Here in The Netherlands we collect styrofoam with the recycling, it is then turned into a high value insulation product used to help insulate our housing stock.
Reduce is better than re-use - I don't think I've seen styrofoam for the last few years in the UK. Cups and food containers are paper and packaging for things like TVs is now shaped cardboard. What are you still getting in styrofoam over there?
It's very common in the packaging for computers and monitors that we order, although shout out to HP for transitioning to almost full cardboard packaging for their desktop PCs.
I recently received a M1 Mini and I was impressed with Apple's packaging. The white box the computer was in had plastic wrap around it but everything else was cardboard or paper. The cable was secured with paper, not twist-ties. The white box fits neatly into the brown cardboard box and is protected at the corners.
Also happy with the M1 Mini, which has 16GB but I don't do virtualization. Mostly too many tabs.
The new Dell monitor I just bought was also all-cardboard packaging, with some impressive engineering with layered compartments and accordion-spring folded reinforcement sections to keep the whole thing nicely sturdy.
it's rare to get anything styrofoam in Oregon, but the last time I visited Florida, it was all over the place - take out containers, everything.
it really depends on the state, since those regulations are currently at the state level. a lot of states frown on federal mandates, and a lot of cities frown on state mandates. we're a huge country.
> in the UK ... packaging for things like TVs is now shaped cardboard.
Shaped cardboard packaging is not universal. I see as much styrofoam as those.
Styrofoam is terrible as 1) the council don't want it in the recycling bins. 2) inevitably it breaks, scattering little foamed plastic beads that disperse easily in wind. So it eventually contributes to the environmental microplastics
I'm not so sure, reducing often does involve carbon release. In this case half the carbon in the styrofoam is released by the mealworms as CO2. If we can delay that a few decades why wouldn't we? Also re-use doesn't preclude eventual reduction, and by delaying it we may also be able to take advantage of more advanced reduction options. I think we need to look at these things on a case by case basis.
The phrase is "reduce, reuse, recycle, in that order" (each being better than the next). In this context, reduction means not buying styrofoam in the first place. I think you're confusing reduction with recycling.
LG started as a chemicals company producing plastics, and LG Chem still does that, so I guess they'd be one of the last to switch. There is always a certain preference for buying from your own company :)
I had a ton of extra styrofoam (I live in the SF Bay Area). It was hard to find out what to do with it, but finally found out that SF will take styrofoam waste for free and compact it with a densifier. Their site says "Our densifier converts Styrofoam into ingots, which can be re-manufactured into door and crown moldings, picture frames, and side and deck board."
so am I. It seemed that out of all the alternatives, this was the best option since it was free, and ostensibly recycled where all the other options were to throw it in landfill.
Also, we might have a far better recycling technology in 100 years and will know where to find the material. Perhaps it is better to simply store it somewhere for the future. Only now we should make sure it doesn't find its way to the oceans.
Most trash heaps from 100+ years ago have something of value in for people today (antiques, museum artifacts, leftover gold/metals in mine waste, etc.).
It seems unlikely that today's trash heaps won't have something of value for future people.
The only challenge is how to stop leaching of poisonous stuff...
I had an odd experience taking styrofoam to the dump in SF. On most days I would be told to just put it in some random dumpster, no receipt written up and no vehicle weigh in/out or anything. I figured that was just the process until one day I was told to take it to a specific place where there was other styrofoam being collected, my vehicle was weighed in/out and a receipt generated. Who knows what they were doing with it on those other days?
Yes, I also had to go through weighing and getting a receipt (but it was still free), and dropped off the foam right in front of the densifier. I've never been through that transfer station before, it's probably just covid rearrangement.
Its already Here and its not necessarily industrial scale either its called EPSCrete [1] Yep no need to transport your styrofoam to a recycler and buy back some insulation product when you can make it yourself [2]
"Fed with Styrofoam as the sole diet, the larvae lived as well as those fed with a normal diet (bran) over a period of 1 month"
I do not believe this claim.
Polystyrene has only carbon and hydrogen - so where are the mealworms getting nitrogen for protein synthesis? If they are getting it from the air, that's pretty major, and I highly doubt it.
Another problematic claim:
"and the rest into mineralized organic material"
What mineral exactly are they making that is usable for plants? Carbon and Hydrogen would leave just CO2 and water as waste products. What could they possibly be making?
