well the thing is, it's not impossible to recycle plastic, but the article also explains that really simple:
> Recycling plastic is "costly," it says, and sorting it, the report concludes, is "infeasible."
1. no infrastructure for sorting, there is no 100% method as of today (basically no research is done on this topic)
2. even if it is feasible, nobody does it becasue it is expensive.
3. there are countries where plastic recycling works, but these are outliners and countries who heavily invest in sorting, recycling on the consumer side.
So I have a PhD in mtls science, and I studied a bit of plastics thermo. However I never worked on the recycling problem.
Plastics, or polymers that aren’t cross linked, are in a sense easy to recycle - Just melt them and recast the part. 3D printing hobbyists even recycle their filament.
The problem is that any melted plastic doesn’t mix with any plastic other than itself. So if you have 99% polyethylene and 1% polypropylene and melt them together they won’t mix. But they won’t separate perfectly either (so you can’t skim the PP put).
Instead you get inter-penetrating phases (a spinodal). These phases have surfaces that don’t stick well together so the end result is that any parts made of this are exceptionally weak.
So this is the dilemma: if you have even 1% of different polymer in your mix, the plastic will suck. But we use at least 4 or 5 different plastics in everyday life all chucked into the same bins, all looking more less the same.
Solutions?
1. One solution is to heat all the plastics so that they break apart and therefore use them for feedstock. But this is very expensive, and the feedstocks aren’t very pure.
2 Make cat fuel. Cheaper then above, since the purity requirements aren’t as strong, but it’s basically the same as number 1. This doesnt increase CO2 emissions since the plastic is displacing oil
3. Burn it for energy. This needs far less strict requirements than 2 and lower CO2 emissions (since you don’t have to waste energy getting oil out). However, you’d have to basically ban public use of perfluorinated polymers or make them very expensive, or make them easy to identify (Teflon, gore-Tex.)
Frankly I’d ban perfluorinates except for use in critical industries. That chemistry is ecologically nasty.
4. Force companies to color their containers according to plastic type. I.e no more clear Pepsi or Coke bottles - all PE products are color, say green. All PP colors are red, etc.
> 4. Force companies to color their containers according to plastic type. I.e no more clear Pepsi or Coke bottles - all PE products are color, say green. All PP colors are red, etc.
well I'm no expert in this topic, just a little bit more engaged with the topic.
the biggest problem is that companies save tons of money not from different colors, but from different components. most cheese products for example have different types of plastic (MA/MH packaging, compound structure plastics are just cheap and easy to do), and most people do not know that if you don't separate them that it is way harder to recycle (some also just don't care). it's a hard topic and I've seen countries like sweden who tackle that problem by teaching everybody how to recycle plastics (they have multiple containers), but I do not thing that this is feasible worldwide. I mean I live in germany and my governement does not tackle the problem, they do not invenst, they do not regulate, all they do is calling itself "world champion of recycling", but what do they do? they declare burning waste as recycling (called thermetic recycling, point 3. but it's not recycling and we do not care about the emission when it comes to burning) or better, we declare it as recycled but ship it to africa / asia and don't look what they do with the waste at all.
waste management is something that most countries don't feel pressured to change something. mostly because you would need to change multiple industries, the packaging industry and the waste management industry.
> Frankly I’d ban perfluorinates except for use in critical industries. That chemistry is ecologically nasty.
well a lot of things are nasty, but as long as they print money. it won't be banned/changed that fast.
Excellent point about the multiple components in products. Ppl don’t realize that there’s a plastic liner on their can of Coke (of course, that just gets burned off when the Al gets recycled)
About Germany’s “recycling” I despise it when “experts” talk down at ppl saying “white lies” because we’re too stupid to understand (Dr. Fauci, I’m looking at you buddy).
Burning plastic isn’t recycling and Germany’s neologism is sophistry.
But it is a decent solution short of significantly increasing the price of plastic. That’s assuming you burn it correctly. And correctly burning it requires very high temperatures to get rid of dioxins. It means making sure to reduce as much as possible Chlorine sulphuric and Fluorine in the feedstock. It means having excellent NOx filters. It means having super tough monitoring of the emissions
When he gets asked about what percentage of people need to get vaccinated in order to achieve herd immunity he keeps pulling out different numbers from his ass until he's pressed to give a fully accurate and honest answer. The truth is that we can't know for certain, but we can use models from existing diseases in order to try and make guesses which gives us a range which will vary in magnitude depending on the accuracy and correctness of the underlying model and its parameters. I don't think it's such a complex concept that people would be incapable of understanding a high level overview. Then as more data comes in or newer models are developed, you can tweak the range while providing a simple explanation for why the newer changes are believed to be more accurate. Fauci is a bad faith science communicator.
Edit: He has also admitted to providing different numbers over time in order to get people more comfortable with the idea. He needs to cut that paternalistic bullshit and just be straight with us.
When 1/3 of the country thinks the pandemic danger is already exaggerated if not completely made up, how can you possibly expect him to be honest about the harsh realities of what is still ahead?
