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Texan used Apple AirTags to discover plastics in Houston aren't being recycled
- more_corn 2y agoPlastic recycling is a myth. It is effectively impossible to do it in an economically feasible way. Recycling itself was invented by plastic companies to divert blame from the company creating the plastic to the consumer. (Just recycle it!) if you don’t believe me look up the origin of the recycling symbol. Which isn’t to say recycling of meta and glass is useless. Recycling plastic is a myth, other recycling may be of some benefit.
- sschueller 2y agoAren't we at a point where recycling aluminum is a lot more energy efficient than removing it from bauxite and therefore more profitable for the industry to pull it from trash?
- cannonpr 2y agoSome countries do recycling of aluminium well, Japan for example, most don’t. Issues with contamination, sorting, pipeline, storage, just to name a few make it hard to implement well.
- foepys 2y agoLast time I checked modern aluminum alloys made it very hard to recycle aluminum waste efficiently. That's still the case, apparently.
- cannonpr 2y agoNearly all industrial ones yes, that’s why some countries that care a lot about recycling use easy to recycle alloys for cans, like Japan. They also religiously keep contaminants and other bits of aluminium out.
- ben_w 2y agoAlways was, I think? At least for domestic uses, I know nothing about fancy alloys. Even when I was a kid, people were big on separating steel and aluminium cans and showing off how recyclable aluminium is.
- mschuster91 2y ago> Recycling plastic is a myth, other recycling may be of some benefit. Some?! That's just a gross understatement. For paper, recycling saves 50% of energy and 66% of water compared to pure fresh paper [1]. Glass saves about 33% of energy [2]. Iron scrap is at 72% energy savings [3], copper at 80% [4]. Aluminium is the most insane example - there, recycling saves utterly astonishing 95% (!) of the energy you'd need to create new virgin aluminium from raw ore [5]. Add to all of that: the more you recycle from these groups of valuable materials, the less environmental destruction you have from mining the ores - and the less chance there is for shit to go seriously wrong, e.g. dam breaks like [6]. The case of plastics recycling is still open, but everything else? It's just so much more efficient. [1] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/umwelttipps-fuer-den-alltag/haushalt-wohnen/papier-recyclingpapier#hintergrund https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/umwelttipps-fuer-den-alltag/h... [2] https://www.bvse.de/glasrecycling/themen/glasrecycling-schont-die-umwelt.html https://www.bvse.de/glasrecycling/themen/glasrecycling-schon... [3] https://www.bvse.de/dateien2020/2-PDF/06-Publikationen/04-Broschueren/0608-EuRIC_Metal_Recycling_Factsheet_GER_002.pdf https://www.bvse.de/dateien2020/2-PDF/06-Publikationen/04-Br... [4] https://www.gdb-online.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Factsheet_Kupfer-Recycling.pdf https://www.gdb-online.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Factsh... [5] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/3521/dokumente/factsheet-aluminium_fi_barrierefrei.pdf https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/35... [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brumadinho_dam_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brumadinho_dam_disaster
- zdwolfe 2y agoThanks for these stats, it changes how I think about aluminum packaging/cans.
- crote 2y agoDo keep in mind that it is relative to new aluminium. It might still be far better for the environment to use other materials. For example, a plastic container might result in X emissions, a recycled aluminium one in 2X emissions, and a virgin aluminium one in 150X emissions. It just means we should absolutely recycle aluminium when used, but it doesn't by definition mean we should be using aluminium in the first place.
- diggan 2y ago> Plastic recycling is a myth. At least for another "eight to nine months from now" > But given that its operational timeline expects the processing plant to open eight to nine months from now, it means that the company will likely amass more trash before it can even open its doors They're basically stockpiling until the plant is operational. I'm not sure how they will achieve this mythical process, but at least they have more than half a year to figure it out.
