18 ms·

Amazon packages burn in India, final stop in broken recycling system

252 points by haltingproblem 4y ago

oftenwrong 4y ago
If we cannot find a way to dispose of plastic without damaging people and the environment, perhaps we should stop producing it.
- Freak_NL 4y ago
  And bring the global economy to an instant standstill? No government is going to enact such a policy, no matter how environmentally friendly its politicians are; certainly not the ones running countries that produce plastic stuff.
  - forinti 4y ago
    We should at the very least stop producing and transporting around the globe useless items such as a plastic tree imported from China I saw on sale in Brazil. A plastic tree in Brazil that came all the way from China! It's surreal.
  - tehjoker 4y ago
    It would be nice to have an earth that supports human life for more than one or two more lifetimes.
    - endisneigh 4y ago
      I assure you even if we were to continue in our current trajectory the Earth would support human life for more than two lifetimes. This is not to say that we shouldn't stop wasting, but let's not exaggerate. That being said the Earth definitely will become less comfortable if we don't put a pin on some of this stuff.
      - TeMPOraL 4y ago
        Conversely, were the global economy collapse completely, Earth will barely support human life for even one lifetime. Obligatory reminder: unless you're Sentinelese, it's highly unlikely you or your community is actually self-sufficient. For most people, everything they eat, everything they wear, everything they live in and live with, is a product of, or is directly dependent on, international manufacturing and shipping. If that goes, billions of people starve.
    - Freak_NL 4y ago
      Of course. But that doesn't change the fact that stopping the production of plastic crap within a few years is not an option beyond the hypothetical realm. Nor is convincing the majority of people to stop buying all that crap simply on the basis of a moral plea. Pricing in externalities might work eventually (and will take a few decades to realize at any significant scale).
- josephcsible 4y ago
  I've been seeing ideas like this a lot lately and I really don't like them. If something that's been in widespread use for decades is bad for the environment, come up with a better alternative first, and only then stop producing the old thing.
  - oftenwrong 4y ago
    Would you say the same if your home was coated in black plastic soot? Why should we hold course after mere decades of turning a blind eye toward the consequences of our lifestyle? Plastic pollution was not a problem for millennia. You come up with a better alternative to that.
    - AussieWog93 4y ago
      I would rather have a home covered in black soot than the entire planet turned into a hyper-authoritaritan nightmare state just to reduce plastic waste.
- lebski88 4y ago
  One of the interesting things I found in this article is that I had no idea what the plastic amazon pouches they kept talking about actually were. Here in the UK amazon ship everything in recycled cardboard. Presumably that's from either environmental pressure of government legislation. Even the tape is paper.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
    Might also be because it's cheaper to ship rectangular boxes than bags here.
ars 4y ago
This headline is the definition of clickbait. And the entire article is clickbait too. Article has nothing to do with Amazon it's about recycling. And they're not burning packages they are burning a small amount of plastic contamination mixed into paper recycling.
- Freak_NL 4y ago
  If you reread the article you'll find that this is not about burning a small amount of plastic contamination. > India may be bringing in as much as 500,000 tons of plastic waste hidden within paper shipments annually, according to a government environmental body that estimated the level of contamination at 5%.
  - ars 4y ago
    I did read the article, and I consider 5% a small amount. The plastic is being burned for energy, which is the best way to handle plastic. The only real issue this article raised is the poor quality incinerators, that don't do a good enough job of burning the plastic. I call this article click bait because they spend way way too long on utterly irrelevant stuff, and the only important part is 2 sentences.
Freak_NL 4y ago
A Dutch newspaper wrote a depressing article¹ two years ago in a similar vain about plastic from the Netherlands ending up in Türkiye for 'recycling'. The same story, just different countries. There are a lot of actors pushing for municipalities to collect plastic separately (like paper and glass), but stories like these make you wonder if that even makes sense at this point. 1: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2020/10/16/plastic-afval-hoe-een-nederlands-dropzakje-kon-eindigen-in-een-turkse-berm-a4016112 https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2020/10/16/plastic-afval-hoe-een-n...
- atonse 4y ago
  Yeah this is what’s bothering about these articles (common at least in American journalism) that condescendingly talk about issues in third world countries that are as bad in the US. Not that we shouldn’t identify these things. But the issue is often not quite related to the country, but a larger issue. As others have pointed out, for whatever reason, plastic is difficult to recycle and through deception, we’ve been sold the idea that it can be recycled. The most promising stuff I’ve seen is waste to energy (basically, burn the stuff). As long as we can effectively capture the emitted toxins from burning the plastic, then it seems like a pretty good system. And some countries have already been doing this.
sjellen 4y ago
In what is about to become the year 2023, the most effective way of recycling is to limit your purchases altogether. Some day go through your Amazon purchase history for the last decade and see how much absolute garbage purchases you made. Resist buying stuff you don't really need. Can you repurpose an item? Then turn to the recycling industry and maybe it will find a way back. Resist > Reuse > Recycle
- CamelCaseName 4y ago
  Slightly tangential, but for the past few weeks I've been actively eating less by deciding what I want to eat, and then ordering / making a slightly smaller portion. I imagine you could apply the same thinking to shopping. Before checking out, pick one or two items to cancel or leave to the next purchase, or choose a smaller size. Sometimes it costs a little more per unit, but the upside is you consume less.
- akira2501 4y ago
  > the most effective way of recycling is to limit your purchases altogether. This has always been true. There's just been a lot of "feel good" marketing around this point to beguile the market out of this rather common sense in the past few decades. > Then turn to the recycling industry and maybe it will find a way back. Putting my curmudgeon hat on for a second, I remember a time when we used to make products with high enough quality and durability that they would either last nearly a lifetime or get repaired when they didn't.
  - dendrite9 4y ago
    I'd bet many of the older things were also disposable but the ones that lasted stick in the mind more. But absolutely we also moved towards less and less repairability in how things are assembled. Adhesives or plastic welding vs rivets and screws. I'm afraid I am not good at thinking about the question well, but is it better to have lighter cars that need less metal but in exchange they are less repairable? I get tied up in defining the bounds of the question so I never have a satisfactory answer. A lot of the money in tech seems to be tied to the same marketing, convincing people to consume. The greenwashing is a problem as well, although I wish I weren't so cynical when I see a company trying to do better so often it seems to read as "We're making our X more green and efficient, so buy more of them" I was swimming in a lake this summer with a friend involved in marketing when he made a comment about what happens when they run out of people's attention seconds. Do we make more, fight harder to retain attention, die?, or is there another solution.
treis 4y ago
I think it's become apparent that the whole recycling concept is misguided. There's just not enough economic value in these materials to justify the socialized cost. It's better to dump the waste into proper landfills. Ultimately environmental impact is mostly about CO2 release these days. We're not running out of most of these raw materials. And for the one big one we are (oil) having it end up buried in a landfill is about the best realistic option we have today.
