Something I watched and read about last year was that injection molding of plastic can be done only when one third or less of the pellets are recycled. If there is too much recycled material in the mix it doesn't flow into the mold correctly and one third is the most you could possibly use and then that product can not be recycled again. The polymers that make up the plastic simply aren't capable of reforming over and over.
Given that plastic at best gets 1.3 uses, the initial one and then a third of that material can go into a recycled container. That is it. When you compare that to the thousands of reuses of glass bottles we used to do for milk it is really apparent how awful the plastic process is, its barely better than just throw away. This also ignores the fact that huge amounts of the plastic used isn't actually recyclable at all.
The triple whammy to all this is that all over the planet people have been cleaning their plastics with hot water, drying and then separating it into different rubbish bags with separate collections and additional bins etc. All for a giant lie about recycling that was never true. We have wasted substantial energy and time on something that never worked and helped destroy the environment even more because of it.
It requires a lot of harsh chemicals to remove the inks. The output paper is substandard. The whole process is energy intensive.
And, the messed up part about the whole thing is that throwing away paper is one of the best things you can do for the environment. It is natural carbon sequestration.
My understanding is that, at least in NYC, the paper is pretty much all turned into pizza boxes.
Which are brown. You don't have to worry about the inks or "substandard" or whatever". And then the pizza boxes aren't re-recycled because of grease.
You suggest we stick to trees instead of recycle, "for paper". But the whole point of recycling is to turn paper into pizza boxes (and presumably also our Amazon shipping boxes, etc.).
It sounds like you're trying to argue against recycling paper... when the reality is it's a huge success, when you realize paper is recycled into cardboard.
The OP is alluding to the fact that growing forests, cutting them down, and then burying the resulting paper should use less energy then recycling and produce less toxic waste products due to fewer chemicals. Such activity has a strong possibility of being a carbon negative process.
It may be better for the environment to sustainably harvest trees to produce cardboard then to recycle other paper products.
This works conceptually if you are sustainably replanting forests to feed your paper mill. In reality, your mileage may very and here in Canada, plenty of paper mills are still running off of irreplaceable primary forest.
A lot of paper is coated in clays, waxes, or plastics, and many inks might make paper unsuitable for use in food grade products like pizza boxes, without heavy processing.
Shipping boxes, maybe. If the structural properties of the resulting board are OK.
But most post-consumer paper is unusable for one reason or another. Recycling of industrial packaging is a slightly different story.
Maybe not that .99c-a-slice garbage but there are some damn good pies to be had here in NYC for sure! Lucali, Totonno's, Joe's... some of the best you will ever have.
And lest this sound myopic! At least in Portland, the pizza boxes can be put into composting bins, including the plant-waste bins that we put out next to garbage bins.
So the paper does, eventually, go to the landfill and become sequestered in the typical fashion.
How much carbon does feeding the pizza boxes to the composting process release into the air, as a percentage of total carbon present in the pizza boxes at rest (ignoring construction costs)?
I’ve only just started doing this - but my understanding is that the lids go into compost. The bottoms shouldn’t because the grease turns to a yuck sludge in compost bins.
Do you mean compost collection bins, or home composting bins?
If you live in an area that collects material for industrial composting you should 100% put the grease coated parts of the cardboard in your compost collection bin.
It varies by area. Here's the guidelines for Portland [0]; it seems that "Home" "FOOD SCRAPS" bins may have pizza boxes in them, as long as wax paper and other inserts are removed. Incidentally, mentally traversing the pizzerias I go to, I think that the only inserts that any of them add are pizza savers [1].
I think the point is that, by recycling, one has to use energy to transport used paper, process paper using machinery, store it, use chemicals which are pollutants themselves, etc. All this instead of just throwing out the paper.
Garbage isn't "just" thrown out, it also has to be transported and stored. We'd still want to sort efficiently recyclable aluminum out of the garbage before it's sent to landfill, so ideally there would be some processing as well.
If you're replacing your paper with paper from trees, you have to do all that anyway (transport, processing, storage, chemicals), and on top of that you have all the energy of getting the raw materials in the first place.
I'm not too sure on the details of how that is done, but I imagine it involves driving huge trucks into forests, cutting trees with machines, stripping and cutting the trees, and transporting wood to industrial areas.
I dont think its enough to matter, but if it was, some places incinerate trash so its still released as carbon dioxide. Wouldn't it rot in a landfill and end up as methane or something?
Good question, I believe it depends on the landfill?
Bacteria probably need the right conditions to efficiently break down materials, cellulose is quite tough.
Some landfills capture the released methane and burn it (to avoid atmospheric pollution), which seems like a decent solution (even more with power generation). Some of the material will remain undecomposed (or take a really long time) so it is a net carbon sink. I think this depends on properly sealing landfills and arranging extraction infrastructure.
Another idea would be to curb methane generation or decomposition somehow. Apparently aerobic decomposition reduces or prevents the release of methane:
Burning trash directly is also an alternative I guess, though one I'm not very comfortable with due to trace elements contained in everyday items -- surely some mercury and heavy metals will sneak into residues? (and then into the atmosphere and our lungs)
There's more mercury released into the environment from incandescent bulbs than CFLs -- or there was, when incandescents were still common and so were coal-fired power plants, and the Obama-era regulation of mercury emissions from power plants hadn't come into force.
Now, of course, we have LEDs in place of CFLs, and coal burning power generation is on the way out, so it's all moot.
The idea was to get an efficiency law passed and now we have a huge move to LED bulbs as a result. So, no, it wasn't a mistake, the CFLs were a stepping stone.
Talking about paper recycling, we must distinguish papers. Like office prints and newspapers are easier to recycle but like pizza box and random food wrapping is difficult (uses more resources) so firing is better.
All human actions have resource costs, trees and paper need absurd amounts of water, specially given that companies use pines and eucalyptus as base material for paper pulp production both species are always starving for water
The reality is that the system requires pigovian taxation to internalize their natural externalized costs, capitalism and specifically our modern version of neoclassical neoliberalism loves to socialize loses and privatize profits, we need public action against that
If you wanna hear my angle, I'd go for making Senates and congresses across the world secret, secret ballots, secret voting and secret deliverations and debates
If you wanna know as to why read on James DAngelo's Toxic Transparency Paradox, his congressional investigations on the systemic benefits of secrecy can be found on http://www.congressionalresearch.org/
Trees (grown for wood fiber) pretty much aren't irrigated. I'm sure there's exceptions, but not on a significant amount of land used for fiber production.
My experience with this comes mainly from Uruguay, Argentinian and specifically Chilean pine and eucalyptus forests used to make wood pulp, which are causing quite serious issues with water management, less so in Uruguay as it is a wetter country, but south of Chile has seen quite the protests over this issue as some of these specific type of trees (Eucalyptus) simply drain the land too much as they evolved for a different environment
Even without addressing the majority of the substance that the parent comment is trying to portray, there should be one major takeaway:
Unregulated markets don't work, except in the way that cancer works to propagate itself before its host dies. They're not self-balancing ecosystems. After all, they're comprised of people.
Completely managed and controlled markets similarly don't work, and for largely the same reasons. After all, they're comprised of people.
Humanity has a unique knack for at least these two things: 1) constructing games, 2) cheating those games it has created for itself to play.
It's no longer enough to hedge against the risks of idealized perfectly spherical and rational actors bouncing about. We have to begin to take into account our own complexity and how we subvert the rules we lay out for ourselves.
Can I interest you in incentive-compatible mechanism design and implementation theory? They are well-established economy fields and do work that you proposed.
We knew asbestos was bad since the 1890s and it wasnt regulated until 1967, lead was known to be bad since the mid 1800s while lead paint wasnt banned until 1978 and leaded gas wasnt banned until 2000, lead paint and pipes are still plentiful across the US. Cigarettes were known to be harmful since the 1890s, and the government didnt do anything about it until 1964.
Regulation can be successful, but at best its slow and incremental, and in the long term corporations will weaken and subvert them. Just having a system which incentivizes good behavior in the first place would be better than trying to regulate bad systems
Yea its easy to say that and then you end up with Love Canal and quack doctors injecting people with bleach to cure their cancer. People do things. Laws and morals stop them from doing bad things. Pray your country doesnt have many people no morals.
D'Angelo goes further and interviews law professors on this issue, and they all not only seem perplexed at first, but agree with him later, and the caveat, is that US Law as it is taught from an orthodox angle, is only really taught after the 1970's or so, and don't really cover how legislation used to be done before it, so law students would naturally assume that "things always were the same way" when it came to how transparency was handled!
Here are some of the talks he has had with Law professors
By now I am convinced that this is the missing piece, that accounts for not only the split between worker-productivity and wages, but everything else since the 1970's, this transparency revolution, with the Toxic Transparency Paradox aftermath is what set the course to where we are today with legislative gridlock, polarization, increases in wealth inequality, oligarchic corporatism etc
I am curious why can't you make single use plastic manufacturers an illegal business. Nobody would use plastic bags if there weren't any one willing to make them
Reusing syringes probably isn’t the best idea, but for most uses, sure.
The main problem to me is that disposing of plastic is always an externality to the companies who produce and market it. Make them pay the recycling or disposal costs up front, and I’d be happy.
Virgin plastic is objectively better for some applications. recycled plastic can be good enough for some uses, but you can't do a blanket ban without even more harm
It’s not quite that simple. A garbage incinerator is not something you can turn on and off according to when you need the energy. It has to be kept going continuously, since it takes a long time for it to get up to the temperature required for efficient and clean combustion. There are similar problems with shutting down.
> In recent years, it has been possible to make PET bottles from 100% recycled plastic which are qualitatively just as good as bottles made from so-called virgin plastic. [1]
Check your facts [2]:
> Greenpeace says plastic bottle recycling rates are ‘stalled’ at around just 59% in the UK.
> Danone brand evian is introducing 100% rPET bottles to the UK this week; the latest in a series of recycled plastic commitments from PepsiCo’s Naked Smoothies, Nestlé’s Buxton bottled water, and Coca-Cola GB.
> This week Coca-Cola Great Britain announced that all plastic bottles in its core brand portfolio – including Coca-Cola, Fanta, Sprite and Oasis – are made with 50% recycled plastic. This equates to removing more than 21,000 tonnes of virgin plastic, according to Coca-Cola.
> “One of the key challenges the industry currently faces is that there isn’t enough food-grade recycled plastic locally available in the UK to switch to 100% rPET across our entire range,”
PET being a 100% recyclable outlier and much of plastics use being inherently unrecyclable aren't necessarily contradictory.
Open questions would be: how much use can be replaced with recyclable variants on the application side? (perhaps some use cases are not doable with PET?) How much use can be replaced on the supply side? (can only a fraction of the crude extracted from the ground enter that PET cycle or does a percentage of the extracted mass have to become other kinds of plastics that are inherently unrecyclable?)