- Reason077 2y ago> ”They're basically stockpiling until the plant is operational.” Sounds like a variant on the classic tire recycling scam: 1. Lowest bidder wins contract to recycle tires, by offering to do it cheaper than anyone else. 2. Starts storing tires somewhere while they “get up and running”. 3. Discovers it’s cheaper to just keep storing the tires than to actually process them, besides they bid too low to make it viable anyway. 4. Years go by and eventually an enormous tire mountain is discovered (or maybe it catches fire), resulting in big cleanup costs usually paid by taxpayers…
- diggan 2y agoI guess somewhere there is a data to either prove or refute this. Look at all the current active recycling centers and look if they built stockpiles before. And which stockpiles actually disappeared after the center was operational, or which never started operating and the stockpile remained. If you really could uncover a conspiracy like this, I'm sure big newspapers would be happy to collaborate on releasing these news :)
- ben_w 2y agoI know one of the people involved in this: https://sargasso-reclamation.com/ https://sargasso-reclamation.com/ If it's possible for Kenya to do this with the incidental bycatch of local fishermen, I would hope an industrialised nation could manage it with pre-sorted domestic and industrial waste.
- Vegenoid 2y agoTaking a look at their website, 2 things jump out to me: > A lean operation, leveraging Africa's strength in labour costs Which is of course a euphemism for "leveraging the low wages of African laborers". And: > We purchase today from out of work fisherman So it seems that this operation can exist because their costs are extremely low due to a poor local economy and a surplus of cheap labor. This does not translate to success in an industrialized first-world country.
- ben_w 2y agoThe second quote is why I made the reference to pre-sorted domestic and industrial waste that isn't going to need anyone to go fishing.
- ifeja 2y agoIf Evian sells its water in bottles made of 100% recycled plastic, that means 100% less plastic is entering the environment from Evian bottles than would otherwise. Do you disagree?
- junga 2y agoNot op nor do I disagree but if recycling plastic involves lots of energy and toxic chemicals, one should compare both of these two evils.
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y agoI do disagree. I don’t believe a food giant such as Evian to tell the truth. I don’t believe McDonalds or Starbucks either. It’s only told for advertising purpose, at least since the 80s if not more.
- hamandcheese 2y agoI might agree if it was actually zero sum, but as far as I know we still make new plastic from oil pumped out of the ground. Demand for recycled plastic is simply indirect demand for new plastic. Even if all plastic was recycled, there is still the issue of microplastics polluting our water and food supply.
- Symmetry 2y agoIf a consumer is conscientious enough to recycle something, the counterfactual is that they put it in the trash rather than that they throw it into the nearest river. In a landfill, a plastic bottle will lock up its constituent carbon for hundreds of years. In that long we should either have learned to manage the amount of carbon in our biosphere. To the extent that the amount of carbon we pump out of the ground is inelastic, better it get locked up in landfills than that it get burned. Now actually it is fairly elastic but given how much worse carbon burned is than carbon stored for hundreds of years I think disposal is probably better for the climate than recycling.
- fluoridation 2y agoI seem to recall that something 10% of the oil that's extracted is used to make plastics, while the rest is used for energy. Framed that way, it could be argued that it doesn't make much of a difference if it gets burned (especially if it's burned in lieu of burning some other fuel), but if it's burned there's no chance it will pollute a river or ocean.
- mulmen 2y agoI don't find this compelling at all. There's no substance here. Summary to save you the time: there's a stockpile of plastic for an under-construction plastic processing facility that needs a large stock of plastic to be economical. Unanswered questions: 1) Is the project on schedule? 2) Is this stockpile unexpected or unmanageable? 3) Is there actually any risk that storage space runs out before the plant becomes operational? The only remotely substantive part of the article has nothing to do with Airtags and is a shallow, uncited critique of an Exxon technology. It isn't clear if the upcoming Cyclix facility even plans to use this Exxon technology. > One more issue that many environmental advocates raise is that the advanced recycling technology that Exxon claims to have made for recycling all kinds of plastic isn’t exactly effective. Who are these environmental advocates you cite? What were their actual words? What does "exactly effective" mean here? > They would also likely demand a lot of fossil fuels to superheat the recyclables, which adds more greenhouse gas emissions. Likely? According to who? Based on what information? Texas has abundant renewable energy, where's the evidence that this requires fossil fuels? This is a trash piece that does not pass the sniff test. It is just shallow, lazy sensationalism that plays to anti-sustainability cynicism. Don't waste your click.
