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I hope they don’t get rid of the symbol entirely! It’s useful to know what resin a product is made of. Things like PLA (which is kinda sorta compostable) are n

I hope they don’t get rid of the symbol entirely! It’s useful to know what resin a product is made of. Things like PLA (which is kinda sorta compostable) are not often recycled, but they can be. If you don’t know what resin the plastic is, then it’s even harder. Keep the resin symbol. Remove the arrows on it. We get better with recycling stuff over time, so eventually more resins could be recycled. But. Part of me wonders if it is actually BETTER to not recycle. Imagine if we made plastic by pulling CO2 from the atmosphere (which we do for PLA!). If the cost were the same and the processing energy the same, wouldn’t it be better for the climate to bury that plastic (sequestering the carbon) instead of recycling it? That is, after all, how we got fossil fuels and reduced the CO2 to preindustrial levels! Burying a bunch of waste carbon from dead algae or trees before fungi evolved that could efficiently break down lignin. Recycling that carbon would’ve meant higher CO2 levels today. And the waste in river thing is primarily about what happens to plastic BEFORE it ends up in a bin (trash OR recycling). Things like water satchets, which really are a compensation for having crap tap water.

DFHippie 5y ago
> If the cost were the same and the processing energy the same, wouldn’t it be better for the climate to bury that plastic (sequestering the carbon) instead of recycling it? Even if it pollutes more to make virgin material than to recycle it -- and I think that's your problem -- if the non-recycled material goes into a landfill instead of the ocean or biosphere, there's a small consolation in that the carbon in the plastic is sequestered.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  I don’t think it’s a small effect. There are something like 300 million tons of plastic waste per year, which is about 1 Gigatonne of CO2, or about 3% of global emissions… more than global aviation! If we cut down all sources of emissions to zero, that would mean humanity using non-fossil plastic (like PLA or electrolytic syngas derived regular plastics) would be carbon negative. The cost of PLA is about $2/kg, or equivalent to about $600/tonneCO2. About how much Climeworks currently costs for direct air CO2 capture.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >The cost of PLA is about $2/kg, or equivalent to about $600/tonneCO2. About how much Climeworks currently costs for direct air CO2 capture. It's probably even better than that, if the PLA cost is for ready-to-use PLA, because presumably dirty/unprocessed PLA costs even less.
jacknews 5y ago
Yes, I've come to the conclusion that it's better to bury most plastic waste. Most plastic comes from oil, which means 'biodegradable' plastic is essentially the same as burning the oil. Actual recycling can work in some cases, but even after all the expense and energy of recycling, the recycled product is usually much lower grade plastic, so it's not sustainable. Better just to bury it (in leak-proof pits), where it will turn back into oil eventually. The real problem with plastic waste is COLLECTING it, making sure it doesn't wash into the oceans, etc. At least the recycle logo might help with that, even a fake one.
- irrational 5y ago
  Wait, does plastic really turn back into oil over time? How much time are we talking about here?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - neltnerb 5y ago
    Not our lifetime. I disagree with the original poster. Often times manufacturing fresh polymer, while cheaper, uses many times the carbon content of the polymer in process energy. Just as an example I know about offhand, isoprene rubber takes five times the carbon content of the product to process from petrochemical feedstocks. That said, recycling isn't very good either, so better would be to just not use it unnecessarily in packaging. I do think it is better to incinerate than to recycle wrong and contaminate the entire recycling stream though. To me, ruining all the other recycling on top of lying about it being recyclable in the first place is way way worse. And no, you cannot generally recycle PLA... I'm not sure where that is coming from. I hate that PLA (often labeled as 7 even though that just means "other") confuses everything even worse when people try to just toss it into typical compost and thus ruin the compost too. Of course it would also ruin the recycling... it would literally be better to just throw it away to be incinerated or else use good old numbers 1 and 2.
    - Robotbeat 5y ago
stronglikedan 5y ago
> I hope they don’t get rid of the symbol entirely! It’s useful to know what resin a product is made of. They should use a different, non-similar symbol for this, since the current batch of recycle symbols have all become synonymous (to the layman) with "put it in the recycle bin".
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  Sure, use a square instead of a triangle. That’s a good idea. Actually, we should use marks that are easily recognized by machine vision so they can be efficiently sorted.
- 09bjb 5y ago
  Would it surprise you to hear that the plastics industry came up with that symbol in order to make it confusing to the layperson to differentiate between recyclables and single-use plastics? "Source" (not a primary source): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g <-- which has some links to further reading/viewing and a few sources.
civilized 5y ago
This seems... not hard. For non-recyclables, just use the same recycling symbol, but put a diagonal bar through it, like on a no-smoking sign. And then provide whatever info you want underneath, same as when it's recyclable.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
If you make plastic by pulling CO2 out of the air, then it would still be more efficient to recycle that into new plastic. You'd still be storing the carbon, just in things that are in active use. There's some potential methods when you can just extract the carbon, which in turn you could also bury, but why not use it for something instead? I feel the "lets put it in a hole" thing has been artifically boosted by fossil fuel interests who just happened to be emptying a hole as they dug it up anyway. If that wasn't the case I'm not sure storing stuff underground would be an obvious solution. Using it for plastics, concrete or other things we need that contain carbon seems like it'll likely be always be a better choice than burying.
- nybble41 5y ago
  > You'd still be storing the carbon, just in things that are in active use. The idea is to extract carbon from the air, make something useful out of it, and then bury the plastic when the item reaches the end of its useful life, thus sequestering the carbon. Recycling the plastics would compete with pulling more carbon from the air and reduce the amount being sequestered. The energy-intensive recycling process might also release more CO2 as a side effect, offsetting the amount captured in the plastic. The goal is to get the carbon into the ground, not to create a closed cycle reprocessing previously captured carbon. Immediate burial would also work, of course, but then there wouldn't be any economic incentive to extract the carbon from the atmosphere in the first place.
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    There's no logical reason why connecting the three steps of the process make sense, unless you start with the premise that you really want to bury post consumer plastic and work back from there. It would only possibly make sense if recycling was fundamentally a dirty process but since we've got enough zero carbon energy available to suck carbon out of the air we've got enough to recycle. We can then use that energy saved by recycling to suck carbon out of the air. Unless there's some weird process or catalyst that makes atmospheric CO2 to consumer grade plastic the absolutely cheapest way to extract CO2 it'll always make sense to save energy and redirect that energy to the most effective method of getting CO2 out of the air whatever that is. I have no reason to believe plastic production will be that and it seems unlikely.
Qub3d 5y ago
The symbol you're talking about was actually revised in 2013 to be a solid triangle around a number instead of the arrows: https://web.archive.org/web/20160126213345/http://www.plasticsindustry.org/AboutPlastics/content.cfm?ItemNumber=823&navItemNumber=1125 https://web.archive.org/web/20160126213345/http://www.plasti...
while1fork 5y ago
Don't have single-use anything. Wash cups and plates like they did for eons before disposable crap.