And as long as any of those questions stay answered "not all" and we are still burning some of the extracted crude for energy: how much efficiency does that energy conversion lose when the crude takes a detour as un-recyclable plastics application between getting extracted from the ground and ending up in the atmosphere after burning? If that efficiency loss is small, un-recyclable plastics use can be environmentally cheap if it happens within the envelope of unavoidable energy use and vice versa.
I've responded to food grade plastics. As I'm trying to stick to Reduce Reuse Recycle, I choose PET and stay away from PP. And we need good HDPE recycling.
There are also ABS, PVC and many others — construction, textiles, shoes, asphalt, consumer goods. But they are not sold as recyclable.
EDIT: can we incinerate trash instead of burning oil? It is a controversial topic.
Would it produce less CO2 than glass? Assuming green energy no, but in such case we could sequence carbon from air. Would it require less energy than recycling? I don't think so.
Many plastics used in construction tend to have much longer lifespans (years to decades) so their recycleability, whilst it shouldn't be dismissed, is a less immediate concern.
E.g., I'm adding PVC cable and pipe ducting in various areas of my house, and am using polycarbonate discs as spacers for shelf uprights on an uneven wall. Both will stay in situ at least until I move (which I have no plans to do at present).
This is called Waste Valorization and is common in Europe. The idea is to run efficicent incinerators (with good filters on emissions to catch various nasty things we don't want in the air/soil/water and use the energy for heating purposes.
I was just wondering if it is possible to just vaporize the matter and absorb/recycle the pollutants and toxic part and release the rest to the atmosphere. And I saw your post :)
Looks like incinerator may leak toxins [1]. It is possible to construct modern incinerator that should not leak [2]. So Europe can afford it, can "many parts of the world"?
Still questions remain
* Should we mark it as clean energy?
* Should we subsidy it? Or should we subsidy recycling?
I really wonder whether this is a US thing. Don't they separate waste? Don't they recycle their trash? To me, some of the other comments (that were posted a few hours earlier) read as if they were from the 1990s.
The US had a big push toward single-stream recycling, where everything is thrown in one bin, and the recycling facility sorts it out.
It's been something of a disaster, because of the way it's changed how individuals "recycle". The bins are frequently full of contaminated and non-recyclable materials that the facility's equipment is incapable of sorting back out. Since it's all commingled in the collection truck, one person who's sloppy about how they recycle can spoil not only their own recycling efforts, but those of their neighbors as well. In my own neighborhood, the recycle bins are frequently full of things like greasy pizza boxes, single-use paper cups, EPS, even yard waste and broken (particleboard) furniture.
Chicago's current program is an illustrative example. After the city introduced it, the percentage of waste Chicagoans placed in the recycle bins roughly doubled, while the percentage of Chicago's waste that actually gets recycled was halved.
Another issue is the bins themselves. They give 0 indication what is acceptable or not. That varies widely on who picks up your garbage. The second part is china stopped importing a lot of it. Turns out many were just bundling it up and shipping it to china. That ended a couple of years ago. That imploded the whole recycling market. The money in it dried up except for very particular items (usually metals). Everything else, no one really wanted it.
To make people want to recycle you need to positively enforce it. If you goto a negative (such as a tax or fine) the incentive to do it falls off quickly. America used to recycle/reuse tons of stuff. Pepsi and Coke figured out a decent cost to their system was the reuse of their bottles. So they funded groups that worked against that. People would put a deposit on the bottles and containers. If you returned it you got the deposit back. If you tossed it someone else usually would find it and return it and get the deposit. It was a positive incentive. Instead now we have this weird thing where companies produce garbage and blame the customers for not 'taking care of it'. We have no real reason to do so other than feeling good about yourself. In some cases the ability and economic reality is not really there.
Most single stream systems are basically 2 trucks. One picks up the garbage. The other picks up the recycling. Garbage goes straight to the dump. The recycling goes to a sort center. They dump it all out on large conveyor belts with a bunch of people standing next to it picking out what they can and slicing open any bags/boxes they see. Pulling anything that is obviously not for the stream (pizza boxes, magazines etc). The magnets pull out anything metal. The plastics and glass are sorted out usually by weight color and symbol if they have the machinery for it. Otherwise it is manual. This all takes time and money. If you are making 50cents for a 2ton bail of plastic the economics is not there. But if you say make 500 dollars for a bail then maybe it is there.
In a neighborhood I once lived in the recycling guy decided he was not going to pick up anything except pop cans and newspaper. Everyone was mostly recycling correctly. Suddenly my neighbors and I had 2x the garbage to deal with. They all dumped it into the other bin and never recycled again for years. It took only one small negative thing to change from 'happy to help' to 'meh not doing it'. The boxes they had it in were obvious. One week everyone was doing it, then almost none. I would drive around the neighborhoods near mine and he had done it there too. They had to change the way they pickup garbage to undo what 1 guy did in 1 day.
Yea, this is a big one. Every time I move, it's different recycling rules to learn. Do we put paper in the blue bin or the green bin? Can we recycle cardboard in this city? What kinds of plastics are OK here and what kind aren't? It changes from city to city.
At one place I lived, I watched the truck come along and they just dump both bins in the same section of the truck. So you've got me agonizing over which bin to sort things into and then the waste management people just re-combine them. I guess I'm the sucker here!
As usual, the USA's un-coordinated "let the states and local governments figure it out" strategy fails again.
In the town where my parents live, waste collection services , including recycling, are contracted out among several private companies. So the rules can vary among neighborhoods.
In Chicago, the city supplies recycling services for single family homes and apartment buildings with up to (if I recall correctly) 4 units, and anything larger than that must privately contract its own waste management. So the rules have the potential to vary from building to building.
A deposit/tax system on plastic containers would likely end most plastic packaging. Consumers tend to prefer the metallic/glass/paper packages when given the choice. to enforce reasonable economics on the recycling side the deposit would likely need to be an order of magnitude higher than the cost of the plastic.
This may provide incentive for either biodegradable or clean burning plastics in the market which could have lower taxes/deposits.
Deposit systems are usually better when the object is reused in some way. Just to put a deposit on something that will be immediately thrown away/recycled I think creates a negative tax issue.
The side issue is plastic is wildly cheap to use and make. You can try to create tax systems that break that. But you just create resentment. A better way is to figure out how to make the other more sturdy reusable and recyclable materials better and cheaper than plastic. Reuse has the issue of re-collection/cleaning and that costs money. If you can crack that the whole market will skip plastic. Anything else tries to bend the market. It usually does not react well to that and creates undesirable side effects. The same thing happened in the coal markets with relation to nat gas. Natural gas became cheaper than coal and easier to use. Huge swaths of the energy market basically ran towards it. If something like that could happen in the plastics markets it would change the world.
Covid shows how difficult it is to implement any effective policy in America above grade school intelligence, and that probably insults grade school children.
The populace is simply too poorly educated, lazy, and propagandized to resist government policy.
When I was living in Japan and shared a homestay with an American fellow from Missouri, it shocked me that he would throw all his recyclables in the general rubbish. As an Australian, despite how my country isn't the best in that field, I've always taken recycling seriously (even with the more challenging rules in Japan). It took him a while before the Japanese host and I could train him to recycle properly. It's not like he wasn't a decent guy, he just wasn't used to it. It made me wonder if recycling just wasn't a big thing in the US, and to hear that California, as a more liberal state, is still on 20% seems to confirm that.
I've seen those in other countries too, actually. My random optimistic theory is that the designer of such bins is trying to "train" people into recycling before the local government entity offers proper recycling infrastructure. But the reality is probably just that they want to look "green" without doing the hard part.
Part of the problem is that recycling is a state-by-state thing, and some states will simply never care about recycling.
When I was growing up in NYC recycling was even part of the curriculum, but there were definitely contexts in which recycling was difficult (for example, sidewalks usually had street garbage cans, but not street recycling cans)
Missouri has shockingly bad recycling service, so it doesn't surprise me. Before I lived there I meticulously separated recylables but soon adopted the local habit.
(St Louis. Kansas City has pretty decent service in this respect)
I am a tea and coffee drinker with a preferred mug and a travel mug which has a lid on it. If I go out for a stroll I fill the travel mug with coffee and take that.
Never do I wake up in the morning and think I need some drink in an aluminium can or plastic bottle. Nor do I wake up and wish my beverages were laced with corn syrup. Or advertised on TV.
If they stopped selling fizzy drinks tomorrow then I would not notice for a long time.
I am also out of the habit of drinking alcohol, however, when I do drink beer I prefer it to be in a pub where the glass is not just recycled but is re-used.
My additions to the recycling bins are small compared to those of a normal person that drinks beer, wine or other alcoholic beverages every day. I am also quite partial to citrus fruits so I have no aspiration to buy 'orange juice'.
For whatever reason I have not adopted the habits of buying these tin cans and plastic bottles in the first place. I am set in my ways and no amount of TV advertising will suddenly make me start the day with an energy drink or have a moment with Coca Cola mid afternoon. I just am not interested.
In the USA there is this culture of drinking fizzy drinks that the advertisers have been working on for decades. The default drink comes in a can or other single use container, not a preferred mug.
Separating waste might be a habit that needs to be worked on by some people, however, there is this deeper habit of using single use containers all the time.
Fizzy drinks are perfectly functional in fountains. And dirt cheap for the restaurants, to the degree that the soda companies restrict their availability to consumers.
The single use drinks are sold at massive profit.
I joke that restaurants are almost universally places that break even on food, if they are lucky, and make all their profit on hard/soft drinks.
Depends on where you live, most cities have recycling programs where recycling is picked up, but as you get more rural you either have to take recycling in yourself or there’s just no good options
Don't lose sight of the forest for the trees. The whole environmental problem with plastic in well managed landfills is filling up city landfills where land is expensive. Rural landfills will never run out of space. It's a non-problem as long as it does actually make it to the landfill and not washed down a river or something.
Homes in rural areas have lots of land where you can compost yourself. Plastic recycling can be expanded by increasing the bottle fee and expanding some form of it to all plastic.
Hm, mine and my neighbors don't. There are communities with small lots like ours that simply don't look or sound like giant farms with acres of land to burn your own trash or create your own composting. In fact we look darn near suburban. We have neighborhoods and small towns. It's not all prairie and farm land when one describes rural life.
This is absurd. Yes rural lacks a government run composting program because it would have a negative benefit but plenty of people do there own composting and use it for gardens or such.
I'm not sure it's entirely correct to say you can't use recycled plastic for injection molding - sure, if you just melt all the dirty & UV damaged plastic with who knows what additives and color pigments, it will not work as well as carefully managed single sourced regular feedstock.
Still, the stuff is still basically hydrocarbons either way - you should be able to break it down to it's constituents and refine it to something indistinguishable from the normal feed stock. Woukd it be horrendously energy intensive ? Most likely! But definitely doable.
BTW, this is why I'm skeptical to efforts to fix the environment just by saving energy. Sure, it should not be wasted but if we want to fix all damage that has veen done while still providing adequate standards of living for everyone, we beed to produce much much moore energy than we do now & do it in a clean way - most likely mega massive solar on enything, lots of nuclear fission and possibly massed off shore wind as well. Ideally backed by storage if/where possible.
