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And to me one of the worst, also recently covered by NPR: the big lies we were told about plastic being recyclable[1]. [1] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/89769

And to me one of the worst, also recently covered by NPR: the big lies we were told about plastic being recyclable[1]. [1] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...

merb 6y ago
well the thing is, it's not impossible to recycle plastic, but the article also explains that really simple: > Recycling plastic is "costly," it says, and sorting it, the report concludes, is "infeasible." 1. no infrastructure for sorting, there is no 100% method as of today (basically no research is done on this topic) 2. even if it is feasible, nobody does it becasue it is expensive. 3. there are countries where plastic recycling works, but these are outliners and countries who heavily invest in sorting, recycling on the consumer side.
- 88840-8855 6y ago
  This is super interesting to me. Can you help out? - what infrastructure is needed for sorting? - what countries are successfully doing that? Taiwan? - can "expensive" be quantified?
  - mkoubaa 6y ago
    It requires human labor so it is expensive in countries where that is expensive. In countries where it is cheap there it isn't prioritized by the public, who ubderstandably instead want better paying jobs
- throwmtlsPhD 6y ago
  Disclaimer: So I have a PhD in mtls science, and I studied a bit of plastics thermo. However I never worked on the recycling problem. Plastics, or polymers that aren’t cross linked, are in a sense easy to recycle - Just melt them and recast the part. 3D printing hobbyists even recycle their filament. The problem is that any melted plastic doesn’t mix with any plastic other than itself. So if you have 99% polyethylene and 1% polypropylene and melt them together they won’t mix. But they won’t separate perfectly either (so you can’t skim the PP put). Instead you get inter-penetrating phases (a spinodal). These phases have surfaces that don’t stick well together so the end result is that any parts made of this are exceptionally weak. So this is the dilemma: if you have even 1% of different polymer in your mix, the plastic will suck. But we use at least 4 or 5 different plastics in everyday life all chucked into the same bins, all looking more less the same. Solutions? 1. One solution is to heat all the plastics so that they break apart and therefore use them for feedstock. But this is very expensive, and the feedstocks aren’t very pure. 2 Make cat fuel. Cheaper then above, since the purity requirements aren’t as strong, but it’s basically the same as number 1. This doesnt increase CO2 emissions since the plastic is displacing oil 3. Burn it for energy. This needs far less strict requirements than 2 and lower CO2 emissions (since you don’t have to waste energy getting oil out). However, you’d have to basically ban public use of perfluorinated polymers or make them very expensive, or make them easy to identify (Teflon, gore-Tex.) Frankly I’d ban perfluorinates except for use in critical industries. That chemistry is ecologically nasty. 4. Force companies to color their containers according to plastic type. I.e no more clear Pepsi or Coke bottles - all PE products are color, say green. All PP colors are red, etc.
  - tesseract 6y ago
    This is likely a dumb outsider viewpoint but: is just burying plastics all that bad? The fact that they stay intact over geologic timescales would seem to make them an ideal carbon sink, which is something we could actually use more of - provided that feedstocks can come out of the carbon cycle (e.g. agricultural) rather than relying on petrochemicals.
    - throwmtlsPhD 6y ago
      I like your comment and the honest answer is I don’t know, but I see no problems with dumping plastic on the ground, vs in the ocean. But some observations on your comment. Is plastic, that was never in the atmosphere (for millions of years anyway), really a carbon sink? It seems that trough its entire lifecycle it never goes into the atmosphere. Also, if you burn plastic you’re displacing oil that wouldn’t otherwise be burned. Oil that is never extracted. And don’t forget that it takes a lot of energy to extract oil, so burning plastic reduces CO2 emissions globally somewhat. Also, I’m skeptical about the practicality of using landfills to create geological treasures for mankind 100k years from now. The problem with it is that I feel that it is wishful thinking that placates our conscience. It’s easy to imagine yourself living “sustainably” in geological time scales. It’s hard to live sustainably in 1000 year timescales.
