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Much US “recycling” goes straight to the landfill

162 points by ppjim 4y ago

kazinator 4y ago
Recycling is largely a scam that was invented by the plastics industry to overcome the objections people had against single-use, disposable items.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  You're giving the plastics industry too much credit. The useful idiots who uncritically bought every word and helped them ram it down everyone's throats deserve some blame too.
- standardUser 4y ago
  "Recycling is largely a scam" And then you name one material that is recycled and ignore the rest, most of which are highly effective. It's called cherry-picking and it's a bad look.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - maxbond 4y ago
    Tangential meta-commentary on a phrase I'm seeing more often that I don't think is effective; "it's a bad look" is not a criticism, unless you can explain why a position being perceived poorly implies that it without merit in this particular circumstance. Most of the time, it is not an opinion worth sharing. For instance, this comment would have been a more effective argument if it simply stated that materials other than plastic could be recycled well. The addition of "it's a bad look" only adds snark which distracts from the point being made and makes the discussion needlessly contentious.
    - _dain_ 4y ago
      good catch, it's one of the more infuriating modern thought-terminating cliches. as if all that matters is how things look, rather than how they actually are.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - standardUser 4y ago
      It's a turn of phrase, easily understood by most.
      - maxbond 4y ago
        I understood what you've said, and I've criticized it. "I don't like you" is also a common phrase, easily understood by most, and appropriate in some circumstances; but similarly, these circumstances are unlikely to come up when speaking to strangers in an online forum, so it's generally just a rude and unnecessary thing to say, and takes the discussion in a toxic direction. Criticize people's ideas and leave them out of it. It's a basic courtesy that keeps the community healthy.
- andrewstuart 4y ago
  This is the short and correct description of what recycling is. It is a distraction so the packaging industry can fill the earth with garbage whilst we feel OK about it. I'm so deeply indoctrinated to believe the recycling lie that I continue to sort my garbage despite believing it all just gets dumped into landfill.
  - jjtheblunt 4y ago
    Glass pop/soda bottles were recycled at grocery stores for decades before plastic recycling was popularized.
    - kccqzy 4y ago
      I think that's just reusing, not recycling. To this day I still buy milk in a glass bottle that comes with a bottle deposit I need to pay. After I'm done with the milk I bring it back to the store to get my deposit back, while they ship the empty glass bottle back. They wash it and then fill it with new milk. It's easy to tell because the bottle only contains a printed logo, all the information that can change such as expiration date or the type of milk are not printed on the bottle at all. That's different from aluminum can recycling or paper recycling. Those are made into raw aluminum billets or pulp to be manufactured again.
      - pests 4y ago
        I have an old-fashioned milk delivery service near me that still uses glass bottles. They charge $2 deposit per bottle regardless of size. Works pretty well.
        jjtheblunt 4y ago
        Same here all over Phoenix metropolitan area, but the dairy coordinates with grocers for bottle trades.
res0nat0r 4y ago
Frontline did a documentary about this a while back. Your plastic fruit container may have "3" on it with the recycle symbol, which means it can go to a facility that can recycle that grade of plastic, but that doesn't mean your city / state has a facility that can process that, or will spend the money to build such a facility. It was a move from the plastics industry to push a feel-good policy, but is likely not doing as much good as many of us think. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/plastic-wars/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/plastic-wars/
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  Voters wanted a feel good policy too, so it worked for politicians and basically everyone. Even today, no one is going to get elected by telling constituents they need to consume less and lower their quality of life.
  - baggy_trough 4y ago
    We'll all be better off if we stop doing performative environmentalism by pretending that recycling helps.
squokko 4y ago
I always suspected this, because given what I know of the average American, there's no chance that the recycling bins aren't full of all kinds of nonrecyclable items. The only things that I expect are reliably recycled are those which are profitable enough to pick out of the mess.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  Dude, it is disgusting what people put in recycling. I think people may be trying to sabotage it the stuff they put in there. Lots of used kitty litter. Lots of soiled clothes. Worst thing we had come through was a human body.
  - swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
    wow tell us more about this recycled human body
    - ROTMetro 4y ago
      Nothing much interesting. They shut down the plant and called the cops. Some of the people in pre-sort (where things first enter the line) were kind of shook up by it. We'd get guns come through a couple of times a month. Those were supposed to get called in to the police too, but since the job is only worked by felons that didn't happen (no snitching rule in effect).
  - mateo411 4y ago
    > Worst thing we had come through was a human body. This should really go in the compost bin.
  - otikik 4y ago
    Perhaps it was all plastic surgery offshoots.
    - ROTMetro 4y ago
      We did have special gloves to protect us for the 'sharps' and medical waste.
null_object 4y ago
In 2020 only 10% of plastic was recycled in Sweden. [0] The rest was burnt to produce heating and electricity - which releases an enormous amount of CO2 gases and other pollutants. Not just a US problem. [0] in Swedish: https://www.ivl.se/press/nyheter/2020-02-21-lattlast-rapport-ger-fakta-och-tips-om-plast.html https://www.ivl.se/press/nyheter/2020-02-21-lattlast-rapport...
- ars 4y ago
  > which releases an enormous amount of CO2 gases and other pollutants. No it does not. This is simply untrue. Burning plastic does not release pollutants, and the CO2 released just replaces CO2 released from burning other fuel (oil, natural gas, etc). It's a 100% win, and every country should copy them.
  - zackees 4y ago
  - saddlerustle 4y ago
    In terms of CO2 per unit energy burning plastic is much worse than burning natural gas (and much much worse than any zero carbon source). Energy is fungible, there's no reason to encourage producing CO2 when it's possible not to.
    - ars 4y ago
      > CO2 per unit energy burning plastic is much worse than burning natural gas That is simply not true. Polyethylene (the most common plastic) is C2H4, while natural gas is a mix ranging from CH4 to C3H8. i.e. almost identical in terms of CO2. Plastic is actually better in some ways since you don't need to spend energy a second time to extract even more oil from the ground, you can just burn what you already have. Plus the world does not burn exclusively natural gas, not even close. > when it's possible not to. As should be pretty obvious the idea is you don't burn some other oil, and instead burn plastic. When we are 100% off of oil/coal/etc we can stop burning plastic, but right now, today, burning plastic is the best option. Burning plastic is not going to magically cause extra CO2 emissions, it would simply substitute one for another, with total amount unchanged.
ars 4y ago
