16 ms·

The Delusion of Advanced Plastic Recycling

225 points by tysone 2y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 2y ago
Honestly the best thing is to just bury the plastic in a modern landfill just like other garbage. Modern landfills are very good and containing all the bad stuff. There is actually plenty of room for them. And you sequester the carbon in the plastics. Win win all around.
- orwin 2y ago
  The issue with landfill is the same as burning plastics. Heavy metal and elements that bioaccumulate in animals and plants being dispersed in a small-ish zone. If you can remove bromine and all that shit before putting plastics in landfills, that would be great.
  - mariusor 2y ago
    And from here to sorting the trash before it reaches the landfill is just a small step in logic.
Workaccount2 2y ago
I just throw plastic in the garbage. This after a life of bending over backwards to recycle. The primary concern for everyone should be carbon in the atmosphere. Landfills full of plastic might be bad for the environment over time, but they are not going to cause a global mass extinction. Probably the dumbest thing humanity can do is burn plastic for energy (i.e. convert sequestered carbon to CO2). Followed second by recycling it.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  In a lot of places, it ends up there anyway. The market for plastic recycling is such that it's often less expensive to just truck it to a landfill. That's what happens in many places, all your efforts to have separate bins for plastic and sorting your trash every week might well be a complete waste of time.
  - c-linkage 2y ago
    I'm pretty sure the point of recycling to make people feel like they are doing something about plastic pollution, and this feeling distracts people from the fact that nothing you do with plastic actually makes a difference. Perception is 9/10s of the law.
    - mariusor 2y ago
      > nothing you do with plastic actually makes a difference ... yet. Do you think that in a wonderful future where we get some technical advancement to be able to deal with plastics effectively, will it be easier to deal with it when it's uniformly spread through the world's landfills, or when it's sorted and dumped in bulk?
      - samatman 2y ago
        This is why I continue to dutifully rinse out plastics and throw them into the landfill via the separate 'recycling' process. I'd rather it go to the special plastic landfill, where, like cryogenically-frozen Effective Altruists, future generations can give it a new life with yet-undiscovered technology.
        mariusor 2y ago
        I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but yes, that's exactly what I'm doing too.
        c-linkage 2y ago
        I, too, will keep using the separate stream, more out of habit than anything else. But the plastic doesn't currently go into a special landfill, it goes into the same ones as all of the other trash. <https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/17/climate/ask-nyt-climate-recycling.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/17/climate/ask-nyt-climate-r...> [I]f the [recycling] plant can find a buyer at a price that makes sense, the bundles will be shipped off to a recycling plant. Sometimes a local one, and sometimes one as far away as Africa or Southeast Asia. If they can’t, everything goes into a landfill or gets incinerated. And even though my original comment is at zero, the industry specifically pushed recycling because by making people feel like they were helping, they would ignore the real problem. <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-...> Yet the industry spent millions telling people to recycle, because, as one former top industry insider told NPR, selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn't true. "If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment," Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association and one of the industry's most powerful trade groups in Washington, D.C., told NPR." Burying the plastic is probably the better option. <https://www.ft.com/content/901c78e6-b4d0-467c-ab87-6fc44c8a004c https://www.ft.com/content/901c78e6-b4d0-467c-ab87-6fc44c8a0...> “The energy required to do reprocessing is higher than the energy required to make the [plastic] in the first place,” he said. To limit carbon emissions in line with the global warming goals of the Paris climate accord, it would be better to “bury the stuff”, according to Hallett.
- titzer 2y ago
  Just throwing it in a hole perpetuates the unsustainable fossil fuel addiction. Does burning it perpetuate that addiction worse (and as a side-effect produce even more CO2)? Yes, so on one level I agree with you, but on another level, we need to get the hell off this ride.
kkfx 2y ago
Let's start to talk instead how to need less plastic. The most commonly discharged plastic is for packaging. Let's start observing the activity, usage who consume the most quantity of plastic: ready made food, small pack of anything. It's then about time to stop vending machines of micro-dose ultra-transformed "food", individually package fruits and vegges not to preserve them but to sell them at a higher price, the proliferation of sugar+gas added water to sell more since many in the western world have access to public clean water at home and so on. Let's star selling the as prepared leaves in a significant quantity instead of pre-dosed individually envelop mini-bags, mini-bags of sugar and so on. This will IMMENSELY reduce the quantity of disposable plastic we drop every day. We can't get rid of anything of course, but we can get rid of many. Even for milk we can start to redistribute it in the classic way instead of in the modern long-range shipping who need plastic to preserve it. If you follow this idea you'll realize a thing: we need to delete modern dense cities. They are the biggest consumer of such packaging because the fast life in tight space demand them. I'm really serious. Try imaging you as a remote worker or an in person worker in a remote spread are how and what kind of food you buy there. You are at home, no need for packed single-dose bags of sugar, you have you own favorite tea in pots, you have plenty of space to stockpile food and buying in big quantity allow to save some time and money, also you might have time to cook at home and so on. Oh, yes, it's just a slice of the total plastic we use, but it's a very big one, used for things we can avoid. Surely we have also much plastic for dress, and that's again can be reduced if we live spread because there is far less "need" to dress ourselves in gazillion of different outfit to go downtown, but we can't avoid that completely, let's start what we can start.
- CorrectHorseBat 2y ago
  So to save a little bit of plastic you'd spend much more energy on everything else? Why not just use glass for milk and paper for tea?
  - kkfx 2y ago