      - lupire 6y ago
        The problem with burying plastic is that there's no room to do that locally, so you have to send it somewhere. Burning is the only thing that makes sense, and that's OK if thebtotalt amount is "not too much", where current fossil fuel usage is "too much".
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - WheelsAtLarge 6y ago
      Waste plastic has a negative value, right now. I think that burying it is even more expensive than to just dump it where ever it's possible, in some places. It may not be legal but as always if people can make a buck then they will. Laws or no laws. It turns out that a lot of the plastic in the ocean is there because there are countries where people are just dumping trash in the ocean. It can be less expensive than transporting it to a dump and dealing with it there. The answer has to include making waste plastic have enough value so that people find it advantageous to recycle it or at least to bury it.
- qq4 6y ago
  I lost all hope in plastic recycling. As an anecdote, outside of my building I've found everything from dirty pizza boxes, toilet paper, dog poop and socks in our recycling bins. There has also been plenty of plastic that isn't processed locally. I even put a sign up once about what is accepted, and still to this day I pull things out to correct what people throw in. I really think progress with plastics has to be before the materials ever reach consumers. And if we are to recycle it by throwing it in a bin, I think there needs to be an incentive for people to play along and not mess everything up.
fsflover 6y ago
And anti-GMO lobby: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food_cont....
- TaylorAlexander 6y ago
  I’m not suggesting you have an opinion here but when I see this I always want to mention the following: I have no issue with GMOs per se. But what I have a real issue with is when companies make herbicide resistant plants and then suggest we dump herbicides in to our soil. These poisons have a serious deleterious effect on the environment and it’s something we now have plenty of evidence for. We’ve also seen plenty of data that this increase in herbicides is causing cancer in farm workers. GMOs can be great. Really I do believe that. But we’ve got these companies that don’t care about much beyond their bottom line pushing out GMOs that encourage extreme levels of biocide use and I and many others have a real problem with that.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    GMO means we can use chemicals that break down as opposed to more toxic ones that build up in the soil.
    - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
      Often any of these chemicals kill the soil microbiology. The real problem according to regenerative farming advocates is the idea that dumping loads of artificial chemicals on to the field is some path to a solution. The alternative is to understand the living nature of the soil and feed it the way you would feed any other living thing. So it is not a choice between “this chemical” or “that chemical” and many view that kind of thinking as the real problem. In this way the GMOs that you describe support that problematic kind of thinking. That said, I am not familiar with what you describe. Which chemicals did not break down and how did GMOs allow us to use chemicals that do break down? I’d like to learn about that. Thank you!
      - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
markbnine 6y ago
Good documentary on this: https://frontlinetv.com/plastic-wars-full-film https://frontlinetv.com/plastic-wars-full-film
hayst4ck 6y ago
In tech it is often incremental changes in the right direction rather than a paradigm shift/rewrite that succeeds. Even if under current technology we are not able to profitably recycle goods, having an obviously detrimental to the environment material more heavily concentrated seems like a positive to me.
dasb 6y ago
For the last couple of years I've been wanting to learn about how and when recycling works, cost comparison between recycled products and new products, environmental impact of landfill vs recycling, etc. I don't know where to look for information. What books should I read? what websites have good information and explanations? whom should I trust?
- lupire 6y ago
  Recycling is like startup stock grants. It's maybe a nice bonus but is a 0 in expected value calculations.
WalterBright 6y ago
The thing to do with plastics is: 1. tax it to discourage its use 2. bury it in landfills
xnx 6y ago
Plastic is recyclable in the same way a sugary bowl of cereal is part of a balanced breakfast.

