action, but this won’t change until conservation becomes the default.
- spodek 6y ago
  I posted a video on my blog here: https://joshuaspodek.com/year-emptied-garbage https://joshuaspodek.com/year-emptied-garbage This post explains more: https://joshuaspodek.com/emptying-my-household-garbage-for-the-first-time-in-2019 https://joshuaspodek.com/emptying-my-household-garbage-for-t...
  - brunoff 6y ago
    There's someone with a nickname similar to yours (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:NYCJosh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:NYCJosh) that after reading the article, updated wikipedia's plastic recycling article - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_recycling#Deception_of_the_public https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_recycling#Deception_of.... I would like to thank him.

Aunche 6y ago

> But it was all just shipped to China and then dumped into the oceans. I've heard this a lot of times, but I've never seen any source that claimed the recycled material sent to China gets dumped in the ocean. As I recall, they had paid a small amount of money for it, so it doesn't make sense why they would just throw it away. I agree that landfills are underrated. It's much more effective to build landfills in poor countries than it is to try to sweep up plastic in the ocean, which may also hurt the environment.

MattGaiser 6y ago
Yes. They are paying for the material as well as the shipping costs of the material. China is a major source of ocean plastic, but I doubt it is because of widespread dumping of imported plastic into the ocean.
- jokethrowaway 6y ago
  Estimates varies between 2/3 and 90% of all plastic dumping in the Ocean coming from Asian countries. We really don't have much hope in regulating that.
  - sumedh 6y ago
    > We really don't have much hope in regulating that. Western countries can stop sending plastic waste to Asian countries, that would be a start.
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      Unless that is the waste they are dumping into the oceans, why would that matter?
      - fuzzfactor 6y ago
        tl;dr: first & last sentences Wealth originates in natural resources. Here you've got bureaucracy, natural resources, value-added product, surplus, scrap, waste, storage, shipping, and business-as-usual being the primary elements interacting overall. It isn't profitable to send a shipload to a place where it isn't worth more money when it gets there. Price matters. Propylene gas is one of the fundamentally simplest hydrocarbon monomers, second only to ethylene gas in simplicity. Used as raw material to produce polypropylene and polyethylene plastics respectively. Very similar in volatility, flammability, and liquefication properties to propane, propylene can be handled using the same familiar tanks used by consumers for cooking and heating. And the same traditional LPG vessels or the modern refrigerated lower-pressure types. We're in a crisis but current prices still represent a somewhat functional market. Lets put them on the same basis in US dollars and look at the math. LPG can be considered a crude natural resource and it's quoted in liters across a broad spectrum of prices from 0.07 to 1.16 USD worldwide: -interestingly this data source does not include Mexico or the US, however North America is represented by Canada https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/lpg_prices/ https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/lpg_prices/ Propane is refined from LPG, quoted per gallon at 0.46 USD. So that's about 0.12 USD per liter for comparison to the LPG spectrum: https://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=propane https://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=propane Propylene is produced using propane as the raw material, quoted per metric tonne at about 870 USD, except on the US Gulf Coast where delivery without shipping is only about 20 USD per tonne. So that's about 0.53 USD per liter elsewhere for comparison to the LPG spectrum: https://www.fibre2fashion.com/market-intelligence/textile-market-watch/propylene-price-trends-industry-reports/17/ https://www.fibre2fashion.com/market-intelligence/textile-ma... Quite a bit of certain value added here in the step from propane to propylene but some people are still paying more for hydrocarbons to burn than others are paying for raw monomers for polymerization into plastic. And they all come in the same vessels when available. Made from the propylene monomer as raw material, solid plastic bulk polypropylene pellets on the same basis at 1170 USD per tonne can be seen to provide notable multiples of value added on the US Gulf Coast. For the pellets that's a price about 0.72+ USD per liter of equivalent propylene monomer (ideally polymerized) to compare to LPG: https://www.fibre2fashion.com/market-intelligence/textile-market-watch/polypropylene-price-trends-industry-reports/20/ https://www.fibre2fashion.com/market-intelligence/textile-ma... Note that both charts from the last data source appear to have European prices quoted in Euros on an otherwise US dollar chart, so things are even more expensive over there than it looks. And the virgin polypropylene or polyethylene pellets might be under consideration to be shipped by the same solid-cargo vessels in competition with more diffucult-to-handle waste plastic. Actually if an overseas factory uses a liter equivalent of cheap plastic pellets to make consumable items for return export, their value added can be a bigger multiple than any of the preceeding members of the value-added chain. Like a few dollars rather than these sub-dollar amounts. Even within the same oil company, different degrees of environmental protection can be accomplished by different groups. Different incentives apply to different groups of bonus-seekers, the exploration, production, refining, petrochemicals, and polymers each have their own not-fully-aligned efforts. Sometimes bonuses can only be had by the most agressive growth operators at all costs, externalized or not. Then there's this from 2013: HN link to: One of the largest polypropylene production facilities opens in Siberia [2013] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24458335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24458335 And since that's not enough for consumers, now there's this from Thursday: HN link to: Launch of New World Class Polypropylene Production Line in La Porte, Texas https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24458348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24458348 Remember, some businesspeople will never be satisfied unless every dollar is greedily extracted at each possible point in a chain, often preferring it to be done to someone else's extreme disadvantage if possible. To be financially sustainable; It takes a lot of surplus to save from destruction, distribute, deploy, repair and/or reuse. It takes a whole lot more scrap to recover the valuable components from. You can only imagine how much tonnage it would take once there are no more financially valuable components. Now both the surplus & scrap have always been under pressure from virgin raw materials and manufacturing to begin with, and so surplus & scrap are still often included with and regarded as _waste_. Some people hate anything old anyway. Actually makes the waste seem to be more valuable if it's not just plain plastic too. There's not supposed to be any level of imagination that can conceive of a scale so vast that handling plain plastic waste would be financially feasible. So the waste doesn't have a chance, there's fundamentally not a promising financial market that can develop around a liability. Unless maybe you promise to do something but you don't actually do it. The only market can be among those willing to pay to discharge a liability. A big city, company, or community can easily attach no remaining value to more dumpster loads of stuff the more wasteful and consumer-oriented the society. It can't be economically handled, stored or shipped, and the more of these efforts that are incurred they increase the depth of the liability, so the incentive can arise to make it the sooner the discharge the better. When the only remaining real value is as scrap for recycling or fuel for energy recovery, but both are uneconomical compared to virgin material, the final incentive falls to incidental accumulators whose economics are not quite prohibitive, but on too small a scale to make a major impact, or on a too-imaginative scale of accumulation which often fails to have a positive outcome. Surplus, scrap, and waste operators have always had their warehouses, scrapyards, and dumps under pressure to discharge at the same average rate as accumulation. Lots of them are always _almost_ full. Seems to me once an overseas business like this is established, there will be times when it will make economic sense for someone to discharge a low-value cargo into the ocean even if they were to continue the voyage all the way to the intended recycling port afterward. If the receiving dump was still anticipated to be full upon the vessel's ETA, the cargo could not be accepted anyway, and a procedure could be developed to handle it with creative paperwork, even routinely without any changes to established office systems. So everyone continues to make money because they're being paid to get rid of the waste, not because someone actually thinks they can add value to the waste if delivered. Maybe extract a little more value, but not add anything, and further value removal can be a costly maybe still leaving most of the bulk left over anyway, and there may be _greener_ pastures. When there's no market to rescue a marginal asset which quickly turns into a vast liability during a voyage, there can be no rescue to hold out for. Fundamentally a shipload of waste is worth less than a shipload of crude oil except for a few days each century wben crude goes below zero. The rest of the time crude oil is higher, sometimes fluctuating wildly while still providing a cheaper source of virgin plastic than recycled plastic can compete with. Waste plastic never rises significantly above zero, and is always on the decline. There could be incentive to ocean dump just because the asset is so marginal, to prevent further cost of handling and storage, and eliminate risk of turning into a liability through time. Actually voyaging nowhere near an overseas port. Covering this with paperwork could be the most profitable business niche in the declining-value chain. Mountains of garbage might have more slippery slopes than you think, and people end up under the table. Returning an unburnt fraction of the vast produced resource to the earth offshore to where much of it originated, but not to the subsurface. In a value-extracted-while-declining way comparable to just spilling the oil intentionally. Similar to the way at the other end a pipeline thief might make more money per barrel than the oil company would from the oil they are stealing as it comes from the earth. I don't know if anyone seriously insures these waste cargoes against losses to begin with. >Here you've got bureaucracy, natural resources, value-added product, surplus, scrap, waste, storage, shipping, and business-as-usual being the primary elements interacting overall. Same elements as the Beirut explosion where the impact may or may not be as large on the environment as many shiploads of waste plastic, but after a period of complacency both raise their ugly head in their own way. In Beirut that was just one shipment and the human failures had an instantaneously undeniable effect after the delay. Shipments which are of marginal value don't have a mainstream re-entry point because they compete with shipments having full value. It wouldn't be so bad without all the dishonesty & greed.

