4 ms·

FWIW, I'm under the impression (while not being an expert), that plastics actually have pretty good recyclability and just suffer an "image problem" for reasons

by gyulai 3y ago

FWIW, I'm under the impression (while not being an expert), that plastics actually have pretty good recyclability and just suffer an "image problem" for reasons unrelated to the actual physical properties of the material. -- e.g. "Great Pacific garbage patch", but that's just because plastic floats and someone didn't take the trouble to recycle stuff before dumping it, not because it's impossible to do that kind of recycling; Or "Microplastics" which are nasty because of their form factor, not necessarily because of the material; Or because of applications where there are paper-based alternatives and paper has a leg up due to being a renewable material. For example, according to a very entertaining little book I have [1] that debunks greenness-myths, you need to use a cotton tote bag 130 times before you reach a break even in terms of economical footprint with using plastic shopping bags. Ironically, people's homes are filling up with cotton bags now, because you keep getting them as advertising gifts by every brand that's trying to brand itself as green, and you're often forced to buy them when you're at the supermarket and forgot to bring yours, and they've run out of paper bags and are not offering plastic for fear of perceptions of un-green-ness. [1] "Is it really green?" by Melissa Hemsley

jrockway 3y ago
Are there any plastic recycling success stories? For example, the PET in plastic bottles can't be recycled into new bottles. The best case is that it can be used in carpet, and probably not very nice carpet that the first world would buy. I've used my reusable grocery bags for over ten years. They have gotten well over 130 uses.
- Symbiote 3y ago
  According to [1], about 15% of recycled PET bottles were used to make new bottles, and those aren't necessarily food/drink bottles. I suspect the quality of collected bottles is a significant factor. Here in Denmark bottles collected as part of the deposit scheme can be recycled into new food containers, but other waste generally cannot. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PET_bottle_recycling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PET_bottle_recycling
- userbinator 3y ago
  I have plastic bags that weren't ever advertised as "reusable", from over 2 decades ago, but are indeed very reusable. They made them thicker and stronger back then, but unfortunately that was wasted by so many choosing not to reuse them.
bdhcuidbebe 3y ago
> FWIW, I'm under the impression (while not being an expert), that plastics actually have pretty good recyclability and just suffer an "image problem" for reasons unrelated to the actual physical properties of the material That’s what big oil managed to dupe policy makers with in the first place, the promise of recyclability. By now it should be apperant for anybody that it was just a big lie [1,2] 1: https://time.com/6173859/plastic-recycling-big-oil-damage/ https://time.com/6173859/plastic-recycling-big-oil-damage/ 2: 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-...
- gyulai 3y ago
  Well, the PBS article, first of all, is extremely poorly written. How can you write that plastic is "indestructible" and that it "breaks down" into microplastics that enter our bodies, in the same sentence, and not spot the contradiction. Also, it actually says "All used plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive." Later down in the article: "Recycling plastic is 'costly,' it [the report] says, and sorting it, the report concludes, is 'infeasible.'" So, it does sound to me like there's an important distinction here where recycling plastics (or, at least, disposing of it responsibly even when that's costly) is possible, it's just not happening. Now, my own perspective: I live in Austria and Germany, where governments have been doing collections of plastic trash separately from residual household waste since the 90s, and are asking households to pay steep prices for disposing of residual waste, but not for disposing of plastic. When I lived in Bavaria, disposal of plastics worked through recycling centers, where people had to separate their plastic waste into half a dozen containers for different kinds of plastics under the watchful eyes of employees educating consumers on what goes where, and doing that kind of separation was the only way you could dispose of plastic at all, without paying the very steep price (effectively a fine), for disposing of it through residual household waste. -- There are a lot of recycling centers in Bavaria, usually no more than 10 minutes' drive from where you live, even if you live in a rural area. And they are packed on a Saturday. Nobody can tell me that people aren't using them. I'm having a hard time imagining that the government would ask households to go to all that trouble and then just send it to landfill. They'd have to make sure to keep it a secret, because people would rightly be angry if they knew this, and they'd have to pay for it through back channels of sorts. This kind of scandal, while it seems possible, hasn't actually broken yet, to the best of my knowledge, over the course of the several decades that this practice has been ongoing an in any of the governments that have been doing this, which are many. So, my working assumption until this particular scandal actually breaks, is that alarmism coming from environmentalists in the U.S. is really about poor waste-disposal habits on the part of the American consumer, and not some kind of conspiracy by big oil that governments are in on, to make us believe that plastic is anything other than the devil.
HPsquared 3y ago
I think plastics don't necessarily have good recyclability, but why is this even needed? Just bury or burn it.
- lost_tourist 3y ago
  pollution and pollution
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    If they can bury nuclear waste, a bit of plastic can't be too bad. Just make the tiniest effort to bury it somewhere suitable, and burn it properly.
    - filleduchaos 3y ago
      We produce multiple orders of magnitude more plastic than nuclear waste. (As an aside, what does "burn it properly" entail? Gasifying before combustion? Even that is not exactly "clean".)
  - kgabis 3y ago
    Not really and not really.
  - userbinator 3y ago
    PE and PP, the most widely used plastics in disposable applications, are essentially highly refined oil (more like a wax) and burn cleaner than coal.
hooverd 3y ago
I hate when that study comes up. There's a lot wrong with it. See: https://medium.com/@parkpoomkomet/breaking-down-the-danish-study-on-the-environmental-impacts-of-grocery-carrier-bags-b8c97eb6c8fb https://medium.com/@parkpoomkomet/breaking-down-the-danish-s... And funnily enough, I see people shopping with reusable poly bags more often than cotton totes. There's one manufacturer that supplies Whole Foods and a lot of other grocery stores, and they're pretty solid.