Together with megaproject scale waste processing it should be possible to cleanup (and reuse!) all the old stuff while also handling all the new stuff comming in.
And the end result would be a nice clean plabet yet again, but this time with very robust energy and industrial infrastructure ready to face future challenges - or disasters!
Sounds like something one can aspire for rather than all the doom and gloom one sees some days.
Buddy of mine works for a company that takes mixed plastic waste and converts it into fuel & feedstock for further plastic reuse. Their goal is to set up small plants throughout the country near plastic production sites, he works at what is effectively their prototype facility in NC. Best news article I found about them: https://www.farmvilleherald.com/2020/06/braven-to-give-plast...
I agree, we need to learn to transmute materials and specifically clean up the waste we've already created. Our technology still has far to evolve to manage it but it's the only truly realistic way forward for our race.
> you should be able to break it down to it's constituents and refine it to something indistinguishable from the normal feed stock. Woukd it be horrendously energy intensive ? Most likely!
Or ... just burn it for energy, and thereby pump less oil.
Sure you'll need more oil for more plastic, but you come out ahead because by burning the plastic you save some oil.
This whole plastic recycling stuff makes zero sense.
Greenwich council in the London, UK does this. They have the worst recycling of any area in the UK and part of the reason is they burn almost all the plastic they gather from recycling, just 5% by volume gets recycled and the rest is burnt.
It's not that clear cut. Creating that glass bottle is far more costly environmentally, lugging its heavy weight around is also much more expensive, cleaning used bottles has a considerable cost, and "thousands" of reuses also sounds optimistic since glass is so easily breakable.
We use a milk/eggs/etc delivery service operated by a local farm, we’ve returned 100s of washed glass bottles without breaking any. They’re thick bottles designed for reuse, they’re not fragile. Despite that, the empties are a tiny fraction of the weight of a full plastic bottle. It seems like a pretty a clear, unmitigated win vs plastic with a local service.
> It seems like a pretty a clear, unmitigated win vs plastic
Did you use hot water to wash them?
Probably yes. Last time I did the math making them out of plastic saved energy vs heating water to wash glass (it was a close call, it depended on if you used a dishwasher vs sink washing).
So it might seem environmental friendly, but if you run the numbers it's not necessarily so.
Energy usage for creation is only one axis of "environmentally friendly", though. It's starting to seem like small bits of plastic permeating everything might not be ideal.
Did your calculations include things like the extraction and distillation of the petroleum?
Beyond the environmental impact, there's also just the stupid, wasted effort that goes into pointlessly recreating the same thing over and over when you don't have to. In this case, the bottle goes back on the return trip from delivering new milk, which had to happen anyway. The milk ends up being the only thing delivered, on net. It's just strikingly elegant in its lack of wasted effort and material. It's not clear if it's a net win, though, given the delivery part, unless there are others on the same street signed up for the same day.
If anyone's in the Bay Area and is interested in delivery sort of like this, which also tries to set up regular delivery routes to minimize the marginal impact of a customer, I recommend checking out Farmstead (https://www.farmsteadapp.com/). They provide a similar milk delivery service by picking up Straus milk bottles and refunding the deposit. They also solved my biggest issue with most of the delivery services by picking up their reusable bags and having minimal packaging inside, but COVID put a stop to the bag pickup, at least temporarily.
That’s honestly one of the most interesting parts of nuclear for me, along with large scale renewables (eg hydro): when you can break the energy = CO2 connection by using energy sources that don’t release extra CO2 per kWh, a lot of the math starts to change. Things that didn’t help before (washing glass bottles with water heated by natural gas) actually become a net benefit. Likewise making the glass in the first place.
People are cleaning the plastic with hot water to put it into the recycling. The only difference being that the glass actually gets used again and isn't dangerous to the environment and us as it breaks down. Plastic has turned into an unmitigated man made nature disaster.
Commercial glass washers can use very little energy; the rinse is done with a small amount of near boiling water which goes into the wash tank, where it's then used for washing.
I'm inclined to say "no", unless you're using a renewable energy source that would otherwise go unused. So excess locally produced power that can't be sold to the grid, essentially.
Power markets are very liquid, so I tend to favour calculating your personal footprint based on the average co2 output of the grid, not the particular energy production method you've chosen. This makes it clear that even if you're paying for wind power, it's still better not to waste electricity.
Some of that energy may become greener over time. There's also the final output of unrecyclable, possibly toxic (if heated in the sun) plastic vs glass which naturally degrades to ... sand?
Reusing washed glass bottles for perishables like milk can be a public health risk. It's hard to get the cleaning process to the point where when the stars align for that 1 out of 100,000 bottles it still gets sterilized.
Until I see statistics proving the opposite I don't believe that. Washing bottles hot enough to kill germs really is not hard and we used to reuse lots of glass bottles.
Getting glass hot enough to kill microbes isn't hard, but it does take a lot of energy. Microbes will attach to the glass and use that as a heat sink, so just hot water isn't enough, you have to use enough to heat the glass.
It's actually tremendously hard to do that on an industrial scale. We still get listeria outbreaks even with pasteurized milk and new bottles. Adding in a source of contaimination is going to make it that much harder.
The issue isn't getting bottles hot enough to kill germs. It's doing so in a way that doesn't aerosolize the bacteria and preventing all the other ways cross contaimination can occur.
That's not the risk. The risk is introducing harmful bacteria into a bottle and then having it reproduce for some days before someone drinks it. Since you're not storing milk in the glass it's not an issue if it isn't completely sanitized.
All of that could be done sustainably if the energy we generated and used was sustainable. Electric trucks and trains, clean energy to run the cleaning facility, even the glass furnaces themselves can be run off electricity which is great if it is clean energy. And when it does break? You can throw it away without worry because it is completely inert and breaks down into sand. Throw all your glass into a specific area on a coast line and the waves will turn it into sand for free. Throw it in a hole as fill material and nobody will ever care because it doesn't pollute.
Though most of the deposit for returning a beer crate is on the crate. The deposit for a regular beer bottle is 8cents - it used to be 15Pfennig, cut in half when the EUR was introduced. The problem is that you cannot easily raise the deposit value of a bottle and inflation has taken most of the value away.
Glass is also 100% pointless to recycle. The planet's crust is made of glass, it's not exactly a scarce resource, and old glass is environmentally harmless.
And in the real world it's virtually never recycled, instead its crushed and used as landfill cover (they cover the trash each night to keep down vermin).
I can't read the article, but in my understanding, sand for concrete is what might be scarce. Because it has to have particles with the right degree of sharp corners. (IIRC, the Saudis import this from Australia or something, because their wind-blown sand is too round.) But glass is much easier.
I'm not too knowledgeable on the process of glass manufacturing, but I know glass takes a pretty high temperature to melt. Mega operations needed for mass manufacture might be different, but smaller scale ones usually heat things up in furnaces burning at thousands of degrees.
Not too hard to get that heat by burning fuel, but through wind power? Not sure how it'll be done.
Wind to heat is easy: just run an electric [arc] furnace. This is how most commercial steel foundries heat iron. this is how Aluminum ore is smelted (the point is the electron exchange, molten metal is a welcome side effect).
The above is why aluminum is smelted in low energy cost areas. the above is why my company runs the foundry only for the night shift - the power company gives us a discount for using power at night when they need to keep the base load power plants running even though nobody is using power, which more than makes up for the extra pay we give to for working the night shift. (Now that wind is >50% of the electric mix in my state I wonder if the shifts are changing)
In fact most high temperature is generated from electric not fuel. If you burn something to get high temperatures the process is inefficient, turning the fuel into electricity and then the electricity into heat is more efficient (look up carnot efficiency)
The problem in the US is that the seller has to use the method that results in them having the least liability in case something goes wrong.
If they choose to use steel or glass, and it doesn't get cleaned properly, and it ends up causing damage, then they might be liable for damages. Their liability insurance will deny coverage for damages because they knowingly used a method that had a higher probability of harm than using new plastic.
I'm sure there might be some way to ensure cleanliness of steel and glass, but it's probably cost prohibitive versus just using plastic, so it might cause the cost of the product to be too high to compete in the market.
Possibly? I guess I assumed there's some cost based reason that plastic is preferred over glass, even excluding for transportation costs due to lower weight and less cleanup costs in case of accidents and glass breaking.
It's probably a combination of all of these things, but the fact that no glass alternatives exist in the market in a similar price range as plastic options indicates there's an overall cost advantage for plastic.
That is more expensive due to energy requirements over simple washes, but if the energy used to do that is renewable then that isn't a big deal. I think the big problem with autoclaving the glass is the time required for heating up and cooling off as thermal shock will break glass. That said, breaking more glass isn't a big deal because it is an inert material. And the sorting and cleaning of glass should be easier and cheaper than ever thanks to better automation and robotics.
Correct it is about the process and a lot of post consumer plastic isn't in practice recycleable at all. Its the absolute best case number and in practice its more like 10% or 1.1 uses as a result as far as I can tell from the various articles on it this year.
Like a lot of things, "it depends". Type of plastic, use case, source of the recycled plastic, and type of injection molding machine all come into play. In practice, it's probably less than 1/3 of post-consumer plastic by a decent margin just because processing god knows what plastic people put in the bin into something you can injection mold requires massively expensive sorting, cleaning, treating, and re-pelletizing.
An interesting point to consider here is that if oil production ever goes down for whatever reason and virgin plastic prices go up as a result, post-consumer plastic recycling becomes a more attractive business prospect.
Hopefully people can find good stuff to do with the heaps of shite we've already created.
Theres a guy in the UK that got started making skateboards out of this plastic, and showing people how to do it. Looks like they branched out. https://preciousplastic.com/
The energy and effort required to collect, clean and re-use glass is much higher than for plastic. Glass doesn't decompose in a landfill and has limits on how often it can be re-used as well.
The detergents, water and heat needed for cleaning alone have a higher environmental impact than the few drops of oil needed to make a plastic bottle.
Plastic waste is a big problem for sure, but switching to glass is not the solution.
Why would you want it to? Being inert is a good thing if you put it underground: no water contamination, no gas being released. But why put it in a landfill when you could reuse or recycle it?
> and has limits on how often it can be re-used as well.
Separating plastic has also the effect of better burning waste. That is because they can control the burning / heat with controlled injection of isolating plastic waste which hast a specified / stable thermal energy in contrast to mixed waste.
>The triple whammy to all this is that all over the planet people have been cleaning their plastics with hot water, drying and then separating it into different rubbish bags with separate collections and additional bins etc. All for a giant lie about recycling that was never true. We have wasted substantial energy and time on something that never worked and helped destroy the environment even more because of it.
I wonder if there is a country where the laws are so structured that you could class action sue for the value of the time lost.