This is supposed to be a surprise? It's very simple: If you have to pay to recycle things, it's a failure. If they pay you, it works. China used to buy plastic recycling from the US (it was never just shipped for disposal, China actually paid for it). For a while they actually wanted it because they could use it to make new stuff. But it become uneconomical (too labor intensive), and they stopped. Metal: You have people hunting for metal, and going through bins for it. i.e. it's good to recycle. Cardboard: Same thing. Everything else? Don't recycle it. Burn the plastic for energy, and bury everything else. Sweden actually buys garbage from other countries to burn for energy. Since they are paying for the item, this works just fine.
- vegetable 4y ago
  Some more relevant information in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXRtNwUju5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXRtNwUju5g Wendover Productions - How China broke the world's recycling
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  Do you mean: if I need to pay but don't pay? I don't see why paying wouldn't work.
rjh29 4y ago
In the UK too there's been a lot of news on this: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/17/uk-plastics-sent-for-recycling-in-turkey-dumped-and-burned-greenpeace-finds https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/17/uk-plast... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/may/16/uk-ewaste-dumped-ghana https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/may/16/uk-ewast... https://www.greenpeace.org/africa/en/blogs/11125/africas-exploding-plastic-nightmare/ https://www.greenpeace.org/africa/en/blogs/11125/africas-exp... Basically recycling companies pay to export the waste to poor countries who simply dump or burn it instead of recycling it. For this reason I avoid plastic and stick to cardboard, glass and aluminium. Fortunately plastic is extremely unfashionable in the UK right now and products are increasingly switching to card or aluminium instead.
legitster 4y ago
If only! Western landfills are amazing technology that affordably and safely lock away garbage. Most of the land can be reclaimed for parks or golf courses or other public spaces. Recycling programs often end in plastics being sent to Asian landfills which are little more than open dumps susceptible to rain, flooding, and contributing to the Pacific garbage patch.
- freedomben 4y ago
  I'd be very interested in a source to read/watch/learn more about landfill tech if anybody knows of a good one
  - kfarr 4y ago
    Also interested if there is any recent work on micro reclamation of discarded high value materials. Probably drinking too much sci Fi cool aid but seems like landfills may someday be a treasure for mining once the tech is capable
    - Bedon292 4y ago
      The most valuable stuff in a landfill is probably aluminum, and based on some 2018 US numbers [1] estimated 1.8% of the mass of the landfill. Would need to dig through ~55.5 tonnes in an ideal scenario to get a tonne. Assuming you can sort it on site you still need to transport it to a facility. Process it and melt it back down into a usable form before selling it. Oh and there are various alloys that you probably have to figure out sorting between as well. At around $2200 / tonne right now. I just don't see the economics working out. Perhaps in an older landfill it could be denser, and maybe it could be easier to sort after other materials have started to break down. Still doubt it would be very economical yet. But I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes economical someday. I do wonder if it may be possible to sort more of the aluminum out on its way in to the landfill rather than trying to do it after the fact. It was something like $6B worth of aluminum landfilled based on the 2018 numbers. I was also curious about separating efficiently and went down a rabbit hole on Eddy Current Separators. High speed rotating alternating magnets I guess can influence non-ferrous materials like aluminum. [2] [1] https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/aluminum-material-specific-data https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiehuIugYE0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiehuIugYE0
olivermarks 4y ago
The Chinese used practically slave labour to sift through US garbage before they ended the imports. 'Recycling' was a euphemism for offshoring garbage whether plastic bottles or solar panels, but now the Chinese have tightened their standards. 2017 film 'Plastic China' trailer https://youtu.be/jnNNnHTLjmg https://youtu.be/jnNNnHTLjmg
- gruez 4y ago
  >The Chinese used practically slave labour to sift through US garbage before they ended the imports Are we talking about actual slavery, or run of the mill "developing country with poor labor standards"?
  - otikik 4y ago
    The US doesn't have great labor standards either. ~800000 US citizens are slaves in all but name. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/27/slavery-loophole-unpaid-labor-in-prisons https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/27/slavery-loop...
  - rootw0rm 4y ago
    China does indeed have poor labor standards. However, Chinese factories aren't really forced to uphold their minimal standards. Here's an article from a week ago: https://www.thecut.com/2022/10/shein-is-treating-workers-even-worse-than-you-thought.html https://www.thecut.com/2022/10/shein-is-treating-workers-eve...
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Lots of talk about blaming recycling programs. But the OP as I understand it, shows that people are not even bothering to put but 5% of their plastic in the recycle bin to begin with!
nickpinkston 4y ago
Friendly reminder that modern, well regulated landfills are actually fine and there is plenty of space for them. Also, most of the ocean plastic comes from a small number of rivers in the less developed world. [1] Rich countries aren't really the problem. While we should try to reduce waste as much as possible. This is far more effective at the front end of the process when they're designed and produced, the vast amount of carbon is from direct carbon from production and follow on carbon from the carbon intensity of the products under use. [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic-tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plas...
- kylehotchkiss 4y ago
  Since you mention it, there's a surprising effort to remove plastic from the ocean too: https://theoceancleanup.com/updates/first-100000-kg-removed-from-the-great-pacific-garbage-patch/ https://theoceancleanup.com/updates/first-100000-kg-removed-... It's definitely a drop in the bucket, but a nice improvement over the we-can't-do-anything attitude previously on the pacific garbage patch
- acchow 4y ago
  > well regulated landfills are actually fine and there is plenty of space for them. On the other hand, a quick Google search turns up quotes like "the US is on pace to run out of room in landfills within 18 years" https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/us-landfills-are-filling-up/ https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/us-landfills-are-fi... So which is it?
  - Baader-Meinhof 4y ago
    I think that is just referring to the existing landfills. We can/do build new landfills all the time. And there is no shortage of unused space for new landfills.
    - midoridensha 4y ago
      Exactly. We can build the next one next to your home.
celestialcheese 4y ago
"Operation National Sword" or "Green Sword"[1] from China in 2017 killed most recycling in North America and Europe. But no municipalities or governments wanted to acknowledge it because they spent decades training the population that recycling is important and they didn't want to undo those years of hard work. It's only been in the last year that things are sort of coming back, but landfilling happens for almost all plastics and paper products, unless your muni does multi-bin sorting and not single-stream. Now that petroleum is more expensive, maybe plastic recycling will make a resurgence, but I'm not holding my breath. Recycling boils down to a really really really big and messy sorting problem, and hopefully someone clever can come up with 0-marginal effort waste bins that handle the sorting so Americans can remain lazy and provide a pre-sorted pickup for recyclers. Multi-stream recycling at the source yields the lowest contamination and best recapture rates for material. [2]. The single-stream wave worked when china bought everything, but now that material quality matters, the volume benefits from single-stream are now a liability. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_National_Sword https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_National_Sword 2 - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-era-of-easy-recycling-may-be-coming-to-an-end/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-era-of-easy-recycli...
