46 ms·
Recycling was a lie to sell more plastic, recycling industry veteran says
- npsimons 6y agohttps://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/05/origins-anti-litter-campaigns/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/05/origins-anti-li...
- WheelsAtLarge 6y agoRecycling is hard. There is no incentive to reuse plastic when it's less expensive to use virgin material. The use of Solar Panels have always been more expensive and less convenient than fossil fuel but we've started to make the transition to solar power chiefly because of the energy credits that the government has been giving to encourage the development of alternative energy. I think we need to start doing the same with plastics and other polluting trash that we output as a society. Plastics will always be less expensive to just dump and not recycle. We need to give industry an alternative. Tax credits will have the benefits of creating new industries and more jobs. Unfortunately we will face the same resistance from the fossil fuel industries that we currently experience but long term it's the right thing to do. It would be nice to get companies to do it with out government incentives but as we have seen that just does not happen.
- throwaway894345 6y agoCarbon tax. Make plastic more expensive by accounting for (some of) it’s environmental impact. Adjust price of goods on import to account for countries of origin that don’t tax carbon.
- lmm 6y agoThat's good, and addresses the problem that actually needs addressing (carbon emissions). It won't lead to more recycling though; if anything, turning oil into plastic that then gets buried in a landfill is a good thing from a carbon-emissions perspective.
- m0zg 6y agoI wonder if, when we finally run out of oil a couple hundred years in the future, all those landfills will turn into gold mines.
- leeoniya 6y agoi've had this thought as well
- kfarr 6y agoyes and for more than just gold
- CyanBird 6y agoNah, you can make plastics out of biofuel, only 5% or so of the world's oil goes to plastics, and there's enough oil in the world for the equivalent of thousands of years of plastic production
- s0rce 6y agoMight be cheaper to use solar power to reduce CO2 to form ethylene and then go from there.
- vasco 6y agoWhere do you think the oil was in the first place?
- throwaway894345 6y agoIt will lead to less plastic production in the first place and possibly to more recycling provided recycling if recycling is or can be less carbon intensive than manufacturing new plastic. Also, oil is already sequestered so pumping it out of the ground to turn into plastic to bury in a landfill isn’t helpful.
- devonkim 6y agoWhile I’m all in favor of fixing externalities in capitalism it’s tough to see how to offset this carbon tax without hurting the poor. This is part of why even conservative think tanks (the folks supporting carbon taxes anyway) are coming around to UBI to offset it instead of some awkward carbon tax credit with some means testing bureaucracy that would be gamed.
- aaronblohowiak 6y agoThe best system I’ve seen proposed has proceeds of the carbon tax given as direct distributions to people (each adult gets 1/n the total fund,) like Alaska’s dividend.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- throwaway894345 6y agoMost if not so carbon tax proposals address this already. The most obvious solution is to cut a check to the poorest Americans from the carbon tax revenues. Making for good means testing is hard but plenty of other countries do this successfully so we aren’t inventing this from scratch.
- fomine3 6y agoCarbon tax should be done for worldwide so it's really difficult.
- rabidrat 6y agoA carbon tax was a reasonable idea 20 years ago. Now it would be too little, too late. If the people in favor of a carbon tax had actually been serious and made it happen, then we could have more nuanced discussions now about how to make it work better. As it is, we don't have N more years to argue about what form the carbon tax should take and how to enact it worldwide. Every passing year makes the authoritarian solution more probable and severe.
- CyanBird 6y agoThe best moment to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second best moment is right now In 20 years would we be saying the same about how "it is too late to do Carbon tax now"? There you have your answer, I don't want to be 60 and needing to deal with still not having carbon taxing which we know is one of the best tools in the toolkit to even begin fixing some of these issues and funding solutions
- apatters 6y agoIt's interesting when people advocate for tariffs on China (and sure, other countries, but China is by far the biggest plastic producer) without calling them what they are.
- YetAnotherNick 6y agoI read somewhere that a reusable bag emits 3000 times more carbon than polythene bag. No one is going to reuse a reusable bag 3000 times, so having carbon tax is going to have opposite effect on the case of plastic.
- dahart 6y agoWhere? Sounds improbable if the reusable bag is made of plastic (does it weigh 30 pounds empty?) and implausible if not.