ummonk 6y ago

We also just have the ability to incinerate trash, generating electricity and avoiding having to create landfills.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

zozbot234 6y ago

Come on, everyone knows that the "recycling" trucks all go to the landfill anyways. "Recycling" was a Big Government socialist conspiracy to train the citizenry into obeying arbitrary rules like mindless drones and forfeiting their God-given freedom.

kurthr 6y ago
You mean the for profit government of regulatory capturing socialists?

11235813213455 6y ago

I think the actions should go on both producers and consumers. Taxes, and also mentality changes, in my case, I produce almost no garbage, because I eat fruit foraged outside, and other local organic food. My only garbage in a year is: 10 rice plastic bag (5kg bags), a toothpaste tube and a toothbrush, a few soap bars plastic wrappings. That's all. That yearly volume you see, that's what most people produce in one day in developed countries

faitswulff 6y ago
This kind of lifestyle is probably impossible in low-income food deserts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
mkl 6y ago
So you only buy second hand electronic devices? And you never receive packages or letters? Never have anything that wears out? I believe I produce very little waste, and put my rubbish and recycling bins out for collection every few months, rather than every two weeks, but I find it hard to see how I could get from where I am to what you describe.
carstenhag 6y ago
It's maybe doable, but just about every fresh food/ingredient ist wrapped in plastic. I can get lentils, rice, bread, maybe milk etc without packaging (Unverpackt-Läden in Germany) but not butter, eggs, cheese, spices and so on.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  Aren't your eggs wrapped in a form of cardboard ?
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  Before the thing came along we were starting to see shops popup in the UK selling loose items. You could take your containers and fill them with milk, rice, washing up liquid, etc. Some of the supermarkets have started experimenting with it.

andrewjl 6y ago

I think govt subsidy on compostable biodegradable plastics would be good too. Especially if the subsidy was not just on the bags themselves, but the research and process engineering to make them more cost-competitive. In the US at least, cities can also get creative, such as exempting compostable items from sales taxes.