- stainablesteel 4y ago
  We're not close to running out of oil yet, although saudi arabia is.
  - Mystery-Machine 4y ago
    Do you have any source for that claim?
    - stainablesteel 4y ago
      this guy did a nice video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIxCIAAJpP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIxCIAAJpP4
- tehjoker 4y ago
  This is not correct at all. Environmental scientists are developing a more sophisticated framework to describe the safe operating envelope for humans and it includes plastic and novel entities. https://ikhapp.org/stories-and-research-brief/defining-the-risk-presented-by-novel-entities-how-plastic-and-chemicals-affect-earth-system-integrity/ https://ikhapp.org/stories-and-research-brief/defining-the-r...
  - treis 4y ago
    This is a poor low effort post that does not directly address anything I've said.
- 4y ago
marze 4y ago
Plastic doesn't recycle, at a practical scale. I like the idea of developing garbage burning plants with superb emission control, and burning it all locally. As well as reducing plastic usage in low value applications. It is sad, all the plastic litter in the world.
- stronglikedan 4y ago
  > Plastic doesn't recycle, at a practical scale. An waste industry buddy of mine designs landfills, and this is his take too. It's better to throw your plastic into regular trash (and other recyclables into the recycle bin), because then you at least know it's likely to end up in a landfill where it's safe, instead of being exported and dumped in the sea.
  - BurningFrog 4y ago
    The landfill is also functionally carbon sequestration.
    - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      Landfills are a large source of GHG emissions, especially in the long term.
      - LarryMullins 4y ago
        Stable plastics probably don't account for much of that. The methane gas comes from food waste/etc rotting.
        mjevans 4y ago
        Which is why it pains me so much that my municipality doesn't include (at least a household food scrap sized) compost bin with standard garbage service. They only offer a giant and expensive yard-waste bin.
altairprime 4y ago
Does Amazon declare the financial and legal risks of externalizing the disposal costs of their plastic- and styrofoam-based (and cardboard!) packaging onto municipal recycling and waste processing? For example: what would it cost Amazon if they were charged a recycling fee for all single-use packaging by the state California?
- fullsend 4y ago
  Probably crippling for them. The scale of materials they use must be astronomical and their retail business has thin margins.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  I can declare it for them: $0. The garbage collection people take the trash from Amazon's customers, rather than Amazon.
- ars 4y ago
  > For example: what would it cost Amazon if they were charged a recycling fee for all single-use packaging by the state California? The bigger question is what would it cost the planet. For Amazon to collect and recycle the packages, rather than the local municipality, would enormously increase the amount of emissions created. You would be making things much much much worse.
  - altairprime 4y ago
    For Amazon to be forced to charge to the customer a small fee for each package shipped, modeled after the electronics recycling fee that California requires to be charged and disclosed at time of purchase, would create a financial risk to their revenue stream, by forcing Amazon to charge customers a fee for every different box and bag used — not to mention compelling customers to use the “reduce number of boxes” option by default, which forces Amazon to absorb the consolidation cost previous externalized by cheap shipping from multiple depots back into their logistics chain. Given only this one example, do those risks reach the levels of potential impact necessary to compel its disclosure in public filings? Are there other examples?
mikeweiss 4y ago
It's past time for state and local government to require large online retailers such as Amazon to provide a means of collecting shipping materials for recycling and reuse... This segment of our economy badly needs some gov regulation... For the sake of the planet
- ars 4y ago
  There is a way, that's the point of the entire article. They put it in the recycling. If you are suggesting shipping the stuff back to Amazon, you should think about that a bit more - the amount of energy you'll use to ship it is an order of magnitude more than the amount you'll save. You would be harming the planet in order to make it seem like you did a good thing.
  - rendang 4y ago
    For at least some types of retail products, it seems like a system of standardized, reusable containers could be workable - the same Amazon, UPS, USPS delivery vans that bring a constant stream of packages to my apartment building could collect and return them without much additional energy expenditure.
    - thomasjb 4y ago
      Possibly using something comparable to the German Flaschenpfand[1] system? I'm unsure of how to develop a suitable packing system that would be machine-friendly, possibly wooden crates packed with shredded cardboard packing. The lid could be press-in cardboard, something like that used in tinfoil food storage boxes, but reliant on the cardboard bending to get past the lip and into the region where it is secured. Alternately, a suitable slide-in wooden lid with a stopping peg inserted and sealed with a wax-type substance could be used (as per [2], with the addition of a sealing peg setup). Sealing wax would probably be used in the cardboard variant also. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaschenpfand https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaschenpfand [2] https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wooden_Matchbox_E_Cafler_Collection_(48708126158).jpg https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wooden_Matchbox_E_...
- 4y ago
hyperpape 4y ago
The idea that we'll get Americans to properly dispose of plastic is not credible to me, without some kind of cultural shift that I don't expect (I'm aware that some other countries, perhaps Germany and Japan, are much more diligent about how you dispose of household waste). I've observed a number of people who haven't seemed to internalize the current rules about what can be recycled. People especially want to think that thin plastic bags can go in the recycling with everything else. I don't think people are going to move away from single-stream recycling, which appears to be a big part of the problem.
- wmf 4y ago
  The "proper" way to dispose of plastic is in the trash. We just need to admit this and get the message out.
  - hyperpape 4y ago
    I'm not completely sure, but I don't think that's true for plastic bottles. Maybe it's the best approach because it's simpler and people can adhere to it, but I think if you could get people to follow the rules, recycling bottles and throwing away thin plastic would be better.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- patja 4y ago
  Most telling is the person in the article with some experience working in the recycling industry who was ignorant of the fact that her curbside recycling program does not accept the blue and white Amazon mailers, nor did she know that the paper shipping label must be removed (often an impossible task without solvents or a lot of time and patience) prior to drop off at the supermarket collection bin.
- MockObject 4y ago
  I was a dutiful recycler until links here on HN taught me that plastic thrown in the main garbage stream would end up safely in a landfill, but 20% of recycled plastic ends up in the ocean!
satya71 4y ago
> There was no doubt in her mind: Smyla had put that envelope into her recycling bin. “That's polyethelene, and I'd recycle that. If it’s got the recycling symbol on it, into the bin it goes,” she says. “I get a lot of Amazon packages, and they all go into the bin, too.” This thanks to Big Oil. https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
- downrightmike 4y ago
  And Big Plastic, consumer recycling was never designed to effectively recycle, it was designed to effectively get people to buy more plastic.
  - AceJohnny2 4y ago
    > it was designed to effectively get people to buy more plastic. I hate this kind of cynicism, because it's disempowering when the truth is so much more actionable. In reality, it was designed to be cheap and useful, and with the disposal costs handwaved [1] away. Plastic can be overcome by developing equally useful and cheap materials. [1] "handwaved" really understates the amount of effort that went into dealing with the disposal costs. You don't create national recycling programs and international standards by handwaving. But reality didn't pan out relative to the hopes.