- YetAnotherNick 6y agoI tried to check the net. I couldn't find exact 3000 number, but the highest number I could find is that cotton bag must be used 7000 times. It varies according to the source though. If I remember correctly I read 3000 number for jute bag. Source: https://phys.org/news/2018-08-reuse-bags.html https://phys.org/news/2018-08-reuse-bags.html . It has pdf linked of the Danish government study.
- dahart 6y agoI also googled it and found multiple different results with numbers more like 100 times (which is quite easy to achieve in practice). I didn’t immediately find any results in the thousands, but isn’t looking for the highest number going to produce the statistically least likely outlier? I think fixating on number of reuses to meet equal carbon footprint is fraught with problems and painting an incomplete picture though, this doesn’t really account for things like plastic production & waste toxicity, or the fact that plastic is non-renewable while cotton is renewable. https://digitalcommons.morris.umn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=urs_2017 https://digitalcommons.morris.umn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/climate/plastic-paper-shopping-bags.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/climate/plastic-paper-sho... https://stanfordmag.org/contents/paper-plastic-or-reusable https://stanfordmag.org/contents/paper-plastic-or-reusable
- emodendroket 6y agoWe need to just use fewer plastics because they're practically worthless for recycling.
- ianmobbs 6y ago> There is no incentive to reuse plastic when it's less expensive to use virgin material. I mean, the environment should be reason enough, but manufacturers don’t care about that
- PaulKeeble 6y agoSomething I watched and read about last year was that injection molding of plastic can be done only when one third or less of the pellets are recycled. If there is too much recycled material in the mix it doesn't flow into the mold correctly and one third is the most you could possibly use and then that product can not be recycled again. The polymers that make up the plastic simply aren't capable of reforming over and over. Given that plastic at best gets 1.3 uses, the initial one and then a third of that material can go into a recycled container. That is it. When you compare that to the thousands of reuses of glass bottles we used to do for milk it is really apparent how awful the plastic process is, its barely better than just throw away. This also ignores the fact that huge amounts of the plastic used isn't actually recyclable at all. The triple whammy to all this is that all over the planet people have been cleaning their plastics with hot water, drying and then separating it into different rubbish bags with separate collections and additional bins etc. All for a giant lie about recycling that was never true. We have wasted substantial energy and time on something that never worked and helped destroy the environment even more because of it.
- cogman10 6y agoPaper recycling is much in the same vein. It requires a lot of harsh chemicals to remove the inks. The output paper is substandard. The whole process is energy intensive. And, the messed up part about the whole thing is that throwing away paper is one of the best things you can do for the environment. It is natural carbon sequestration. We are far better off tree farming for paper.
- cookingrobot 6y agoExactly. My favorite environmental slogan is “bury the trees”.
- nobody9999 6y agoI was always a fan of "Nuke the whales" myself.
- kazagistar 6y ago
- emodendroket 6y agoIt seems like we were pretty much paying China to throw away our garbage and had to confront the myth when they stopped accepting it.
- CyanBird 6y agoYep, and now that iirc Vietnam also stopped receiving some trash same with the Philippines th entire system of recycling just collapsed on itself
- ars 6y ago> we were pretty much paying China to throw away our garbage This was never true, China was paying us for the recycling, but they wanted to upgrade their economy so they stopped making money on it, and stopped buying the recycling. It's very common myth that we pay countries to take our recycling: this never happens.
- chrischen 6y agoPeople have to reuse and resell and buy used. Dispel any notion that you may be a “cheap” person for buying used by the fact that it is infinitely better for the environment. Often time people will say that it is not worth the time to resell something less than $10 (time to meet a buyer/shop an item), but that’s because the actual costs of trashing it are externalized. Even if you don't throw it away and just store it in a closet, you're creating demand for the manufacturing of new product that will all eventually be trashed. The longer you hoard it the lower the value—and thus re-usability—it holds. There should also be laws that guarantee the right to transfer warranties so that manufacturers cannot disincentivize the second hand market.
- s0rce 6y agoBuying used is great. I got married in a pair of shoes I bought used on eBay!
- tempestn 6y agoBought my wife's engagement ring used on eBay. (With her knowledge and full support!) Edit: Actually, time fogged my memory a bit. She didn't know I was buying it beforehand, but we knew each other well by then, and I knew she'd be on board with it, and in fact wouldn't want me to waste money on a big retail diamond. And indeed, she loves the ring, knowing it came from eBay!