- freitzkriesler2 2y ago[dead]
- tadfisher 2y agoI'm firmly in the "we need to do everything we can to reduce global warming to below 2 degrees C and potentially cause a mass extinction event" camp, and I get extremely irritated when folks fail to understand that demand is for energy, our energy distribution is interconnected via a grid, and those points make energy a fungible commodity. Better than powering recycling plants, though, is to stop producing and consuming single-use plastics. A great way to do this is to stop subsidizing recycling programs and bake the energy cost into the product that must eventually be recycled.
- arresin 2y agoMultiuse plastic releases much more phthalates and is very expensive. It’s both a pipe dream and a bad idea. The only solution is landfill. Or… we can trust Exxon (ffs) to build a recycling plant of the future that somehow is green also.
- Terr_ 2y agoI realize I may be in a minority here, but I'm willing to do quite a lot of sorting as long as someone can promise me that things are at least going into distinct separate holes in the ground, so that my efforts aren't wasted when some future situation makes it profitable to mine them out.
- armada651 2y agoI stopped recycling plastic when it became clear that 70% of the collected plastic was being burned just like the regular trash. The only things I will recycle are PET bottles, glass, aluminum cans and paper. At the start of this year my municipality recognized that collecting plastics separately was simply a net loss environmentally and economically and removed all plastic waste containers (except for PET). Instead they will now simply try to recover some of the useful plastics for recycling from the mixed trash and burn the rest with the trash. When the plastic recycling stream contains 70% trash that you can't use, then recovering the 30% from the plastic recycling stream is barely more economical than recovering that from the mixed trash stream.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Symmetry 2y agoThe real danger with plastic is that it'll go to some under regulated recycler which picks out the 30% of plastic that it can recycle and then dumps the rest in the nearest river. If I put it in the trash in a modern country I can be sure it'll at least end up in a land fill or the equivalent. And in contrast to the incredibly wonderful glass and aluminium recycling systems plastic recycling doesn't really save that much production energy.
- dirtdobber 2y agoI have two indoor bins: one for plastics/recycling and one for garbage. I line both with trash bags. Unfortunately, the city gets very upset about the recyclable materials being in plastic bags (something about it messing up their machines). I like it better this way because I don't have an indoor bin full of loose, used plastics and paper which feels unorganized and dirty. I feel like these small, yet annoying, inconveniences hurt participation (in addition to the countless stories of plastics and garbage just being thrown into the same hole in the ground, or into an ocean patch off the coast of some other country).
- numpad0 2y agodupe? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41413174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41413174
- mulmen 2y agoNot a dupe. Same event but that's a far more substantive piece.
- xyst 2y agoThe investigative report shows the facility is funded by ExxonMobil. So, O&G is still trying to greenwash their wanton production of virgin plastic through recycling programs? It’s been decades since O&G’s own researchers (and later suppressed) determined recycling was not commercially viable. Public is already aware of this (woman who started own investigation with AirTags was skeptical of city claims). A mere 5% of plastic produced is recycled [1] The real headline here is Houston (effectively O&G’s backyard) public officials are clueless. [1] https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1131131088/recycling-plastic-is-practically-impossible-and-the-problem-is-getting-worse https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1131131088/recycling-plastic-...
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago[dupe] More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41413174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41413174
- librasteve 2y agoin the UK local councils have made a business out of paying unscrupulous firms in SE Asia and Africa to just take our “recycling” and either land fill, dump illegally or burn it - returning empty containers are very cheap transport - it even gets dumped into the ocean I am definitely going to try this!
- MongoTheMad 2y ago> Wright Waste Management did not allow CBS News to enter and inspect its premises. Still, the news team's drone camera discovered that all the trash picked up from the Houston Recycling Collaboration (HRC) was apparently just sitting there on its premises, stacked more than 10 feet high. Anyone else bothered by CBS's lack of decency here? They flew a drone inside a place they could not enter.