Not even just the time, there is a clear energy cost that every household has been paying electricity and gas costs for heating of water. Extra cleaning materials in brushes and washing up liquid and additional dishwasher tablets etc etc. I doubt most households have good enough accounting to attribute the cost of recycling directly other than perhaps the cost of recycling bags (ours requires all recycling in clear bags) but it goes well beyond just time, we have literally burnt CO2 to recycle something that actually can't be recycled.
What I don't understand is why governments and councils continued to go along with this, to collect it all separately and then just send most of it to be burnt or landfill, the cost surely wasn't worth it. My Freedom of information act request to my council about plastic recycling was eye opening, just 3.2% of the plastic put into recycling correctly was actually recycled. They know full well this is pointless and yet it continues.
Most of the restaurants by me already seem to use a few standard size food containers. Why do these containers need to be broken down into raw material and then reconstituted? If they were high quality enough, could they not just be sanitized and then repurchased by restaurants directly from the recycler? Seems like there'd be much less waste of material. The big question would be if the sanitation process would be not be more expensive than just remanufacturing the containers.
Plastic isn't very robust. I personally utilise a standard container size and wash and reuse it for my own purposes to avoid kitchen bags and such. But the lids crack as they get brittle after repeated washing and the plastic itself scuffs and looses its transparency and surface. It may actually be problematic to have scratched surfaces for bacteria and cleaning and the containers wouldn't look the same in the store even after one wash and refill.
Plastic just isn't good for reuse, it is not robust.
Yes good points, which is why I think the type of plastic matters. Rubbermaid, for example, makes a variety of high quality reusable plastic food containers.
The Just Salad restaurant chain in NYC will sell you a reusable plastic salad container that you can wash and bring to them to prepare your meal in and there doesn't seem to be any issue with food safety regarding those bowls. It's heavier duty than the clear disposable ones they give you otherwise.
There's certainly a usable life to anything, plastic will degrade over multiple washes and being battered with utensils. I'd expect well used ones would need to be retired but it should still be better than the current situation where they are primarily single use.
I am often suspicious that green initiatives exacerbate rather than ameliorate the environmental damage we cause. Green products cost more, and are generally more complicated than traditional ones.
I doubt that many people sit down and weigh the pros and cons dispassionately. Most of the time it is politicians making political capital and shrill activists wanting us to "think of the children"; basically, ill-conceived and costly theatre.
This might be a naive question, but given that plastic is made of oil, and that it doesn’t decompose, isn’t it a great way to perform carbon sequestration?
In other words, isn’t the use of plastics replaces potential carbon emission via burning of oil?
This is backwards. First, plastic is something like 1% of all oil production. Secondly, oil is the the best way to do sequestration by keeping it in the ground.
Unless you mean turning co2 into oil to make plastic or something? Which is itself weird for the energy requirement.
But you assume that the oil saved by a reduction in plastic use will be kept in the ground. Isn't a fairer assumption that it would be repurposed and burnt?
Plastic does break down, it is just really slow. But since the oil was extracted from thousands of feet down and was already sequestered before we decided to manufacture stuff with it, it can only at best be carbon neutral, assuming the plastic lasts as long as the original oil would have.
You could make it carbon negative if you converted CO2 gas into plastic, but the energy requirements to do so are enormous. It is the same problem with fertilizer production. We could make synthetic fertilizer from the air, but it requires so much more energy to the already immensely energy intensive production process that you don't actually gain anything.
If the energy needed was all clean energy, and we had enough of it, we could make carbon negative plastics. But that is like ridiculously cheap electricity to the point where residential power costs would be measured in like 50 cents per year, minus power line upkeep.
Its already sequestered as oil just leave it in the ground. Given how little of the plastic can be recycled and it doesn't really decompose and pollutes the water and our food we tends to burn it for energy to get rid of it.
minor nitpick that doesn't change the substance of your point.
1.5 uses actually, the initial use is already 1/3 recycled. the correct calculation is 1/(1-r) where r=1/3. For example if you had to use 10% new material each time it is seems logical that you would get more than two uses out of the material. 1 use then .9 then .81 ect,
Alas no, you can' recycle something that was made with recycled material. It gets at most one reuse if it was made out of 100% virgin plastic, everything else is throwaway, the recycled material poisons the rest.
This was a popular conspiracy theory in the 90's. Another one for the "yup that conspiracy actually happened" book. Ive been called a monster many times for trying to explain this, usually by liberal women. They just hear a bunch of numbers and then their heads explode once they realize I was saying to just put the bottle in the normal trash instead of the special one for virtue signaling.
I was dragged to a recycling plant with a bunch of curious engineers from Google a long time ago. The takeaway was that is was a giant scam- we can't recycle glass, paper is iffy, msot of the stuff is meh, but aluminum is ok. Trash trucks literally pulled up to the plant and removed the "unrecycleable" waste.
We were all so pissed we went into software, when one could literally just put trash into a different container with a green/blue color, and thus purify and bless it, and then send it to a dump.
The part we missed was the ships just taking all this trash to China and Bangladesh.
Wait, how is the glass unrecyclable? Glass should be one of the most recyclable bits, along with metals.
Just because plastic is a scam doesn't necessarily mean everything else recycled is. Scrap metal is big business. Old rubber tires get shredded and vulcanized into new products.
Glass doesn't have to be clear for most disposable uses; it's mostly useful in things such as windows, where you probably want to keep them around. For bottles, it doesn't really matter much.
Nearly all glassmaking involves adding all the glass bits you cut off or broke back into the kiln. Almost no glass is actually 100% virgin glass. So glass is absolutely recyclable.
The only caveat is colored glass can only really be used to make the same color glass (at least economically).
I mean the goal with glass isn't to recycle it anyways, it is to reuse it. And when glass does eventually get thrown away, it is completely inert. It is just sand but in large solid pieces instead of grains. Hell if we cleaned it first, we could literally throw the glass in large piles in designated areas of the coast and just let the waves smash it all back into sand with zero ill effects.
I guess it is just a US thing. I read a lot of HN so naturally had the same very skeptical disposition, until we went to see one of those plants in town. Started recycling at home the same week.
Metals, Glass and paper are profitable to be recycled, plastic a bit less so, but still doable.
But in EU there are a lot of programs to cut taxes or subsidize recycling so maybe that’s actually working?
It drove me nuts when BPA hit the radar and I switched to mostly glass while everyone around me just... bought different plastic.
If this one was 'safe' until it wasn't, why do you think a newer kind of plastic is going to be safe? Plus now you have bought twice as many containers.
Correct, however it is significantly less plastic that would be used in a plastic bottle, since it doesn't have to hold any pressure by itself. The aluminum is one of the most recyclable materials we have.
Klean Kanteen had some drama because they weren't clear on what their liners were made of before they started telling people their products were safe.
Narrator: they weren't
They had to do a big mea culpa and then scramble to change their product line later in the game than they could have.
And then there was an organic food company (Muir) that dragged their feet on switching the liners for their canned tomatoes and sauces (you may recall that acids make the leaching worse) and pissed a lot of people right off.
Silicon as well. If it’s safe enough to have in your body, it’s safe enough to drink from. Also it’s extremely heat resistant (I use it for sous-vide cooking).
This may be a dumb question, but is there really a "yup that conspiracy actually happened" book? Not literally a book with that title, but is there some resource that has a list of these?
The funny thing is, if everyone "virtue signaled" like the "liberal women" do by cleaning plastic and putting it in the right bin, recycling might be somewhat less money-losing by virtue of being better-sorted. But yeah, fuck 'em for "virtue signaling" while they sip their lattes and go to yoga, right? It's better to see the lie and do what they don't want you to do. /s
I get it, plastic can't be recycled profitably and we should be using way less. But one of the reasons its so terrible to recycle is because of how poorly it's sorted.
Did you even read the article? It isn't profitable and it will never be. The only reason why it could go on for as long as it did is because China was subsidizing us with slave labor.
Putting effort into sorting better is throwing good money after bad. Even if you sort perfectly it's still virtue signalling; far better to spend that time on something productive and donate the earnings to something effective.
Probably a couple of seconds. Maybe 5 cents for a typical HN reader. Which is significantly more than recycling that bottle is worth (I'm pretty sure GGP was talking about putting the bottle in the landfill bin rather than the paper bin).
I believe OP is affirming the actual costs of recycling, as discussed in the article. In a world where every consumer perfectly sorts there recyclables, it still doesn't make sense for the producers.
Unpopular opinion: there's nothing wrong with not recycling plastic and sending it right to the landfill. It sequesters carbon, isn't too terrible for the environment (it just sits there in the ground), and it's not like we're going to run out of landfill space any time soon[1]. I'm all for recycling if it's a net positive in terms of resource consumption, but I don't see the appeal of recycling for the sake of recycling.
[1] https://www.npr.org/transcripts/739893511 "Thomas says we probably have thousands of years of landfill space left in the U.S. And even hardcore environmentalists reluctantly agree that, yeah, we have a lot of space left. But people thought we were running out of space, and that was what mattered."
It is going to break down into small microplastics and potentially leak out into the water supply and then the wider food chain. What happened in the oceans is mostly about dumped fishing gear and all the "ask no questions recycling" sent to asia to be processed finding its way into the oceans rather than the landfilled material but it is still breaking down in a similar way and needs to be dealt with properly
There are ways to re-sequester plastic in landfills that won't lead to that - Generally even poorly managed landfull will be a better option than the same amount of plastic sitting around in the general environment breaking down rapidly in the presence of UV and heat, not to mention the damage it does to wildlife.
Landfill isn't a perfect solution for plastic waste, especially if it isn't well managed. But it is, on the balance of factors, one of the better options available to us currently.
I believe that modern landfills are not permitted to have run-offs (i think the term is 'leachate') into the environment. There is a water-tight lining between the ground and the actual landfill.
So I suspect that in practice plastics sent to landfills are effectively sealed from the environment, at least in most Western countries.
I think there is a misconception that landfill is bad because it used to actually be bad many decades ago. Now there is a lot of regulation around what is required to build a landfill site, and a lot more technical knowledge on how to do it safely. This is a pattern I see occasionally where folks learn something when they are young, and repeat it long past when it ceases to be true, never noticing that it has become a falsehood.
It’s a different issue in countries with less land (Japan being the most extreme one) where landfill is just too expensive because land is expensive. But the US has lots of unused and cheap land that nobody would notice if you added a well-run landfill to.
It depends where in the world you live. I live in Vietnam and a couple of weeks ago they burnt the entire local landfill site because it was too full (for a city of about 200,000 people, took about 4 days to burn). Now, I'm pretty sure that's not government policy here and probably illegal... But that doesn't change the fact that for a lot of the world, that's still how landfill works.
In March 2019 storm water released 135 tonnes of rubbish from a landfill on the west coast of NZ, spreading it across a 64km area of otherwise natural beauty. It was touch-and-go on declaring it a national disaster but in the end it wasn't, and it fell to volunteers to clean up the surface evidence of the spill, at least what hadn't made it down the fox river and out to sea.