- ralph84 6y ago> the actual costs of trashing it are externalized Does it really cost that much to bury things in the ground? And how much of that cost is externalized? Where I live garbage collection is done by for-profit companies that charge for it. Seems more likely that the costs of producing things in the first place are what's externalized by producing in third world countries with lax environmental standards.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago> Seems more likely that the costs of producing things in the first place are what's externalized by producing in third world countries with lax environmental standards. Environmental standards in developed (first world) countries are also lax because the long term effects of fossil fuel usage isn’t included in the price.
- Waterluvian 6y agoAlmost all plastic is just garbage. Full stop. Cardboard and paper products recycle pretty well. So does aluminum and some glass bottles. We need to use more glass bottles and other reusable containers when we go shopping. The Canadian government is planning to ban single use plastics like bags and containers in 2021 and I’m on board. Even if it costs more it’s just the right thing to do.
- s0rce 6y agoCalifornia is pursuing similiar bans on single use plastics, and some are already banned in certain metro areas. Unfortunately, it seems like various restaurants and stores have simply started to distribute "non-single use" versions of the takeout containers and plastic bags which are more robust (ie. use more material), however, its likely these simply get discarded anyways which makes the problem worse. Other than the round "deli" containers which are great and I actually re-use. Only a few restaurants have switched to glass canning jars which can be reused easily, given away or recycled.
- baggy_trough 6y agoThat is because it is an absurd waste of resources to use glass canning jars for takeout.
- vladvasiliu 6y agoIt might depend. Around my office in Paris there were a bunch of takeout salad bars that seemed fairly popular. Each would serve the salad in a dingy plastic bowl. At some point last year, one of the places started selling glass bowls and inciting people to reuse them. They were pretty nice too, I actually went and bought one for my own use. Most of those places' customers are people working in the local offices. So it's doable for them to wash the bowls and bring them back for another salad another day. I know at least one of the other salad bars would put your salad in your own bowl, so you wouldn't even be stuck going to the same place over and over. It didn't really catch on with most people. Having your own bowl won't give you any kind of discount at all. So I expect that aside from some people who actually want to do something for the environment, pretty much no one bothers to wash the bowl and drag it back to the salad place "for no reason". I think this also contributes to people's impression that plastic really is cheap (they're giving it away for free !) and that it's not really a problem for them to solve.
- jojobas 6y agoEmissions per kg of stainless steel is about the same as emissions per kg of plastic. It never sat right with me that a recyclable plastic pen is somehow more environmentally friendly than a steel pen that could last decades.
- jjeaff 6y agoHow heavy is a stainless steel pen vs a plastic one? A plastic pen could also last for years.
- CyanBird 6y agoI think that's a bad perspective, no one cares if a pen last 50000 years, we "want it* to degrade A pen that biodegrades in 5 years under landfill conditions is far better for our needs that a pen that last 100 years
- jojobas 6y agoYou don't necessarily want it degrade, most likely you don't want it anywhere near the landfill. You want it to be recyclable, and this recyclability makes it much less worth keeping in the user's mind.
- moonchild 6y agoA metal pen isn't going to have a particularly adverse effect on its environment the way a plastic one is; thus, it doesn't particularly matter if it degrades.
- jojobas 6y agoPlastic pens could last for years (perhaps easier to break but equally easy to lose) but are marketed as disposable. The biggest Australian stationary store carries 10-packs of Cristal pens for A$4 and doesn't carry refills - these pens go straight to the bin. I've never thrown away a steel pen.
- tristor 6y agoEspecially when the cost differential per unit is minimal. I love my Zebra pens and I found that they were just nice enough that when people borrow them from me they most often will return them. Plastic pens on the other hand simply disappear over time. I have some Zebra pens that have been with me for years.
- Todd 6y agoThis originally aired on the PBS series Frontline in March. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/plastic-wars/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/plastic-wars/ Watching this made me very sad. I feel like I've been lied to my entire life. Of course, I'm also to blame for not spending more time seeking out the truth. Marketing is indeed very effective. This show changed my perspective and has made me want to redouble my efforts with regard to my impact on the environment.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago> This show changed my perspective and has made me want to redouble my efforts with regard to my impact on the environment. At this point, the only effort worth making is reducing consumption. Reducing travel, reducing use of everything across the board. Of course, our whole society is setup so people need others to consume more and more so they can feed their family, because all the debt has that growth baked in in order to break even.