    Energy I can make (and I make) locally, for instance from p.v. instead of spending in plastic that demand energy anyway. There is a common misconception about modern cities than "far past one". Nowadays we do not simply live in dense area walking around with stairs having next to no equipment at home like in the aforementioned past where people live tight but also simply, working in most cases "from home" meaning they just go downstairs and they are in their shops. Modern cities demand a gazillion of things, just a building for: - clean water - hot water - sewers - fire safety - elevators - seismic safety - HVAC - .... Demand MUCH more energy than modern wood based single-family homes (if well built ad without exaggeration of course) both to be build, operated, maintained and evolved. We are not anymore in the era of rock+wood homes passing from a generation to another for centuries with little to no changes. With "new deal" tech we simply can't live in cities. Just take a look at a mean apartment in your country, in Italy a mean apartment need 20-30kW thermal power to heat in the winter simply because even if it's less and less cold most of them was built in an era where no one care about insulation. Modern homes with 1kW electrical can heat and cool themselves in the mean for the same country. In single family homes there is typically room to recharge from p.v. cars if you WFH or working in a spread area to recharge them from p.v. at work, the same model. In cities it's simply not possible. How much energy this alone means? Now try seeing "future personal air mobility" sold as urban https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-report.pdf https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... but definitively NOT urban, cities can't simply adapt, you need to rebuild them to adapt more than few evolutionary steps. In a spread (not too much of course) area you have plenty of space to adapt and buildings are small, they can be made in recyclable materials for most of their structure and the same is valid for local infra. Cities demand big harbors, airports, highways who consume enormous resources and can't change much, a spread are use maybe even LESS resources and being spread can slowly adapt. Try just seen the nightmare of Jakarta and their "solution" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-01/indonesia-sets-2024-deadline-to-move-its-new-capital-to-borneo https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-01/indonesia... can you measure how big waste of resources such move represent?
amusingimpala75 2y ago
I may be missing it, but this article mainly talks about the issues of pyrolysis and advanced plastics recycling. But it provides data supporting traditional recycling, citing a 55-85% success rate. Are there any other issues with traditional recycling, or do we just need to make sure that the plastic being recycled is using the better/older method?
- kragen 2y ago
  pyrolysis makes yogurt tubs from yogurt tubs. traditional 'mechanical' recycling makes park benches from yogurt tubs and throws up its hands at the park benches
- ZeroGravitas 2y ago
  They're kind of complementary. The expanded version of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle has Waste-to-energy and landfill as next steps. Chemical recycling could fit in between mechanical recycling and Waste-to-energy. Though if you just let corporations lie about stuff then it's hard for any kind of logical actions to be taken. Personally I don't mind the mass balance stuff they mention as long as there is a mandated minimum. Similar to 'green electricity' that all come through the same wires as the coal generation it's fine if consumer brands want to pay a little extra to market themselves as 100% green energy but if you spread any extra cost across every faceless user by forcing them to buy a minimum 1% green energy and ramp it up over a few years then that's a good way to fund the initial rollout of new cleaner options.
- yarekt 2y ago
  As I understand it, plastics that come “post consumer” are too polluted to be used for anything but lowest grade of products: tyres, though probably not even that as people want “performance” from their tyres. Where I live (UK) most plastic waste can’t be recycled yet, and they took our bins when I accidentally (optimistically) tried :(
tmaly 2y ago
I think a better approach to this would be to improve packaging technology. Are there ways to use less plastic or none at all in packaging?
- mannycalavera42 2y ago
  "packaging" is just a synonym of "ad space" that's the real challenge (not saying it's impossible, need just _some_ revolutionary approach I think)
  - sumtechguy 2y ago
    > need just _some_ revolutionary approach That 'revolutionary approach' is making one of the other things that we can recycle very easily cheaper. Plastics are wildly cheap and durable enough for their use. But paper (kinda recyclable), glass (very recyclable), metal (very recyclable) are kind of expensive vs plastic. Taxing it would create a weird perverse thing. The real thing that needs to happen is the remaining 3 things we can recycle easily need to be cheaper. When nat gas became cheaper vs coal (which is really cheap) the energy companies very quickly started switching over to NG.
    - staunton 2y ago
      How do you imagine those things "become" cheaper without things like taxing? Just suggesting that the only way forward is to "make them cheaper" seems to amount to "do nothing to fix the problem, just wait until someone invents some magic solution". What if a magic solution is not possible, or at least noone finds it?
      - sumtechguy 2y ago
        In most terms if you constrain supply price goes up. If you make cheaper to make and get and supply goes up it becomes cheaper. Waving the 'just tax it' flag does not actually make things cheaper or better. It just shifts costs and removes capital from the system. It is the broken window fallacy. If you just spend money on 'this other thing' 'this other great thing will happen'. To understand that this book shows what doing that sort of thinking does. https://fee.org/ebooks/economics-in-one-lesson/ https://fee.org/ebooks/economics-in-one-lesson/ Getting tax law and pushing things to work are a delicate balance. Recycling is a good example of it. We are paying people money to 'recycle' plastic. When the reality is only 5-10% of plastics can be recycled. There is no magic fix. The basic problem is economics. Plastics are cheaper to use. Because they are a byproduct of something everyone needs. That is not going to change. If you tax it here they can find some other country willing to crack the oil and do it for the cheap way. You have to make other options cheaper. That usually comes thru volume.
epolanski 2y ago
One thing that I would really really like to emphasize: the biggest source of micro polymers, those that you can find in antartica, oceans or the everest comes from car tires. If we want less plastics pollution, this has to be handled first. The world desperately needs a tax tied to how polluting things are. If money's on the line industries and people will quickly adapt. Without it? There's way too much convenience to prompt looking for serious alternatives.
- jl6 2y ago
  Is there a viable alternative to current car tires?
  - epolanski 2y ago
    Using cars less (investing in public transport) and reducing the average weight of cars sensibly would make already an extremely huge difference. The difference in tire wear between a Corolla and a EV SUV is quite huge, e.g., you're gonna change tires way more often on the second one.
    - throwaway22032 2y ago
      This feels like a distraction, though. If car tyres cause unrecoverable pollution then we don't need to reduce that by half or something, we need to almost eliminate it. That means that we need a type of car tyre which does not cause this pollution.
      - epolanski 2y ago
        I don't see how would that be possible, tires work based on traction which depends on friction, you're gonna have to lose material. At the end of the day, I disagree with you, you play with the cards you have at hand, and at the moment tire technology isn't gonna change, so at least we should push for using less and smaller cars.
leto_ii 2y ago
> There are many flavors of this kind of accounting. Another version of free attribution would allow the company to take that entire 30-pound batch of “33% recycled” pouches and split them even further: > A third of them, 10 pounds, could be labeled 100% recycled — shifting the value of the full batch onto them — so long as the remaining 20 pounds aren’t labeled as recycled at all. Amusingly reminiscent of CDO tranches.
- lo_zamoyski 2y ago
  ANTONIO Is your recycled plastic ewes and rams? SHYLOCK I cannot tell; I make it breed as fast
- Scubabear68 2y ago
  Maybe more like CDO^2…
sandworm101 2y ago