Quite a bit more of that kind of thing expected with the increase in extreme weather events from climate change. In Westland alone there are another 12 at-risk old landfill sites. It's estimated that the cost of preventing further spills from the one already-open landfill alone is ~2.3M. In an economically depressed region like Westland it won't be funded, and they're far from the only region in NZ that's facing this problem. Just the first to have experienced a spill event.
I think cleaning up old sites should be prioritized; this is kind of the same commons maintenance as decommissioning old nuclear reactors.
Unfortunately the purely-for-profit structure of these long-term ventures can mean that there is no money to cover the cleanup if things go really wrong, depending on who owns the site. I think you need to look at some sort of cleanup fund in escrow as a precondition for building sites like this, which should incentivize improvements in safety measures too.
For sure, I’ve argued for an equivalent of the superfund for NZ previously, and to bring it to bear on site remediations such as this. It’s not a perfect model, but heck it’s better than doing things ad-hoc and asking for point funding, turning things that should have been foreseen and managed over the long term into unpleasant sudden surprises.
Absolutely. This is one of the big problems with recycling as currently implemented in the US; it’s based on shipping our waste to countries with much worse waste-handling practices.
> It sequesters carbon, isn't too terrible for the environment (it just sits there in the ground), and it's not like we're going to run out of landfill space any time soon[1].
I could care less about the space personally, I think that’s a non-issue, but let’s not romanticize plastic as being harmless or somehow good for us. The danger of this argument is that, like recycling, it encourages more plastic use and more plastic waste, rather than committing to doing what we most need, which is to stop using so much of it, especially for single-serving, single-use convenience, where viable alternatives don’t just exist but have been widely used.
We can sequester carbon best by not pulling it out of the ground, plastic production and distribution uses a lot, and putting it in the landfill doesn’t exactly make up for it.
Plastic production has toxic byproducts, and leeches toxic waste into the ground & water. By “isn’t too terrible for the environment”, what are we comparing to? It’s pretty bad compared to a lot of the actionable alternatives we have.
I'm not sure the parent poster was calling for continued or increased use of plastics alongside landfilling. We need to do ALL of what you said and ALSO what the parent poster said.
Not digging up more sequestered carbon, and utilizing long-term-stable methods of re-sequestering that which has already been released is needed. Landfilling (after, if necessary for the type of plastic being handled, appropriate treatment/encapsulation) is an appropriate tool to bring to bear.
In terms of plastic in circulation, what alternative handling do you have in mind?
* right now way to much seems to just end up in the ocean or blowing around. Good luck getting 7bn people to properly dispose of their trash...
* I don't think you can call it sequestering carbon if the carbon was never in the air to start with. And that's assuming no one starts burning their trash
* you still need to extract a lot of oil to make that plastic. That means emissions and pollution and sending money to shitty regimes. Then you have to process the oil into plastic with more emissions and pollution etc.
I don't think anyone serious thinks all plastic should be banned. It just needs to be used more responsibly. I bought some ham today. Each slice had a plastic sheet separating it from the others (why?). Then 6 slices were in a plastic packet. I got a twin pack so that was 2 packs wrapped in more plastic. Then the cashier looked at me like I was crazy when I declined a plastic bag to carry it in. Do we really need 4 layers of non-reusable protection from cooked ham? Could paper or reusable plastic not have done at least some of those jobs? I think we're still stuck with conspicuous consumption models from the 80s where people wanted that. I don't want that.
On the other hand, it's worth noticing that the plastic packets + sheets you bought (wasteful and pointless as they are) probably amounted to...5 grams of material?
If we're talking pollution and climate change, imo these debates around plastic are all pointless distractions from the cold brutal fact that our westernised high-energy lifestyles are not sustainable, and certainly not scalable to a world with 10 billion consumers.
We can either get used to living at a standard closer to 1920s Europe in energy use (re flight, transportation), get comfortable with the idea that the wealthier billion or so of us will be much better off than the bottom 9, or wait for most of mankind to die climate-related deaths.
It's reduce, reuse, recycle, in that order. You are arguing that we have no problem, and we don't need to do any of the three! No wonder it's an unpopular opinion. Reducing consumption means reducing production. It doesn't matter how effective litter prevention and recycling programs are, it doesn't matter how seemingly bullet-proof landfills are, some percentage of produced plastic ends up as waste in the environment (estimates range from 5 to 11%). Production goes up, litter goes up. Simple equation.
We need to massively reduce single-use plastics.
Even in advanced landfill-having countries, single-use plastics end up as litter in the environment, but the millions of tons per year. I've personally picked up 500 bags of garbage on 4 different continents. Landfills or not, it's everywhere.
Right, if the consumer put it in the ocean instead of the trash, that plastic wasn’t going to get recycled either.
If you put it in landfill in the US, it’s definitely in landfill. If you “recycle” it, it may get shipped to China (or now Cambodia) and then dumped somewhere.
How does plastic end up in the ocean? I would have assumed it was through littering or the fishing industry[0], but perhaps some of it is debris that blows from landfill to waterways?
That’s plastic to-be recycled, not thrown away. We don’t put our trash on shipping containers, we have closed trucks bring it to landfills. We do put recycling on shipping containers and it often blows off into the ocean or ends up in their world countries that get paid to accept it for “recycling” when they don’t have the means to do so and it just ends up in low quality landfills that leak into rivers/oceans.
So that’s more of a reason to just discard plastic.
I mostly agree that landfills aren't too terrible for the environment but I think the issue specifically with plastic is that it can stay around for thousands of years.
Cardboard and paper products recycle pretty well. So does aluminum and some glass bottles.
We need to use more glass bottles and other reusable containers when we go shopping.
The Canadian government is planning to ban single use plastics like bags and containers in 2021 and I’m on board. Even if it costs more it’s just the right thing to do.
The problem is that it's so cheap to make new things that recycling is almost never cost effective. I think I lost faith in the concept (at least in the current economic climate) right about the time I found out that old glass isn't re-melted for use as new glass items, it's just smashed up and used as aggregate for road beds.
> old glass isn't re-melted for use as new glass items
Are you sure this is true? Searching now, I seem to find claims that the majority of recycled glass is often made into new containers as one would expect. Here, for example, is a source that says "Up to 90% of glass collected via multi-stream recycling programs becomes new glass products": https://ourhappyplanet.org/glass-recycling/.
Obviously, "up to" is weasel-speak, but I found some other sites making similar although slightly lower claims. Also, there is a distinction between "single stream" and "multi stream" recycling, with this source claiming that the percentage for "single stream" is only 45%. Do you know of better numbers? Or economic arguments for why clean glass would not be recycled?
Yes, see EPA numbers [1] and an ACS article [2]. It's probably between the two (26% and 33%) depending on your definition of "recycling", the particular state/city, and year.
I don't think those percentages pertain to the right question. What I think we are looking for is the amount [melted down for reuse] divided by the amount [properly put into a recycling container]. The first link (EPA) is dividing the [tons of glass recycled] (presumably entering the recycling stream) by the [tons of glass generated] (manufactured). The second (ACS) says 33% is recycled (as opposed to put into general trash), but also repeats the claim that "90% of glass put into multistream collections gets recycled" (presumably meaning actually remelted).
"Recycled" doesn't mean only "remelted" - it includes things like using it as aggregate in concrete. I don't think you're going to find the numbers you're looking for short of going to a recycling facility and a bottling plant.
Focusing on fossil fuels would handle the plastic aspect, but if we're rewriting tax code I think we're better off trying to cast a wider net.
I'd propose that we tax the hell out of manufacturers' that won't accept delivery of things they manufactured (be it packaging or the products themselves--in whatever state). To avoid this tax they must also meet transparency guidelines for how inbound waste of this sort is disposed of.
This way the "how do we deal with the waste?" problem is handled by the same people who decide what materials to use in the first place.
We use the tax money to set up municipal recycling facilities that use the bar codes on the waste to sort it based on who made it, and instead of shipping it to third world countries they ship it there instead.
Exactly, the new stuff is too cheap compared to the recycling option only because we don't properly account for the long term costs of the new goods.
I'd like to see the cost of waste and re-use placed entirely on producers. If you sell something you have to accept it's waste back. I think we would see a big shift to reusable durable containers.
> The problem is that it's so cheap to make new things that recycling is almost never cost effective. I think I lost faith in the concept (at least in the current economic climate) right about the time I found out that old glass isn't re-melted for use as new glass items, it's just smashed up and used as aggregate for road beds.
Yes, this is correct, although, it is also important to note that the reason why plastic is so "cheap" is because the externalities of it are not captured in the price. To put this in a different perspective, it is best to think of plastic as having a price that is below its costs. Plastic today has a low price. At the same time, the world is becoming filled with it. This accumulation is developing severe and systemic long term consequences. Reverting the damage is extremely difficult, expensive, and some damage may be irreversible, such as the loss of life and ecosystems. The externalities produced by plastics can be seen as a form of long term debt. In this way, it makes it clear that plastic is not all that cheap. In fact, it's quite expensive.
So how can we alter this behavior? I'll venture on my own here by suggesting a similar proposal by Professor Nordhaus and his book The Climate Casino, which is to capture the cost of the externalities into the price through the use of taxation. Carbon taxes is the most supported form of reducing carbon emissions by economists. I wouldn't be surprised if the same support exists for reducing our plastic production. If the production of plastic is taxed at the bottom of the supply chain, thus making it more costly compared to alternative materials, then we should expect an automatic market restructure that will naturally phase it out.
I like the idea of carbon taxes in principle, however I'm afraid of public revolt against such taxes if it were introduced in practice. Hopefully I'm wrong but I don't think you can convince large swaths of the population and the immense private companies that control every aspect of daily life will willingly accept these as an added cost, but chaos instead and worse realities beyond that.
Maybe we do trial runs of these taxes or something? Has that been done before? A/B testing on public tax money?
This is a good point you are bringing up. There will naturally be push back. It is in our natural self-interest, and especially the self-interest of corporations, to not have to pay more. I did not mention this in my comment, but I will have you know that Professor Nordhaus is equally supportive of cap-and-trade. They are both equally effective in his eyes if executed to their potential. Which one is best is dependent on the country and its culture. For instance, Americans are particularly sensitive to rising taxation proposals than their European counterparts. Given this, it may be challenging to pass a carbon tax in the United States. It may be easier to have a cap-and-trade policy passed instead. It's nice to know we have this swift alternative, especially in this time of urgency. But something to consider is that the institutions needed to implement and support cap-and-trade are either non-existent or immature within the United States. Execution may be poor as a result. A carbon tax, however, will likely have greater success given tax institutions are well established here. Although American Conservatives are more resistant to the idea of rising taxation than their Liberal counterparts, know though that a portion of them do believe global warming is an issue that should be addressed. Given this, I believe a carbon tax or cap-and-trade is a winning strategy to win them over versus the popular proposals on the left, which is to reduce emissions through the means of overt regulation or government-owned projects.