- searchableguy 6y agoNo. Participate in politics to force industries to adopt environment friendly practices and production. Be more full proof and apply the same rules to import/export. This is how oil, fast food, meat, luxury, etc industries want you to behave. Recycle, reuse and reduce was a failure which was proposed the same way you did. Consumer responsibility could be an additional measure but not the main focus. It's their fault first and foremost.
- Sabinus 6y agoThe problem is, conservatives and others worldwide oppose this because it imposes costs on business in just one country, leaving businesses there with a disadvantage in world markets. Policies like these need to be coupled with import tariffs to countries with dirty industries, else we just end up legislating all our industry away and instead buy from countries who have no problem with polluting the environment.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
- Tomminn 6y agoI can never decide whether to recycle or just throw plastic in the trash. If I throw it in the trash, I know it's at least going to go to a well-managed landfill and has a negligible chance of ending up in a river somewhere overseas, and then into the ocean. Plus, the feedback feels more accurate. The feeling of how much non-degradable trash I'm creating hits viscerally when I throw plastic in the bin, and makes it hurt more to buy plastic. I end up using the recycling because my flatmates get angry when I don't.
- cdolan 6y agoWhen in doubt, throw it out
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y agoIn some places (e.g. Santa Fe County, where I live), you can be fined for placing "recyclable" materials in the "trash" stream.
- cdolan 6y agoPerfect example of regulation having the opposite impact of its stated intent. Its 100% better to dispose of something that “maybe” recyclable, rather than “wish-recycle” it and contaminate an entire load of material.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y agoThat's a misreading of what I said about SFC regulations. The (potential) fine is there to prevent people from throwing away e.g. corrugated cardboard boxes, glass bottles, aluminum cans. From my interactions with the solid waste dept. workers, I find it extremely unlikely that anyone would intervene if you put a "maybe recyclable" in the trash stream.
- cdolan 6y agoI missed this! Perhaps you are correct. But I know where I live (Pittsburgh), if I put soiled and nasty cardboard in the trash, Pittsburgh’s sanitation people will take the cardboard out and leave it for the recycling route. Sometimes the recycling driver notices its not “clean”, and leaves it for next weeks’ trash route. <Cue Zaney Movie Theme>
- noodlesUK 6y agoYou know it’s really sad to see things continue to go this way. There should be serious penalties for lying to the public like this... On a related note, since the pandemic began, there’s been a pseudo-milkman service in my area (in the USA). I was very excited by this, cause I looked forward to happy memories of glass milk bottles sitting by my doorstep like when I lived in the U.K. and had a milkman. The milk comes in tetrapaks... Are tetrapaks reusable? No. Are they better than plastic? Probably, I’m not sure? Could it totally be glass bottles? Yes, it could.
- Ericson2314 6y agoThe plastic industry is basically Capitalism metastasizing: pure make-work / make-capital, the system feeding itself for no good exogenous end.
- AbrahamParangi 6y agoThere is a lesson here which you may apply in many other places.
- linsomniac 6y agoDup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22741635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22741635
- noizejoy 6y agoA couple of directly related recent discussions: [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24441979 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24441979 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24454067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24454067
- tristor 6y agoThis is why I really try to buy glass container products when possible and just wash / reuse. A lot of people over-focus on recycling because it makes them feel like they're doing something, but they forget recycling is the last of the 3 Rs. It's Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, not Recycle, Recycle, Recycle. I don't recycle at home and some people think me a monster, but my calculated home carbon footprint is significantly lower than the average because I shy away from single-use packaging, low quality products, and minimize my wastage. I wish there was some answer to better educate people, because the marketing around recycling has been so successful and yet people with the best of intentions will absolutely buy tons of single-use packaging covered products thinking it's okay because the packaging is compostable or they will recycle.
- cdolan 6y agoThe amount of VC dollars chasing wishful recycling is also pretty astounding
- dkdk8283 6y agoAt my local waste management facility I witnessed trucks dumping all collected recycled material into the landfill. I asked and I was told this is standard. Since then I don't recycle.
- aetilley 6y agoThere's a landfill at your local waste management facility?