>> If you turned all of what’s been made into cling wrap, it would cover every inch of the globe. An interesting analogy but cling wrap is famously thin. Here is another perspective: Worldwide plastic production is estimated at just over 400,000,000 tons, or 400,000,000,000kg. Not all plastic is the same but its density is roughly equivalent to that of water (once all the air-filled plastics like Styrofoam are crushed down). A cubic kilometer of water weighs in at 1,000,000,000,000kg, roughly double the world plastic problem. (someone please check my math ;) So yes, you could wrap the entire planet in a layer of cling film. But you also could dispose of all the world's plastic in a single 1km x 1km landfill piled 400m deep, which would be barely a dot on the map and certainly a far better solution than dumping it in the oceans.
- gnatman 2y ago
  "once all the air-filled plastics [...] are crushed down" is doing a lot of work in this scenario but still an interesting thought experiment!
TheDudeMan 2y ago
The delusion of thinking you can change consumer behavior via blog post... It seems like the solution is to tax the producer.
SubiculumCode 2y ago
I no longer care about plastics recycling. I only care that they get to the dump.
kogus 2y ago
Has recycling done any net good at all? The old mantra of "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" is in that order for a reason - Recycling was theoretically acknowledged as the "least bad" option. But in practice, I think many people viewed it as a get out of jail free card - consume whatever you want as long as you recycle the packaging. Now it turns out that it was (mostly) a farce all along. Most recycling ends up in landfills, and the recycling process has terrible pollution side effects of its own. The shocking part of it to me is that it has taken us forty plus years for this to even approach mainstream conversation. The idea that "recycling is a sham" sounded like a conspiracy theory up until recently. The level of effort that has been put into marketing recycling, just to enable ever-increasing consumerism is staggering.
- SteveNuts 2y ago
  As far as I understand it, recycling metals has a very large net positive for energy spent (vs. mining and refining new ores). Plastic and paper pulp recycling has always been dubiously valuable.
  - kogus 2y ago
    Thank you for that clarification. You are absolutely right- I was referring primarily to plastic recycling.
doe_eyes 2y ago
The second point of that article - that with creative accounting, 10%-recycled material turns into a small batch of "100%-recycled" material and a large pile of "0%-recycled" material - is kind of funny. Although it's interesting that we take this fungibility for granted when talking about money, but not plastic pellets. By the way, the "carbon offsets" industry does this and more. It's a general problem with industries that sell warm-and-fuzzy-feelings with no one particularly interested in looking under the hood. Also extends to some charities, etc. Anyway, the first claim of the article - that in the pyrolysis process, not all plastic is turned into plastic - seems... kind of nitpicky? So some of it is turned into fuel or paints - so what? A lot of consumer recycling is actually "downcycling". The glossy newspapers you put in the recycling bin probably don't end up as glossy newspapers - more likely, they end up as cardboard.
bandrami 2y ago
Unfortunately the only answer is that we need to use less "disposable" plastic in the first place.
paul7986 2y ago
Recently my township in southern york county pa made recycling a lot more costly and thus MANY are no longer are recycling. Society embraced the plastics industries (like the tobacco industry of the past.. smoking is healthy) drum banging that recycling is good, yet and of course years later we hear their drum banging was driven by money and greed ... such changed society into you must recycle to past few years we are hearing nothing is recycled. Thus I do not recycle (MANY others here no longer do too) because its costly now and as well was anything really being recycled (what to believe?). What i do rather is buy a few Fuji waters and reuse them throughout a month. OVerall when i was recycling or whatever i was doing i would drink 6 small bottles of water a day and put them in the recycle bin. Im definitely now using a ton less plastic.
xlinux 2y ago
Minimalisim is what the world needs.
welder 2y ago
Just do like Vienna... they incinerate their plastic with almost no emissions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml0gXre_V-U&t=91s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml0gXre_V-U&t=91s
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- arresin 2y ago
  I find that extremely hard to believe. Especially wrt micro plastics and aerosolised phthalates.
mjevans 2y ago
Let us have the damned plastic straws. If the (industrial?) compostable / degrades better plastic isn't a myth go ahead and require that as the material, but otherwise straws are too useful. As for the rest? Regulations. Regulate the use of easy to clean and reuse durable containers. Make their sizes standard, interchangeable. Alternately, allow containers that are fully disposable. However the customer fee for a fully disposable container should be zero overhead. Yes this includes paper bags at the grocery store. That tech is super useful and should be encouraged over... heavy plastic BS bags.
- KennyBlanken 2y ago
  "straws are too useful"? I haven't used one since I was a teen - or on the rare occasion I've had a smoothie. I'm pretty sure I would cope without a straw if need be. The environmental cost is outweighed by the necessity, and we really need to start thinking about the necessity of items, not how convenient they make things.
  - yarekt 2y ago
    Just like plastic use in medical setting, single use plastic straws have a similar sort of use, but they are obviously not needed everywhere. Another source of major plastic waste is fishing, but people love their fish /shrug
jkestner 2y ago
I see a lot of people despairing from the consumer side. Let me mention the producer side. Making an outdoor-rated device with a radio, plastic is a hard material to ignore. Given that there’s little else that has the right characteristics at anywhere near the right price, I’ve done a lot of searching for easily recyclable plastics (ABS ain’t one of them). Most of those are not right for the product and would only doom it to the landfill quicker when they failed. So I focused on plastics that would keep the product in use as long as possible. For recycling, we’re going to experiment with doing it ourselves—take used product back, and have our injection molder regrind it for a future batch (this is why I picked a local partner, they’re down for it). Given that all the real waste is produced by single-use plastics, I think this exercise has been the commercial equivalent of washing and sorting all my food packaging.
- anfilt 2y ago
  Just use metals then. Aluminum is good. If you want cheaper and easily castable/molded like plastic then die cast zinc is great.
  - jkestner 2y ago
    Would love to tear down an outdoor-rated device with a radio cased in die-cast zinc—please let me know when you find one.
    - anfilt 2y ago
      Like you would just make your enclosure out of the zinc is what I am thinking. I know satellite dish parts are often made out die cast zinc and those are out in the elements for years. For instance here is an example part made of a zinc casting: https://www.dynacast.com/en-gb/specialty-die-casting/die-casting-parts-and-product-examples/radio-assembly-for-satellite-systems https://www.dynacast.com/en-gb/specialty-die-casting/die-cas... The only thing about metal enclosures is you just need either a connector passed through for your antenna or a channel that your antenna can be potted into like on some cellphones with an aluminum body. Since an antenna in a metal box is umm not going to get much if any signal. --Edit-- Also you can find lots of old radios before plastic was wide spread in metal enclosures. Although those old devices are not exactly water tight no gaskets or sealant between parts. Unless you look at older military grade units.
