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Something 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
by PaulKeeble 6y ago
Something 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 agoBury the trees is good. Carbon sequestration and all that, as long as you replant them.
- sthnblllII 6y agoI dont think its enough to matter, but if it was, some places incinerate trash so its still released as carbon dioxide. Wouldn't it rot in a landfill and end up as methane or something?
- gnramires 6y agoGood question, I believe it depends on the landfill? Bacteria probably need the right conditions to efficiently break down materials, cellulose is quite tough. Some landfills capture the released methane and burn it (to avoid atmospheric pollution), which seems like a decent solution (even more with power generation). Some of the material will remain undecomposed (or take a really long time) so it is a net carbon sink. I think this depends on properly sealing landfills and arranging extraction infrastructure. Seems like a good resource: https://www.epa.gov/lmop/basic-information-about-landfill-gas https://www.epa.gov/lmop/basic-information-about-landfill-ga... Another idea would be to curb methane generation or decomposition somehow. Apparently aerobic decomposition reduces or prevents the release of methane: https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/climate-change/composting-avoid-methane-production https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/climate-change/composting-avoid-... Burning trash directly is also an alternative I guess, though one I'm not very comfortable with due to trace elements contained in everyday items -- surely some mercury and heavy metals will sneak into residues? (and then into the atmosphere and our lungs)
- sthnblllII 6y agoAnother reason compact fluorescent bulbs were a mistake.
- tuatoru 6y agoThere's more mercury released into the environment from incandescent bulbs than CFLs -- or there was, when incandescents were still common and so were coal-fired power plants, and the Obama-era regulation of mercury emissions from power plants hadn't come into force. Now, of course, we have LEDs in place of CFLs, and coal burning power generation is on the way out, so it's all moot.
- crazygringo 6y agoMy understanding is that, at least in NYC, the paper is pretty much all turned into pizza boxes. Which are brown. You don't have to worry about the inks or "substandard" or whatever". And then the pizza boxes aren't re-recycled because of grease. You suggest we stick to trees instead of recycle, "for paper". But the whole point of recycling is to turn paper into pizza boxes (and presumably also our Amazon shipping boxes, etc.). It sounds like you're trying to argue against recycling paper... when the reality is it's a huge success, when you realize paper is recycled into cardboard.
- Kednicma 6y agoAnd lest this sound myopic! At least in Portland, the pizza boxes can be put into composting bins, including the plant-waste bins that we put out next to garbage bins. So the paper does, eventually, go to the landfill and become sequestered in the typical fashion.
- jsmeaton 6y agoI’ve only just started doing this - but my understanding is that the lids go into compost. The bottoms shouldn’t because the grease turns to a yuck sludge in compost bins.
- popinman322 6y agoDo you mean compost collection bins, or home composting bins? If you live in an area that collects material for industrial composting you should 100% put the grease coated parts of the cardboard in your compost collection bin.
- jsmeaton 6y agoYes sorry I’m talking about home composting.
- Kednicma 6y agoIt varies by area. Here's the guidelines for Portland [0]; it seems that "Home" "FOOD SCRAPS" bins may have pizza boxes in them, as long as wax paper and other inserts are removed. Incidentally, mentally traversing the pizzerias I go to, I think that the only inserts that any of them add are pizza savers [1]. [0] https://www.portland.gov/bps/garbage-recycling/compost-what-goes-bin https://www.portland.gov/bps/garbage-recycling/compost-what-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_saver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_saver
- CyanBird 6y agoAll human actions have resource costs, trees and paper need absurd amounts of water, specially given that companies use pines and eucalyptus as base material for paper pulp production both species are always starving for water The reality is that the system requires pigovian taxation to internalize their natural externalized costs, capitalism and specifically our modern version of neoclassical neoliberalism loves to socialize loses and privatize profits, we need public action against that If you wanna hear my angle, I'd go for making Senates and congresses across the world secret, secret ballots, secret voting and secret deliverations and debates If you wanna know as to why read on James DAngelo's Toxic Transparency Paradox, his congressional investigations on the systemic benefits of secrecy can be found on http://www.congressionalresearch.org/ http://www.congressionalresearch.org/
- maxerickson 6y agoTrees (grown for wood fiber) pretty much aren't irrigated. I'm sure there's exceptions, but not on a significant amount of land used for fiber production.