- mwint 4y ago
  Huh, this is an interesting question I’ve never thought of: Why wouldn’t it always be more efficient to do single-stream recycling, with giant blue bins for people to throw recyclable stuff in, and have manual sorting at facilities? If the answer is “too expensive to pay people to sort”, then maybe I’d argue that recycling is a terrible economic idea: isn’t it certainly more expensive in lost productivity for untrained people to puzzle over bin types, than for trained people to sort after that fact?
  - nico 4y ago
    On the same line, isn’t it also more expensive for humanity as a whole to keep throwing stuff away just to make and buy more?
    - 4y ago
anm89 4y ago
Throw your plastics directly in the trash. This way you will be honest with yourself about where your plastic is going and maybe use marginally less. The truth is though that if you aren't growing your own food and making your own household items, you are pretty much signed up to create large volumes of plastic waste in a way that is mostly out of your control.
mrinterweb 4y ago
Placing blame and responsibility on consumers to not purchase single-use plastic is not the right approach. Discouraging the use of single-use plastics should be done at government policy level to heavily tax the sale of single-use plastics, and subsidize sustainable alternatives.
- swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
  Prices may increase but imagine how much more competitive American or European manufacturing could be if the cheapest materials (and incidentally most environmentally harmful) were taxed appropriately. There’s a cycle of waste where cheap goods break but its okay because its cheap. Instead we could be making things that last.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    Building products that last as long as possible is a sure fire way to destroy your market. You can't both build things that can be infinitely fixable and sell a steady stream of them.
    - swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
      This is only true if you hold a monopoly on the market. Durability is a competitive advantage that businesses and individuals will often clamor for. It’s not easy to replicate
      - thrown_22 4y ago
        And yet no one is building durable products.
        swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
        There’s plenty of manufacturing devoted to quality, but often are outcompeted by outsourced manufacturing using questionable labor and lacking environmental safeguards. Hence why I advocate for taxing plastics
opportune 4y ago
Just fucking throw it away. Why do we pay extra for the privilege of recycling something that is barely recyclable to begin with? Putting plastic in a landfill sequesters carbon, has less emissions in transportation, and doesn’t require paying people to sort it (ultimately born by us chumps paying extra to recycle it - if recycling were truly worth it, they’d be paying us to take it away, or at least discount our garbage service for separating out plastics). Landfills already have mitigations in place for groundwater contamination since landfills can have much more harmful things than micro plastics seep out of them. Not to mention all the micro labor involved in cleaning plastic, and in sorting it for people who aren’t lucky enough to have single stream recycling. Maybe it makes some people feel good but it seems like a distraction and waste of time just to make an unviable activity slightly more viable (if plastic recycling were actually viable this would be centralized since it’s more efficient). I completely support recycling for materials like aluminum and glass that make sense to recycle, but recycling plastic has never made sense economically, and putting it in a landfill isn’t that bad.
- alistairSH 4y ago
  Oddly, my county (Fairfax Co, VA) stopped collecting glass, but continues to collect plastic. IIRC, the problem was broken glass clogging up the sorting machinery. Anyways, I’d prefer we taxed the crap out of single-use packaging to properly account for the waste handling over time.
  - enragedcacti 4y ago
    FWIW Fairfax now has purple bins scattered around for recycling glass, which then gets crushed up and used in place of fill gravel in county projects. It's a pain to drop it all off yourself but at least it is actually getting used. BTW I highly recommend wearing ear protection, it can be really loud dropping the glass into the container. https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/publicworks/recycling-trash/glass https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/publicworks/recycling-trash/gl...
  - unnamed76ri 4y ago
    Taxing the crap out of anything to fix a problem means taking money from one group of people, losing 80% to gov bureaucracy, and giving the remaining 20% to someone else. Likely a campaign donor. When will people recognize that government is really really bad at solving problems. How is that war on drugs going anyway?
kylehotchkiss 4y ago
Keeping it isolated to its own landfill might prove better than mixing it if plastic eating bacteria tech continues to innovate: https://www.livescience.com/plastic-eating-bacteria https://www.livescience.com/plastic-eating-bacteria
insane_dreamer 4y ago
Just to be clear, it wasn't being recycled when we were shipping it to China either. It was just going into their landfills instead of our landfills. Recycling plastic is a non-solution to a much bigger problem: over-consumption of plastics. The only way I see forward is for governments to implement policies that discourage use of plastics by consumers and manufacturers. Some places have done this with plastic bags, but need to do it for plastic single-use bottles, etc.
- diebeforei485 4y ago
  There should be some sort of tax on plastic bottles with less than half gallon (~ 2 liters) of liquid in them.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    The ghost of Wilford Brimley has entered the chat. Diabetus.
- Baader-Meinhof 4y ago
  Plastic bags are unfairly maligned: - They are often quite economically produced, and only require a small amount of plastic. - They are likely reused, often as trash can liners. - As long as we bury them in appropriate landfills, then the carbon in the bag goes back into the ground. (See other comments on the myth of landfill space running out.) - Manufacturing cloth tote bags has a carbon footprint 20,000 times higher than a plastic bag. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/24/style/cotton-totes-climate-crisis.amp.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/24/style/cotton-totes-climat... - Furthermore, cloth tote bags hold bacteria and are unhygienic for carrying groceries. Washing the bags cost electricity/water and probably not carbon neutral either.
  - insane_dreamer 4y ago
    Some fair points. However, many (most?) reusable grocery bags these days are made from jute, or a mix of jute and cotton, not cotton. Jute is much more environmentally friendly than cotton, and it can be rough so minimally processed. We're not talking about those highly-processed fashion cotton bags (that don't really replace plastic bags). Some cloth bags are made with plastic, which is still better than single-use plastic bags (esp since one of those larger tote bags, like the kind at Trader Joe's replaces 4-5 of those plastic bags that supermarkets would bag your groceries in. It's also not about how much plastic is used to create the plastic bags, it's how much environmental pollution is created from the bags.