Always42 2y ago
Where I live, it's required that I have both recycling and trash picked up every week. How much more pullotion is added by that second truck driving around? Also instead of forcing me to get trash picked up every week why can't it be bi weekly? I know I know, money. But guh.
- gwbas1c 2y ago
  > How much more pullotion is added by that second truck driving around? Probably not much, or negligible. If everything was going into a single trash truck, it would fill faster. The fact is, trash / recyclable trucks do fill up and need to dump their load. (I'll let you figure out how to run those numbers.) In my case, my company sends a single truck with one side that handles recycling and the other that handles trash. I prefer it because I only have a single trash day, and everything gets picked up at the same time. What I don't like is that all trash pickup (in my town) is private. There are 2-4 different trash trucks that visit my street a week, depending on if a company is doing well or mismanaged and going out of business.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
Does anyone familiar with molecular recycling know current state of the art, tradeoffs, etc.? Curious to see how that's coming along, especially given the seeming failure of mechanical recycling.
- 1970-01-01 2y ago
  I keep posting my thoughts and they are mostly ignored. Molecular recycling is a different beast entirely and it's mostly unknown in the news. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40713873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40713873
tim333 2y ago
It seems to me that sticking it in a landfill is a kind of recycling. We take hydrocarbons out of the ground, polymerize them, use them a bit and then put them back in the ground where they came from.
marmadukester39 2y ago
Every time this comes up I find myself so angry that we cant have a truly circular approach with legally mandated standard sized containers. Put labels on the damn things to market whats inside. You could even do the same thing with plastic utensils. This profusion of package sizes and shapes is the true insanity.
scotty79 2y ago
I think plastic should be labled as carbon sequestration method and dumped into old mines to wait for some generation in the future that can figure out how to properly used it for something.
scotty79 2y ago
There should be a way to turn plastic into something we use a lot like bricks or road support material.
idrathernot 2y ago
Pyrolysis is dumb. It’s relatively easy to recycle Polyethylene using compression molding (google CTC Plastics)
hatmatrix 2y ago
I've heard it summed up this way: "They lied to us 30 years ago. How can we trust they're not lying this time?" Recycling technology has not advanced enough that what is promised is credible. If they were honest about the difficulties in recycling, it may be that we still might have carried forward with the plastic revolution - but we probably would have been less cowboy-ish in adopting it for everything.
vegetablepotpie 2y ago
From an economic perspective, the problem with pyrolysis waste-to-energy is that it takes more energy to use the process than it produces [1]. This is a process that is harmful to communities around the plants, harmful to the environment, and does not benefit users of the process. I do not understand why organizations like Exxon-Mobil and the American Chemistry Council are promoting it. [1] https://www.lboro.ac.uk/media-centre/press-releases/2019/may/pyrolysis-defies-the-laws-of-physics/ https://www.lboro.ac.uk/media-centre/press-releases/2019/may...
- InitialLastName 2y ago
  > I do not understand why organizations like Exxon-Mobil and the American Chemistry Council are promoting it. If they don't pretend there's a responsible way to dispose of plastic, someone might hold them responsible for the plastic waste they produce.
- dzdt 2y ago
  Organizations like Exxon-Mobil promote these fairy-tale schemes as a talking point to counter legislation that would restrict their unlimited production of fossil-fuel based plastics. Its the same scheme with carbon capture for coal-burning power plants. The technology doesn't and will never work as described, but talking up its potential gives an excuse not to regulate the polluting industry now.
- lenerdenator 2y ago
  > I do not understand why organizations like Exxon-Mobil and the American Chemistry Council are promoting it. Because if you start to look at plastics by what has to be done with them after they're consumed, they don't make sense as a common consumer product* anymore. And if they don't make sense as a common consumer product, then there's fewer people lining up to buy Exxon Mobil's plastic stocks, which are made of oil. Since Exxon Mobil is a company that exists to transfer value to shareholders via the extraction and processing of hydrocarbons, this is a problem. The ACC is made up of scientists and engineers that work for companies like Exxon Mobil. * common consumer product meaning that it's used in places for broad public use where alternatives such as aluminum or wood are viable, like beverage cans.
jurassicfoxy 2y ago
Recyling plastic has died for me. I read an article (probably posted on HN) that convinced me the act of "recyling" dumps enough microplastics into the water stream that it's all better off in a landfill. Finally that was it for me. Maybe on the odd day I'll throw # 1 PETE into the recyling bin, else it's into the garbage bag for me. Now we must simply focus on buying less.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Landfills are awesome. Properly managed, they're pretty much the best way to deal with trash. But they're also not completely out of sight, so people desperately look for inferior alternatives.
  - titzer 2y ago
    You know what's awesome? The biosphere, which recycles 99.9999% of its own matter in a vast, global cooperative, driven by unending clean source of energy that is literally beamed in from space with no waste products. Chucking it all in a hole? Not even close.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      I agree. But the thing about trash is, biosphere can't handle much of it. Chucking it into a high-tech hole lets you manage the decomposition, releasing contents over time in form and quantity that the biosphere can safely handle. Also in general, unsafe things are usually best kept concentrated and supervised. Spreading them all around the environment isn't solving the problem - it's just another way to put the issue out of mind, while future generations suffer from a slow-brew, large-scale disaster.
    - pixl97 2y ago
      Until the thing you're still using as a product gets ate by this vast global cooperative.
    - lazide 2y ago
      Uh, someone has clearly not spent much time in a swamp. Or around caliche/dry lake beds (especially when on that last stage of drying when everything starts to rot). Just because it’s biological and natural doesn’t mean it’s necessarily pleasant, nice smelling, or healthy to be around. If your only exposure to nature is national parks and the like, it’s easy to over glorify nature. Not saying landfills are nice or anything, or healthy either. But nature has its equivalents.
frdsfctt 2y ago
Plastic recycling is a scam - see DeGennes or Florry-Huggins. But there is no need to give up. As long as we can keep brominated, chlorinated and fluorinated plastics out of the input stream (by taxes and deposits) burning plastic for energy is not that bad. Fundamentally, as I see it, consumers and regulators love their Gore-Tex jackets and their teflon tape too much to have viable plastic burning.