How does poorly discarded plastic waste contribute to climate change? In fact, plastic is anti-climate change because the weight of it is much less than producing and transporting glass.
California is pursuing similiar bans on single use plastics, and some are already banned in certain metro areas. Unfortunately, it seems like various restaurants and stores have simply started to distribute "non-single use" versions of the takeout containers and plastic bags which are more robust (ie. use more material), however, its likely these simply get discarded anyways which makes the problem worse. Other than the round "deli" containers which are great and I actually re-use. Only a few restaurants have switched to glass canning jars which can be reused easily, given away or recycled.
I have thought about this a bit and I wonder why can't you just have a return fee for the "non-single use" (probably glass) container. This would not be unheard of, if you've ever bought the expensive milks that come in a glass bottle you will get money if you bring the container back to the store (at least where I live). Also things like kegs and propane containers operate this way.
The problem is that this system at scale would require a widely accepted standard of "container", otherwise people would just accumulate an endless number of different containers for different restaurants so nothing ends up being reused.
In Canada that's referred to as a deposit and retailers will often price it on shelves without the deposit invluded, because technically it's like borrowing a shopping cart. Very related to this discussing, this week I found a $0.25 deposit on a 1.5L $2 plastic water bottle. That's enough for me to consider some kind of alternative.
That's what happens with most beers sold in bottles in Poland, there's a standardized bottle shape, you pay a little extra when buying such a beer. Even so, there's still a lot of beer bottles being trashed. Maybe the price is too low for most of people. In turn, this is what a lot of homeless people do, they collect such bottles for reimbursement.
In addition to replacing single use plastic bags with heavy weight reusable bags. We can't reuse bags any more due to covid19. So now we are single using heavy weight reusable plastic bags.
It might depend. Around my office in Paris there were a bunch of takeout salad bars that seemed fairly popular. Each would serve the salad in a dingy plastic bowl.
At some point last year, one of the places started selling glass bowls and inciting people to reuse them. They were pretty nice too, I actually went and bought one for my own use.
Most of those places' customers are people working in the local offices. So it's doable for them to wash the bowls and bring them back for another salad another day. I know at least one of the other salad bars would put your salad in your own bowl, so you wouldn't even be stuck going to the same place over and over.
It didn't really catch on with most people.
Having your own bowl won't give you any kind of discount at all. So I expect that aside from some people who actually want to do something for the environment, pretty much no one bothers to wash the bowl and drag it back to the salad place "for no reason". I think this also contributes to people's impression that plastic really is cheap (they're giving it away for free !) and that it's not really a problem for them to solve.
The most depressing thing is almost everything we do sucks for the environment at this scale. The only effective action I see is mass population decline. Just not having kids easily out weighs several lifetimes of being frugal.
I suppose it depends what your values are. Do you prioritize preserving the environment or maximizing the happiness and joy of human life? Those might not always, or even usually, be aligned.
It costs more for now. As it becomes the norm, I think we'll see many innovations and new strategies come to fruition.
I specifically like the idea of zero waste stores where you bring your own containers to fill. Not only do you eliminate waste, reusable and sealable containers are so much nicer than what most products come in.
I am very confident this is the case. When we have a well-oiled culture of reuse it will be easy and cheap to just show up with your various containers and do your shopping.
Labor is the biggest expense for businesses, and anything that increases number of man hours means higher costs.
Plastic wrapped items make it very easy for customers to shop themselves with minimal interaction from staff and for the store to still guarantee cleanliness standards. I can only imagine that people coming in with their own containers will require more staff to follow proper protocols in dispensing items and whatnot, resulting in higher costs.
Maybe even take it a step further and have standardized containers that you can drop off when you go shopping in exchange for clean ones and use those. The ones you dropped off can be sent off to a facility to deep clean them, similar to how beer bottles work.
A grocery store I used to live near had a hookup like this with a local dairy farm for their glass bottle milk. iirc returning the bottle also got you like $.25 off the next gallon at checkout.
> I specifically like the idea of zero waste stores where you bring your own containers to fill. Not only do you eliminate waste, reusable and sealable containers are so much nicer than what most products come in.
How would the food arrive at the store?
I used to buy food from a store with bulk bins. The store has a program where you can order the bags that they fill the bins from and pick those up directly--strong paper bags, usually around 25lbs. Lately I've found a mill and some other businesses nearby sell these bags of locally grown staple foods. By switching to the "upstream" bags, I've been able to choose local farms I want to support, nearly eliminate going to the supermarket (for produce I have a small, nearly-wild garden and do some foraging), and pay less for fresher food. Would it be possible to eliminate the 25lb bags from the loop? Probably, but they definitely reduce the friction of buying their contents, and they're made from a small amount (square-cube law) of material that makes a good sheet mulch.
I love glass. It would be nice to have a standardized glass container reusal system. Like what the milkman would do but on steroids. I would be happy to fund that with taxes.
If they went as far as to sanitize the containers with super hot water or something like that so as to not use chemicals, I would be so happy.
Aluminum is by far the most recyclable. It takes ENORMOUSLY less energy to produce an aluminum can by melting one down than from ore.
Paper and glass also make economic sense to recycle. However, paper recycling is limited to making egg cartons, paper shopping bags, pizza boxes, and other low quality items. A lot of glass that gets recycled is actually crushed and used for fill, though most is actually recycled.
Plastic recycling largely meant putting it in container ships with other garbage and sending it off to Asia where it gets buried or burned. Once Asian countries said STOP DOING THIS a year or two ago, plastic "recycling" no longer made any sense.
I like glass and far prefer it to plastic in every use case. That said, I don't look forward to a glass future unless it's unbreakable. Trashy people are trashy, and litter whatever they have. I remember vividly as a kid streets spotted with broken soda bottles, and an occasional beer bottle. I'd much prefer not to return to those times.
Mostly plastic and aluminum. You can still find some more niche items in glass, sometimes. But if you're in a convenient store buying a soda, you'll certainly getting plastic, at least since the 90s.
Such a ban on single-use plastics came into effect last year in India. As they say "devil is in the details" , there were a bunch of criteria defined for the ban. Eg material for carrybags, thickness for some items & so on. Immediately, everywhere the polythene bags are replaced by poly-something-else bags . (Polystyrene?) . And the items which were banned based on micron thickness, were replaced by items which are one micron thicker than that limit . The one-time-use factor did not change a bit. Instead of that older material, we're now throwing newer / different / thicker material.
It is still plastic, non-biodegradable, single-use, garbage.
You can’t recycle pizza boxes where you are? It’s corrugated cardboard right? That stuff recycles well I thought. They just slurry it down to a mash and reconstitute paper or whatever.
Any food / grease contaminates the recycling process heavily. If your pizza box is empty and never touched food, sure, but more likely than not, trash it.
When Chicago banned single use bags, the side effect was very durable disposable bags. They were a vew mils thick and great for heavy stuff, but overkill for dog poop and kitchen trash.
You have to also take into count the weight and the resource cost of shipping. Or alternatively the time cost of repackaging/reusing.
If used plastic can be safely stored for just a cent but glass takes someone 5 minutes to reuse, your probably making things worse however you measure it.
Watching this made me very sad. I feel like I've been lied to my entire life. Of course, I'm also to blame for not spending more time seeking out the truth. Marketing is indeed very effective. This show changed my perspective and has made me want to redouble my efforts with regard to my impact on the environment.
> This show changed my perspective and has made me want to redouble my efforts with regard to my impact on the environment.
At this point, the only effort worth making is reducing consumption. Reducing travel, reducing use of everything across the board. Of course, our whole society is setup so people need others to consume more and more so they can feed their family, because all the debt has that growth baked in in order to break even.
No. Participate in politics to force industries to adopt environment friendly practices and production. Be more full proof and apply the same rules to import/export.
This is how oil, fast food, meat, luxury, etc industries want you to behave. Recycle, reuse and reduce was a failure which was proposed the same way you did. Consumer responsibility could be an additional measure but not the main focus.
The problem is, conservatives and others worldwide oppose this because it imposes costs on business in just one country, leaving businesses there with a disadvantage in world markets. Policies like these need to be coupled with import tariffs to countries with dirty industries, else we just end up legislating all our industry away and instead buy from countries who have no problem with polluting the environment.
> Participate in politics to force industries to adopt environment friendly practices and production.
In my opinion, there is no environmentally friendly practice that allows the world to consume at the pace it wants to. You can’t have multiple annual flights to vacation destinations, large vehicles, and quarter acre lots per family.
Not only can the tiny proportion of the world enjoying the above not have it anymore, but to mitigate the damage already done, we probably need to come to a near stop rather than just slow down from 80mph to 40mph.
All while a few billion people in the developing world are looking forward to their children being able to fly to destinations for vacations and enjoy a backyard and nice car.
A high carbon emission tax can force people to reduce their useless flights. Aviation industry's global emission is at 2 percent and only tiny percentage (3-5%?) of world population travel by air. A lot of problems is also due to inefficient traffic control and laws. Plus, that include air cargo. I can't find anything that accounts only for consumer flights.
We’re in agreement that the way to solve the problem of overconsumption is to raise the cost of consuming by increasing taxes on fossil fuels.
Problem is any politician that proposes it will get voted out because people want to consume. So until a a large majority of people are willing to forgo the type of life desired based on what people are used to and currently enjoying, it seems impossible to impose the requisite level of taxation.
As I already pointed out, only a small amount of people travel by air regularly. So I really doubt that would be a problem for election.
For other industries, it's a mixed bag. Some will be welcomed such as reduction in planned obsolescence, better public transportation, more greenery, less trash on roads, breathable air, etc.
Most people won't notice inefficient coal power plants getting replaced by other better options. They want electricity at cheap and they will get it.
People with resources travel by air regularly, and they influence others. Also, people like to believe they will one day live the jet setting life, so taking that option away could be perceived as a negative.
People also prefer personal car transportation versus public transportation. Public transport requires living in high density environments, which means no personal backyards, no driveways for your 2+ car households, etc. Fossil fuels without the accompanying tax make cheap things possible, like household supplies and convenient packaging. Making fossil fuels more expensive hits everyone's quality of life, and we can see that when fuel prices go up and now everyone is complaining about increases in prices of food and materials.
>Most people won't notice inefficient coal powerplants getting replaced by other better options. They want electricity at cheap and they will get it.
If it was possible to offer electricity cheaper, why would it not already be the case?
> People also prefer personal car transportation versus public transportation.
I suspect it's because many countries don't have good transportation system. You are right, it would be inefficient to build large scale public transportation system in rural areas but considering that they don't account for as much pollution. I think it's an okay trade off for now.
Free public transportation also encourages more development as it benefits poor people (who are less likely to own and use their own vehicles) more.
Pushing down the cost of electricity would be a really good way to get folks to prefer it over other energy sources. Then making the grid more efficient and lower emissions benefits all the downstream applications without needing to wait for equipment replacements.