    - downrightmike 4y ago
      https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
- sokoloff 4y ago
  > If it’s got the recycling symbol on it, into the bin it goes I wonder if she actually means the resin identification code (RIC) and is confusing that with a recycling symbol. (Edit to add: as in “this is recyclable in your particular blue bin”)
varelse 4y ago
[dead]
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Interesting that plastic bottles that get accidentally shipped to India are still worth extracting and recycling. > unmasked waste pickers sifted for metal cans or intact plastic bottles that could be sold The plastic they burn is envelopes made of soft plastic that have been incorrectly sorted by the recycling process and bundled with paper that they do actually want.
Scalene2 4y ago
So, in my city, there's a warehouse, they buy Amazon returns and surplus in bulk, every week on the same day, they fill shallow elevated bins ideal for picking through with the items. Day 1 everything is $25 an item, the price reduces each day until everything is $1 on day 7. It is a great low cost (it's actually profitable), probably profitable enough that if Amazon ran these themselves they could pay to process all the waste in an eco friendly way and not lose money.
- sargun 4y ago
  Where is this?
- polar8 4y ago
  Very cool, where is that?
  - malfist 4y ago
    Lots of places take Amazon returns and do something similar. There's an auction house near me that regularly auctions pallets of returns from amazon. A relative of mine used to run a store where she'd buy those pallets and repair the items and resale them. Usually most things are returned work fine, or are missing something you could get from lowes. Amazon doesn't test a lot of their returns and they get sent out like that. Bargain Hunt's business model is entirely reselling amazon returns.
WeylandYutani 4y ago
https://www.hrw.org/report/2022/09/21/its-if-theyre-poisoning-us/health-impacts-plastic-recycling-turkey https://www.hrw.org/report/2022/09/21/its-if-theyre-poisonin... I would prefer a system were each country cleans up their own mess but robots are more expensive than people.
disqard 4y ago
Does anyone here have any experience with Ridwell? They claim to collect and recycle hard-to-recycle materials, like the bags potato chips come in.
- daxfohl 4y ago
  My partner signed us up. I'm skeptical. My understanding is they don't really know what to do with it but are trying various things. So not recycling per se, but using the scraps for other purposes, similar to how shredded tires can be used in playgrounds. I haven't heard anything great yet coming out of it though; there's simply not much you can do with bits of plastic that you can't do better and cheaper with something else, and the supply is always going to grossly outweigh any demand. My guess is it's just an expensive roundabout way to get to a landfill. I hope I'm wrong.
  - disqard 4y ago
    We're in the same boat, in many aspects. Thanks for sharing your perspective!
ENOTTY 4y ago
> Laurie Smyla, a 73-year-old retiree from Sloatsburg, New York [...] Smyla has a degree in environmental science and even served as coordinator for the local recycling program in the late 1980s, as she explains when reached by phone. She was able to quickly identify the envelope as polyethylene, the most common type of plastic. I gotta wonder, how many people did the reporters have to contact before finding the perfect subject to put a human angle on this part of the story. Kudos to them for doing the legwork
broooder 4y ago
I am trying to start a local 3D printing business, where a lot of basic parts or things people need can be made locally with Amazon style 2-day delivery. The order just goes to someone in your area who is certified to make stuff. I think this could massively help our global logistics and waste problems, and be a boon to local economies. https://HeyRobot.org https://HeyRobot.org Please get in touch if anyone is interested in joining in this project. I work on it nights and weekends… No VCs, just me and some friends coding.
andrewstuart 4y ago
I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about “plastic roads”. Many countries, desperate to make use of the gargantuan flow of waste plastic, and desperate to avoid it going into landfill, are putting the waste plastic into roads. This is called “recycling”. Sounds like a great idea until you realize that cars and trucks drive on the roads and grind them into dust - dust containing microplastics. The microplastic dust will go into air, waterways, rivers, oceans, food, plants animals and people. All this is because the environmentalists have decided that “keeping plastics out of landfill” is more important than anything. Plastic roads are an environmental disaster in an epic scale being created in the name of “recycling”. The worst thing is that for some reason it’s not obvious that this is a disastrous idea, and all around the world people are breathlessly talking up plastic roads like its a solution to the plastic waste problem. “In 2015, the Indian government made it mandatory for plastic waste to be used in constructing roads near large cities of more than 500,000 people” https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210302-could-plastic-roads-make-for-a-smoother-ride https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210302-could-plastic-ro... Mandated madness. The safest place for the fire hydrant of waste plastic is in landfill, not “recycled” into microplastic dust. Would you like a plastic road outside your house, or outside your kids school?
- malandrew 4y ago
  What if you use the plastic as a foundation or filler covered by a layer of asphalt?just curious if it’s possible to elongate the plastic tire interface and eliminate pulverization
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    Yeah, the dust coming off of roads is from the vulcanized rubber tires, not so much the asphalt itself.
    - atombender 4y ago
      Asphalt is in fact a substantial source of pollutants: https://news.yale.edu/2020/09/02/asphalt-adds-air-pollution-especially-hot-sunny-days https://news.yale.edu/2020/09/02/asphalt-adds-air-pollution-....
neonate 4y ago
https://archive.ph/O1iGo https://archive.ph/O1iGo
amriksohata 4y ago
The opposition parties in India like AAP and Congress are also playing a dirty game as they have investment in some of these companies, instead they blame random one off days like Diwali for fireworks to take the attention off this plastic and crop stubble burning
- rand0mx1 4y ago
  you failed to mention the real culprit.
  - amriksohata 4y ago
    The real culprits are those who take attention off the real issues and just blame Diwali or one off festival days. Entire days and weeks of meat eating and fattening animals for meat is one of the real culprits of damage to the climate.
danielodievich 4y ago
A friend of mine had this boyfriend once who ran a business that used recycled glass. Something to do with producing high quality sand for filtration systems and some other interesting processes (can't remember exactly what it was anymore bummer). The sand was made out of ground glass from wine bottles. As he told me, his process required just the right kind of glass and it had to be very, very clean. There was substantial investment into washing and label removal, to produce the right inputs. He said it was barely worthwhile, and he said that most plastic and even glass recyclables are just too dirty and too mixed up for it to be worthwhile. Al and Fe cans and Cu wire on other hand are absolutely a go.
mumblemumble 4y ago
I am increasingly coming to wonder if the non-biodegradability of plastic should be regarded as a feature rather than a bug. This stuff is made of oil. The last thing we want to do with oil, from an environmental standpoint, is turn it into greenhouse gases. The best way to accomplish that would be to leave it underground. Since we're not doing that, perhaps the second best thing is to convert it into a solid material and then put it back underground. It seems like landfills are our chance at keeping this stuff reasonably contained, and, in that setting, the fact that it lasts forever hopefully means that this carbon we dug up from underground won't end up in the atmosphere quite so quickly. All other options seem to ultimately lead toward large-scale greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution and water pollution. Recycling seems to be, at best, a more scenic route to that same destination.