225 points by tysone 2y ago

Honestly the best thing is to just bury the plastic in a modern landfill just like other garbage. Modern landfills are very good and containing all the bad stuff. There is actually plenty of room for them. And you sequester the carbon in the plastics. Win win all around.

orwin 2y ago
The issue with landfill is the same as burning plastics. Heavy metal and elements that bioaccumulate in animals and plants being dispersed in a small-ish zone. If you can remove bromine and all that shit before putting plastics in landfills, that would be great.
- mariusor 2y ago
  And from here to sorting the trash before it reaches the landfill is just a small step in logic.

Workaccount2 2y ago

I just throw plastic in the garbage. This after a life of bending over backwards to recycle. The primary concern for everyone should be carbon in the atmosphere. Landfills full of plastic might be bad for the environment over time, but they are not going to cause a global mass extinction. Probably the dumbest thing humanity can do is burn plastic for energy (i.e. convert sequestered carbon to CO2). Followed second by recycling it.

SoftTalker 2y ago
In a lot of places, it ends up there anyway. The market for plastic recycling is such that it's often less expensive to just truck it to a landfill. That's what happens in many places, all your efforts to have separate bins for plastic and sorting your trash every week might well be a complete waste of time.
- c-linkage 2y ago
  I'm pretty sure the point of recycling to make people feel like they are doing something about plastic pollution, and this feeling distracts people from the fact that nothing you do with plastic actually makes a difference. Perception is 9/10s of the law.
  - mariusor 2y ago
    > nothing you do with plastic actually makes a difference ... yet. Do you think that in a wonderful future where we get some technical advancement to be able to deal with plastics effectively, will it be easier to deal with it when it's uniformly spread through the world's landfills, or when it's sorted and dumped in bulk?
    - samatman 2y ago
      This is why I continue to dutifully rinse out plastics and throw them into the landfill via the separate 'recycling' process. I'd rather it go to the special plastic landfill, where, like cryogenically-frozen Effective Altruists, future generations can give it a new life with yet-undiscovered technology.
      - mariusor 2y ago
        I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but yes, that's exactly what I'm doing too.
        c-linkage 2y ago
        I, too, will keep using the separate stream, more out of habit than anything else. But the plastic doesn't currently go into a special landfill, it goes into the same ones as all of the other trash. <https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/17/climate/ask-nyt-climate-recycling.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/17/climate/ask-nyt-climate-r...> [I]f the [recycling] plant can find a buyer at a price that makes sense, the bundles will be shipped off to a recycling plant. Sometimes a local one, and sometimes one as far away as Africa or Southeast Asia. If they can’t, everything goes into a landfill or gets incinerated. And even though my original comment is at zero, the industry specifically pushed recycling because by making people feel like they were helping, they would ignore the real problem. <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-...> Yet the industry spent millions telling people to recycle, because, as one former top industry insider told NPR, selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn't true. "If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment," Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association and one of the industry's most powerful trade groups in Washington, D.C., told NPR." Burying the plastic is probably the better option. <https://www.ft.com/content/901c78e6-b4d0-467c-ab87-6fc44c8a004c https://www.ft.com/content/901c78e6-b4d0-467c-ab87-6fc44c8a0...> “The energy required to do reprocessing is higher than the energy required to make the [plastic] in the first place,” he said. To limit carbon emissions in line with the global warming goals of the Paris climate accord, it would be better to “bury the stuff”, according to Hallett.
titzer 2y ago
Just throwing it in a hole perpetuates the unsustainable fossil fuel addiction. Does burning it perpetuate that addiction worse (and as a side-effect produce even more CO2)? Yes, so on one level I agree with you, but on another level, we need to get the hell off this ride.

kkfx 2y ago

Let's start to talk instead how to need less plastic. The most commonly discharged plastic is for packaging. Let's start observing the activity, usage who consume the most quantity of plastic: ready made food, small pack of anything. It's then about time to stop vending machines of micro-dose ultra-transformed "food", individually package fruits and vegges not to preserve them but to sell them at a higher price, the proliferation of sugar+gas added water to sell more since many in the western world have access to public clean water at home and so on. Let's star selling the as prepared leaves in a significant quantity instead of pre-dosed individually envelop mini-bags, mini-bags of sugar and so on. This will IMMENSELY reduce the quantity of disposable plastic we drop every day. We can't get rid of anything of course, but we can get rid of many. Even for milk we can start to redistribute it in the classic way instead of in the modern long-range shipping who need plastic to preserve it. If you follow this idea you'll realize a thing: we need to delete modern dense cities. They are the biggest consumer of such packaging because the fast life in tight space demand them. I'm really serious. Try imaging you as a remote worker or an in person worker in a remote spread are how and what kind of food you buy there. You are at home, no need for packed single-dose bags of sugar, you have you own favorite tea in pots, you have plenty of space to stockpile food and buying in big quantity allow to save some time and money, also you might have time to cook at home and so on. Oh, yes, it's just a slice of the total plastic we use, but it's a very big one, used for things we can avoid. Surely we have also much plastic for dress, and that's again can be reduced if we live spread because there is far less "need" to dress ourselves in gazillion of different outfit to go downtown, but we can't avoid that completely, let's start what we can start.

CorrectHorseBat 2y ago
So to save a little bit of plastic you'd spend much more energy on everything else? Why not just use glass for milk and paper for tea?
- kkfx 2y ago
  Energy I can make (and I make) locally, for instance from p.v. instead of spending in plastic that demand energy anyway. There is a common misconception about modern cities than "far past one". Nowadays we do not simply live in dense area walking around with stairs having next to no equipment at home like in the aforementioned past where people live tight but also simply, working in most cases "from home" meaning they just go downstairs and they are in their shops. Modern cities demand a gazillion of things, just a building for: - clean water - hot water - sewers - fire safety - elevators - seismic safety - HVAC - .... Demand MUCH more energy than modern wood based single-family homes (if well built ad without exaggeration of course) both to be build, operated, maintained and evolved. We are not anymore in the era of rock+wood homes passing from a generation to another for centuries with little to no changes. With "new deal" tech we simply can't live in cities. Just take a look at a mean apartment in your country, in Italy a mean apartment need 20-30kW thermal power to heat in the winter simply because even if it's less and less cold most of them was built in an era where no one care about insulation. Modern homes with 1kW electrical can heat and cool themselves in the mean for the same country. In single family homes there is typically room to recharge from p.v. cars if you WFH or working in a spread area to recharge them from p.v. at work, the same model. In cities it's simply not possible. How much energy this alone means? Now try seeing "future personal air mobility" sold as urban https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-report.pdf https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... but definitively NOT urban, cities can't simply adapt, you need to rebuild them to adapt more than few evolutionary steps. In a spread (not too much of course) area you have plenty of space to adapt and buildings are small, they can be made in recyclable materials for most of their structure and the same is valid for local infra. Cities demand big harbors, airports, highways who consume enormous resources and can't change much, a spread are use maybe even LESS resources and being spread can slowly adapt. Try just seen the nightmare of Jakarta and their "solution" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-01/indonesia-sets-2024-deadline-to-move-its-new-capital-to-borneo https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-01/indonesia... can you measure how big waste of resources such move represent?