jrochkind1 4y ago
> In large part, that's due to the fact that China stopped importing plastic waste back in 2018, causing a massive pile up in western countries. I don't think so, I've seen reports that most plastic waste sent to China wound up in landfills or incinerators too. So it's actually probably a net improvement to not spend all that energy sending it 7000 miles to China to put it in a landfill. It's been a fiction all along, we just paid China to make it easier for us to pull the wool over our own eyes. Or, even more cycnically, to get it into their landfills or incinerated air pollution instead of ours.
jh00ker 4y ago
This is so disheartening. I subscribed to and helped perpetuate The Lie. Damn. While we're on this topic, does anyone have info regarding what happens to the plastic bags I return to my local (CA, US) grocery store collection bin? Are they part of a separate stream? I add all sorts of used plastic bags to that bin (thin produce bags, the more heavy-duty grocery bags, Amazon padded shipping envelopes, deflated shipping air bags, clean zip lock bags, etc.). I also wonder if I'm gumming up the works by putting different types of plastic bags in the bin because most bags don't have recycle markings/numbers.
- NickRandom 4y ago
  Sadly, almost certainly. The results of your action is that the entire load is rejected as mixed waste and sent to landfill rather than being able to be recycled so although your intentions are good, the end result is far worse than if you didn't do it all.
- Bedon292 4y ago
  Yes, thin plastic bags are very bad for typical processing machines. They take them at grocery stores so they can be a different stream. Although I have my doubts that much recycling is actually done with them there too. Putting things in recycling that aren't explicitly accepted by your local facility is bad. Never put things in that aren't marked, and definitely not thin unmarked stuff. It increase the costs by gumming up processing equipment if they try to do something with it. And likely does just shunt the whole section over to the landfill. Although most of the stuff probably ends up there anyways. Same thing with greasy pizza boxes, they just taint the load.
not2b 4y ago
The article is specifically about plastic waste. A considerably higher proportion of glass, metal, and paper is successfully recycled, not all of it, but value is extracted and reused.
- Ptchd 4y ago
  Do you really save energy by recycling paper?
greggeter 4y ago
js2 4y ago
Concurrent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33314434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33314434
userbinator 4y ago
I wonder how long it will be until landfills become valuable mines. A lot of materials in them may certainly be reused again in the future. After all, everything is "recycling" on a long-enough timescale... and the fact that the stuff in landfills has already been processed once may be advantageous from the perspective of needing less processing when it's mined again, compared to something like crude oil.
fencepost 4y ago
It's not shocking if you understand some of what's involved. For glass, there are lots of different chemical compositions related to color, hardness and other physical and chemical properties, plus all the contamination with other materials like labels. You can't just throw it all into a big furnace and get anything except low quality glass with inclusions - and there's no market for that. Heck, ask glass blowers what COE they use and if you can bring your own colors in. Paper has a lot of the same issue, cleaning it isn't worth what you can get from it. I would guess that we might see an increase in some sort of biological breakdown of it in the future, BUT that might end up releasing a lot more carbon than simply sequestering it in landfills. I suspect that we'll see big improvement in plastics in the coming decades with better breakdown and separation options, but even there contamination will be a big problem. Metals are about the only thing really practical to recycle, at least given current prices for them.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Here's a 12 minute walk through a glass recycling facility and a nearby facility that turns the cullet into blow-in fiberglass insulation. Quite interesting. There's an optical sorter that excludes brown glass and ceramic pieces. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR9FtWVjk2c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR9FtWVjk2c
  - fencepost 4y ago
    Nice and informative video! My exposure to glass has mostly been working with someone doing glass blowing and hot glass work, so even the clean cullet from the recycling process would likely not be good enough there - it needs basically zero contaminants, because just one or two little dark spots in the clear part of a paperweight can be a problem.
keepquestioning 4y ago
Why can't we burn plastic for energy?
_carbyau_ 4y ago
We've recently had another bin added for compost. Now it's Recycle, Compost, Garbage. This upset me so much as it is very clear that there is no mature recycling industry and it's getting worse. A mature recycling industry could just take "rubbish" as a single output, sort it efficiently and get on with things. Get money for taking your rubbish. Get money for selling recycled output. Everyone has experienced the "outsource it to the masses so we don't have to cover the expense of doing it". What happened to "efficiency of expertise" and "economies of scale" ?
ROTMetro 4y ago
Fun fact. The recycling plant I worked at would buy and mix in new cardboard with our recycled cardboard because we couldn't get the contamination rate to an acceptable level without blending.
pfdietz 4y ago
When we get off of fossil fuels, the economy will have a shortage of cheap reduced carbon. At that point, plastic can be recycled not as plastic, but as a carbon source. It'll be vigorously thermally processed to get small molecules out that can be dealt with like fossil fuels currently are.
pencilguin 4y ago
I used to think that failing to recycle plastic was fine, because plastic in landfills is carbon sequestered. If not made into plastic, that same carbon would be burned and enter the atmosphere. Then I found out that, for each carbon bound up in a piece of plastic, a half-dozen are released to the atmosphere in doing that. Thus, for each bit of plastic not recycled, so much more is made from scratch, and that much more CO2 enters the atmosphere. (Presumably, recycling involves energetic processing, but less.) In the future, when the energy used in processing comes more from renewables, will balances shift? Shale oil, by the way, is equally evil. For each carbon extracted and delivered, four or five are burnt in extracting it.
Trias11 4y ago
I wonder if truth about recycling is such a politically incorrect subject similar to profiling of a typical criminal in a specific city/state?
iancmceachern 4y ago
Moat of plastic recycling is focused on heating up and melting down thermoplastics. I've been wondering if there is another way. Like dissolving the plastics into solvents, then distilling and separating the different compounds in the solution, then pull out thr solvents in a recoverable way, then one would be left with pure compounds. It seems like the science and tech for this exists now, we just need to industrialized it and make it profitable to do so. Not unlike distilling organic compounds like we do today on a commercial scale.
pabs3 4y ago
Perhaps we should require all manufacturers of physical products to have cradle-to-grave lifecycle planning for their products. The supermarket should accept discarded containers from consumers, the tomato soup company should accept discarded cans from supermarkets and the can manufacturers should accept discarded cans from them. Pretty soon you will have reusable containers for almost everything.
tb_technical 4y ago
The only way to improve this metric is to subsidize green recycling industries, and to provide abundant and cheap energy for the process to occur.