by gyulai 3y ago

jrockway 3y ago

Are there any plastic recycling success stories? For example, the PET in plastic bottles can't be recycled into new bottles. The best case is that it can be used in carpet, and probably not very nice carpet that the first world would buy. I've used my reusable grocery bags for over ten years. They have gotten well over 130 uses.

Symbiote 3y ago
According to [1], about 15% of recycled PET bottles were used to make new bottles, and those aren't necessarily food/drink bottles. I suspect the quality of collected bottles is a significant factor. Here in Denmark bottles collected as part of the deposit scheme can be recycled into new food containers, but other waste generally cannot. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PET_bottle_recycling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PET_bottle_recycling
userbinator 3y ago
I have plastic bags that weren't ever advertised as "reusable", from over 2 decades ago, but are indeed very reusable. They made them thicker and stronger back then, but unfortunately that was wasted by so many choosing not to reuse them.

bdhcuidbebe 3y ago

> FWIW, I'm under the impression (while not being an expert), that plastics actually have pretty good recyclability and just suffer an "image problem" for reasons unrelated to the actual physical properties of the material That’s what big oil managed to dupe policy makers with in the first place, the promise of recyclability. By now it should be apperant for anybody that it was just a big lie [1,2] 1: https://time.com/6173859/plastic-recycling-big-oil-damage/ https://time.com/6173859/plastic-recycling-big-oil-damage/ 2: 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-...

gyulai 3y ago
Well, the PBS article, first of all, is extremely poorly written. How can you write that plastic is "indestructible" and that it "breaks down" into microplastics that enter our bodies, in the same sentence, and not spot the contradiction. Also, it actually says "All used plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive." Later down in the article: "Recycling plastic is 'costly,' it [the report] says, and sorting it, the report concludes, is 'infeasible.'" So, it does sound to me like there's an important distinction here where recycling plastics (or, at least, disposing of it responsibly even when that's costly) is possible, it's just not happening. Now, my own perspective: I live in Austria and Germany, where governments have been doing collections of plastic trash separately from residual household waste since the 90s, and are asking households to pay steep prices for disposing of residual waste, but not for disposing of plastic. When I lived in Bavaria, disposal of plastics worked through recycling centers, where people had to separate their plastic waste into half a dozen containers for different kinds of plastics under the watchful eyes of employees educating consumers on what goes where, and doing that kind of separation was the only way you could dispose of plastic at all, without paying the very steep price (effectively a fine), for disposing of it through residual household waste. -- There are a lot of recycling centers in Bavaria, usually no more than 10 minutes' drive from where you live, even if you live in a rural area. And they are packed on a Saturday. Nobody can tell me that people aren't using them. I'm having a hard time imagining that the government would ask households to go to all that trouble and then just send it to landfill. They'd have to make sure to keep it a secret, because people would rightly be angry if they knew this, and they'd have to pay for it through back channels of sorts. This kind of scandal, while it seems possible, hasn't actually broken yet, to the best of my knowledge, over the course of the several decades that this practice has been ongoing an in any of the governments that have been doing this, which are many. So, my working assumption until this particular scandal actually breaks, is that alarmism coming from environmentalists in the U.S. is really about poor waste-disposal habits on the part of the American consumer, and not some kind of conspiracy by big oil that governments are in on, to make us believe that plastic is anything other than the devil.

HPsquared 3y ago

I think plastics don't necessarily have good recyclability, but why is this even needed? Just bury or burn it.

lost_tourist 3y ago
pollution and pollution
- HPsquared 3y ago
  If they can bury nuclear waste, a bit of plastic can't be too bad. Just make the tiniest effort to bury it somewhere suitable, and burn it properly.
  - filleduchaos 3y ago
    We produce multiple orders of magnitude more plastic than nuclear waste. (As an aside, what does "burn it properly" entail? Gasifying before combustion? Even that is not exactly "clean".)
- kgabis 3y ago
  Not really and not really.
- userbinator 3y ago
  PE and PP, the most widely used plastics in disposable applications, are essentially highly refined oil (more like a wax) and burn cleaner than coal.

hooverd 3y ago

I hate when that study comes up. There's a lot wrong with it. See: https://medium.com/@parkpoomkomet/breaking-down-the-danish-study-on-the-environmental-impacts-of-grocery-carrier-bags-b8c97eb6c8fb https://medium.com/@parkpoomkomet/breaking-down-the-danish-s... And funnily enough, I see people shopping with reusable poly bags more often than cotton totes. There's one manufacturer that supplies Whole Foods and a lot of other grocery stores, and they're pretty solid.