Hell, what in the last 4 years has made you believe that half of the country ISN'T worth talking down to...
That may work with you, but what makes you think it's the right approach for communicating to everybody? Public health reminds me a bit of behavioral finance, in which we admit that people don't act rationally in all cases and give advice accordingly. You can argue it's a cop out, that it's paternalistic, that is morally wrong. You'd be at least partially right about all of those things, but what if people achieve better outcomes?
I think people in Sweden will typically recycle (in separate bins) paper, paperboard, clear glass, colored glass and metal. Bottles and cans with deposit are returned in a machine for that purpose. Recycling other plastic containers is not as common, but I suppose some do.
Getting rid of waste plastic in the environment is not impossible. The big problem is that manufactures only pay for the creation of the product. We need to have them pay for the disposal too. In time they will find the least expensive way to recycle it.
"Cat feed" is raw material for the cat cracker unit.
Where heavy petroleum fractions and other applicable refinery streams are broken down into lower molecular weight hydrocarbons
The cat feedstock is some nasty material that looks worse than most crude oil.
It would seem feasible to introduce a small percentage of waste hydrocarbon plastics to the cat feed as it was being processed, in order to at least recover a bit of the fuel value from the plastic.
I can only imagine it is simply cheaper to continue to purchase the equal number of barrels of regular cat feed than it is to attempt to displace some of it using waste polyethylene & polypropylene which may even be possible to deliver at no material cost.
OTOH, for all I know people may be doing this already.
Yeah, HN's short timeouts are a damn nuisance especially if one's as prolix as me (I've been caught out many times). That said, HN's edit duration is still considerably longer than say The Register's one of only ten minutes.
Of course, one should never be one's own editor as one always misses something - that is until one reads it the next day and sees one's glaring typos! But that's impractical.
It seems to me that a partial solution would be to allow small/limited edits after the normal timeout and or highlight the changes in some way. This would negate the problem of a subsequent poster's reply comment sounding ridiculous if the original post was altered too much.
> 4. Force companies to color their containers according to plastic type. I.e no more clear Pepsi or Coke bottles - all PE products are color, say green. All PP colors are red, etc.
Humans don't have to sort the plastics, machines could. Is there a machine-readable but human-invisible marking we could give them? Like coloring them in a way that would be distinctive under a UV camera or UV light?
In my not-so-professional opinion, IR and Raman spectrography could give us something. Or density, depending on how selectively the industrialized mechanical processes are at resolving small changes in physical properties.
> Hitachi holds the record for the smallest RFID chip, at 0.05 mm × 0.05 mm......These dust-sized chips can store 38-digit numbers using 128-bit Read Only Memory (ROM). A major challenge is the attachment of antennas, thus limiting read range to only millimeters.
Sounds to me like RFID chips can be small enough to not worry about. Even at 1mm^3, you can likely just let it fall out while melting down plastic, and collect it later.
Not that I'm advocating for doing so, I think enforcing a visible symbol indicating the contents is a far better idea.
This is likely a dumb outsider viewpoint but: is just burying plastics all that bad? The fact that they stay intact over geologic timescales would seem to make them an ideal carbon sink, which is something we could actually use more of - provided that feedstocks can come out of the carbon cycle (e.g. agricultural) rather than relying on petrochemicals.
Waste plastic has a negative value, right now. I think that burying it is even more expensive than to just dump it where ever it's possible, in some places. It may not be legal but as always if people can make a buck then they will. Laws or no laws.
It turns out that a lot of the plastic in the ocean is there because there are countries where people are just dumping trash in the ocean. It can be less expensive than transporting it to a dump and dealing with it there.
The answer has to include making waste plastic have enough value so that people find it advantageous to recycle it or at least to bury it.
I like your comment and the honest answer is I don’t know, but I see no problems with dumping plastic on the ground, vs in the ocean.
But some observations on your comment.
Is plastic, that was never in the atmosphere (for millions of years anyway), really a carbon sink? It seems that trough its entire lifecycle it never goes into the atmosphere.
Also, if you burn plastic you’re displacing oil that wouldn’t otherwise be burned. Oil that is never extracted. And don’t forget that it takes a lot of energy to extract oil, so burning plastic reduces CO2 emissions globally somewhat.
Also, I’m skeptical about the practicality of using landfills to create geological treasures for mankind 100k years from now. The problem with it is that I feel that it is wishful thinking that placates our conscience. It’s easy to imagine yourself living “sustainably” in geological time scales. It’s hard to live sustainably in 1000 year timescales.
Why can’t we force containers to be made of the same plastic?
Or use a better material, eg aluminium. I’ve seen aluminium bottles with aluminium caps. I realise the lining is plastic, but that little bit of plastic has to be better than a plastic bottle.
> polymers that aren’t cross linked, are in a sense easy to recycle
The way to do big changes is one small step at a time, and the reasonable way is to start with the low hanging fruit. So the the interesting question isn't why we're being lied to by Big Recycling, but why the easiest steps aren't being taken.