162 points by ppjim 4y ago

Recycling is largely a scam that was invented by the plastics industry to overcome the objections people had against single-use, disposable items.

dsfyu404ed 4y ago
You're giving the plastics industry too much credit. The useful idiots who uncritically bought every word and helped them ram it down everyone's throats deserve some blame too.
standardUser 4y ago
"Recycling is largely a scam" And then you name one material that is recycled and ignore the rest, most of which are highly effective. It's called cherry-picking and it's a bad look.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- maxbond 4y ago
  Tangential meta-commentary on a phrase I'm seeing more often that I don't think is effective; "it's a bad look" is not a criticism, unless you can explain why a position being perceived poorly implies that it without merit in this particular circumstance. Most of the time, it is not an opinion worth sharing. For instance, this comment would have been a more effective argument if it simply stated that materials other than plastic could be recycled well. The addition of "it's a bad look" only adds snark which distracts from the point being made and makes the discussion needlessly contentious.
  - _dain_ 4y ago
    good catch, it's one of the more infuriating modern thought-terminating cliches. as if all that matters is how things look, rather than how they actually are.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - standardUser 4y ago
    It's a turn of phrase, easily understood by most.
    - maxbond 4y ago
      I understood what you've said, and I've criticized it. "I don't like you" is also a common phrase, easily understood by most, and appropriate in some circumstances; but similarly, these circumstances are unlikely to come up when speaking to strangers in an online forum, so it's generally just a rude and unnecessary thing to say, and takes the discussion in a toxic direction. Criticize people's ideas and leave them out of it. It's a basic courtesy that keeps the community healthy.
andrewstuart 4y ago
This is the short and correct description of what recycling is. It is a distraction so the packaging industry can fill the earth with garbage whilst we feel OK about it. I'm so deeply indoctrinated to believe the recycling lie that I continue to sort my garbage despite believing it all just gets dumped into landfill.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  Glass pop/soda bottles were recycled at grocery stores for decades before plastic recycling was popularized.
  - kccqzy 4y ago
    I think that's just reusing, not recycling. To this day I still buy milk in a glass bottle that comes with a bottle deposit I need to pay. After I'm done with the milk I bring it back to the store to get my deposit back, while they ship the empty glass bottle back. They wash it and then fill it with new milk. It's easy to tell because the bottle only contains a printed logo, all the information that can change such as expiration date or the type of milk are not printed on the bottle at all. That's different from aluminum can recycling or paper recycling. Those are made into raw aluminum billets or pulp to be manufactured again.
    - pests 4y ago
      I have an old-fashioned milk delivery service near me that still uses glass bottles. They charge $2 deposit per bottle regardless of size. Works pretty well.
      - jjtheblunt 4y ago
        Same here all over Phoenix metropolitan area, but the dairy coordinates with grocers for bottle trades.

res0nat0r 4y ago

Frontline did a documentary about this a while back. Your plastic fruit container may have "3" on it with the recycle symbol, which means it can go to a facility that can recycle that grade of plastic, but that doesn't mean your city / state has a facility that can process that, or will spend the money to build such a facility. It was a move from the plastics industry to push a feel-good policy, but is likely not doing as much good as many of us think. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/plastic-wars/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/plastic-wars/

lotsofpulp 4y ago
Voters wanted a feel good policy too, so it worked for politicians and basically everyone. Even today, no one is going to get elected by telling constituents they need to consume less and lower their quality of life.
- baggy_trough 4y ago
  We'll all be better off if we stop doing performative environmentalism by pretending that recycling helps.

squokko 4y ago

I always suspected this, because given what I know of the average American, there's no chance that the recycling bins aren't full of all kinds of nonrecyclable items. The only things that I expect are reliably recycled are those which are profitable enough to pick out of the mess.

ROTMetro 4y ago
Dude, it is disgusting what people put in recycling. I think people may be trying to sabotage it the stuff they put in there. Lots of used kitty litter. Lots of soiled clothes. Worst thing we had come through was a human body.
- swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
  wow tell us more about this recycled human body
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    Nothing much interesting. They shut down the plant and called the cops. Some of the people in pre-sort (where things first enter the line) were kind of shook up by it. We'd get guns come through a couple of times a month. Those were supposed to get called in to the police too, but since the job is only worked by felons that didn't happen (no snitching rule in effect).
- mateo411 4y ago
  > Worst thing we had come through was a human body. This should really go in the compost bin.
- otikik 4y ago
  Perhaps it was all plastic surgery offshoots.
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    We did have special gloves to protect us for the 'sharps' and medical waste.

null_object 4y ago

In 2020 only 10% of plastic was recycled in Sweden. [0] The rest was burnt to produce heating and electricity - which releases an enormous amount of CO2 gases and other pollutants. Not just a US problem. [0] in Swedish: https://www.ivl.se/press/nyheter/2020-02-21-lattlast-rapport-ger-fakta-och-tips-om-plast.html https://www.ivl.se/press/nyheter/2020-02-21-lattlast-rapport...

ars 4y ago
> which releases an enormous amount of CO2 gases and other pollutants. No it does not. This is simply untrue. Burning plastic does not release pollutants, and the CO2 released just replaces CO2 released from burning other fuel (oil, natural gas, etc). It's a 100% win, and every country should copy them.
- zackees 4y ago
- saddlerustle 4y ago
  In terms of CO2 per unit energy burning plastic is much worse than burning natural gas (and much much worse than any zero carbon source). Energy is fungible, there's no reason to encourage producing CO2 when it's possible not to.
  - ars 4y ago
    > CO2 per unit energy burning plastic is much worse than burning natural gas That is simply not true. Polyethylene (the most common plastic) is C2H4, while natural gas is a mix ranging from CH4 to C3H8. i.e. almost identical in terms of CO2. Plastic is actually better in some ways since you don't need to spend energy a second time to extract even more oil from the ground, you can just burn what you already have. Plus the world does not burn exclusively natural gas, not even close. > when it's possible not to. As should be pretty obvious the idea is you don't burn some other oil, and instead burn plastic. When we are 100% off of oil/coal/etc we can stop burning plastic, but right now, today, burning plastic is the best option. Burning plastic is not going to magically cause extra CO2 emissions, it would simply substitute one for another, with total amount unchanged.