I just installed a new gas heating system (replacing my 1975-vintage hardware that died) because PG&E charges me roughly 6.4 cents per KWh delivered by pipe vs 44 cents per KWh delivered by wire. [1] Ironically, my red-state-dwelling parents are all-electric and are emitting less CO2e than I am because it's cheaper for them.
I moved out of walking range of a Caltrain station and honestly don't miss it. Tickets are always more expensive than driving, the service is slow, and living nearby is noisy. But it doesn't have to be that way. I only actually used it if I was going all the way to San Francisco, my bicycle was broken, or it was raining a lot - so a few times per year. There's just no will here to make the public transit experience excellent.
[1] Folks may notice that the $0.44/KWh is far above the stated rate. That's because there's tiers and fees. Other folks are quick to point to time-of-use as a way to solve everything, but that would actually increase my bill because most of my electricity use is either base load or peak-hours activities. And I dislike the cognitive burden of micro-optimizing everything all the time.
I agree with you that this should work, but it makes me sad that this kind of solution preserves access for the wealthy and excludes those who are not. Maybe clean energy can help reduce the divide eventually.
Personally I'd rather not promote additional tracking and surveillance. Simple measures, while they might not be perfect, at least have easy-to-predict outcomes. Directly taxing what you want less of (e.g., CO2e) doesn't require complicated mechanisms and can be rapidly and broadly applied.
I think it should be illegal for waste disposal to be as intransparent as it is now. I live in Germany and always considered our Recycling Practices as highly valuable, until I was contracted to build a project for an industrial waste processing company, which led me to realize that our system is 60% virtue signalling, 35% political corruption and 5% useful.
The problem, as they've described, if you were intellectually honest is really not about how much you can recycle, but more about how you can burn things cleanly by sorting stuff as best as possible.
Have two bins, dry waste and wet waste, everything else should be handled at the waste management plant, as they have to sort anyway, but wetting materials that could otherwise burn cleanly and efficiently raises the price and makes automated sorting much harder and more expensive.
If the waste management company can recycle anything for profit, they will absolutely do so, but forcing them to do so at cost for materials that nobody wants to buy because the material is in low demand just shifts the problem in the pipeline to the landfill after you've spent energy on trying to recycle it.
I ve worked in waste management where we tried to make them transparent against their will.
The reason why large recyclers, burning plants manager and all the other companies taking your trash and trying to do someth with it is that the margins are barely worth it, nobody want to raises prices and there s no much they can do to even give an environmentally safe disposal, they re not built as innovative engineering companies but as inherited old school mafia-like gangs.
We found out huge over pricing on our clients thanks to large data mining, and they confessed that without lying on their contracts and quantity they process they d close the door. They were fine losing our client if that meant honestly weighting waste and pricing at the contract.
Our client was the largest supermarket chain in my country, with 800 stores: they couldnt even afford real priced waste management because why, it s not their priority. They only hired us to fuck their providers into submitting to loss making.
That s waste management, and my more idealist "liberal" young colleagues didnt last long in a company that was trying to talk to every side. It s so much easier to go to environmental think tanks that talk abt recycling coffee cups than make a supermarket company accept to lose money with no environmental benefit for the sake of just keeping the sector alive and legal. In Italy, waste management isnt even done legally and we had to politely decline to go there to help too ahah
People have to reuse and resell and buy used. Dispel any notion that you may be a “cheap” person for buying used by the fact that it is infinitely better for the environment.
Often time people will say that it is not worth the time to resell something less than $10 (time to meet a buyer/shop an item), but that’s because the actual costs of trashing it are externalized. Even if you don't throw it away and just store it in a closet, you're creating demand for the manufacturing of new product that will all eventually be trashed. The longer you hoard it the lower the value—and thus re-usability—it holds.
There should also be laws that guarantee the right to transfer warranties so that manufacturers cannot disincentivize the second hand market.
> the actual costs of trashing it are externalized
Does it really cost that much to bury things in the ground? And how much of that cost is externalized? Where I live garbage collection is done by for-profit companies that charge for it.
Seems more likely that the costs of producing things in the first place are what's externalized by producing in third world countries with lax environmental standards.
> Seems more likely that the costs of producing things in the first place are what's externalized by producing in third world countries with lax environmental standards.
Environmental standards in developed (first world) countries are also lax because the long term effects of fossil fuel usage isn’t included in the price.
And since that gas comes from one place, it is relatively easy to capture it and do things with it. Methane in particular can be burned, either to destroy it or even as a power source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landfill_gas_utilization
At 1000$/tonne of CO2 (Air capture!) burying a soda bottle (2L - 42g) would cost on the order of 5 cents, or conveniently what many states charge as a bottle deposit, so no. You would have to be burying 5-10 kilos of plastic to approach even $10 worth of carbon dioxide emission mitigation.
If you're getting rid of something and it doesn't seem worth selling, give it away. Platforms like Craigslist and Facebook marketplace are great for this. ime you'll find a taker for anything that's not complete junk.
Bought my wife's engagement ring used on eBay. (With her knowledge and full support!)
Edit: Actually, time fogged my memory a bit. She didn't know I was buying it beforehand, but we knew each other well by then, and I knew she'd be on board with it, and in fact wouldn't want me to waste money on a big retail diamond. And indeed, she loves the ring, knowing it came from eBay!
Milk used to be delivered on electric milk 'float' vehicles in the UK in glass pint bottles. The milkman left pints of milk sealed with a foil top and took the used bottles left for them by the customer.
I used to watch the bottles being washed and sterilized on a conveyor through the factory window as a small child.
Today we have Tetrapak waxed paper boxed milk or plastic jugs. the Tetrapak website is classic wooly green washing https://www.tetrapak.com/us/sustainability/carton-recycling
Plastic jugs are already being discussed here. How on earth did we get to this low point?
It's interesting how consistent all this news has been with the Penn & Teller: Bullshit! episode on recycling from over 15 years ago. From what I recall, the takeaway was that recycling anything other than glass, paper, or aluminum was a waste of money.
At the time, I wasn't sure how valid it was (whether they were potentially exaggerating or simply being contrarian, etc.), but it seemed plausible, and now it's looking increasingly likely that their take was spot on.
this just isnt true though. there are some plastics like thermoset plastics that are fairly valuable commodities and are worth recycling. there are many plants making money off shredding, sorting and extruding into little granules that can be used for things like injection molding. not to mention that recycling e-waste is another very profitable and useful activity. copper wire alone is a complete no-brainer. penn and teller were definitely not spot on.
This is why I really try to buy glass container products when possible and just wash / reuse. A lot of people over-focus on recycling because it makes them feel like they're doing something, but they forget recycling is the last of the 3 Rs. It's Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, not Recycle, Recycle, Recycle. I don't recycle at home and some people think me a monster, but my calculated home carbon footprint is significantly lower than the average because I shy away from single-use packaging, low quality products, and minimize my wastage.
I wish there was some answer to better educate people, because the marketing around recycling has been so successful and yet people with the best of intentions will absolutely buy tons of single-use packaging covered products thinking it's okay because the packaging is compostable or they will recycle.
You know it’s really sad to see things continue to go this way. There should be serious penalties for lying to the public like this...
On a related note, since the pandemic began, there’s been a pseudo-milkman service in my area (in the USA). I was very excited by this, cause I looked forward to happy memories of glass milk bottles sitting by my doorstep like when I lived in the U.K. and had a milkman. The milk comes in tetrapaks... Are tetrapaks reusable? No. Are they better than plastic? Probably, I’m not sure? Could it totally be glass bottles? Yes, it could.
Recycling is hard. There is no incentive to reuse plastic when it's less expensive to use virgin material.
The use of Solar Panels have always been more expensive and less convenient than fossil fuel but we've started to make the transition to solar power chiefly because of the energy credits that the government has been giving to encourage the development of alternative energy.
I think we need to start doing the same with plastics and other polluting trash that we output as a society. Plastics will always be less expensive to just dump and not recycle. We need to give industry an alternative. Tax credits will have the benefits of creating new industries and more jobs. Unfortunately we will face the same resistance from the fossil fuel industries that we currently experience but long term it's the right thing to do.
It would be nice to get companies to do it with out government incentives but as we have seen that just does not happen.
Carbon tax. Make plastic more expensive by accounting for (some of) it’s environmental impact. Adjust price of goods on import to account for countries of origin that don’t tax carbon.
That's good, and addresses the problem that actually needs addressing (carbon emissions). It won't lead to more recycling though; if anything, turning oil into plastic that then gets buried in a landfill is a good thing from a carbon-emissions perspective.
Nah, you can make plastics out of biofuel, only 5% or so of the world's oil goes to plastics, and there's enough oil in the world for the equivalent of thousands of years of plastic production
It will lead to less plastic production in the first place and possibly to more recycling provided recycling if recycling is or can be less carbon intensive than manufacturing new plastic. Also, oil is already sequestered so pumping it out of the ground to turn into plastic to bury in a landfill isn’t helpful.
I read somewhere that a reusable bag emits 3000 times more carbon than polythene bag. No one is going to reuse a reusable bag 3000 times, so having carbon tax is going to have opposite effect on the case of plastic.
I tried to check the net. I couldn't find exact 3000 number, but the highest number I could find is that cotton bag must be used 7000 times. It varies according to the source though. If I remember correctly I read 3000 number for jute bag.
I also googled it and found multiple different results with numbers more like 100 times (which is quite easy to achieve in practice). I didn’t immediately find any results in the thousands, but isn’t looking for the highest number going to produce the statistically least likely outlier?
I think fixating on number of reuses to meet equal carbon footprint is fraught with problems and painting an incomplete picture though, this doesn’t really account for things like plastic production & waste toxicity, or the fact that plastic is non-renewable while cotton is renewable.
It's interesting when people advocate for tariffs on China (and sure, other countries, but China is by far the biggest plastic producer) without calling them what they are.
A carbon tax was a reasonable idea 20 years ago. Now it would be too little, too late. If the people in favor of a carbon tax had actually been serious and made it happen, then we could have more nuanced discussions now about how to make it work better. As it is, we don't have N more years to argue about what form the carbon tax should take and how to enact it worldwide. Every passing year makes the authoritarian solution more probable and severe.
The best moment to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second best moment is right now
In 20 years would we be saying the same about how "it is too late to do Carbon tax now"?
There you have your answer, I don't want to be 60 and needing to deal with still not having carbon taxing which we know is one of the best tools in the toolkit to even begin fixing some of these issues and funding solutions
While I’m all in favor of fixing externalities in capitalism it’s tough to see how to offset this carbon tax without hurting the poor. This is part of why even conservative think tanks (the folks supporting carbon taxes anyway) are coming around to UBI to offset it instead of some awkward carbon tax credit with some means testing bureaucracy that would be gamed.
The best system I’ve seen proposed has proceeds of the carbon tax given as direct distributions to people (each adult gets 1/n the total fund,) like Alaska’s dividend.
Most if not so carbon tax proposals address this already. The most obvious solution is to cut a check to the poorest Americans from the carbon tax revenues. Making for good means testing is hard but plenty of other countries do this successfully so we aren’t inventing this from scratch.