- CyanBird 6y agoMy experience with this comes mainly from Uruguay, Argentinian and specifically Chilean pine and eucalyptus forests used to make wood pulp, which are causing quite serious issues with water management, less so in Uruguay as it is a wetter country, but south of Chile has seen quite the protests over this issue as some of these specific type of trees (Eucalyptus) simply drain the land too much as they evolved for a different environment
- sthnblllII 6y ago> relegate the lobbyists to the lobby – giving them no access to markup sessions and no access to committee votes These are some hot takes, but somewhat surprisingly they check out. Will read more.
- CyanBird 6y agoYeah, yeah D'Angelo goes further and interviews law professors on this issue, and they all not only seem perplexed at first, but agree with him later, and the caveat, is that US Law as it is taught from an orthodox angle, is only really taught after the 1970's or so, and don't really cover how legislation used to be done before it, so law students would naturally assume that "things always were the same way" when it came to how transparency was handled! Here are some of the talks he has had with Law professors https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVfzvhRhmgI&list=PLzctEq7iZD-60bCLvKu0uPRilT1qSThT- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVfzvhRhmgI&list=PLzctEq7iZD... And some other snippets in general https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC88MPXm1jZPNRwdOGyBNqqg/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC88MPXm1jZPNRwdOGyBNqqg/vid... By now I am convinced that this is the missing piece, that accounts for not only the split between worker-productivity and wages, but everything else since the 1970's, this transparency revolution, with the Toxic Transparency Paradox aftermath is what set the course to where we are today with legislative gridlock, polarization, increases in wealth inequality, oligarchic corporatism etc
- baskire 6y agoWe’d be better off burning our trash at peaker power plants when the sun isn’t shining, the wind isn’t blowing...etc.
- hanche 6y agoIt’s not quite that simple. A garbage incinerator is not something you can turn on and off according to when you need the energy. It has to be kept going continuously, since it takes a long time for it to get up to the temperature required for efficient and clean combustion. There are similar problems with shutting down.
- maxerickson 6y agoIt's not like production of paper from pulp wood involves butterflies and popsicles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_liquor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_liquor (the first ingredient is hot lye!) In general, paper recycling is productive enough that paper mills buy recycled paper as an input. Cardboard even more so.
- konjin 6y agoThere is more than one form of pollution. This is like complaining about aicd from an Uranium mine. True but hardly the biggest issue.
- maxerickson 6y agoYes, that was my point "It requires a lot of harsh chemicals to remove the inks." Virgin inputs also requires harsh chemicals, there's no advantage.
- searchableguy 6y agoI am curious why can't you make single use plastic manufacturers an illegal business. Nobody would use plastic bags if there weren't any one willing to make them
- labster 6y agoReusing syringes probably isn’t the best idea, but for most uses, sure. The main problem to me is that disposing of plastic is always an externality to the companies who produce and market it. Make them pay the recycling or disposal costs up front, and I’d be happy.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago>I am curious why can't you make single use plastic manufacturers an illegal business For a bunch of the same reasons you can't "just" make alcohol illegal or outlaw internal combustion engines.
- bluGill 6y agoVirgin plastic is objectively better for some applications. recycled plastic can be good enough for some uses, but you can't do a blanket ban without even more harm
- fomine3 6y agoTalking about paper recycling, we must distinguish papers. Like office prints and newspapers are easier to recycle but like pizza box and random food wrapping is difficult (uses more resources) so firing is better.
- sthnblllII 6y agoThis was a popular conspiracy theory in the 90's. Another one for the "yup that conspiracy actually happened" book. Ive been called a monster many times for trying to explain this, usually by liberal women. They just hear a bunch of numbers and then their heads explode once they realize I was saying to just put the bottle in the normal trash instead of the special one for virtue signaling.
- hinkley 6y agoIt drove me nuts when BPA hit the radar and I switched to mostly glass while everyone around me just... bought different plastic. If this one was 'safe' until it wasn't, why do you think a newer kind of plastic is going to be safe? Plus now you have bought twice as many containers.
- systematical 6y agoYup glass and metal only. Water tastes terrible out of anything else. Beer too.
- na85 6y agoYour metal beer cans have a plastic liner in them. Every single one.
- Polylactic_acid 6y agoSaw a video of someone dissolving the aluminium and it was left with a soft drink in a plastic bag.