ars 4y ago

This is supposed to be a surprise? It's very simple: If you have to pay to recycle things, it's a failure. If they pay you, it works. China used to buy plastic recycling from the US (it was never just shipped for disposal, China actually paid for it). For a while they actually wanted it because they could use it to make new stuff. But it become uneconomical (too labor intensive), and they stopped. Metal: You have people hunting for metal, and going through bins for it. i.e. it's good to recycle. Cardboard: Same thing. Everything else? Don't recycle it. Burn the plastic for energy, and bury everything else. Sweden actually buys garbage from other countries to burn for energy. Since they are paying for the item, this works just fine.

vegetable 4y ago
Some more relevant information in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXRtNwUju5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXRtNwUju5g Wendover Productions - How China broke the world's recycling
Dylan16807 4y ago
Do you mean: if I need to pay but don't pay? I don't see why paying wouldn't work.

rjh29 4y ago

In the UK too there's been a lot of news on this: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/17/uk-plastics-sent-for-recycling-in-turkey-dumped-and-burned-greenpeace-finds https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/17/uk-plast... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/may/16/uk-ewaste-dumped-ghana https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/may/16/uk-ewast... https://www.greenpeace.org/africa/en/blogs/11125/africas-exploding-plastic-nightmare/ https://www.greenpeace.org/africa/en/blogs/11125/africas-exp... Basically recycling companies pay to export the waste to poor countries who simply dump or burn it instead of recycling it. For this reason I avoid plastic and stick to cardboard, glass and aluminium. Fortunately plastic is extremely unfashionable in the UK right now and products are increasingly switching to card or aluminium instead.

legitster 4y ago

If only! Western landfills are amazing technology that affordably and safely lock away garbage. Most of the land can be reclaimed for parks or golf courses or other public spaces. Recycling programs often end in plastics being sent to Asian landfills which are little more than open dumps susceptible to rain, flooding, and contributing to the Pacific garbage patch.

freedomben 4y ago
I'd be very interested in a source to read/watch/learn more about landfill tech if anybody knows of a good one
- kfarr 4y ago
  Also interested if there is any recent work on micro reclamation of discarded high value materials. Probably drinking too much sci Fi cool aid but seems like landfills may someday be a treasure for mining once the tech is capable
  - Bedon292 4y ago
    The most valuable stuff in a landfill is probably aluminum, and based on some 2018 US numbers [1] estimated 1.8% of the mass of the landfill. Would need to dig through ~55.5 tonnes in an ideal scenario to get a tonne. Assuming you can sort it on site you still need to transport it to a facility. Process it and melt it back down into a usable form before selling it. Oh and there are various alloys that you probably have to figure out sorting between as well. At around $2200 / tonne right now. I just don't see the economics working out. Perhaps in an older landfill it could be denser, and maybe it could be easier to sort after other materials have started to break down. Still doubt it would be very economical yet. But I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes economical someday. I do wonder if it may be possible to sort more of the aluminum out on its way in to the landfill rather than trying to do it after the fact. It was something like $6B worth of aluminum landfilled based on the 2018 numbers. I was also curious about separating efficiently and went down a rabbit hole on Eddy Current Separators. High speed rotating alternating magnets I guess can influence non-ferrous materials like aluminum. [2] [1] https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/aluminum-material-specific-data https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiehuIugYE0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiehuIugYE0

olivermarks 4y ago

The Chinese used practically slave labour to sift through US garbage before they ended the imports. 'Recycling' was a euphemism for offshoring garbage whether plastic bottles or solar panels, but now the Chinese have tightened their standards. 2017 film 'Plastic China' trailer https://youtu.be/jnNNnHTLjmg https://youtu.be/jnNNnHTLjmg

gruez 4y ago
>The Chinese used practically slave labour to sift through US garbage before they ended the imports Are we talking about actual slavery, or run of the mill "developing country with poor labor standards"?
- otikik 4y ago
  The US doesn't have great labor standards either. ~800000 US citizens are slaves in all but name. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/27/slavery-loophole-unpaid-labor-in-prisons https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/27/slavery-loop...
- rootw0rm 4y ago
  China does indeed have poor labor standards. However, Chinese factories aren't really forced to uphold their minimal standards. Here's an article from a week ago: https://www.thecut.com/2022/10/shein-is-treating-workers-even-worse-than-you-thought.html https://www.thecut.com/2022/10/shein-is-treating-workers-eve...

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

Lots of talk about blaming recycling programs. But the OP as I understand it, shows that people are not even bothering to put but 5% of their plastic in the recycle bin to begin with!

nickpinkston 4y ago

Friendly reminder that modern, well regulated landfills are actually fine and there is plenty of space for them. Also, most of the ocean plastic comes from a small number of rivers in the less developed world. [1] Rich countries aren't really the problem. While we should try to reduce waste as much as possible. This is far more effective at the front end of the process when they're designed and produced, the vast amount of carbon is from direct carbon from production and follow on carbon from the carbon intensity of the products under use. [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic-tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plas...

kylehotchkiss 4y ago
Since you mention it, there's a surprising effort to remove plastic from the ocean too: https://theoceancleanup.com/updates/first-100000-kg-removed-from-the-great-pacific-garbage-patch/ https://theoceancleanup.com/updates/first-100000-kg-removed-... It's definitely a drop in the bucket, but a nice improvement over the we-can't-do-anything attitude previously on the pacific garbage patch
acchow 4y ago
> well regulated landfills are actually fine and there is plenty of space for them. On the other hand, a quick Google search turns up quotes like "the US is on pace to run out of room in landfills within 18 years" https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/us-landfills-are-filling-up/ https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/us-landfills-are-fi... So which is it?
- Baader-Meinhof 4y ago
  I think that is just referring to the existing landfills. We can/do build new landfills all the time. And there is no shortage of unused space for new landfills.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    Exactly. We can build the next one next to your home.

celestialcheese 4y ago

"Operation National Sword" or "Green Sword"[1] from China in 2017 killed most recycling in North America and Europe. But no municipalities or governments wanted to acknowledge it because they spent decades training the population that recycling is important and they didn't want to undo those years of hard work. It's only been in the last year that things are sort of coming back, but landfilling happens for almost all plastics and paper products, unless your muni does multi-bin sorting and not single-stream. Now that petroleum is more expensive, maybe plastic recycling will make a resurgence, but I'm not holding my breath. Recycling boils down to a really really really big and messy sorting problem, and hopefully someone clever can come up with 0-marginal effort waste bins that handle the sorting so Americans can remain lazy and provide a pre-sorted pickup for recyclers. Multi-stream recycling at the source yields the lowest contamination and best recapture rates for material. [2]. The single-stream wave worked when china bought everything, but now that material quality matters, the volume benefits from single-stream are now a liability. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_National_Sword https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_National_Sword 2 - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-era-of-easy-recycling-may-be-coming-to-an-end/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-era-of-easy-recycli...