- andrewstuart 4y ago
  “Keeping plastic out of landfill” has become the goal of environmentalists. But why? Waste plastic belongs in landfill. It’s crazy to try to address the plastic waste problem by keeping it in the environment, as though “it’s useful so it’s OK” makes sense. Just dispose of it safely.
  - mumblemumble 4y ago
    I don't know about "has become". I've known it to be the goal as far back as the 1980s. (Anything before then is before I started forming memories.) I think it probably comes from the same place as organic food and suchlike: a conflation of "more natural" with "better for the environment." They're not necessarily the same thing, and we're finding increasingly many situations where doing things in a "more natural" way is actually pretty terrible for the earth's ecosystems when seven billion humans are trying to do it at a planetary scale.
  - deadbunny 4y ago
    > But why? Because plastic producing companies have spent the last 40 years and a lot of money telling us that plastics are good "because they can be recycled" while not recycling and not addressing the very real problems caused by plastics because profit. https://www.dailyimpact.net/2020/11/24/the-second-biggest-scam-ever-plastic-recycling/ https://www.dailyimpact.net/2020/11/24/the-second-biggest-sc...
userbinator 4y ago
She was able to quickly identify the envelope as polyethylene, the most common type of plastic. PE burns much cleaner than coal, and probably paper too. Burning plastic releases a slew of toxins into the air, including dioxins, furans, mercury and other emissions that threaten the health of people, animals and vegetation, according to multiple studies. Unless they're somehow burning lots of chlorinated/fluorinated stuff (which is almost certainly not being used for much in the way of packaging, simply because those plastics are so much more expensive), that's just fearmongering. ...and mercury? WTF. That's where I stopped reading the article because it stopped making sense. Combustion certainly can't transmute elements, and mercury wouldn't be present unless they're burning something else... ...like coal, which does contain mercury as a significant impurity.
- jlund-molfese 4y ago
  Good point! It seems like part of the article was incompletely plagiarized from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187802961630158X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187802961... Incineration of plastic waste in an open field is a major source of air pollution. Most of the times, the Municipal Solid Waste containing about 12% of plastics is burnt, releasing toxic gases like Dioxins, Furans, Mercury and Polychlorinated Biphenyls into the atmosphere. Further, burning of Poly Vinyl Chloride liberates hazardous halogens and pollutes air, the impact of which is climate change. The toxic substances thus released are posing a threat to vegetation, human and animal health and environment as a whole. So if the study is on municipal solid waste overall, being burned in a pit, it's probably not very relevant to burning plastics by themselves. Municipal waste contains all sorts of things you wouldn't want to burn, like phones, batteries, fluorescent light bulbs etc.
  - userbinator 4y ago
    Is that really saying burning chlorinated plastics --- in particular --- causes climate change? That whole quote reads so oddly it's like it was written by a bot.
  - avg_dev 4y ago
    Thank you both for this note. It helps me remember to practice skepticism in all things. I believe I still identify strongly with the article and I believe that it is easy for consumers like me to forget that my purchasing actions have many consequences like children and people getting sick because of the plastic waste burning as a result of a recycling program that is largely bs. But that doesn’t mean I am right, and I feel that it is quite important for me to realize that my sources of information are largely imperfect, often with huge biases present in them.
diebeforei485 4y ago
Soft plastics haven't been recycled in a long time. I trash those.
srinathkrishna 4y ago
This was quite hard hitting. I mean, if you're a consumer in the US where even a simple piece of fruit comes packaged often in plastic, you know the piece of plastic isn't going to be completely recycled. I always thought this ends up in a landfill which is bad in itself! There have been a few other outlets that have focused on this problem in the past. John Oliver did a segment too. Are there any startups working in this space? Incineration is quite bad if the fumes aren't contained - is there research happening in controlling/eliminating toxins even if incineration is done?
- Supermancho 4y ago
  > This was quite hard hitting. This has been the reality since (just after) the onset of the recycle narrative took off. Noise is made, action never taken. The news outlets that show the horrific fatal diseases that children (with no other income) acquire through the scavenging has been a slow news day story for decades. See youtube - children, scavenge, dump. Anyone who sees the horrific waste of child-serving-sized coke plastic bottles, held together by more plastic, for 8$ at Target^ should be disgusted by the unavoidable sins of the US capitalist culture. ^You can get glass bottles held together by cardboard for slightly less, not that I'm advocating this purchase either.
miked85 4y ago
"recycling" is mostly an illusion
koopuluri 4y ago
This is just sad. I live in an Indian metro, in an upper middle class neighborhood, and recently saw a pile of plastic burning on the side of our street. This happens infrequently (handful of times in a year), but only because of the pressure from the residents here who can afford to apply power to push it out of our neighborhood. The smoke is dense, white and spreads quickly. It has a strong smell to it and quickly seeps into adjacent homes (which are 5 storied apartment buildings, so it reaches a lot of people). It gives me a headache that lasts for at least a couple of hours. I can't even imagine what it would be like to live in Muzaffarnagar (city from article) next to one of these plastic burning facilities if one small pile on my street had such a big impact on my family's wellbeing. > Around Muzaffarnagar, respiratory problems such as asthma and bronchitis along with eye infections associated with air pollution and the burning of plastic are on the rise, up as much as 30% over the last few years, according to Muzaffarnagar’s chief medical officer. Mainstream narrative over-indexes on long-term impact of global warming vs. the shorter term health impacts of pollution. This makes sense: when developed countries dictate global media narrative, they're not going to focus on the pollution aspect much because it doesn't impact them in a tangible, day-to-day basis. But the immediate health impact is a stronger narrative: there are people who are impacted by it every day and are dying. It has a face to it. We need a lot more coverage on this front. Grateful for this article.
milleramp 4y ago
We should be saving this stuff in a safe large landfill here in the states. With improvements in recycling economy, perhaps in 25years a large plastic landfill would worth an lot of money. Trash futures anyone?
ngoilapites 4y ago
Please could someone provide a reliable source of what happens to recycling by material and country?
welder 4y ago
Burning waste correctly is actually a really good way to recycle. For example, Vienna incinerates it's garbage and plastic to provide heating for almost half the city. The emissions from burning 1 persons yearly garbage is estimated It's estimated that incinerating the entire annual waste for one person in Vienna produces the same carbon emissions as driving a car 100 km. [0] [0] https://youtu.be/Ml0gXre_V-U?t=80 https://youtu.be/Ml0gXre_V-U?t=80
voidee 4y ago
I ordered a small item from Amazon about a few months ago and it came in a paper envelope which was light weight but padded with a corrugated paper mesh which was not rigid like cardboard. At the time I thought, “This is the perfect replacement for those plastic blue and white envelopes!” But every small item since then has been shipped in the standard plastic envelopes. I don’t know what it would take to change all to these soft paper envelopes. If all retailers changed to these, it would be so much easier to recycle.
snambi 4y ago
Amazon is highly irresponsible company. It wastes so much packaging for each shipment.

