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>"It is cheaper to just make a new plastic product than to collect it and recycle it or reuse it," says Kristian Syberg, who studies plastic pollution at Roskil

• baggy_trough 1y ago
  That would depend on how much it costs to convert used plastic into a useful form, compared to the raw materials. There's no reason to expect it to be cheaper.
  • Suppafly 1y ago
    >There's no reason to expect it to be cheaper. Sure there is, the raw materials have to be mined and transported across the country and such, it's ridiculous that it's cheaper to do that than to shred existing material and melt it back down. Even if you're downcycling from something like soda bottles to something like fence posts or plastic bricks or whatever, it should definitely be cheaper to recycle.
    • baggy_trough 1y ago
      That depends on the properties of the material and how much it costs to mine and transport it. Plastic is lightweight and ludicrously cheap to produce (hence why there are so many cost effective uses for it). Just the fact that it is dyed different colors may present an insurmountable cost problem for recyclers.
  • const_cast 1y ago
    > There's no reason to expect it to be cheaper. There is IMO, because we don't factor the cost of disposal and it's management into just about any product. Except maybe nuclear reactors. The reason plastic is so cheap is that you're free to make it and let it go where ever the fuck it does. The taypayer pays for cleanup in the long run, not you. You're externalizing a lot of costs.
    • baggy_trough 1y ago
      It can simply be placed in the landfill. I already pay garbage costs.
      • const_cast 1y ago
        Which isn't a one and done transaction, landfills require maintenance on the scale of decades. And, problem do occur, like leakage, which you need to manage. We're still paying for landfill management that are many, many decades old.
        • baggy_trough 1y ago
          Fair enough. But that sounds very manageable compared to trying to replace or eliminate our uses of plastic, or compared to inventing a cost effective way to recycle them.
          • const_cast 1y ago
            It does, which is why we do it, but really our dependence on plastic doesn't really come down to it's usefulness, but rather it's disposable-ness. We don't really reduce or reuse plastic consumption, even when it might make sense or might be more convenient. We use an excess of plastic with the intention it will just be thrown away - this is pretty contrary to how consumer goods were manufactured and used in the past. It was common to return glass jugs or containers to stores so they can be reused. It was typical to buy goods in-store, which required significantly less wrapping than something like Amazon. And, in general, most goods were designed for longer-term use. Now, some fields need that disposability, like medical supplies. But we really overdo it as a whole. There's a lot of plastic that we come in contact with on the orders of seconds, that we then immediately throw away. It's improving, though. Most people I know don't use plastic bottles anymore, they use reusable bottles they can refill.
            • baggy_trough 1y ago
              In other words, it's so cheap (meaning it uses so little resources) that we don't need to bother about it.
• antisthenes 1y ago
  > especially since people provide the used plastic for basically free. It is definitely not free. It requires another completely separate set of trucks to go around in addition to all the regular trash-collecting trucks. Which means vehicle maintenance, crew salaries and general administration. The reason it's not cost effective is because the negative externalities aren't built into the price of making the new items.
  • baggy_trough 1y ago
    > The reason it's not cost effective is because the negative externalities aren't built into the price of making the new items. That could be true, or not. It might be the case that recycling isn't cost effective even assuming negative externalities are properly costed.