mwint 4y ago
Huh, this is an interesting question I’ve never thought of: Why wouldn’t it always be more efficient to do single-stream recycling, with giant blue bins for people to throw recyclable stuff in, and have manual sorting at facilities? If the answer is “too expensive to pay people to sort”, then maybe I’d argue that recycling is a terrible economic idea: isn’t it certainly more expensive in lost productivity for untrained people to puzzle over bin types, than for trained people to sort after that fact?
- nico 4y ago
  On the same line, isn’t it also more expensive for humanity as a whole to keep throwing stuff away just to make and buy more?
  - 4y ago

anm89 4y ago

Throw your plastics directly in the trash. This way you will be honest with yourself about where your plastic is going and maybe use marginally less. The truth is though that if you aren't growing your own food and making your own household items, you are pretty much signed up to create large volumes of plastic waste in a way that is mostly out of your control.

mrinterweb 4y ago

Placing blame and responsibility on consumers to not purchase single-use plastic is not the right approach. Discouraging the use of single-use plastics should be done at government policy level to heavily tax the sale of single-use plastics, and subsidize sustainable alternatives.

swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
Prices may increase but imagine how much more competitive American or European manufacturing could be if the cheapest materials (and incidentally most environmentally harmful) were taxed appropriately. There’s a cycle of waste where cheap goods break but its okay because its cheap. Instead we could be making things that last.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  Building products that last as long as possible is a sure fire way to destroy your market. You can't both build things that can be infinitely fixable and sell a steady stream of them.
  - swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
    This is only true if you hold a monopoly on the market. Durability is a competitive advantage that businesses and individuals will often clamor for. It’s not easy to replicate
    - thrown_22 4y ago
      And yet no one is building durable products.
      - swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
        There’s plenty of manufacturing devoted to quality, but often are outcompeted by outsourced manufacturing using questionable labor and lacking environmental safeguards. Hence why I advocate for taxing plastics

opportune 4y ago

Just fucking throw it away. Why do we pay extra for the privilege of recycling something that is barely recyclable to begin with? Putting plastic in a landfill sequesters carbon, has less emissions in transportation, and doesn’t require paying people to sort it (ultimately born by us chumps paying extra to recycle it - if recycling were truly worth it, they’d be paying us to take it away, or at least discount our garbage service for separating out plastics). Landfills already have mitigations in place for groundwater contamination since landfills can have much more harmful things than micro plastics seep out of them. Not to mention all the micro labor involved in cleaning plastic, and in sorting it for people who aren’t lucky enough to have single stream recycling. Maybe it makes some people feel good but it seems like a distraction and waste of time just to make an unviable activity slightly more viable (if plastic recycling were actually viable this would be centralized since it’s more efficient). I completely support recycling for materials like aluminum and glass that make sense to recycle, but recycling plastic has never made sense economically, and putting it in a landfill isn’t that bad.

alistairSH 4y ago
Oddly, my county (Fairfax Co, VA) stopped collecting glass, but continues to collect plastic. IIRC, the problem was broken glass clogging up the sorting machinery. Anyways, I’d prefer we taxed the crap out of single-use packaging to properly account for the waste handling over time.
- enragedcacti 4y ago
  FWIW Fairfax now has purple bins scattered around for recycling glass, which then gets crushed up and used in place of fill gravel in county projects. It's a pain to drop it all off yourself but at least it is actually getting used. BTW I highly recommend wearing ear protection, it can be really loud dropping the glass into the container. https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/publicworks/recycling-trash/glass https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/publicworks/recycling-trash/gl...
- unnamed76ri 4y ago
  Taxing the crap out of anything to fix a problem means taking money from one group of people, losing 80% to gov bureaucracy, and giving the remaining 20% to someone else. Likely a campaign donor. When will people recognize that government is really really bad at solving problems. How is that war on drugs going anyway?

kylehotchkiss 4y ago

Keeping it isolated to its own landfill might prove better than mixing it if plastic eating bacteria tech continues to innovate: https://www.livescience.com/plastic-eating-bacteria https://www.livescience.com/plastic-eating-bacteria

insane_dreamer 4y ago

Just to be clear, it wasn't being recycled when we were shipping it to China either. It was just going into their landfills instead of our landfills. Recycling plastic is a non-solution to a much bigger problem: over-consumption of plastics. The only way I see forward is for governments to implement policies that discourage use of plastics by consumers and manufacturers. Some places have done this with plastic bags, but need to do it for plastic single-use bottles, etc.

diebeforei485 4y ago
There should be some sort of tax on plastic bottles with less than half gallon (~ 2 liters) of liquid in them.
- hinkley 4y ago
  The ghost of Wilford Brimley has entered the chat. Diabetus.
Baader-Meinhof 4y ago
Plastic bags are unfairly maligned: - They are often quite economically produced, and only require a small amount of plastic. - They are likely reused, often as trash can liners. - As long as we bury them in appropriate landfills, then the carbon in the bag goes back into the ground. (See other comments on the myth of landfill space running out.) - Manufacturing cloth tote bags has a carbon footprint 20,000 times higher than a plastic bag. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/24/style/cotton-totes-climate-crisis.amp.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/24/style/cotton-totes-climat... - Furthermore, cloth tote bags hold bacteria and are unhygienic for carrying groceries. Washing the bags cost electricity/water and probably not carbon neutral either.
- insane_dreamer 4y ago
  Some fair points. However, many (most?) reusable grocery bags these days are made from jute, or a mix of jute and cotton, not cotton. Jute is much more environmentally friendly than cotton, and it can be rough so minimally processed. We're not talking about those highly-processed fashion cotton bags (that don't really replace plastic bags). Some cloth bags are made with plastic, which is still better than single-use plastic bags (esp since one of those larger tote bags, like the kind at Trader Joe's replaces 4-5 of those plastic bags that supermarkets would bag your groceries in. It's also not about how much plastic is used to create the plastic bags, it's how much environmental pollution is created from the bags.