If we cannot find a way to dispose of plastic without damaging people and the environment, perhaps we should stop producing it.

Freak_NL 4y ago
And bring the global economy to an instant standstill? No government is going to enact such a policy, no matter how environmentally friendly its politicians are; certainly not the ones running countries that produce plastic stuff.
- forinti 4y ago
  We should at the very least stop producing and transporting around the globe useless items such as a plastic tree imported from China I saw on sale in Brazil. A plastic tree in Brazil that came all the way from China! It's surreal.
- tehjoker 4y ago
  It would be nice to have an earth that supports human life for more than one or two more lifetimes.
  - endisneigh 4y ago
    I assure you even if we were to continue in our current trajectory the Earth would support human life for more than two lifetimes. This is not to say that we shouldn't stop wasting, but let's not exaggerate. That being said the Earth definitely will become less comfortable if we don't put a pin on some of this stuff.
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      Conversely, were the global economy collapse completely, Earth will barely support human life for even one lifetime. Obligatory reminder: unless you're Sentinelese, it's highly unlikely you or your community is actually self-sufficient. For most people, everything they eat, everything they wear, everything they live in and live with, is a product of, or is directly dependent on, international manufacturing and shipping. If that goes, billions of people starve.
  - Freak_NL 4y ago
    Of course. But that doesn't change the fact that stopping the production of plastic crap within a few years is not an option beyond the hypothetical realm. Nor is convincing the majority of people to stop buying all that crap simply on the basis of a moral plea. Pricing in externalities might work eventually (and will take a few decades to realize at any significant scale).
josephcsible 4y ago
I've been seeing ideas like this a lot lately and I really don't like them. If something that's been in widespread use for decades is bad for the environment, come up with a better alternative first, and only then stop producing the old thing.
- oftenwrong 4y ago
  Would you say the same if your home was coated in black plastic soot? Why should we hold course after mere decades of turning a blind eye toward the consequences of our lifestyle? Plastic pollution was not a problem for millennia. You come up with a better alternative to that.
  - AussieWog93 4y ago
    I would rather have a home covered in black soot than the entire planet turned into a hyper-authoritaritan nightmare state just to reduce plastic waste.
lebski88 4y ago
One of the interesting things I found in this article is that I had no idea what the plastic amazon pouches they kept talking about actually were. Here in the UK amazon ship everything in recycled cardboard. Presumably that's from either environmental pressure of government legislation. Even the tape is paper.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
  Might also be because it's cheaper to ship rectangular boxes than bags here.

ars 4y ago

This headline is the definition of clickbait. And the entire article is clickbait too. Article has nothing to do with Amazon it's about recycling. And they're not burning packages they are burning a small amount of plastic contamination mixed into paper recycling.

Freak_NL 4y ago
If you reread the article you'll find that this is not about burning a small amount of plastic contamination. > India may be bringing in as much as 500,000 tons of plastic waste hidden within paper shipments annually, according to a government environmental body that estimated the level of contamination at 5%.
- ars 4y ago
  I did read the article, and I consider 5% a small amount. The plastic is being burned for energy, which is the best way to handle plastic. The only real issue this article raised is the poor quality incinerators, that don't do a good enough job of burning the plastic. I call this article click bait because they spend way way too long on utterly irrelevant stuff, and the only important part is 2 sentences.

Freak_NL 4y ago

A Dutch newspaper wrote a depressing article¹ two years ago in a similar vain about plastic from the Netherlands ending up in Türkiye for 'recycling'. The same story, just different countries. There are a lot of actors pushing for municipalities to collect plastic separately (like paper and glass), but stories like these make you wonder if that even makes sense at this point. 1: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2020/10/16/plastic-afval-hoe-een-nederlands-dropzakje-kon-eindigen-in-een-turkse-berm-a4016112 https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2020/10/16/plastic-afval-hoe-een-n...

atonse 4y ago
Yeah this is what’s bothering about these articles (common at least in American journalism) that condescendingly talk about issues in third world countries that are as bad in the US. Not that we shouldn’t identify these things. But the issue is often not quite related to the country, but a larger issue. As others have pointed out, for whatever reason, plastic is difficult to recycle and through deception, we’ve been sold the idea that it can be recycled. The most promising stuff I’ve seen is waste to energy (basically, burn the stuff). As long as we can effectively capture the emitted toxins from burning the plastic, then it seems like a pretty good system. And some countries have already been doing this.

sjellen 4y ago

In what is about to become the year 2023, the most effective way of recycling is to limit your purchases altogether. Some day go through your Amazon purchase history for the last decade and see how much absolute garbage purchases you made. Resist buying stuff you don't really need. Can you repurpose an item? Then turn to the recycling industry and maybe it will find a way back. Resist > Reuse > Recycle

CamelCaseName 4y ago
Slightly tangential, but for the past few weeks I've been actively eating less by deciding what I want to eat, and then ordering / making a slightly smaller portion. I imagine you could apply the same thinking to shopping. Before checking out, pick one or two items to cancel or leave to the next purchase, or choose a smaller size. Sometimes it costs a little more per unit, but the upside is you consume less.
akira2501 4y ago
> the most effective way of recycling is to limit your purchases altogether. This has always been true. There's just been a lot of "feel good" marketing around this point to beguile the market out of this rather common sense in the past few decades. > Then turn to the recycling industry and maybe it will find a way back. Putting my curmudgeon hat on for a second, I remember a time when we used to make products with high enough quality and durability that they would either last nearly a lifetime or get repaired when they didn't.
- dendrite9 4y ago
  I'd bet many of the older things were also disposable but the ones that lasted stick in the mind more. But absolutely we also moved towards less and less repairability in how things are assembled. Adhesives or plastic welding vs rivets and screws. I'm afraid I am not good at thinking about the question well, but is it better to have lighter cars that need less metal but in exchange they are less repairable? I get tied up in defining the bounds of the question so I never have a satisfactory answer. A lot of the money in tech seems to be tied to the same marketing, convincing people to consume. The greenwashing is a problem as well, although I wish I weren't so cynical when I see a company trying to do better so often it seems to read as "We're making our X more green and efficient, so buy more of them" I was swimming in a lake this summer with a friend involved in marketing when he made a comment about what happens when they run out of people's attention seconds. Do we make more, fight harder to retain attention, die?, or is there another solution.

treis 4y ago

I think it's become apparent that the whole recycling concept is misguided. There's just not enough economic value in these materials to justify the socialized cost. It's better to dump the waste into proper landfills. Ultimately environmental impact is mostly about CO2 release these days. We're not running out of most of these raw materials. And for the one big one we are (oil) having it end up buried in a landfill is about the best realistic option we have today.