- olivermarks 6y agoMilk used to be delivered on electric milk 'float' vehicles in the UK in glass pint bottles. The milkman left pints of milk sealed with a foil top and took the used bottles left for them by the customer. I used to watch the bottles being washed and sterilized on a conveyor through the factory window as a small child. Today we have Tetrapak waxed paper boxed milk or plastic jugs. the Tetrapak website is classic wooly green washing https://www.tetrapak.com/us/sustainability/carton-recycling https://www.tetrapak.com/us/sustainability/carton-recycling Plastic jugs are already being discussed here. How on earth did we get to this low point?
- Liquix 6y ago> How on earth did we get to this low point? By putting the bottom line first. Cheaper manufacturing = bigger profits = Good™. All else be damned.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoOr cheaper manufacturing = lower prices = people will buy your products otherwise they buy from someone else and you go out of business.
- Roritharr 6y agoI think it should be illegal for waste disposal to be as intransparent as it is now. I live in Germany and always considered our Recycling Practices as highly valuable, until I was contracted to build a project for an industrial waste processing company, which led me to realize that our system is 60% virtue signalling, 35% political corruption and 5% useful. The problem, as they've described, if you were intellectually honest is really not about how much you can recycle, but more about how you can burn things cleanly by sorting stuff as best as possible. Have two bins, dry waste and wet waste, everything else should be handled at the waste management plant, as they have to sort anyway, but wetting materials that could otherwise burn cleanly and efficiently raises the price and makes automated sorting much harder and more expensive. If the waste management company can recycle anything for profit, they will absolutely do so, but forcing them to do so at cost for materials that nobody wants to buy because the material is in low demand just shifts the problem in the pipeline to the landfill after you've spent energy on trying to recycle it.
- xwolfi 6y agoI ve worked in waste management where we tried to make them transparent against their will. The reason why large recyclers, burning plants manager and all the other companies taking your trash and trying to do someth with it is that the margins are barely worth it, nobody want to raises prices and there s no much they can do to even give an environmentally safe disposal, they re not built as innovative engineering companies but as inherited old school mafia-like gangs. We found out huge over pricing on our clients thanks to large data mining, and they confessed that without lying on their contracts and quantity they process they d close the door. They were fine losing our client if that meant honestly weighting waste and pricing at the contract. Our client was the largest supermarket chain in my country, with 800 stores: they couldnt even afford real priced waste management because why, it s not their priority. They only hired us to fuck their providers into submitting to loss making. That s waste management, and my more idealist "liberal" young colleagues didnt last long in a company that was trying to talk to every side. It s so much easier to go to environmental think tanks that talk abt recycling coffee cups than make a supermarket company accept to lose money with no environmental benefit for the sake of just keeping the sector alive and legal. In Italy, waste management isnt even done legally and we had to politely decline to go there to help too ahah
- obilgic 6y agoHonest question: What would be the consequence of throwing the plastic garbage in to the space, assuming that It is affordable enough to do?
- zxcmx 6y agoUsing current technology, we would most likely render the earth uninhabitable due to the carbon emissions required to get it there. If we had fusion & a space elevator it might be survivable. We can borrow the reasoning from: https://what-if.xkcd.com/7/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/7/ That thought exercise involves moving 455 megatons of human off-planet. Getting rid of all plastic waste would in some ways be harder than that. Because we'd need to move that mass every year. Current plastic production is about 380 megatons per year.
- systematical 6y agoIf it were affordable you could just send it to the sun.
- whoopdedo 6y agoActually hitting the Sun is hard. It's not as simple as dropping it off and letting gravity make it "fall" like blue ice from an airplane. There's not only the matter of making it escape the Earth's gravity (which is considerable), but also that the Earth and all the garbage on it is already moving in an orbit around the Sun that you'd have to decelerate from. More likely we'd end up with a chain of trash comets.
- systematical 6y agoWe're talking in hypothetical's. If we are sending trash into space (as the comment above me suggested) then why not send it to the Sun and incinerate it. Of course there is no way to make this economical, even with a space elevator it would probably be too costly.
- starpilot 6y agoSo... should we start just throwing plastic bottles in the trash?
- jader201 6y agoI keep seeing articles on HN, along with supporting discussion, that suggests that recycling is mostly a hoax — at least for plastics. Full stop: what should the average person be doing with regards to recycling? Or is this a big fat unknown?