DFHippie 5y ago

> If the cost were the same and the processing energy the same, wouldn’t it be better for the climate to bury that plastic (sequestering the carbon) instead of recycling it? Even if it pollutes more to make virgin material than to recycle it -- and I think that's your problem -- if the non-recycled material goes into a landfill instead of the ocean or biosphere, there's a small consolation in that the carbon in the plastic is sequestered.

Robotbeat 5y ago
I don’t think it’s a small effect. There are something like 300 million tons of plastic waste per year, which is about 1 Gigatonne of CO2, or about 3% of global emissions… more than global aviation! If we cut down all sources of emissions to zero, that would mean humanity using non-fossil plastic (like PLA or electrolytic syngas derived regular plastics) would be carbon negative. The cost of PLA is about $2/kg, or equivalent to about $600/tonneCO2. About how much Climeworks currently costs for direct air CO2 capture.
- gruez 5y ago
  >The cost of PLA is about $2/kg, or equivalent to about $600/tonneCO2. About how much Climeworks currently costs for direct air CO2 capture. It's probably even better than that, if the PLA cost is for ready-to-use PLA, because presumably dirty/unprocessed PLA costs even less.

jacknews 5y ago

Yes, I've come to the conclusion that it's better to bury most plastic waste. Most plastic comes from oil, which means 'biodegradable' plastic is essentially the same as burning the oil. Actual recycling can work in some cases, but even after all the expense and energy of recycling, the recycled product is usually much lower grade plastic, so it's not sustainable. Better just to bury it (in leak-proof pits), where it will turn back into oil eventually. The real problem with plastic waste is COLLECTING it, making sure it doesn't wash into the oceans, etc. At least the recycle logo might help with that, even a fake one.