jrochkind1 4y ago

> In large part, that's due to the fact that China stopped importing plastic waste back in 2018, causing a massive pile up in western countries. I don't think so, I've seen reports that most plastic waste sent to China wound up in landfills or incinerators too. So it's actually probably a net improvement to not spend all that energy sending it 7000 miles to China to put it in a landfill. It's been a fiction all along, we just paid China to make it easier for us to pull the wool over our own eyes. Or, even more cycnically, to get it into their landfills or incinerated air pollution instead of ours.

jh00ker 4y ago

This is so disheartening. I subscribed to and helped perpetuate The Lie. Damn. While we're on this topic, does anyone have info regarding what happens to the plastic bags I return to my local (CA, US) grocery store collection bin? Are they part of a separate stream? I add all sorts of used plastic bags to that bin (thin produce bags, the more heavy-duty grocery bags, Amazon padded shipping envelopes, deflated shipping air bags, clean zip lock bags, etc.). I also wonder if I'm gumming up the works by putting different types of plastic bags in the bin because most bags don't have recycle markings/numbers.

NickRandom 4y ago
Sadly, almost certainly. The results of your action is that the entire load is rejected as mixed waste and sent to landfill rather than being able to be recycled so although your intentions are good, the end result is far worse than if you didn't do it all.
Bedon292 4y ago
Yes, thin plastic bags are very bad for typical processing machines. They take them at grocery stores so they can be a different stream. Although I have my doubts that much recycling is actually done with them there too. Putting things in recycling that aren't explicitly accepted by your local facility is bad. Never put things in that aren't marked, and definitely not thin unmarked stuff. It increase the costs by gumming up processing equipment if they try to do something with it. And likely does just shunt the whole section over to the landfill. Although most of the stuff probably ends up there anyways. Same thing with greasy pizza boxes, they just taint the load.

not2b 4y ago

The article is specifically about plastic waste. A considerably higher proportion of glass, metal, and paper is successfully recycled, not all of it, but value is extracted and reused.

Ptchd 4y ago
Do you really save energy by recycling paper?

greggeter 4y ago

js2 4y ago

Concurrent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33314434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33314434

userbinator 4y ago

I wonder how long it will be until landfills become valuable mines. A lot of materials in them may certainly be reused again in the future. After all, everything is "recycling" on a long-enough timescale... and the fact that the stuff in landfills has already been processed once may be advantageous from the perspective of needing less processing when it's mined again, compared to something like crude oil.

fencepost 4y ago

It's not shocking if you understand some of what's involved. For glass, there are lots of different chemical compositions related to color, hardness and other physical and chemical properties, plus all the contamination with other materials like labels. You can't just throw it all into a big furnace and get anything except low quality glass with inclusions - and there's no market for that. Heck, ask glass blowers what COE they use and if you can bring your own colors in. Paper has a lot of the same issue, cleaning it isn't worth what you can get from it. I would guess that we might see an increase in some sort of biological breakdown of it in the future, BUT that might end up releasing a lot more carbon than simply sequestering it in landfills. I suspect that we'll see big improvement in plastics in the coming decades with better breakdown and separation options, but even there contamination will be a big problem. Metals are about the only thing really practical to recycle, at least given current prices for them.

pfdietz 4y ago
Here's a 12 minute walk through a glass recycling facility and a nearby facility that turns the cullet into blow-in fiberglass insulation. Quite interesting. There's an optical sorter that excludes brown glass and ceramic pieces. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR9FtWVjk2c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR9FtWVjk2c
- fencepost 4y ago
  Nice and informative video! My exposure to glass has mostly been working with someone doing glass blowing and hot glass work, so even the clean cullet from the recycling process would likely not be good enough there - it needs basically zero contaminants, because just one or two little dark spots in the clear part of a paperweight can be a problem.

keepquestioning 4y ago

Why can't we burn plastic for energy?

_carbyau_ 4y ago

We've recently had another bin added for compost. Now it's Recycle, Compost, Garbage. This upset me so much as it is very clear that there is no mature recycling industry and it's getting worse. A mature recycling industry could just take "rubbish" as a single output, sort it efficiently and get on with things. Get money for taking your rubbish. Get money for selling recycled output. Everyone has experienced the "outsource it to the masses so we don't have to cover the expense of doing it". What happened to "efficiency of expertise" and "economies of scale" ?

ROTMetro 4y ago

Fun fact. The recycling plant I worked at would buy and mix in new cardboard with our recycled cardboard because we couldn't get the contamination rate to an acceptable level without blending.

pfdietz 4y ago

When we get off of fossil fuels, the economy will have a shortage of cheap reduced carbon. At that point, plastic can be recycled not as plastic, but as a carbon source. It'll be vigorously thermally processed to get small molecules out that can be dealt with like fossil fuels currently are.

pencilguin 4y ago

I used to think that failing to recycle plastic was fine, because plastic in landfills is carbon sequestered. If not made into plastic, that same carbon would be burned and enter the atmosphere. Then I found out that, for each carbon bound up in a piece of plastic, a half-dozen are released to the atmosphere in doing that. Thus, for each bit of plastic not recycled, so much more is made from scratch, and that much more CO2 enters the atmosphere. (Presumably, recycling involves energetic processing, but less.) In the future, when the energy used in processing comes more from renewables, will balances shift? Shale oil, by the way, is equally evil. For each carbon extracted and delivered, four or five are burnt in extracting it.

Trias11 4y ago

I wonder if truth about recycling is such a politically incorrect subject similar to profiling of a typical criminal in a specific city/state?

iancmceachern 4y ago

Moat of plastic recycling is focused on heating up and melting down thermoplastics. I've been wondering if there is another way. Like dissolving the plastics into solvents, then distilling and separating the different compounds in the solution, then pull out thr solvents in a recoverable way, then one would be left with pure compounds. It seems like the science and tech for this exists now, we just need to industrialized it and make it profitable to do so. Not unlike distilling organic compounds like we do today on a commercial scale.

pabs3 4y ago

Perhaps we should require all manufacturers of physical products to have cradle-to-grave lifecycle planning for their products. The supermarket should accept discarded containers from consumers, the tomato soup company should accept discarded cans from supermarkets and the can manufacturers should accept discarded cans from them. Pretty soon you will have reusable containers for almost everything.

tb_technical 4y ago

The only way to improve this metric is to subsidize green recycling industries, and to provide abundant and cheap energy for the process to occur.