stainablesteel 4y ago
We're not close to running out of oil yet, although saudi arabia is.
- Mystery-Machine 4y ago
  Do you have any source for that claim?
  - stainablesteel 4y ago
    this guy did a nice video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIxCIAAJpP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIxCIAAJpP4
tehjoker 4y ago
This is not correct at all. Environmental scientists are developing a more sophisticated framework to describe the safe operating envelope for humans and it includes plastic and novel entities. https://ikhapp.org/stories-and-research-brief/defining-the-risk-presented-by-novel-entities-how-plastic-and-chemicals-affect-earth-system-integrity/ https://ikhapp.org/stories-and-research-brief/defining-the-r...
- treis 4y ago
  This is a poor low effort post that does not directly address anything I've said.
4y ago

marze 4y ago

Plastic doesn't recycle, at a practical scale. I like the idea of developing garbage burning plants with superb emission control, and burning it all locally. As well as reducing plastic usage in low value applications. It is sad, all the plastic litter in the world.

stronglikedan 4y ago
> Plastic doesn't recycle, at a practical scale. An waste industry buddy of mine designs landfills, and this is his take too. It's better to throw your plastic into regular trash (and other recyclables into the recycle bin), because then you at least know it's likely to end up in a landfill where it's safe, instead of being exported and dumped in the sea.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  The landfill is also functionally carbon sequestration.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    Landfills are a large source of GHG emissions, especially in the long term.
    - LarryMullins 4y ago
      Stable plastics probably don't account for much of that. The methane gas comes from food waste/etc rotting.
      - mjevans 4y ago
        Which is why it pains me so much that my municipality doesn't include (at least a household food scrap sized) compost bin with standard garbage service. They only offer a giant and expensive yard-waste bin.

altairprime 4y ago

Does Amazon declare the financial and legal risks of externalizing the disposal costs of their plastic- and styrofoam-based (and cardboard!) packaging onto municipal recycling and waste processing? For example: what would it cost Amazon if they were charged a recycling fee for all single-use packaging by the state California?

fullsend 4y ago
Probably crippling for them. The scale of materials they use must be astronomical and their retail business has thin margins.
whatshisface 4y ago
I can declare it for them: $0. The garbage collection people take the trash from Amazon's customers, rather than Amazon.
ars 4y ago
> For example: what would it cost Amazon if they were charged a recycling fee for all single-use packaging by the state California? The bigger question is what would it cost the planet. For Amazon to collect and recycle the packages, rather than the local municipality, would enormously increase the amount of emissions created. You would be making things much much much worse.
- altairprime 4y ago
  For Amazon to be forced to charge to the customer a small fee for each package shipped, modeled after the electronics recycling fee that California requires to be charged and disclosed at time of purchase, would create a financial risk to their revenue stream, by forcing Amazon to charge customers a fee for every different box and bag used — not to mention compelling customers to use the “reduce number of boxes” option by default, which forces Amazon to absorb the consolidation cost previous externalized by cheap shipping from multiple depots back into their logistics chain. Given only this one example, do those risks reach the levels of potential impact necessary to compel its disclosure in public filings? Are there other examples?

mikeweiss 4y ago

It's past time for state and local government to require large online retailers such as Amazon to provide a means of collecting shipping materials for recycling and reuse... This segment of our economy badly needs some gov regulation... For the sake of the planet

ars 4y ago
There is a way, that's the point of the entire article. They put it in the recycling. If you are suggesting shipping the stuff back to Amazon, you should think about that a bit more - the amount of energy you'll use to ship it is an order of magnitude more than the amount you'll save. You would be harming the planet in order to make it seem like you did a good thing.
- rendang 4y ago
  For at least some types of retail products, it seems like a system of standardized, reusable containers could be workable - the same Amazon, UPS, USPS delivery vans that bring a constant stream of packages to my apartment building could collect and return them without much additional energy expenditure.
  - thomasjb 4y ago
    Possibly using something comparable to the German Flaschenpfand[1] system? I'm unsure of how to develop a suitable packing system that would be machine-friendly, possibly wooden crates packed with shredded cardboard packing. The lid could be press-in cardboard, something like that used in tinfoil food storage boxes, but reliant on the cardboard bending to get past the lip and into the region where it is secured. Alternately, a suitable slide-in wooden lid with a stopping peg inserted and sealed with a wax-type substance could be used (as per [2], with the addition of a sealing peg setup). Sealing wax would probably be used in the cardboard variant also. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaschenpfand https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaschenpfand [2] https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wooden_Matchbox_E_Cafler_Collection_(48708126158).jpg https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wooden_Matchbox_E_...
4y ago

hyperpape 4y ago

The idea that we'll get Americans to properly dispose of plastic is not credible to me, without some kind of cultural shift that I don't expect (I'm aware that some other countries, perhaps Germany and Japan, are much more diligent about how you dispose of household waste). I've observed a number of people who haven't seemed to internalize the current rules about what can be recycled. People especially want to think that thin plastic bags can go in the recycling with everything else. I don't think people are going to move away from single-stream recycling, which appears to be a big part of the problem.

wmf 4y ago
The "proper" way to dispose of plastic is in the trash. We just need to admit this and get the message out.
- hyperpape 4y ago
  I'm not completely sure, but I don't think that's true for plastic bottles. Maybe it's the best approach because it's simpler and people can adhere to it, but I think if you could get people to follow the rules, recycling bottles and throwing away thin plastic would be better.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
patja 4y ago
Most telling is the person in the article with some experience working in the recycling industry who was ignorant of the fact that her curbside recycling program does not accept the blue and white Amazon mailers, nor did she know that the paper shipping label must be removed (often an impossible task without solvents or a lot of time and patience) prior to drop off at the supermarket collection bin.
MockObject 4y ago
I was a dutiful recycler until links here on HN taught me that plastic thrown in the main garbage stream would end up safely in a landfill, but 20% of recycled plastic ends up in the ocean!

satya71 4y ago

> There was no doubt in her mind: Smyla had put that envelope into her recycling bin. “That's polyethelene, and I'd recycle that. If it’s got the recycling symbol on it, into the bin it goes,” she says. “I get a lot of Amazon packages, and they all go into the bin, too.” This thanks to Big Oil. https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...

downrightmike 4y ago
And Big Plastic, consumer recycling was never designed to effectively recycle, it was designed to effectively get people to buy more plastic.
- AceJohnny2 4y ago
  > it was designed to effectively get people to buy more plastic. I hate this kind of cynicism, because it's disempowering when the truth is so much more actionable. In reality, it was designed to be cheap and useful, and with the disposal costs handwaved [1] away. Plastic can be overcome by developing equally useful and cheap materials. [1] "handwaved" really understates the amount of effort that went into dealing with the disposal costs. You don't create national recycling programs and international standards by handwaving. But reality didn't pan out relative to the hopes.
  - downrightmike 4y ago
    https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
sokoloff 4y ago
> If it’s got the recycling symbol on it, into the bin it goes I wonder if she actually means the resin identification code (RIC) and is confusing that with a recycling symbol. (Edit to add: as in “this is recyclable in your particular blue bin”)

varelse 4y ago

[dead]

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

Interesting that plastic bottles that get accidentally shipped to India are still worth extracting and recycling. > unmasked waste pickers sifted for metal cans or intact plastic bottles that could be sold The plastic they burn is envelopes made of soft plastic that have been incorrectly sorted by the recycling process and bundled with paper that they do actually want.

