6 ms·

> The solution is to actually recycle plastic, build circular supply chains, and use biodegradable materials as much as possible. This assumes that: (1) Plast

by Syonyk 4y ago

> The solution is to actually recycle plastic, build circular supply chains, and use biodegradable materials as much as possible. This assumes that: (1) Plastic can actually be recycled. Unlike a lot of other materials, it degrades rather substantially every time you try, and plastic quality coming out of recycling isn't generally uniform enough to make anything more than the big, chunky "recycled plastic toys and benches" you'll occasionally see. More and more, it's evident that "plastic recycling" is a myth mostly funded by plastic producers and crew, who wish to have it be seen as "not the terror it actually is." Hard on profits, you know, if people don't like your product. The Guardian has done some great work on the truths behind plastic recycling, and they're not pretty. That's before you get into the biological impacts of microplastics on "literally everything on the planet that's alive." And, (2) that "biodegradable materials" actually do that in realistic end of life conditions. They don't. People date landfill digs by reading the headlines on the newspapers that are "slightly yellowed compared to when they were buried." Treating plastic as the life-toxic sludge it is would be a far better start. At least with metal recycling, we know it's actually being put back into a smelter for recycling, and that it uses far less energy than the original materials (though "pure circular" with most metals is still a problem as they just dilute the various alloys down with virgin metal enough to make the additives not a problem in current systems). "Oh, it's fine, it's recycled!" leads to far more plastic use than "No, we literally can't do anything with it, the best we can do is go burn it to offset coal use" (which is what my local area does with plastic, as it seems to have the best impact for the least cost, and the burn temperature is probably hot enough to decompose all the nasties...).

robonerd 4y ago
Many kinds of plastics can't be recycled at all, not even downcycled. Thermoset plastics particularly, which includes almost everything made out of fiberglass (glass fibers in thermoset plastic matrix.) That stuff either gets thrown into a landfill, or ground up and burnt.
- Syonyk 4y ago
  That most of it burns is part of why "go burn it to offset coal" came out so well in some of the lifecycle analysis for end of life program I'm familiar with: https://www.hefty.com/sites/default/files/2021-01/Hefty-EnergyBag-Program-Life-Cycle-Assessment-Aug-2020.pdf https://www.hefty.com/sites/default/files/2021-01/Hefty-Ener... Instead of having to pay to sort and process, you just grind it up and mix it in with the coal (or heave the bags in, I'm not sure as to the actual feed mechanism though I keep meaning to see if I can get a tour). I'm not actually in the program area, but I know where to drop my bags of plastic to get them into the program (one of the recycling companies in the area of the program handles it, and I'm over there often enough that I'll toss a few of the bags in the back of the car if I'm going that way).
balaji1 4y ago
> You must reduce the amount of plastic shipped overseas by putting it in the regular garbage instead of the recycle bin. That's the reality. Why does the US/California make it seem like recycling is a magic trick to save the planet?
- Syonyk 4y ago
  > Why does the US/California make it seem like recycling is a magic trick to save the planet? Because it's the most profitable step of the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, [some people add other entries] chain, so it's in their interests to pretend the other steps don't exist. If I buy a bottle of water packed in plastic and don't worry about it because I assume it's recyclable and therefore "of zero net impact" (also not true, but implied by most of the standard recycling glossy brochures), I've helped their profits. If I bring my own water with me, or use a water fountain or something, I've not contributed to growing the profits of all the companies in the chain of extracting oil from the ground, processing it into various precursors, making it into a cheap, flimsy plastic, pumping water out of the ground to fill that bottle, trucking it across the roads built of oil with fuel built of oil, and selling it to someone, then also the profits of dealing with the waste plastic (trash, recycling, whatever)! Reduce (don't buy stuff in the first place) and Reuse (finding ways to have things be not-single-use) just don't have nearly the profit chain. Pay attention to just how much rhetoric about climate/trash/etc boils down to, "We can consume our way out of problems caused by overconsumption." There are no shortage of companies happy to sell you "green" versions of whatever you might have otherwise bought - but very few people are willing to ask the question, "Should you have bought it in the first place?"
  - osdoorp 4y ago
    "We can consume our way out of problems caused by overconsumption." — well said
  - Eric_WVGG 4y ago
    I interpret the grift a little differently. A lot of the messaging — paid for by the fossil fuels industry — is "we're all in this together." Image of countless families sorting their plastic bottles or whatever. Don't look around the corner at industry generating a magnitude larger amount of waste. Are you doing your part? They used messaging to make their problem our problem.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Probably the only realistic way to 'recycle' plastic is to follow something like the fungal approach to 'recycling' durable woody materials, i.e. cellolose and lignin - the slowly break them down all the way to CO2, extracting whatever energy is available along the way. This is why we get a late-season pulse of CO2 in the fall, as fungi do their work, in the northern hemisphere. Under normal steady state conditions, growing plants then uptake that released CO2 in the spring, accounting for the sawtooth pattern in the northern hemisphere Keeling Curve. On the other hand, making plastics from biomass carbon sources or from direct air capture and burying the material in landfills permanently is actually a form of permanent carbon storage. It's probably just best to reduce plastic use as much as possible.
- lisper 4y ago
  > slowly break them down all the way to CO2 Sure, let's turn all the plastic into atmospheric CO2. What could go wrong?
  - Retric 4y ago
    Assuming the plastics started from atmospheric CO2 in the first place, noting.
    - lisper 4y ago
      But plastics are not made from atmospheric CO2, they are made from fossil hydrocarbons, i.e. from oil.
      - Retric 4y ago
        Not all plastics are made from fossil fuels, and photochemsyn was suggesting: “making plastics from biomass carbon sources or from direct air capture”
        wildmanx 4y ago
        The overwhelming majority is. So much that it's not even worth discussing the rest since it makes it look like it's not all that bad. Yes, it is that bad.
tkzed49 4y ago
Recycling sucks, but you could replace "biodegradable" with "industrially compostable" or even "ecologically safer". I'm not convinced that getting newspaper out of landfills is on the same order of importance as not littering plastics into the environment. Paper seems like a huge win over plastic and even if you have to use a "biodegradable" plastic, at least it's actually feasible to compost it.