It's almost fruitless to discuss these issues on online forums because otherwise intelligent people insists on explaining how hard the problem of universal polymer recycling really is, as if that would make all recycling of plastics (sometimes even all recycling, full stop) impossible.
Meanwhile countries such as Norway recycles 95% av all PET bottles while the US is stuck on 30%.
Yet every discussion that remotely touches on recycling has to iterate that it's all a big lie.
I lost all hope in plastic recycling. As an anecdote, outside of my building I've found everything from dirty pizza boxes, toilet paper, dog poop and socks in our recycling bins. There has also been plenty of plastic that isn't processed locally. I even put a sign up once about what is accepted, and still to this day I pull things out to correct what people throw in.
I really think progress with plastics has to be before the materials ever reach consumers. And if we are to recycle it by throwing it in a bin, I think there needs to be an incentive for people to play along and not mess everything up.
It requires human labor so it is expensive in countries where that is expensive. In countries where it is cheap there it isn't prioritized by the public, who ubderstandably instead want better paying jobs
I’m not suggesting you have an opinion here but when I see this I always want to mention the following: I have no issue with GMOs per se. But what I have a real issue with is when companies make herbicide resistant plants and then suggest we dump herbicides in to our soil. These poisons have a serious deleterious effect on the environment and it’s something we now have plenty of evidence for. We’ve also seen plenty of data that this increase in herbicides is causing cancer in farm workers.
GMOs can be great. Really I do believe that. But we’ve got these companies that don’t care about much beyond their bottom line pushing out GMOs that encourage extreme levels of biocide use and I and many others have a real problem with that.
The GMO debate is one of the great "we lost the message" moments. I feel like there was a time, probably right after WWII or so, when we tended to feel like science was actually moving us forward as a species, and in the last few decades, it's slipped away to the point where we can't even maintain trust in strong scientific consensus (see: anti-vax)
The opportunities for genetic modification are boundless: more nutrition! Higher yields! Reduced allergens! Not to mention complete green-field things like bacteria designed to clean up industrial waste. These are things that could make ordinary people say "we're moving forward as a species."
So what's the face of this brilliant new industry? A mediocre tomato whose primary selling point was a few days longer shelf life in the store, and some staple crops sold with the explicit feature of "you can pour MORE herbicides on them!" GMO didn't hit the market as a way to make good things better, it was a way to make lousy things viable. We blew the launch, and the entire product category has to spend decades building the goodwill it should already have.
Yes, it's oversimplifying to the level of malpractice to put it that way, but marketing and presentation matters.
another example is high yeild gmos which reduce nutritional content and increase water content to increase profits while delivering a lower quality crop
Often any of these chemicals kill the soil microbiology. The real problem according to regenerative farming advocates is the idea that dumping loads of artificial chemicals on to the field is some path to a solution. The alternative is to understand the living nature of the soil and feed it the way you would feed any other living thing.
So it is not a choice between “this chemical” or “that chemical” and many view that kind of thinking as the real problem. In this way the GMOs that you describe support that problematic kind of thinking.
That said, I am not familiar with what you describe. Which chemicals did not break down and how did GMOs allow us to use chemicals that do break down? I’d like to learn about that. Thank you!
This article seems to suggest GMO crops reduce pesticide use. Maybe we need to collect the data for both GMO crops and non GMO crops on pesticide use. But who should we trust to collect that data?
Your article is about pesticide use. But I am talking about the increase in herbicide use. Monsanto’s “roundup ready” line of GMO products is intended to be blanketed with glyphosate (aka RoundUp), a powerful herbicide. According to the following study, glyphosate use increased 15 fold since the introduction of “Roundup Ready” products.
Funny thing is, once people started blanketing with roundup, it didn't take long for roundup-resistant weeds to develop.
> Growing reliance on the broad-spectrum herbicide glyphosate has triggered the spread of tolerant and resistant weeds in the U.S. and globally [5–10]. To combat weeds less sensitive to glyphosate, farmers typically increase glyphosate application rates and spray more often [11–13]. In addition, next-generation herbicide-tolerant crops are, or will soon be on the market genetically engineered to withstand the application of additional herbicides (up to over a dozen), including herbicides posing greater ecological, crop damage, and human health risks (e.g., 2,4-D and dicamba) [6].
Roundup is used at tiny quantities. Yes 15 times as much is used, but that is still much less than a liter per hectare. And roundup strongly binds to dirt where nothing can get it until it degrades in about half a year. It degrades into common elements in the soil so it isn't making any difference.
Anyone can publish anything. Such as calling out the WHO even though they ignored most of the evidence. Then speculation about antibiotic resistance even though bacteria don't use the pathways glyphosphate targets.
For the last couple of years I've been wanting to learn about how and when recycling works, cost comparison between recycled products and new products, environmental impact of landfill vs recycling, etc.
I don't know where to look for information.
What books should I read? what websites have good information and explanations? whom should I trust?
In tech it is often incremental changes in the right direction rather than a paradigm shift/rewrite that succeeds.
Even if under current technology we are not able to profitably recycle goods, having an obviously detrimental to the environment material more heavily concentrated seems like a positive to me.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...