amusingimpala75 2y ago

I may be missing it, but this article mainly talks about the issues of pyrolysis and advanced plastics recycling. But it provides data supporting traditional recycling, citing a 55-85% success rate. Are there any other issues with traditional recycling, or do we just need to make sure that the plastic being recycled is using the better/older method?

kragen 2y ago
pyrolysis makes yogurt tubs from yogurt tubs. traditional 'mechanical' recycling makes park benches from yogurt tubs and throws up its hands at the park benches
ZeroGravitas 2y ago
They're kind of complementary. The expanded version of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle has Waste-to-energy and landfill as next steps. Chemical recycling could fit in between mechanical recycling and Waste-to-energy. Though if you just let corporations lie about stuff then it's hard for any kind of logical actions to be taken. Personally I don't mind the mass balance stuff they mention as long as there is a mandated minimum. Similar to 'green electricity' that all come through the same wires as the coal generation it's fine if consumer brands want to pay a little extra to market themselves as 100% green energy but if you spread any extra cost across every faceless user by forcing them to buy a minimum 1% green energy and ramp it up over a few years then that's a good way to fund the initial rollout of new cleaner options.
yarekt 2y ago
As I understand it, plastics that come “post consumer” are too polluted to be used for anything but lowest grade of products: tyres, though probably not even that as people want “performance” from their tyres. Where I live (UK) most plastic waste can’t be recycled yet, and they took our bins when I accidentally (optimistically) tried :(

tmaly 2y ago

I think a better approach to this would be to improve packaging technology. Are there ways to use less plastic or none at all in packaging?

mannycalavera42 2y ago
"packaging" is just a synonym of "ad space" that's the real challenge (not saying it's impossible, need just _some_ revolutionary approach I think)
- sumtechguy 2y ago
  > need just _some_ revolutionary approach That 'revolutionary approach' is making one of the other things that we can recycle very easily cheaper. Plastics are wildly cheap and durable enough for their use. But paper (kinda recyclable), glass (very recyclable), metal (very recyclable) are kind of expensive vs plastic. Taxing it would create a weird perverse thing. The real thing that needs to happen is the remaining 3 things we can recycle easily need to be cheaper. When nat gas became cheaper vs coal (which is really cheap) the energy companies very quickly started switching over to NG.
  - staunton 2y ago
    How do you imagine those things "become" cheaper without things like taxing? Just suggesting that the only way forward is to "make them cheaper" seems to amount to "do nothing to fix the problem, just wait until someone invents some magic solution". What if a magic solution is not possible, or at least noone finds it?
    - sumtechguy 2y ago
      In most terms if you constrain supply price goes up. If you make cheaper to make and get and supply goes up it becomes cheaper. Waving the 'just tax it' flag does not actually make things cheaper or better. It just shifts costs and removes capital from the system. It is the broken window fallacy. If you just spend money on 'this other thing' 'this other great thing will happen'. To understand that this book shows what doing that sort of thinking does. https://fee.org/ebooks/economics-in-one-lesson/ https://fee.org/ebooks/economics-in-one-lesson/ Getting tax law and pushing things to work are a delicate balance. Recycling is a good example of it. We are paying people money to 'recycle' plastic. When the reality is only 5-10% of plastics can be recycled. There is no magic fix. The basic problem is economics. Plastics are cheaper to use. Because they are a byproduct of something everyone needs. That is not going to change. If you tax it here they can find some other country willing to crack the oil and do it for the cheap way. You have to make other options cheaper. That usually comes thru volume.

epolanski 2y ago

One thing that I would really really like to emphasize: the biggest source of micro polymers, those that you can find in antartica, oceans or the everest comes from car tires. If we want less plastics pollution, this has to be handled first. The world desperately needs a tax tied to how polluting things are. If money's on the line industries and people will quickly adapt. Without it? There's way too much convenience to prompt looking for serious alternatives.

jl6 2y ago
Is there a viable alternative to current car tires?
- epolanski 2y ago
  Using cars less (investing in public transport) and reducing the average weight of cars sensibly would make already an extremely huge difference. The difference in tire wear between a Corolla and a EV SUV is quite huge, e.g., you're gonna change tires way more often on the second one.
  - throwaway22032 2y ago
    This feels like a distraction, though. If car tyres cause unrecoverable pollution then we don't need to reduce that by half or something, we need to almost eliminate it. That means that we need a type of car tyre which does not cause this pollution.
    - epolanski 2y ago
      I don't see how would that be possible, tires work based on traction which depends on friction, you're gonna have to lose material. At the end of the day, I disagree with you, you play with the cards you have at hand, and at the moment tire technology isn't gonna change, so at least we should push for using less and smaller cars.

leto_ii 2y ago

> There are many flavors of this kind of accounting. Another version of free attribution would allow the company to take that entire 30-pound batch of “33% recycled” pouches and split them even further: > A third of them, 10 pounds, could be labeled 100% recycled — shifting the value of the full batch onto them — so long as the remaining 20 pounds aren’t labeled as recycled at all. Amusingly reminiscent of CDO tranches.

lo_zamoyski 2y ago
ANTONIO Is your recycled plastic ewes and rams? SHYLOCK I cannot tell; I make it breed as fast
Scubabear68 2y ago
Maybe more like CDO^2…

sandworm101 2y ago

>> If you turned all of what’s been made into cling wrap, it would cover every inch of the globe. An interesting analogy but cling wrap is famously thin. Here is another perspective: Worldwide plastic production is estimated at just over 400,000,000 tons, or 400,000,000,000kg. Not all plastic is the same but its density is roughly equivalent to that of water (once all the air-filled plastics like Styrofoam are crushed down). A cubic kilometer of water weighs in at 1,000,000,000,000kg, roughly double the world plastic problem. (someone please check my math ;) So yes, you could wrap the entire planet in a layer of cling film. But you also could dispose of all the world's plastic in a single 1km x 1km landfill piled 400m deep, which would be barely a dot on the map and certainly a far better solution than dumping it in the oceans.

gnatman 2y ago
"once all the air-filled plastics [...] are crushed down" is doing a lot of work in this scenario but still an interesting thought experiment!