I can never decide whether to recycle or just throw plastic in the trash.
If I throw it in the trash, I know it's at least going to go to a well-managed landfill and has a negligible chance of ending up in a river somewhere overseas, and then into the ocean.
Plus, the feedback feels more accurate. The feeling of how much non-degradable trash I'm creating hits viscerally when I throw plastic in the bin, and makes it hurt more to buy plastic.
I end up using the recycling because my flatmates get angry when I don't.
Tougher plastic is more valuable. Laundry detergent bottles, milk jugs, yogurt tubs. Picture what would happen if you crushed the item in your hand. Would it crack and splinter? Trash. Would it rebound, unblemished? Probably worth recycling.
That's a misreading of what I said about SFC regulations.
The (potential) fine is there to prevent people from throwing away e.g. corrugated cardboard boxes, glass bottles, aluminum cans. From my interactions with the solid waste dept. workers, I find it extremely unlikely that anyone would intervene if you put a "maybe recyclable" in the trash stream.
Perhaps you are correct. But I know where I live (Pittsburgh), if I put soiled and nasty cardboard in the trash, Pittsburgh’s sanitation people will take the cardboard out and leave it for the recycling route.
Sometimes the recycling driver notices its not “clean”, and leaves it for next weeks’ trash route.
Legal question: How can we make Plastics into the next Big Tobacco or Big Opioid lawsuit? In other words, hold an industry responsible for the damage they knew they were causing? They knowingly traded our environment for their profits.
I admire what the U.S. government did in those other two cases. While they came late, at least there were consequences.
I got really annoying billing from the garbage collection at my summer house (they did not allow me to pay automatically or per year) so I asked if I could cancel the collection altogether: To my surprise they said: yes, your house is worth less than $10K (it's worth $0 to them) so you may cancel it!
Which I immediately did, then for 2 years I used my neighbors garbage container and we shared the bill (she allowed me to pay once per year digitally).
But then she sold her house, and since you can't really ask your new neighbors if you can share garbage collection before getting to know them, I was stuck in a bind:
Trust me, nothing you read or do will ever be as good of a teacher as not having garbage collection! It's as hard as coding C/C++! ;)
So now I carefully plan my stay in the house, meticulously making sure the garbage I create is minimal and smell free so I can bring it back to the city!
Everything I invest in long term is either glass, cork, natural rubber, stain free steel or cast iron.
Plastic is going away as we speak since the polymers in the low quality oil that we extract today can't hold anything.
Fuels are also getting worse, the alkylate gasoline (basically distilled gasoline) I put in my lawnmower only lasts 3 months in a plastic container now (down from more than a winter only a couple of years back) so now I store it in metal jeep dunks.
In Sweden we are now since 2018 mixing ethanol into all fuels (gasoline and diesel) by law! I have a hunch covid lung problems are not getting better because of this!
50% of all the dead here lived at home (without jobs) between our largest highways with the most heavy traffic, the life vein of Sweden (intersection of E18 and E4 in the north of Stockholm, the 55/267/275 shortcuts aren't used by the largest trucks because the short radius of the ramps/roundabouts).
The other 50% where elderly (probably living near highways too, if I'm right).
Reuse, preservation and production is now the only thing you can do, consumption is dying.
> we were pretty much paying China to throw away our garbage
This was never true, China was paying us for the recycling, but they wanted to upgrade their economy so they stopped making money on it, and stopped buying the recycling.
It's very common myth that we pay countries to take our recycling: this never happens.
Plastic is not biodegradable. Which means once plastic has come into existence, it's gonna be around pretty much forever. Considering the fact that forever is a long time and that we continue to make more plastic anyway, I don't see how it matters that we use the same plastic once or some finite number of times.
We need to find a way to destroy plastic safely or just not produce plastic at all. I imagine the politics and the economics around plastic is more complicated than we appreciate. After all it's related to oil.
Recyclable plastic is just a way to get us to buy more plastic while feeling a sense of satisfaction/pride that we are doing our part to save the planet. That's just ironic and, frankly, as consumers quite pathetic.
Aluminum seems like a great material for containers. It's easily melted and reused and you can coat the inside with a thin polymer to hold corrosive liquids like Coke.
Any reason we don't use aluminum containers outside the beverage industry?
These are known as crowlers (can growlers) and are meant to replace the 1L and 1.89L glass growlers that have gone out of fashion somewhat over the last couple years.
Crowlers look like oversized beverage cans, and come with either a pull tab (like a normal beverage can) or a resealable metal cap.
Note that all beverage cans have a plastic liner (epoxy usually).
Especially when the cost differential per unit is minimal. I love my Zebra pens and I found that they were just nice enough that when people borrow them from me they most often will return them. Plastic pens on the other hand simply disappear over time. I have some Zebra pens that have been with me for years.
Plastic pens could last for years (perhaps easier to break but equally easy to lose) but are marketed as disposable.
The biggest Australian stationary store carries 10-packs of Cristal pens for A$4 and doesn't carry refills - these pens go straight to the bin. I've never thrown away a steel pen.
You don't necessarily want it degrade, most likely you don't want it anywhere near the landfill. You want it to be recyclable, and this recyclability makes it much less worth keeping in the user's mind.
A metal pen isn't going to have a particularly adverse effect on its environment the way a plastic one is; thus, it doesn't particularly matter if it degrades.
The first plastic road in India was constructed in Chennai in 2002 from shredded waste plastic. This plastic road is reported to be durable and pothole free (Subramaniam 2016; Manju, Sathya, & Sheema 2017). Today, there is more than 33,000 km of plastic road in India with most of them being rural roads and a small number in cities such as Chennai and Mumbai (Subramaniam 2016).
...
The waste plastic content for dense-graded and open-graded mixes is set at 6-8% of the mass of the bitumen (Sharp et al. 2017).
Putting that 6-8% in perspective, Australia produces about 3 .5 million tons of plastic waste a year, and uses 800,000 tons of bitumen. So only about 1% could be recycled at the 6-8% level.
Perhaps an even bigger downer is:
However, the concern associated with plastics breaking down into microplastics might create another problem to the environment. Subramaniam (2016) quoted a Professor of Plant and Soil Ecology at Freie Universität Berlin, ‘once in the soil, these particles may persist, accumulate and eventually reach levels that can affect the functioning and biodiversity of the soil’.
This is a very long thread, with a lot of interesting talk about taxes and disincentives for single-use plastics, so I thought I'd hoist this to top level. Canada (as well as I assume many other places) has a deposit system for the fancy milks you might buy, wherein the retailer will often list the milk without the $1 included, because it's arguably analogous to borrowing a shopping cart (where you'd insert a coin and get it back when you're done).
I was recently surprised to find a similar deposit on a single-use plastic bottle of water (1.5L, $2) of $0.25. I have no idea where I'd return the bottle to get that 25 cents back, but it was enough to get my attention, and though I use a re-usable coffee canister as much as feasible, I'll probably try and find a solution for large quantities of water as well (beyond my 20oz canteen). I definitely find this less convenient during the pandemic, because coffee shops don't fill directly into personal mugs anymore, and there aren't that many public bottle filling stations around. In a counter intuitive move, many public water fountains have even been shut off for Covid.
The biggest and most important step is to reduce how much you buy in the first place. Not just plastics, everything.
Secondly you should reuse what you already have for as long as possible. Reuse those food containers, repair clothes with holes in them and so on. Use that cloth shopping bag for as long as possible instead of buying new ones. One of my canvas shopping bags is over 30 years old and still hasn't needed any repairs.
Recycling should only be the choice when you cannot reduce, reuse or repair any longer.
And all of this is of course just individual action, the real results will only come from heavily regulating or completely shutting down the fossil fuel industry.
The plastic industry is just an extension of the petrochemical industry. As oil and gas consumption for fuel drops, they are finding other outlets for production.
In Spain we have a Non-Profit that focuses on getting the people to recycle called Ecoembes. It is founded by the package companies and it is like a lobby of the recycling business present all over the country. It is also worth noting that every disposable package is taxed to the company producing it unless recycled back.
You do not have to be very smart to see that you are giving the packaging back to those companies as cheap labour and that it would cause a significant impact on their profits if not recycled.
The technology developed by the French Company Carbios[1] is really promising on that matter.
This Company creates a new generation of fully biodegradable plastics with a controlled lifespan, a process enabling infinite biorecycling of plastic waste (PET) and a new biological pathway for the production of competitive biosourced polymers.
The big lesson here is the industry's regulation dodge for the externality produced by "blaming the consumer" Because of course the consumer is never actually to blame in the eyes of a politician so just pollute on and pollute harder. Have a campaign contribution. "People don't want clean."
Doesn't it depend on what kind of plastic you use? You know there are many kind of "plastics". People who talk about recycling "plastics" while not distinguishing between different kind of "plastics" make me sceptic.
Headline seems a bit off. Yes, recycling was preferable to reduction from the industry's perspective. The deal was always, "hey, you can keep using our products because now we're recycling". I wouldn't say that makes it a lie.
Biodegradable plastic has been a thing since the 70's. My dad used to carry around samples of cellulose-based transparent plastic[-like] envelopes, you actually could eat them. (They didn't taste like anything.)
Perhaps we should require a minimum % of post-consumer recycled content in new plastics going forward. I have decades of industry-sponsored research indicating that plastic recycling is cheap and effective.
Humanity is proving that there's some brilliant people among us making things better but the majority of us are just too stupid and greedy to know or care how to manage a planet well for ourselves.
At my local waste management facility I witnessed trucks dumping all collected recycled material into the landfill. I asked and I was told this is standard.
Actually hitting the Sun is hard. It's not as simple as dropping it off and letting gravity make it "fall" like blue ice from an airplane. There's not only the matter of making it escape the Earth's gravity (which is considerable), but also that the Earth and all the garbage on it is already moving in an orbit around the Sun that you'd have to decelerate from. More likely we'd end up with a chain of trash comets.
We're talking in hypothetical's. If we are sending trash into space (as the comment above me suggested) then why not send it to the Sun and incinerate it. Of course there is no way to make this economical, even with a space elevator it would probably be too costly.
That thought exercise involves moving 455 megatons of human off-planet. Getting rid of all plastic waste would in some ways be harder than that. Because we'd need to move that mass every year.
Current plastic production is about 380 megatons per year.
Given that plastic at best gets 1.3 uses, the initial one and then a third of that material can go into a recycled container. That is it. When you compare that to the thousands of reuses of glass bottles we used to do for milk it is really apparent how awful the plastic process is, its barely better than just throw away. This also ignores the fact that huge amounts of the plastic used isn't actually recyclable at all.
The triple whammy to all this is that all over the planet people have been cleaning their plastics with hot water, drying and then separating it into different rubbish bags with separate collections and additional bins etc. All for a giant lie about recycling that was never true. We have wasted substantial energy and time on something that never worked and helped destroy the environment even more because of it.