Scalene2 4y ago

So, in my city, there's a warehouse, they buy Amazon returns and surplus in bulk, every week on the same day, they fill shallow elevated bins ideal for picking through with the items. Day 1 everything is $25 an item, the price reduces each day until everything is $1 on day 7. It is a great low cost (it's actually profitable), probably profitable enough that if Amazon ran these themselves they could pay to process all the waste in an eco friendly way and not lose money.

sargun 4y ago
Where is this?
polar8 4y ago
Very cool, where is that?
- malfist 4y ago
  Lots of places take Amazon returns and do something similar. There's an auction house near me that regularly auctions pallets of returns from amazon. A relative of mine used to run a store where she'd buy those pallets and repair the items and resale them. Usually most things are returned work fine, or are missing something you could get from lowes. Amazon doesn't test a lot of their returns and they get sent out like that. Bargain Hunt's business model is entirely reselling amazon returns.

WeylandYutani 4y ago

https://www.hrw.org/report/2022/09/21/its-if-theyre-poisoning-us/health-impacts-plastic-recycling-turkey https://www.hrw.org/report/2022/09/21/its-if-theyre-poisonin... I would prefer a system were each country cleans up their own mess but robots are more expensive than people.

disqard 4y ago

Does anyone here have any experience with Ridwell? They claim to collect and recycle hard-to-recycle materials, like the bags potato chips come in.

daxfohl 4y ago
My partner signed us up. I'm skeptical. My understanding is they don't really know what to do with it but are trying various things. So not recycling per se, but using the scraps for other purposes, similar to how shredded tires can be used in playgrounds. I haven't heard anything great yet coming out of it though; there's simply not much you can do with bits of plastic that you can't do better and cheaper with something else, and the supply is always going to grossly outweigh any demand. My guess is it's just an expensive roundabout way to get to a landfill. I hope I'm wrong.
- disqard 4y ago
  We're in the same boat, in many aspects. Thanks for sharing your perspective!

ENOTTY 4y ago

> Laurie Smyla, a 73-year-old retiree from Sloatsburg, New York [...] Smyla has a degree in environmental science and even served as coordinator for the local recycling program in the late 1980s, as she explains when reached by phone. She was able to quickly identify the envelope as polyethylene, the most common type of plastic. I gotta wonder, how many people did the reporters have to contact before finding the perfect subject to put a human angle on this part of the story. Kudos to them for doing the legwork

broooder 4y ago

I am trying to start a local 3D printing business, where a lot of basic parts or things people need can be made locally with Amazon style 2-day delivery. The order just goes to someone in your area who is certified to make stuff. I think this could massively help our global logistics and waste problems, and be a boon to local economies. https://HeyRobot.org https://HeyRobot.org Please get in touch if anyone is interested in joining in this project. I work on it nights and weekends… No VCs, just me and some friends coding.

andrewstuart 4y ago

I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about “plastic roads”. Many countries, desperate to make use of the gargantuan flow of waste plastic, and desperate to avoid it going into landfill, are putting the waste plastic into roads. This is called “recycling”. Sounds like a great idea until you realize that cars and trucks drive on the roads and grind them into dust - dust containing microplastics. The microplastic dust will go into air, waterways, rivers, oceans, food, plants animals and people. All this is because the environmentalists have decided that “keeping plastics out of landfill” is more important than anything. Plastic roads are an environmental disaster in an epic scale being created in the name of “recycling”. The worst thing is that for some reason it’s not obvious that this is a disastrous idea, and all around the world people are breathlessly talking up plastic roads like its a solution to the plastic waste problem. “In 2015, the Indian government made it mandatory for plastic waste to be used in constructing roads near large cities of more than 500,000 people” https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210302-could-plastic-roads-make-for-a-smoother-ride https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210302-could-plastic-ro... Mandated madness. The safest place for the fire hydrant of waste plastic is in landfill, not “recycled” into microplastic dust. Would you like a plastic road outside your house, or outside your kids school?

malandrew 4y ago
What if you use the plastic as a foundation or filler covered by a layer of asphalt?just curious if it’s possible to elongate the plastic tire interface and eliminate pulverization
- zdragnar 4y ago
  Yeah, the dust coming off of roads is from the vulcanized rubber tires, not so much the asphalt itself.
  - atombender 4y ago
    Asphalt is in fact a substantial source of pollutants: https://news.yale.edu/2020/09/02/asphalt-adds-air-pollution-especially-hot-sunny-days https://news.yale.edu/2020/09/02/asphalt-adds-air-pollution-....

neonate 4y ago

https://archive.ph/O1iGo https://archive.ph/O1iGo

amriksohata 4y ago

The opposition parties in India like AAP and Congress are also playing a dirty game as they have investment in some of these companies, instead they blame random one off days like Diwali for fireworks to take the attention off this plastic and crop stubble burning

rand0mx1 4y ago
you failed to mention the real culprit.
- amriksohata 4y ago
  The real culprits are those who take attention off the real issues and just blame Diwali or one off festival days. Entire days and weeks of meat eating and fattening animals for meat is one of the real culprits of damage to the climate.

danielodievich 4y ago

A friend of mine had this boyfriend once who ran a business that used recycled glass. Something to do with producing high quality sand for filtration systems and some other interesting processes (can't remember exactly what it was anymore bummer). The sand was made out of ground glass from wine bottles. As he told me, his process required just the right kind of glass and it had to be very, very clean. There was substantial investment into washing and label removal, to produce the right inputs. He said it was barely worthwhile, and he said that most plastic and even glass recyclables are just too dirty and too mixed up for it to be worthwhile. Al and Fe cans and Cu wire on other hand are absolutely a go.

mumblemumble 4y ago

I am increasingly coming to wonder if the non-biodegradability of plastic should be regarded as a feature rather than a bug. This stuff is made of oil. The last thing we want to do with oil, from an environmental standpoint, is turn it into greenhouse gases. The best way to accomplish that would be to leave it underground. Since we're not doing that, perhaps the second best thing is to convert it into a solid material and then put it back underground. It seems like landfills are our chance at keeping this stuff reasonably contained, and, in that setting, the fact that it lasts forever hopefully means that this carbon we dug up from underground won't end up in the atmosphere quite so quickly. All other options seem to ultimately lead toward large-scale greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution and water pollution. Recycling seems to be, at best, a more scenic route to that same destination.