merb 6y ago

well the thing is, it's not impossible to recycle plastic, but the article also explains that really simple: > Recycling plastic is "costly," it says, and sorting it, the report concludes, is "infeasible." 1. no infrastructure for sorting, there is no 100% method as of today (basically no research is done on this topic) 2. even if it is feasible, nobody does it becasue it is expensive. 3. there are countries where plastic recycling works, but these are outliners and countries who heavily invest in sorting, recycling on the consumer side.

88840-8855 6y ago
This is super interesting to me. Can you help out? - what infrastructure is needed for sorting? - what countries are successfully doing that? Taiwan? - can "expensive" be quantified?
- mkoubaa 6y ago
  It requires human labor so it is expensive in countries where that is expensive. In countries where it is cheap there it isn't prioritized by the public, who ubderstandably instead want better paying jobs
throwmtlsPhD 6y ago
Disclaimer: So I have a PhD in mtls science, and I studied a bit of plastics thermo. However I never worked on the recycling problem. Plastics, or polymers that aren’t cross linked, are in a sense easy to recycle - Just melt them and recast the part. 3D printing hobbyists even recycle their filament. The problem is that any melted plastic doesn’t mix with any plastic other than itself. So if you have 99% polyethylene and 1% polypropylene and melt them together they won’t mix. But they won’t separate perfectly either (so you can’t skim the PP put). Instead you get inter-penetrating phases (a spinodal). These phases have surfaces that don’t stick well together so the end result is that any parts made of this are exceptionally weak. So this is the dilemma: if you have even 1% of different polymer in your mix, the plastic will suck. But we use at least 4 or 5 different plastics in everyday life all chucked into the same bins, all looking more less the same. Solutions? 1. One solution is to heat all the plastics so that they break apart and therefore use them for feedstock. But this is very expensive, and the feedstocks aren’t very pure. 2 Make cat fuel. Cheaper then above, since the purity requirements aren’t as strong, but it’s basically the same as number 1. This doesnt increase CO2 emissions since the plastic is displacing oil 3. Burn it for energy. This needs far less strict requirements than 2 and lower CO2 emissions (since you don’t have to waste energy getting oil out). However, you’d have to basically ban public use of perfluorinated polymers or make them very expensive, or make them easy to identify (Teflon, gore-Tex.) Frankly I’d ban perfluorinates except for use in critical industries. That chemistry is ecologically nasty. 4. Force companies to color their containers according to plastic type. I.e no more clear Pepsi or Coke bottles - all PE products are color, say green. All PP colors are red, etc.
- tesseract 6y ago
  This is likely a dumb outsider viewpoint but: is just burying plastics all that bad? The fact that they stay intact over geologic timescales would seem to make them an ideal carbon sink, which is something we could actually use more of - provided that feedstocks can come out of the carbon cycle (e.g. agricultural) rather than relying on petrochemicals.
  - throwmtlsPhD 6y ago
    I like your comment and the honest answer is I don’t know, but I see no problems with dumping plastic on the ground, vs in the ocean. But some observations on your comment. Is plastic, that was never in the atmosphere (for millions of years anyway), really a carbon sink? It seems that trough its entire lifecycle it never goes into the atmosphere. Also, if you burn plastic you’re displacing oil that wouldn’t otherwise be burned. Oil that is never extracted. And don’t forget that it takes a lot of energy to extract oil, so burning plastic reduces CO2 emissions globally somewhat. Also, I’m skeptical about the practicality of using landfills to create geological treasures for mankind 100k years from now. The problem with it is that I feel that it is wishful thinking that placates our conscience. It’s easy to imagine yourself living “sustainably” in geological time scales. It’s hard to live sustainably in 1000 year timescales.
    - lupire 6y ago
      The problem with burying plastic is that there's no room to do that locally, so you have to send it somewhere. Burning is the only thing that makes sense, and that's OK if thebtotalt amount is "not too much", where current fossil fuel usage is "too much".
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - WheelsAtLarge 6y ago
    Waste plastic has a negative value, right now. I think that burying it is even more expensive than to just dump it where ever it's possible, in some places. It may not be legal but as always if people can make a buck then they will. Laws or no laws. It turns out that a lot of the plastic in the ocean is there because there are countries where people are just dumping trash in the ocean. It can be less expensive than transporting it to a dump and dealing with it there. The answer has to include making waste plastic have enough value so that people find it advantageous to recycle it or at least to bury it.
qq4 6y ago
I lost all hope in plastic recycling. As an anecdote, outside of my building I've found everything from dirty pizza boxes, toilet paper, dog poop and socks in our recycling bins. There has also been plenty of plastic that isn't processed locally. I even put a sign up once about what is accepted, and still to this day I pull things out to correct what people throw in. I really think progress with plastics has to be before the materials ever reach consumers. And if we are to recycle it by throwing it in a bin, I think there needs to be an incentive for people to play along and not mess everything up.

fsflover 6y ago

And anti-GMO lobby: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food_cont....

TaylorAlexander 6y ago
I’m not suggesting you have an opinion here but when I see this I always want to mention the following: I have no issue with GMOs per se. But what I have a real issue with is when companies make herbicide resistant plants and then suggest we dump herbicides in to our soil. These poisons have a serious deleterious effect on the environment and it’s something we now have plenty of evidence for. We’ve also seen plenty of data that this increase in herbicides is causing cancer in farm workers. GMOs can be great. Really I do believe that. But we’ve got these companies that don’t care about much beyond their bottom line pushing out GMOs that encourage extreme levels of biocide use and I and many others have a real problem with that.
- bluGill 6y ago
  GMO means we can use chemicals that break down as opposed to more toxic ones that build up in the soil.
  - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
    Often any of these chemicals kill the soil microbiology. The real problem according to regenerative farming advocates is the idea that dumping loads of artificial chemicals on to the field is some path to a solution. The alternative is to understand the living nature of the soil and feed it the way you would feed any other living thing. So it is not a choice between “this chemical” or “that chemical” and many view that kind of thinking as the real problem. In this way the GMOs that you describe support that problematic kind of thinking. That said, I am not familiar with what you describe. Which chemicals did not break down and how did GMOs allow us to use chemicals that do break down? I’d like to learn about that. Thank you!
    - 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

markbnine 6y ago

Good documentary on this: https://frontlinetv.com/plastic-wars-full-film https://frontlinetv.com/plastic-wars-full-film

hayst4ck 6y ago

In tech it is often incremental changes in the right direction rather than a paradigm shift/rewrite that succeeds. Even if under current technology we are not able to profitably recycle goods, having an obviously detrimental to the environment material more heavily concentrated seems like a positive to me.

dasb 6y ago

For the last couple of years I've been wanting to learn about how and when recycling works, cost comparison between recycled products and new products, environmental impact of landfill vs recycling, etc. I don't know where to look for information. What books should I read? what websites have good information and explanations? whom should I trust?

lupire 6y ago
Recycling is like startup stock grants. It's maybe a nice bonus but is a 0 in expected value calculations.

WalterBright 6y ago

The thing to do with plastics is: 1. tax it to discourage its use 2. bury it in landfills

xnx 6y ago

Plastic is recyclable in the same way a sugary bowl of cereal is part of a balanced breakfast.