- KozmoNau7 6y agoThe biggest and most important step is to reduce how much you buy in the first place. Not just plastics, everything. Secondly you should reuse what you already have for as long as possible. Reuse those food containers, repair clothes with holes in them and so on. Use that cloth shopping bag for as long as possible instead of buying new ones. One of my canvas shopping bags is over 30 years old and still hasn't needed any repairs. Recycling should only be the choice when you cannot reduce, reuse or repair any longer. And all of this is of course just individual action, the real results will only come from heavily regulating or completely shutting down the fossil fuel industry.
- gruez 6y agoUnpopular opinion: there's nothing wrong with not recycling plastic and sending it right to the landfill. It sequesters carbon, isn't too terrible for the environment (it just sits there in the ground), and it's not like we're going to run out of landfill space any time soon[1]. I'm all for recycling if it's a net positive in terms of resource consumption, but I don't see the appeal of recycling for the sake of recycling. [1] https://www.npr.org/transcripts/739893511 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/739893511 "Thomas says we probably have thousands of years of landfill space left in the U.S. And even hardcore environmentalists reluctantly agree that, yeah, we have a lot of space left. But people thought we were running out of space, and that was what mattered."
- catmanjan 6y agoThe problem is the plastic that doesn't make it landfill and is instead in the ocean/rest of the environment
- daxfohl 6y agoIsn't it more likely that "recycled" plastic being shipped to Asia will end up in the ocean than if you just pitch it in a landfill? So tossing plastic in the recycle bin is plausibly an environmental net negative.
- theptip 6y agoRight, if the consumer put it in the ocean instead of the trash, that plastic wasn’t going to get recycled either. If you put it in landfill in the US, it’s definitely in landfill. If you “recycle” it, it may get shipped to China (or now Cambodia) and then dumped somewhere.
- jakear 6y agoThat’s plastic to-be recycled, not thrown away. We don’t put our trash on shipping containers, we have closed trucks bring it to landfills. We do put recycling on shipping containers and it often blows off into the ocean or ends up in their world countries that get paid to accept it for “recycling” when they don’t have the means to do so and it just ends up in low quality landfills that leak into rivers/oceans. So that’s more of a reason to just discard plastic.
- buu700 6y agoIt's interesting how consistent all this news has been with the Penn & Teller: Bullshit! episode on recycling from over 15 years ago. From what I recall, the takeaway was that recycling anything other than glass, paper, or aluminum was a waste of money. At the time, I wasn't sure how valid it was (whether they were potentially exaggerating or simply being contrarian, etc.), but it seemed plausible, and now it's looking increasingly likely that their take was spot on.
- the_cat_kittles 6y agothis just isnt true though. there are some plastics like thermoset plastics that are fairly valuable commodities and are worth recycling. there are many plants making money off shredding, sorting and extruding into little granules that can be used for things like injection molding. not to mention that recycling e-waste is another very profitable and useful activity. copper wire alone is a complete no-brainer. penn and teller were definitely not spot on.
- spirobel 6y agoIn the end plastic is just a bunch of carbon chains. I dont get why people get so obsessed about it and treat it like its toxic. And now this drama about "microplastics" thats just dust. All these hysterical people in the world get on my nerves.
- GarrisonPrime 6y agoIt also creates jobs (the sorters, packagers, sellers, etc.). Gotta keep the pleebs occupied.
- proee 6y agoAluminum seems like a great material for containers. It's easily melted and reused and you can coat the inside with a thin polymer to hold corrosive liquids like Coke. Any reason we don't use aluminum containers outside the beverage industry?
- Liquix 6y agoshort answer: aluminum is cheap, but plastic is cheaper.
- MattGaiser 6y agoAny aluminum containers resealable? That's a huge issue with a lot of products.
- whoopdedo 6y agoI believe that some beer vendors have dabbled in can/bottle hybrids that are metal but with a screw-on cap.
- ireflect 6y agoThese are known as crowlers (can growlers) and are meant to replace the 1L and 1.89L glass growlers that have gone out of fashion somewhat over the last couple years. Crowlers look like oversized beverage cans, and come with either a pull tab (like a normal beverage can) or a resealable metal cap. Note that all beverage cans have a plastic liner (epoxy usually).
- TedShiller 6y agoLegal question: How can we make Plastics into the next Big Tobacco or Big Opioid lawsuit? In other words, hold an industry responsible for the damage they knew they were causing? They knowingly traded our environment for their profits. I admire what the U.S. government did in those other two cases. While they came late, at least there were consequences. References: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agre... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purdue_Pharma#Oxycontin-related_lawsuits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purdue_Pharma#Oxycontin-relate...