TheDudeMan 2y ago

The delusion of thinking you can change consumer behavior via blog post... It seems like the solution is to tax the producer.

SubiculumCode 2y ago

I no longer care about plastics recycling. I only care that they get to the dump.

kogus 2y ago

Has recycling done any net good at all? The old mantra of "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" is in that order for a reason - Recycling was theoretically acknowledged as the "least bad" option. But in practice, I think many people viewed it as a get out of jail free card - consume whatever you want as long as you recycle the packaging. Now it turns out that it was (mostly) a farce all along. Most recycling ends up in landfills, and the recycling process has terrible pollution side effects of its own. The shocking part of it to me is that it has taken us forty plus years for this to even approach mainstream conversation. The idea that "recycling is a sham" sounded like a conspiracy theory up until recently. The level of effort that has been put into marketing recycling, just to enable ever-increasing consumerism is staggering.

SteveNuts 2y ago
As far as I understand it, recycling metals has a very large net positive for energy spent (vs. mining and refining new ores). Plastic and paper pulp recycling has always been dubiously valuable.
- kogus 2y ago
  Thank you for that clarification. You are absolutely right- I was referring primarily to plastic recycling.

doe_eyes 2y ago

The second point of that article - that with creative accounting, 10%-recycled material turns into a small batch of "100%-recycled" material and a large pile of "0%-recycled" material - is kind of funny. Although it's interesting that we take this fungibility for granted when talking about money, but not plastic pellets. By the way, the "carbon offsets" industry does this and more. It's a general problem with industries that sell warm-and-fuzzy-feelings with no one particularly interested in looking under the hood. Also extends to some charities, etc. Anyway, the first claim of the article - that in the pyrolysis process, not all plastic is turned into plastic - seems... kind of nitpicky? So some of it is turned into fuel or paints - so what? A lot of consumer recycling is actually "downcycling". The glossy newspapers you put in the recycling bin probably don't end up as glossy newspapers - more likely, they end up as cardboard.

bandrami 2y ago

Unfortunately the only answer is that we need to use less "disposable" plastic in the first place.

paul7986 2y ago

Recently my township in southern york county pa made recycling a lot more costly and thus MANY are no longer are recycling. Society embraced the plastics industries (like the tobacco industry of the past.. smoking is healthy) drum banging that recycling is good, yet and of course years later we hear their drum banging was driven by money and greed ... such changed society into you must recycle to past few years we are hearing nothing is recycled. Thus I do not recycle (MANY others here no longer do too) because its costly now and as well was anything really being recycled (what to believe?). What i do rather is buy a few Fuji waters and reuse them throughout a month. OVerall when i was recycling or whatever i was doing i would drink 6 small bottles of water a day and put them in the recycle bin. Im definitely now using a ton less plastic.

xlinux 2y ago

Minimalisim is what the world needs.

welder 2y ago

Just do like Vienna... they incinerate their plastic with almost no emissions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml0gXre_V-U&t=91s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml0gXre_V-U&t=91s

deleted 2y ago
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arresin 2y ago
I find that extremely hard to believe. Especially wrt micro plastics and aerosolised phthalates.

mjevans 2y ago

Let us have the damned plastic straws. If the (industrial?) compostable / degrades better plastic isn't a myth go ahead and require that as the material, but otherwise straws are too useful. As for the rest? Regulations. Regulate the use of easy to clean and reuse durable containers. Make their sizes standard, interchangeable. Alternately, allow containers that are fully disposable. However the customer fee for a fully disposable container should be zero overhead. Yes this includes paper bags at the grocery store. That tech is super useful and should be encouraged over... heavy plastic BS bags.

KennyBlanken 2y ago
"straws are too useful"? I haven't used one since I was a teen - or on the rare occasion I've had a smoothie. I'm pretty sure I would cope without a straw if need be. The environmental cost is outweighed by the necessity, and we really need to start thinking about the necessity of items, not how convenient they make things.
- yarekt 2y ago
  Just like plastic use in medical setting, single use plastic straws have a similar sort of use, but they are obviously not needed everywhere. Another source of major plastic waste is fishing, but people love their fish /shrug

jkestner 2y ago

I see a lot of people despairing from the consumer side. Let me mention the producer side. Making an outdoor-rated device with a radio, plastic is a hard material to ignore. Given that there’s little else that has the right characteristics at anywhere near the right price, I’ve done a lot of searching for easily recyclable plastics (ABS ain’t one of them). Most of those are not right for the product and would only doom it to the landfill quicker when they failed. So I focused on plastics that would keep the product in use as long as possible. For recycling, we’re going to experiment with doing it ourselves—take used product back, and have our injection molder regrind it for a future batch (this is why I picked a local partner, they’re down for it). Given that all the real waste is produced by single-use plastics, I think this exercise has been the commercial equivalent of washing and sorting all my food packaging.

anfilt 2y ago
Just use metals then. Aluminum is good. If you want cheaper and easily castable/molded like plastic then die cast zinc is great.
- jkestner 2y ago
  Would love to tear down an outdoor-rated device with a radio cased in die-cast zinc—please let me know when you find one.
  - anfilt 2y ago
    Like you would just make your enclosure out of the zinc is what I am thinking. I know satellite dish parts are often made out die cast zinc and those are out in the elements for years. For instance here is an example part made of a zinc casting: https://www.dynacast.com/en-gb/specialty-die-casting/die-casting-parts-and-product-examples/radio-assembly-for-satellite-systems https://www.dynacast.com/en-gb/specialty-die-casting/die-cas... The only thing about metal enclosures is you just need either a connector passed through for your antenna or a channel that your antenna can be potted into like on some cellphones with an aluminum body. Since an antenna in a metal box is umm not going to get much if any signal. --Edit-- Also you can find lots of old radios before plastic was wide spread in metal enclosures. Although those old devices are not exactly water tight no gaskets or sealant between parts. Unless you look at older military grade units.