- chrisbolt 6y agohttps://youtu.be/7r7_SFdSdE4 https://youtu.be/7r7_SFdSdE4
- KozmoNau7 6y agoCorrect, however it is significantly less plastic that would be used in a plastic bottle, since it doesn't have to hold any pressure by itself. The aluminum is one of the most recyclable materials we have.
- howlgarnish 6y agoIt's not that clear cut. Creating that glass bottle is far more costly environmentally, lugging its heavy weight around is also much more expensive, cleaning used bottles has a considerable cost, and "thousands" of reuses also sounds optimistic since glass is so easily breakable.
- timClicks 6y agoContemporary glass bottles break easily. But historically bottles were much thicker and could be re-used dozens of times.
- dathinab 6y agoIn Germany you can buy milk in glass bottles in some super markets and they don't brake easily. And not only can they be reused, broken glass bottles can still be recycled.
- mrec 6y agoBeer too IIRC - you can buy it by the crate and return the empties to get a meaningful deposit back.
- Xylakant 6y agoThough most of the deposit for returning a beer crate is on the crate. The deposit for a regular beer bottle is 8cents - it used to be 15Pfennig, cut in half when the EUR was introduced. The problem is that you cannot easily raise the deposit value of a bottle and inflation has taken most of the value away.
- mrec 6y agoAh, I was there pre-Euro.
- ericd 6y agoWe use a milk/eggs/etc delivery service operated by a local farm, we’ve returned 100s of washed glass bottles without breaking any. They’re thick bottles designed for reuse, they’re not fragile. Despite that, the empties are a tiny fraction of the weight of a full plastic bottle. It seems like a pretty a clear, unmitigated win vs plastic with a local service.
- ravar 6y agominor nitpick that doesn't change the substance of your point. 1.5 uses actually, the initial use is already 1/3 recycled. the correct calculation is 1/(1-r) where r=1/3. For example if you had to use 10% new material each time it is seems logical that you would get more than two uses out of the material. 1 use then .9 then .81 ect,
- PaulKeeble 6y agoAlas no, you can' recycle something that was made with recycled material. It gets at most one reuse if it was made out of 100% virgin plastic, everything else is throwaway, the recycled material poisons the rest.
- anticensor 6y agoPaper gets recycled twice: First grade paper→Third grade paper→Newspaper, or Cardboard→Cardboard→Cardboard.
- m4rtink 6y agoI'm not sure it's entirely correct to say you can't use recycled plastic for injection molding - sure, if you just melt all the dirty & UV damaged plastic with who knows what additives and color pigments, it will not work as well as carefully managed single sourced regular feedstock. Still, the stuff is still basically hydrocarbons either way - you should be able to break it down to it's constituents and refine it to something indistinguishable from the normal feed stock. Woukd it be horrendously energy intensive ? Most likely! But definitely doable. BTW, this is why I'm skeptical to efforts to fix the environment just by saving energy. Sure, it should not be wasted but if we want to fix all damage that has veen done while still providing adequate standards of living for everyone, we beed to produce much much moore energy than we do now & do it in a clean way - most likely mega massive solar on enything, lots of nuclear fission and possibly massed off shore wind as well. Ideally backed by storage if/where possible. Together with megaproject scale waste processing it should be possible to cleanup (and reuse!) all the old stuff while also handling all the new stuff comming in. And the end result would be a nice clean plabet yet again, but this time with very robust energy and industrial infrastructure ready to face future challenges - or disasters! Sounds like something one can aspire for rather than all the doom and gloom one sees some days.
- ars 6y ago> you should be able to break it down to it's constituents and refine it to something indistinguishable from the normal feed stock. Woukd it be horrendously energy intensive ? Most likely! Or ... just burn it for energy, and thereby pump less oil. Sure you'll need more oil for more plastic, but you come out ahead because by burning the plastic you save some oil. This whole plastic recycling stuff makes zero sense.
- zbrozek 6y agoAFAIK Japan does this and it works out OK for them. But I'd love to read more about it if there are decent English sources.
- PaulKeeble 6y ago
- double0jimb0 6y agoThat 1.3 number is generally accurate, it varies a bit by type of plastic and end-item requirements. BUT, that 30%, it’s not post-consumer recycled plastic. It’s the manufacture grinding up the runners, sprues, and bad parts. In the industry it’s called “regrind”. [0] So if they were trying to tell you it was post-consumer, that was probably misleading. (Products that use post-consumer recycled plastic will almost always say so, as it is a marketing angle) [0] https://knowledge.ulprospector.com/1468/pe-regrinding-plastics/ https://knowledge.ulprospector.com/1468/pe-regrinding-plasti...
