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Great, another reason I'm pissed off about plastic recycling! I've been collecting my plastic for as long as I can remember and recycling it, then they tell us

Great, another reason I'm pissed off about plastic recycling! I've been collecting my plastic for as long as I can remember and recycling it, then they tell us only about 12% has EVER been recycled. Now we can break it down to get the oil back! A$$holes!

sbaiddn 4y ago
Don't recycle. If its going to get dumped anyway put your plastic recycling in the garbage. Then it'll end up in a nominally regulated local dump and not in a Vietnamese river. Btw anyone who has even a cursory understanding of polymer physics suspected that plastics recycling was a scam. The whole scheme was either to greenwash industry throwing the moral responsibility to the end users or to condition us to recycle when they finally figured out how to do it. For what it's worth, extracting energy out of plastic is probably best way to deal with it.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  You forgot the third option... Grind it up, and put it in inappropriate places... Like "ooh, we can mix it into asphalt"... Mixing some material that you don't want and can be quite toxic into something you're gonna leave in the environment just seems like a bad idea... Let me think... When else did we do that? Oh yeah - when we mixed coal fly ash into bricks[1]! Everyone wants mercury poisoning from the bricks their houses were made from - and it was a very cheap way to dispose of otherwise hard to deal with toxic waste! [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_ash_brick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_ash_brick
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
What percentage of plastic do you think is even collected? It's a weird stat to compare the household recycling of bottles and containers (which even in the US gets recycled at a non-trivial rate) and all plastic ever (lawn chairs, toys, complex mixed materials etc.)
- sbaiddn 4y ago
  Almost none. If you aren't sorting the plastic by type (the number in the package) it probably won't get done and will be routed to a landfill (or river) in Asia. Big corporate consumers of plastic can recycle because they guarantee that its all one type of plastic (say a fisherman's nylon net). So recycled plastic does exist. But mostly of it isn't.
xsmasher 4y ago
Be careful where you get stats like that. If the stat says that "12% of plastic (ever produced globally) is recycled" that doesn't mean your local recycling program is terrible. I just got a notice from my trash company that only 10% of their collected material is contaminated / not recyclable.
- sbaiddn 4y ago
  The problem with plastics (polymers, really) is that if even 1% off collected polymer of type A (say PE) is off type B (say ABS), then their melt wont mix. If the mix doesn't melt you get spinal decomposition, as microstructure that looks like lamella. It is very weak compared to plastic A or B. Therefore you cannot simply melt plastic back together unless you have an almost 100% pure feedstock. But melting things together is the easiest and cost effective way to recycle anything really. Metals aren't as finicky and they are relatively easy ways to separate them in a dumb fashion (big old electromagnet). With plastics you can just break down and make (relatively bad) feedstock or burn it for energy (actually a good solution). Burning plastic, however, has the risk of burning chlorinated or fluoridated plastic and that really sucks. Polymers are amazing, but they also suck.
askvictor 4y ago
I'm getting to the point where I think plastic recycling was always a scam to make people use more plastics without any guilt. That said, putting plastics into landfill not such a bad thing; we've taken oil from the ground, made it into plastics, then putting it back in the ground. Better than burning it. There is a lot of space for landfill, and not very much oil. The problem is when it doesn't end up in landfill, but ends up in the sea. Which by virtue of there being more and more plastics (since they're guilt-free now) there is more and more of.

sbaiddn 4y ago

Don't recycle. If its going to get dumped anyway put your plastic recycling in the garbage. Then it'll end up in a nominally regulated local dump and not in a Vietnamese river. Btw anyone who has even a cursory understanding of polymer physics suspected that plastics recycling was a scam. The whole scheme was either to greenwash industry throwing the moral responsibility to the end users or to condition us to recycle when they finally figured out how to do it. For what it's worth, extracting energy out of plastic is probably best way to deal with it.

londons_explore 4y ago
You forgot the third option... Grind it up, and put it in inappropriate places... Like "ooh, we can mix it into asphalt"... Mixing some material that you don't want and can be quite toxic into something you're gonna leave in the environment just seems like a bad idea... Let me think... When else did we do that? Oh yeah - when we mixed coal fly ash into bricks[1]! Everyone wants mercury poisoning from the bricks their houses were made from - and it was a very cheap way to dispose of otherwise hard to deal with toxic waste! [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_ash_brick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_ash_brick

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

What percentage of plastic do you think is even collected? It's a weird stat to compare the household recycling of bottles and containers (which even in the US gets recycled at a non-trivial rate) and all plastic ever (lawn chairs, toys, complex mixed materials etc.)

sbaiddn 4y ago
Almost none. If you aren't sorting the plastic by type (the number in the package) it probably won't get done and will be routed to a landfill (or river) in Asia. Big corporate consumers of plastic can recycle because they guarantee that its all one type of plastic (say a fisherman's nylon net). So recycled plastic does exist. But mostly of it isn't.

xsmasher 4y ago

Be careful where you get stats like that. If the stat says that "12% of plastic (ever produced globally) is recycled" that doesn't mean your local recycling program is terrible. I just got a notice from my trash company that only 10% of their collected material is contaminated / not recyclable.

sbaiddn 4y ago
The problem with plastics (polymers, really) is that if even 1% off collected polymer of type A (say PE) is off type B (say ABS), then their melt wont mix. If the mix doesn't melt you get spinal decomposition, as microstructure that looks like lamella. It is very weak compared to plastic A or B. Therefore you cannot simply melt plastic back together unless you have an almost 100% pure feedstock. But melting things together is the easiest and cost effective way to recycle anything really. Metals aren't as finicky and they are relatively easy ways to separate them in a dumb fashion (big old electromagnet). With plastics you can just break down and make (relatively bad) feedstock or burn it for energy (actually a good solution). Burning plastic, however, has the risk of burning chlorinated or fluoridated plastic and that really sucks. Polymers are amazing, but they also suck.

askvictor 4y ago

I'm getting to the point where I think plastic recycling was always a scam to make people use more plastics without any guilt. That said, putting plastics into landfill not such a bad thing; we've taken oil from the ground, made it into plastics, then putting it back in the ground. Better than burning it. There is a lot of space for landfill, and not very much oil. The problem is when it doesn't end up in landfill, but ends up in the sea. Which by virtue of there being more and more plastics (since they're guilt-free now) there is more and more of.