irrational 5y ago
Wait, does plastic really turn back into oil over time? How much time are we talking about here?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- neltnerb 5y ago
  Not our lifetime. I disagree with the original poster. Often times manufacturing fresh polymer, while cheaper, uses many times the carbon content of the polymer in process energy. Just as an example I know about offhand, isoprene rubber takes five times the carbon content of the product to process from petrochemical feedstocks. That said, recycling isn't very good either, so better would be to just not use it unnecessarily in packaging. I do think it is better to incinerate than to recycle wrong and contaminate the entire recycling stream though. To me, ruining all the other recycling on top of lying about it being recyclable in the first place is way way worse. And no, you cannot generally recycle PLA... I'm not sure where that is coming from. I hate that PLA (often labeled as 7 even though that just means "other") confuses everything even worse when people try to just toss it into typical compost and thus ruin the compost too. Of course it would also ruin the recycling... it would literally be better to just throw it away to be incinerated or else use good old numbers 1 and 2.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago

stronglikedan 5y ago

> I hope they don’t get rid of the symbol entirely! It’s useful to know what resin a product is made of. They should use a different, non-similar symbol for this, since the current batch of recycle symbols have all become synonymous (to the layman) with "put it in the recycle bin".

Robotbeat 5y ago
Sure, use a square instead of a triangle. That’s a good idea. Actually, we should use marks that are easily recognized by machine vision so they can be efficiently sorted.
09bjb 5y ago
Would it surprise you to hear that the plastics industry came up with that symbol in order to make it confusing to the layperson to differentiate between recyclables and single-use plastics? "Source" (not a primary source): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g <-- which has some links to further reading/viewing and a few sources.

civilized 5y ago

This seems... not hard. For non-recyclables, just use the same recycling symbol, but put a diagonal bar through it, like on a no-smoking sign. And then provide whatever info you want underneath, same as when it's recyclable.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

If you make plastic by pulling CO2 out of the air, then it would still be more efficient to recycle that into new plastic. You'd still be storing the carbon, just in things that are in active use. There's some potential methods when you can just extract the carbon, which in turn you could also bury, but why not use it for something instead? I feel the "lets put it in a hole" thing has been artifically boosted by fossil fuel interests who just happened to be emptying a hole as they dug it up anyway. If that wasn't the case I'm not sure storing stuff underground would be an obvious solution. Using it for plastics, concrete or other things we need that contain carbon seems like it'll likely be always be a better choice than burying.

nybble41 5y ago
> You'd still be storing the carbon, just in things that are in active use. The idea is to extract carbon from the air, make something useful out of it, and then bury the plastic when the item reaches the end of its useful life, thus sequestering the carbon. Recycling the plastics would compete with pulling more carbon from the air and reduce the amount being sequestered. The energy-intensive recycling process might also release more CO2 as a side effect, offsetting the amount captured in the plastic. The goal is to get the carbon into the ground, not to create a closed cycle reprocessing previously captured carbon. Immediate burial would also work, of course, but then there wouldn't be any economic incentive to extract the carbon from the atmosphere in the first place.
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  There's no logical reason why connecting the three steps of the process make sense, unless you start with the premise that you really want to bury post consumer plastic and work back from there. It would only possibly make sense if recycling was fundamentally a dirty process but since we've got enough zero carbon energy available to suck carbon out of the air we've got enough to recycle. We can then use that energy saved by recycling to suck carbon out of the air. Unless there's some weird process or catalyst that makes atmospheric CO2 to consumer grade plastic the absolutely cheapest way to extract CO2 it'll always make sense to save energy and redirect that energy to the most effective method of getting CO2 out of the air whatever that is. I have no reason to believe plastic production will be that and it seems unlikely.

Qub3d 5y ago

The symbol you're talking about was actually revised in 2013 to be a solid triangle around a number instead of the arrows: https://web.archive.org/web/20160126213345/http://www.plasticsindustry.org/AboutPlastics/content.cfm?ItemNumber=823&navItemNumber=1125 https://web.archive.org/web/20160126213345/http://www.plasti...

while1fork 5y ago

Don't have single-use anything. Wash cups and plates like they did for eons before disposable crap.