Always42 2y ago

Where I live, it's required that I have both recycling and trash picked up every week. How much more pullotion is added by that second truck driving around? Also instead of forcing me to get trash picked up every week why can't it be bi weekly? I know I know, money. But guh.

gwbas1c 2y ago
> How much more pullotion is added by that second truck driving around? Probably not much, or negligible. If everything was going into a single trash truck, it would fill faster. The fact is, trash / recyclable trucks do fill up and need to dump their load. (I'll let you figure out how to run those numbers.) In my case, my company sends a single truck with one side that handles recycling and the other that handles trash. I prefer it because I only have a single trash day, and everything gets picked up at the same time. What I don't like is that all trash pickup (in my town) is private. There are 2-4 different trash trucks that visit my street a week, depending on if a company is doing well or mismanaged and going out of business.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago

Does anyone familiar with molecular recycling know current state of the art, tradeoffs, etc.? Curious to see how that's coming along, especially given the seeming failure of mechanical recycling.

1970-01-01 2y ago
I keep posting my thoughts and they are mostly ignored. Molecular recycling is a different beast entirely and it's mostly unknown in the news. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40713873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40713873

tim333 2y ago

It seems to me that sticking it in a landfill is a kind of recycling. We take hydrocarbons out of the ground, polymerize them, use them a bit and then put them back in the ground where they came from.

marmadukester39 2y ago

Every time this comes up I find myself so angry that we cant have a truly circular approach with legally mandated standard sized containers. Put labels on the damn things to market whats inside. You could even do the same thing with plastic utensils. This profusion of package sizes and shapes is the true insanity.

scotty79 2y ago

I think plastic should be labled as carbon sequestration method and dumped into old mines to wait for some generation in the future that can figure out how to properly used it for something.

scotty79 2y ago

There should be a way to turn plastic into something we use a lot like bricks or road support material.

idrathernot 2y ago

Pyrolysis is dumb. It’s relatively easy to recycle Polyethylene using compression molding (google CTC Plastics)

hatmatrix 2y ago

I've heard it summed up this way: "They lied to us 30 years ago. How can we trust they're not lying this time?" Recycling technology has not advanced enough that what is promised is credible. If they were honest about the difficulties in recycling, it may be that we still might have carried forward with the plastic revolution - but we probably would have been less cowboy-ish in adopting it for everything.

vegetablepotpie 2y ago

From an economic perspective, the problem with pyrolysis waste-to-energy is that it takes more energy to use the process than it produces [1]. This is a process that is harmful to communities around the plants, harmful to the environment, and does not benefit users of the process. I do not understand why organizations like Exxon-Mobil and the American Chemistry Council are promoting it. [1] https://www.lboro.ac.uk/media-centre/press-releases/2019/may/pyrolysis-defies-the-laws-of-physics/ https://www.lboro.ac.uk/media-centre/press-releases/2019/may...

InitialLastName 2y ago
> I do not understand why organizations like Exxon-Mobil and the American Chemistry Council are promoting it. If they don't pretend there's a responsible way to dispose of plastic, someone might hold them responsible for the plastic waste they produce.
dzdt 2y ago
Organizations like Exxon-Mobil promote these fairy-tale schemes as a talking point to counter legislation that would restrict their unlimited production of fossil-fuel based plastics. Its the same scheme with carbon capture for coal-burning power plants. The technology doesn't and will never work as described, but talking up its potential gives an excuse not to regulate the polluting industry now.
lenerdenator 2y ago
> I do not understand why organizations like Exxon-Mobil and the American Chemistry Council are promoting it. Because if you start to look at plastics by what has to be done with them after they're consumed, they don't make sense as a common consumer product* anymore. And if they don't make sense as a common consumer product, then there's fewer people lining up to buy Exxon Mobil's plastic stocks, which are made of oil. Since Exxon Mobil is a company that exists to transfer value to shareholders via the extraction and processing of hydrocarbons, this is a problem. The ACC is made up of scientists and engineers that work for companies like Exxon Mobil. * common consumer product meaning that it's used in places for broad public use where alternatives such as aluminum or wood are viable, like beverage cans.

jurassicfoxy 2y ago

Recyling plastic has died for me. I read an article (probably posted on HN) that convinced me the act of "recyling" dumps enough microplastics into the water stream that it's all better off in a landfill. Finally that was it for me. Maybe on the odd day I'll throw # 1 PETE into the recyling bin, else it's into the garbage bag for me. Now we must simply focus on buying less.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
Landfills are awesome. Properly managed, they're pretty much the best way to deal with trash. But they're also not completely out of sight, so people desperately look for inferior alternatives.
- titzer 2y ago
  You know what's awesome? The biosphere, which recycles 99.9999% of its own matter in a vast, global cooperative, driven by unending clean source of energy that is literally beamed in from space with no waste products. Chucking it all in a hole? Not even close.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    I agree. But the thing about trash is, biosphere can't handle much of it. Chucking it into a high-tech hole lets you manage the decomposition, releasing contents over time in form and quantity that the biosphere can safely handle. Also in general, unsafe things are usually best kept concentrated and supervised. Spreading them all around the environment isn't solving the problem - it's just another way to put the issue out of mind, while future generations suffer from a slow-brew, large-scale disaster.
  - pixl97 2y ago
    Until the thing you're still using as a product gets ate by this vast global cooperative.
  - lazide 2y ago
    Uh, someone has clearly not spent much time in a swamp. Or around caliche/dry lake beds (especially when on that last stage of drying when everything starts to rot). Just because it’s biological and natural doesn’t mean it’s necessarily pleasant, nice smelling, or healthy to be around. If your only exposure to nature is national parks and the like, it’s easy to over glorify nature. Not saying landfills are nice or anything, or healthy either. But nature has its equivalents.

frdsfctt 2y ago

Plastic recycling is a scam - see DeGennes or Florry-Huggins. But there is no need to give up. As long as we can keep brominated, chlorinated and fluorinated plastics out of the input stream (by taxes and deposits) burning plastic for energy is not that bad. Fundamentally, as I see it, consumers and regulators love their Gore-Tex jackets and their teflon tape too much to have viable plastic burning.