- PaulKeeble 6y agoCorrect it is about the process and a lot of post consumer plastic isn't in practice recycleable at all. Its the absolute best case number and in practice its more like 10% or 1.1 uses as a result as far as I can tell from the various articles on it this year.
- tomerico 6y agoThis might be a naive question, but given that plastic is made of oil, and that it doesn’t decompose, isn’t it a great way to perform carbon sequestration? In other words, isn’t the use of plastics replaces potential carbon emission via burning of oil?
- whatisthiseven 6y agoThis is backwards. First, plastic is something like 1% of all oil production. Secondly, oil is the the best way to do sequestration by keeping it in the ground. Unless you mean turning co2 into oil to make plastic or something? Which is itself weird for the energy requirement.
- dredmorbius 6y agoSlightly higher, about 4% worldwide, though some of that is NG. https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/How-Much-Crude-Oil-Does-Plastic-Production-Really-Consume.html https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/How-Much-Crude-Oi...
- tomerico 6y agoBut you assume that the oil saved by a reduction in plastic use will be kept in the ground. Isn't a fairer assumption that it would be repurposed and burnt?
- AjithAntony 6y agoI think he just generally meant stop using oil for all uses for maximum carbon sequestration
- beisner 6y agoGreat way to sequester it right into a whale's stomach.
- PaulKeeble 6y agoIts already sequestered as oil just leave it in the ground. Given how little of the plastic can be recycled and it doesn't really decompose and pollutes the water and our food we tends to burn it for energy to get rid of it.
- cherrycherry98 6y agoMost of the restaurants by me already seem to use a few standard size food containers. Why do these containers need to be broken down into raw material and then reconstituted? If they were high quality enough, could they not just be sanitized and then repurchased by restaurants directly from the recycler? Seems like there'd be much less waste of material. The big question would be if the sanitation process would be not be more expensive than just remanufacturing the containers.
- PaulKeeble 6y agoPlastic isn't very robust. I personally utilise a standard container size and wash and reuse it for my own purposes to avoid kitchen bags and such. But the lids crack as they get brittle after repeated washing and the plastic itself scuffs and looses its transparency and surface. It may actually be problematic to have scratched surfaces for bacteria and cleaning and the containers wouldn't look the same in the store even after one wash and refill. Plastic just isn't good for reuse, it is not robust.
- cherrycherry98 6y agoYes good points, which is why I think the type of plastic matters. Rubbermaid, for example, makes a variety of high quality reusable plastic food containers. The Just Salad restaurant chain in NYC will sell you a reusable plastic salad container that you can wash and bring to them to prepare your meal in and there doesn't seem to be any issue with food safety regarding those bowls. It's heavier duty than the clear disposable ones they give you otherwise. There's certainly a usable life to anything, plastic will degrade over multiple washes and being battered with utensils. I'd expect well used ones would need to be retired but it should still be better than the current situation where they are primarily single use.
- tacocataco 6y agoWhat about the waxed cardboard containers my Chinese place uses? Plastic must not be THAT much cheaper if this waxed cardboard is in use.
- therockspush 6y agoI've been lied to again? Hopefully people can find good stuff to do with the heaps of shite we've already created. Theres a guy in the UK that got started making skateboards out of this plastic, and showing people how to do it. Looks like they branched out. https://preciousplastic.com/ https://preciousplastic.com/ Some other companies jumping on the wagon train too. https://wasteboards.com/about/ https://wasteboards.com/about/ This could just be more greenwashing, but it's inspiring.
- m463 6y agoalso: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_road https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_road
- m463 6y agoA friend of mine was involved in a recycling project for a major chemical company (decades ago). Just a small fraction - way less that 1/3 - can be used in recycling and it makes the resulting plastic a lot weaker and limited in uses. I would imagine for something like plastic for food or water bottles might need to be new. and then there are prions: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/prions-are-forever/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/prions-ar...