- anticensor 6y agoYou asked a trillion dollar question, but you will probably not receive a Nobel Economy Award for that.
- TedShiller 6y agoI never expected I would!
- cmurf 6y agoProsecute them for fraud. They gained financially through deception.
- bazooka_penguin 6y agoGuess we have no choice but to send it into the sun now.
- cbsmith 6y agoHeadline seems a bit off. Yes, recycling was preferable to reduction from the industry's perspective. The deal was always, "hey, you can keep using our products because now we're recycling". I wouldn't say that makes it a lie.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- harry8 6y agoThe big lesson here is the industry's regulation dodge for the externality produced by "blaming the consumer" Because of course the consumer is never actually to blame in the eyes of a politician so just pollute on and pollute harder. Have a campaign contribution. "People don't want clean." Keeps working too!
- kostko 6y agoWe should just unpackage things and leave the plastic in the stores so they have to deal with it...
- stewbrew 6y agoDoesn't it depend on what kind of plastic you use? You know there are many kind of "plastics". People who talk about recycling "plastics" while not distinguishing between different kind of "plastics" make me sceptic.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- monadic2 6y agoNo shit. How can anyone in the US believe otherwise?
- hoseja 6y agoThe hype for recycle is due to the fact that it is the only one of the R's that increases profits for corporations.
- bootcampwhere 6y agoIrs been known for years yet idiots keep filling the blue bin year after year because it makes them feel good. You can't blame industry for people being idiots.
- brailsafe 6y agoThis is a very long thread, with a lot of interesting talk about taxes and disincentives for single-use plastics, so I thought I'd hoist this to top level. Canada (as well as I assume many other places) has a deposit system for the fancy milks you might buy, wherein the retailer will often list the milk without the $1 included, because it's arguably analogous to borrowing a shopping cart (where you'd insert a coin and get it back when you're done). I was recently surprised to find a similar deposit on a single-use plastic bottle of water (1.5L, $2) of $0.25. I have no idea where I'd return the bottle to get that 25 cents back, but it was enough to get my attention, and though I use a re-usable coffee canister as much as feasible, I'll probably try and find a solution for large quantities of water as well (beyond my 20oz canteen). I definitely find this less convenient during the pandemic, because coffee shops don't fill directly into personal mugs anymore, and there aren't that many public bottle filling stations around. In a counter intuitive move, many public water fountains have even been shut off for Covid.
- ainiriand 6y agoI always knew. Let me elaborate: In Spain we have a Non-Profit that focuses on getting the people to recycle called Ecoembes. It is founded by the package companies and it is like a lobby of the recycling business present all over the country. It is also worth noting that every disposable package is taxed to the company producing it unless recycled back. You do not have to be very smart to see that you are giving the packaging back to those companies as cheap labour and that it would cause a significant impact on their profits if not recycled. (edit: typo)
- hackeraccount 6y agoYou can force someone to lie to you. Maybe you should be angry with the liar but that shouldn't stop you from seeing the reality of the situation.
- melicerte 6y agoThe technology developed by the French Company Carbios[1] is really promising on that matter. This Company creates a new generation of fully biodegradable plastics with a controlled lifespan, a process enabling infinite biorecycling of plastic waste (PET) and a new biological pathway for the production of competitive biosourced polymers. [1] https://carbios.fr/en/ https://carbios.fr/en/ (edited for formatting).
- JohnL4 6y agoIn my experience, "biodegradable" plastic requires high-temperature industrial composting and still generates toxic breakdown components.