by Syonyk 4y ago

robonerd 4y ago

Many kinds of plastics can't be recycled at all, not even downcycled. Thermoset plastics particularly, which includes almost everything made out of fiberglass (glass fibers in thermoset plastic matrix.) That stuff either gets thrown into a landfill, or ground up and burnt.

Syonyk 4y ago
That most of it burns is part of why "go burn it to offset coal" came out so well in some of the lifecycle analysis for end of life program I'm familiar with: https://www.hefty.com/sites/default/files/2021-01/Hefty-EnergyBag-Program-Life-Cycle-Assessment-Aug-2020.pdf https://www.hefty.com/sites/default/files/2021-01/Hefty-Ener... Instead of having to pay to sort and process, you just grind it up and mix it in with the coal (or heave the bags in, I'm not sure as to the actual feed mechanism though I keep meaning to see if I can get a tour). I'm not actually in the program area, but I know where to drop my bags of plastic to get them into the program (one of the recycling companies in the area of the program handles it, and I'm over there often enough that I'll toss a few of the bags in the back of the car if I'm going that way).

balaji1 4y ago

> You must reduce the amount of plastic shipped overseas by putting it in the regular garbage instead of the recycle bin. That's the reality. Why does the US/California make it seem like recycling is a magic trick to save the planet?

Syonyk 4y ago
> Why does the US/California make it seem like recycling is a magic trick to save the planet? Because it's the most profitable step of the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, [some people add other entries] chain, so it's in their interests to pretend the other steps don't exist. If I buy a bottle of water packed in plastic and don't worry about it because I assume it's recyclable and therefore "of zero net impact" (also not true, but implied by most of the standard recycling glossy brochures), I've helped their profits. If I bring my own water with me, or use a water fountain or something, I've not contributed to growing the profits of all the companies in the chain of extracting oil from the ground, processing it into various precursors, making it into a cheap, flimsy plastic, pumping water out of the ground to fill that bottle, trucking it across the roads built of oil with fuel built of oil, and selling it to someone, then also the profits of dealing with the waste plastic (trash, recycling, whatever)! Reduce (don't buy stuff in the first place) and Reuse (finding ways to have things be not-single-use) just don't have nearly the profit chain. Pay attention to just how much rhetoric about climate/trash/etc boils down to, "We can consume our way out of problems caused by overconsumption." There are no shortage of companies happy to sell you "green" versions of whatever you might have otherwise bought - but very few people are willing to ask the question, "Should you have bought it in the first place?"
- osdoorp 4y ago
  "We can consume our way out of problems caused by overconsumption." — well said
- Eric_WVGG 4y ago
  I interpret the grift a little differently. A lot of the messaging — paid for by the fossil fuels industry — is "we're all in this together." Image of countless families sorting their plastic bottles or whatever. Don't look around the corner at industry generating a magnitude larger amount of waste. Are you doing your part? They used messaging to make their problem our problem.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Probably the only realistic way to 'recycle' plastic is to follow something like the fungal approach to 'recycling' durable woody materials, i.e. cellolose and lignin - the slowly break them down all the way to CO2, extracting whatever energy is available along the way. This is why we get a late-season pulse of CO2 in the fall, as fungi do their work, in the northern hemisphere. Under normal steady state conditions, growing plants then uptake that released CO2 in the spring, accounting for the sawtooth pattern in the northern hemisphere Keeling Curve. On the other hand, making plastics from biomass carbon sources or from direct air capture and burying the material in landfills permanently is actually a form of permanent carbon storage. It's probably just best to reduce plastic use as much as possible.

lisper 4y ago
> slowly break them down all the way to CO2 Sure, let's turn all the plastic into atmospheric CO2. What could go wrong?
- Retric 4y ago
  Assuming the plastics started from atmospheric CO2 in the first place, noting.
  - lisper 4y ago
    But plastics are not made from atmospheric CO2, they are made from fossil hydrocarbons, i.e. from oil.
    - Retric 4y ago
      Not all plastics are made from fossil fuels, and photochemsyn was suggesting: “making plastics from biomass carbon sources or from direct air capture”
      - wildmanx 4y ago
        The overwhelming majority is. So much that it's not even worth discussing the rest since it makes it look like it's not all that bad. Yes, it is that bad.

tkzed49 4y ago

Recycling sucks, but you could replace "biodegradable" with "industrially compostable" or even "ecologically safer". I'm not convinced that getting newspaper out of landfills is on the same order of importance as not littering plastics into the environment. Paper seems like a huge win over plastic and even if you have to use a "biodegradable" plastic, at least it's actually feasible to compost it.