- sergeykish 6y ago> In recent years, it has been possible to make PET bottles from 100% recycled plastic which are qualitatively just as good as bottles made from so-called virgin plastic. [1] Check your facts [2]: > Greenpeace says plastic bottle recycling rates are ‘stalled’ at around just 59% in the UK. > Danone brand evian is introducing 100% rPET bottles to the UK this week; the latest in a series of recycled plastic commitments from PepsiCo’s Naked Smoothies, Nestlé’s Buxton bottled water, and Coca-Cola GB. > This week Coca-Cola Great Britain announced that all plastic bottles in its core brand portfolio – including Coca-Cola, Fanta, Sprite and Oasis – are made with 50% recycled plastic. This equates to removing more than 21,000 tonnes of virgin plastic, according to Coca-Cola. > “One of the key challenges the industry currently faces is that there isn’t enough food-grade recycled plastic locally available in the UK to switch to 100% rPET across our entire range,” I have at least one product > Frosch packaging is 100% recycled plastic [3] [1] https://www.plasticsoupfoundation.org/en/2018/02/pet-bottles-made-100-recycled-plastic/ https://www.plasticsoupfoundation.org/en/2018/02/pet-bottles... [2] https://www.beveragedaily.com/Article/2020/09/24/The-journey-to-100-recycled-plastic-bottles-rPET-in-the-UK https://www.beveragedaily.com/Article/2020/09/24/The-journey... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frosch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frosch
- stewbrew 6y agoI really wonder whether this is a US thing. Don't they separate waste? Don't they recycle their trash? To me, some of the other comments (that were posted a few hours earlier) read as if they were from the 1990s.
- NegativeLatency 6y agoDepends on where you live, most cities have recycling programs where recycling is picked up, but as you get more rural you either have to take recycling in yourself or there’s just no good options
- erickhill 6y agoOut in rural areas there's also zero composting. I know, because I own a homes in both a major US city and a rural location. Also, most of the plastic the city takes, the rural location services won't.
- mdorazio 6y agoLike a lot of things, "it depends". Type of plastic, use case, source of the recycled plastic, and type of injection molding machine all come into play. In practice, it's probably less than 1/3 of post-consumer plastic by a decent margin just because processing god knows what plastic people put in the bin into something you can injection mold requires massively expensive sorting, cleaning, treating, and re-pelletizing. An interesting point to consider here is that if oil production ever goes down for whatever reason and virgin plastic prices go up as a result, post-consumer plastic recycling becomes a more attractive business prospect.
- holri 6y agoSeparating plastic has also the effect of better burning waste. That is because they can control the burning / heat with controlled injection of isolating plastic waste which hast a specified / stable thermal energy in contrast to mixed waste.
- speleding 6y agoThe energy and effort required to collect, clean and re-use glass is much higher than for plastic. Glass doesn't decompose in a landfill and has limits on how often it can be re-used as well. The detergents, water and heat needed for cleaning alone have a higher environmental impact than the few drops of oil needed to make a plastic bottle. Plastic waste is a big problem for sure, but switching to glass is not the solution.
- DanBC 6y agoYes. If we used plastic once and then burnt it it's probably better for CO2 than reusing glass.
- chimprich 6y ago> Glass doesn't decompose in a landfill Why would you want it to? Being inert is a good thing if you put it underground: no water contamination, no gas being released. But why put it in a landfill when you could reuse or recycle it? > and has limits on how often it can be re-used as well. What are these limits?
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago>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. I wonder if there is a country where the laws are so structured that you could class action sue for the value of the time lost.
- PaulKeeble 6y agoNot even just the time, there is a clear energy cost that every household has been paying electricity and gas costs for heating of water. Extra cleaning materials in brushes and washing up liquid and additional dishwasher tablets etc etc. I doubt most households have good enough accounting to attribute the cost of recycling directly other than perhaps the cost of recycling bags (ours requires all recycling in clear bags) but it goes well beyond just time, we have literally burnt CO2 to recycle something that actually can't be recycled. What I don't understand is why governments and councils continued to go along with this, to collect it all separately and then just send most of it to be burnt or landfill, the cost surely wasn't worth it. My Freedom of information act request to my council about plastic recycling was eye opening, just 3.2% of the plastic put into recycling correctly was actually recycled. They know full well this is pointless and yet it continues.
- blippage 6y agoI am often suspicious that green initiatives exacerbate rather than ameliorate the environmental damage we cause. Green products cost more, and are generally more complicated than traditional ones. I doubt that many people sit down and weigh the pros and cons dispassionately. Most of the time it is politicians making political capital and shrill activists wanting us to "think of the children"; basically, ill-conceived and costly theatre.