- bullen 6y agoI got really annoying billing from the garbage collection at my summer house (they did not allow me to pay automatically or per year) so I asked if I could cancel the collection altogether: To my surprise they said: yes, your house is worth less than $10K (it's worth $0 to them) so you may cancel it! Which I immediately did, then for 2 years I used my neighbors garbage container and we shared the bill (she allowed me to pay once per year digitally). But then she sold her house, and since you can't really ask your new neighbors if you can share garbage collection before getting to know them, I was stuck in a bind: Trust me, nothing you read or do will ever be as good of a teacher as not having garbage collection! It's as hard as coding C/C++! ;) So now I carefully plan my stay in the house, meticulously making sure the garbage I create is minimal and smell free so I can bring it back to the city! Everything I invest in long term is either glass, cork, natural rubber, stain free steel or cast iron. Plastic is going away as we speak since the polymers in the low quality oil that we extract today can't hold anything. Fuels are also getting worse, the alkylate gasoline (basically distilled gasoline) I put in my lawnmower only lasts 3 months in a plastic container now (down from more than a winter only a couple of years back) so now I store it in metal jeep dunks. In Sweden we are now since 2018 mixing ethanol into all fuels (gasoline and diesel) by law! I have a hunch covid lung problems are not getting better because of this! 50% of all the dead here lived at home (without jobs) between our largest highways with the most heavy traffic, the life vein of Sweden (intersection of E18 and E4 in the north of Stockholm, the 55/267/275 shortcuts aren't used by the largest trucks because the short radius of the ramps/roundabouts). The other 50% where elderly (probably living near highways too, if I'm right). Reuse, preservation and production is now the only thing you can do, consumption is dying.
- greyhair 6y agoThere is so much excess natural gas in the US that they are building a plastics manufacturing plants to convert ethane to plastic. https://www.npr.org/2019/11/15/778665357/the-u-s-natural-gas-boom-is-fueling-a-global-plastics-boom https://www.npr.org/2019/11/15/778665357/the-u-s-natural-gas... The plastic industry is just an extension of the petrochemical industry. As oil and gas consumption for fuel drops, they are finding other outlets for production.
- zenpaul 6y agoIn September Planet Money podcast covered how the plastic industry sold the public on plastic recycling when they know it was not realistic. https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/912150085/waste-land https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/912150085/waste-land
- sdfkkksdfsdff 6y agoWhy not recyle it into plants? Burn it to produce CO2, let plants absorb CO2 to grow?
- kovac 6y agoPlastic is not biodegradable. Which means once plastic has come into existence, it's gonna be around pretty much forever. Considering the fact that forever is a long time and that we continue to make more plastic anyway, I don't see how it matters that we use the same plastic once or some finite number of times. We need to find a way to destroy plastic safely or just not produce plastic at all. I imagine the politics and the economics around plastic is more complicated than we appreciate. After all it's related to oil. Recyclable plastic is just a way to get us to buy more plastic while feeling a sense of satisfaction/pride that we are doing our part to save the planet. That's just ironic and, frankly, as consumers quite pathetic.
- youeseh 6y agoThere's a Planet Money episode about this that is worth a listen: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/912150085/waste-land https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/912150085/waste-land
- carapace 6y agoBiodegradable plastic has been a thing since the 70's. My dad used to carry around samples of cellulose-based transparent plastic[-like] envelopes, you actually could eat them. (They didn't taste like anything.)
- notmyname9173 6y agoPerhaps we should require a minimum % of post-consumer recycled content in new plastics going forward. I have decades of industry-sponsored research indicating that plastic recycling is cheap and effective.
- neycoda 6y agoHumanity is proving that there's some brilliant people among us making things better but the majority of us are just too stupid and greedy to know or care how to manage a planet well for ourselves.
- rstuart4133 6y agoNo one has mentioned recycling plastics in bitumen. It's a growing thing. From https://austroads.com.au/publications/pavement/ap-t351-19/media/AP-T351-19_Viability_of_Using_Recycled_Plastics_in_Asphalt_and_Sprayed_Sealing_Applications.pdf https://austroads.com.au/publications/pavement/ap-t351-19/me... : The first plastic road in India was constructed in Chennai in 2002 from shredded waste plastic. This plastic road is reported to be durable and pothole free (Subramaniam 2016; Manju, Sathya, & Sheema 2017). Today, there is more than 33,000 km of plastic road in India with most of them being rural roads and a small number in cities such as Chennai and Mumbai (Subramaniam 2016). ... The waste plastic content for dense-graded and open-graded mixes is set at 6-8% of the mass of the bitumen (Sharp et al. 2017). Putting that 6-8% in perspective, Australia produces about 3 .5 million tons of plastic waste a year, and uses 800,000 tons of bitumen. So only about 1% could be recycled at the 6-8% level. Perhaps an even bigger downer is: However, the concern associated with plastics breaking down into microplastics might create another problem to the environment. Subramaniam (2016) quoted a Professor of Plant and Soil Ecology at Freie Universität Berlin, ‘once in the soil, these particles may persist, accumulate and eventually reach levels that can affect the functioning and biodiversity of the soil’.