andrewstuart 4y ago
“Keeping plastic out of landfill” has become the goal of environmentalists. But why? Waste plastic belongs in landfill. It’s crazy to try to address the plastic waste problem by keeping it in the environment, as though “it’s useful so it’s OK” makes sense. Just dispose of it safely.
- mumblemumble 4y ago
  I don't know about "has become". I've known it to be the goal as far back as the 1980s. (Anything before then is before I started forming memories.) I think it probably comes from the same place as organic food and suchlike: a conflation of "more natural" with "better for the environment." They're not necessarily the same thing, and we're finding increasingly many situations where doing things in a "more natural" way is actually pretty terrible for the earth's ecosystems when seven billion humans are trying to do it at a planetary scale.
- deadbunny 4y ago
  > But why? Because plastic producing companies have spent the last 40 years and a lot of money telling us that plastics are good "because they can be recycled" while not recycling and not addressing the very real problems caused by plastics because profit. https://www.dailyimpact.net/2020/11/24/the-second-biggest-scam-ever-plastic-recycling/ https://www.dailyimpact.net/2020/11/24/the-second-biggest-sc...

userbinator 4y ago

She was able to quickly identify the envelope as polyethylene, the most common type of plastic. PE burns much cleaner than coal, and probably paper too. Burning plastic releases a slew of toxins into the air, including dioxins, furans, mercury and other emissions that threaten the health of people, animals and vegetation, according to multiple studies. Unless they're somehow burning lots of chlorinated/fluorinated stuff (which is almost certainly not being used for much in the way of packaging, simply because those plastics are so much more expensive), that's just fearmongering. ...and mercury? WTF. That's where I stopped reading the article because it stopped making sense. Combustion certainly can't transmute elements, and mercury wouldn't be present unless they're burning something else... ...like coal, which does contain mercury as a significant impurity.

jlund-molfese 4y ago
Good point! It seems like part of the article was incompletely plagiarized from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187802961630158X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187802961... Incineration of plastic waste in an open field is a major source of air pollution. Most of the times, the Municipal Solid Waste containing about 12% of plastics is burnt, releasing toxic gases like Dioxins, Furans, Mercury and Polychlorinated Biphenyls into the atmosphere. Further, burning of Poly Vinyl Chloride liberates hazardous halogens and pollutes air, the impact of which is climate change. The toxic substances thus released are posing a threat to vegetation, human and animal health and environment as a whole. So if the study is on municipal solid waste overall, being burned in a pit, it's probably not very relevant to burning plastics by themselves. Municipal waste contains all sorts of things you wouldn't want to burn, like phones, batteries, fluorescent light bulbs etc.
- userbinator 4y ago
  Is that really saying burning chlorinated plastics --- in particular --- causes climate change? That whole quote reads so oddly it's like it was written by a bot.
- avg_dev 4y ago
  Thank you both for this note. It helps me remember to practice skepticism in all things. I believe I still identify strongly with the article and I believe that it is easy for consumers like me to forget that my purchasing actions have many consequences like children and people getting sick because of the plastic waste burning as a result of a recycling program that is largely bs. But that doesn’t mean I am right, and I feel that it is quite important for me to realize that my sources of information are largely imperfect, often with huge biases present in them.

diebeforei485 4y ago

Soft plastics haven't been recycled in a long time. I trash those.

srinathkrishna 4y ago

This was quite hard hitting. I mean, if you're a consumer in the US where even a simple piece of fruit comes packaged often in plastic, you know the piece of plastic isn't going to be completely recycled. I always thought this ends up in a landfill which is bad in itself! There have been a few other outlets that have focused on this problem in the past. John Oliver did a segment too. Are there any startups working in this space? Incineration is quite bad if the fumes aren't contained - is there research happening in controlling/eliminating toxins even if incineration is done?

Supermancho 4y ago
> This was quite hard hitting. This has been the reality since (just after) the onset of the recycle narrative took off. Noise is made, action never taken. The news outlets that show the horrific fatal diseases that children (with no other income) acquire through the scavenging has been a slow news day story for decades. See youtube - children, scavenge, dump. Anyone who sees the horrific waste of child-serving-sized coke plastic bottles, held together by more plastic, for 8$ at Target^ should be disgusted by the unavoidable sins of the US capitalist culture. ^You can get glass bottles held together by cardboard for slightly less, not that I'm advocating this purchase either.

miked85 4y ago

"recycling" is mostly an illusion

koopuluri 4y ago

This is just sad. I live in an Indian metro, in an upper middle class neighborhood, and recently saw a pile of plastic burning on the side of our street. This happens infrequently (handful of times in a year), but only because of the pressure from the residents here who can afford to apply power to push it out of our neighborhood. The smoke is dense, white and spreads quickly. It has a strong smell to it and quickly seeps into adjacent homes (which are 5 storied apartment buildings, so it reaches a lot of people). It gives me a headache that lasts for at least a couple of hours. I can't even imagine what it would be like to live in Muzaffarnagar (city from article) next to one of these plastic burning facilities if one small pile on my street had such a big impact on my family's wellbeing. > Around Muzaffarnagar, respiratory problems such as asthma and bronchitis along with eye infections associated with air pollution and the burning of plastic are on the rise, up as much as 30% over the last few years, according to Muzaffarnagar’s chief medical officer. Mainstream narrative over-indexes on long-term impact of global warming vs. the shorter term health impacts of pollution. This makes sense: when developed countries dictate global media narrative, they're not going to focus on the pollution aspect much because it doesn't impact them in a tangible, day-to-day basis. But the immediate health impact is a stronger narrative: there are people who are impacted by it every day and are dying. It has a face to it. We need a lot more coverage on this front. Grateful for this article.

milleramp 4y ago

We should be saving this stuff in a safe large landfill here in the states. With improvements in recycling economy, perhaps in 25years a large plastic landfill would worth an lot of money. Trash futures anyone?

ngoilapites 4y ago

Please could someone provide a reliable source of what happens to recycling by material and country?

welder 4y ago

Burning waste correctly is actually a really good way to recycle. For example, Vienna incinerates it's garbage and plastic to provide heating for almost half the city. The emissions from burning 1 persons yearly garbage is estimated It's estimated that incinerating the entire annual waste for one person in Vienna produces the same carbon emissions as driving a car 100 km. [0] [0] https://youtu.be/Ml0gXre_V-U?t=80 https://youtu.be/Ml0gXre_V-U?t=80

voidee 4y ago

I ordered a small item from Amazon about a few months ago and it came in a paper envelope which was light weight but padded with a corrugated paper mesh which was not rigid like cardboard. At the time I thought, “This is the perfect replacement for those plastic blue and white envelopes!” But every small item since then has been shipped in the standard plastic envelopes. I don’t know what it would take to change all to these soft paper envelopes. If all retailers changed to these, it would be so much easier to recycle.

snambi 4y ago

Amazon is highly irresponsible company. It wastes so much packaging for each shipment.