3 ms·
> Probably because in most of the US recycling is fake and it all ends up in the landfill anyway, or the amount of energy spent recycling outweighs the savings.
by mikeyouse 4y ago
> Probably because in most of the US recycling is fake and it all ends up in the landfill anyway, or the amount of energy spent recycling outweighs the savings.
> Recycling is something the oil companies came up with to whitewash their image, and justify single use plastics, it doesn’t work, has never worked and it’s hard to see how it would work.
No, it's because he's an idiot whose brain is turned to mush from obsessing about culture war politics.
The plastic recycling history is vaguely interesting for some plastics and completely irrelevant for glass and metals which are profitably recycled due to the economics of recycling them vs. creating them from scratch.
In any case, the local waste plant recycles what they can and then burns the rest for energy so I'll let them make the call on what's profitable to process.
- hinkley 4y agoIn the case of glass it’s also the physics. All fired silicon materials are more stable when they have been fired at least twice. If you make ceramics, you save all your failures to make grog, which is basically ceramic sand or dust. Mixed in with fresh clay it reduced the expansion ratio and the internal stresses. Bottles with recycled material are more sturdy than those without. I don’t know how the process of bringing a bottle plant online works, but if it doesn’t include either buying grog from a supplier or feeding all the glass from the test runs into a hopper I would be very surprised. I have never heard a physicist explain this phenomenon, but if you crush something it tends to break along the weakest points, so crushed silicon has selected out many of the weakest grains and left the strongest ones. Then either they continue to grow or they just increase the ratio of strong to weak.