It makes sense. It implies the mealworms can use it for energy, but not for growth. It's basically a carbohydrate, they would need some protein, fat, and trace elements for proper growth.
Now I just need to know if these worms would harm my chickens. They (the chickens) already try and eat foam packing material that gets blown out of trash cans on windy days. The worms can't be worse, right?
We don't eat the chickens and barely eat the eggs (they're pets), so no risk to us.
Wife is vegan, kid doesn't really like them and I just don't eat a lot of food. Nobody is really all that interested. We eat some but the chickens are free range and since the last move, we haven't found their nesting ground. We get one a day is a predictable place and the rest are who knows where. Even with one a day, we give about half away.
Huh, I thought chickens were more predictable and nested. Ducks sometimes just drop and egg while they're walking around, but mine stay in a pretty small area so they're easy to find if they haven't broken them.
>The mealworms are able to do this due to their gut bacteria (Exiguobacterium sp. strain YT2) that actually breaks down the polystyrene.
> The fact that these worms are converting about half of the styrofoam they eat into carbon dioxide and the rest into mineralized organic material suggest that it has come full circle.
The bacteria breaks the molecules and shouldn't harm the animals that eat them.
I don't know about industrial processes involving bacteria, but the mealworms might be providing a lot of value. First they chew up the styrofoam, and then they provide an environment (pH, nutrients, enzymes) for the bacteria to be effective. Mealworms are also fairly easy to breed.
If you isolated the bacteria, you might need to provide those other functions in an alternative way that's more cost effective than putting some worms in a bucket.
Would you need to feed the mealworms anything other than just styrofoam? i.e. can you just have a giant vat of mealworms that you through styrofoam into?
My recollection of the original stanford writeup was that you actually couldn't feed the worms anything else. If given any options, they picked styrofoam last.
True, but at industrial volumes it might be more space/cost/time effective to directly use the bacteria, combined with a mechanical or chemical pre-processing step.
How are you defining efficiency? Time to “disappear” the styrofoam? If yes, that’s not the problem to solve here. Health concerns are to be reduced from used styrofoam. Burning reacts it with air, and as another has commented, that produces harmful byproducts. Decomposing into CO2 (perhaps which can be captured) and manure is perhaps a better alternative?
> It does not. Burning in an incinerator is completely clean and releases only water and CO2. If you burn it badly you can make smoke, so don't do that.
I suppose I should have been more careful with my terms - "burning" was meant as a layman's "making fire" rather than in a controlled process within an incinerator as you mentioned.
If this is clean, why are people so motivated to look for alternatives for its disposal, giving up and resorting to landfill? Is incineration cost-prohibitive? Or is the transport to the incinerators inefficient?
Because people are not rational and incineration "seems" dirty somehow, even though it is - by far - the mostly environmentally friendly way to deal with plastic. Far outclassing recycling.
It just looks bad, and recycling is about feeling good, not the environment.
Incineration not only disposes of the plastic, it also gives you back the energy embodied in the raw material used to make it. Then you can avoid burning some other oil, and use that other oil to make fresh plastic.
You can think of it as recycling with extra steps :)
The danger from Styrofoam comes when the smoke from burning it releases harmful amounts of PAH (Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons). According to the Illinois Department of Public Health, it is known that PAH stays in the environment for years; has been linked to short-term symptoms like eye irritation, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and confusion, and long-term symptoms like kidney and liver damage and cataracts.
I did a science fair project once in elementary school. My project was to see what materials would break down styrofoam. I took a big chunk and broke it into pieces, leaving each in a jar of different liquid (and burning one). As one would expect, burning it worked really well, but of course let off a ton of black smoke.
But you know what else fully dissolved the styrofoam? Coke. One week in a jar of coke and it was gone.
If you want to dissolve polystyrene (styrofoam) then acetone or any other organic solvent (even gasoline) does a much faster job. And because the foam is mostly air you can get rid of quite a lot of it before the solution becomes completely saturated. This solution can be used as a sealant, or to fill molds and produce plastic parts, although it's advisable to use a vacuum chamber to recycle your solvent and help with the degassing.
I was just melting styrofoam with acetone sprayed from syringe.
Fun ended when I decided to include lego minifigure and found out that acetone also dissolves abs plastic. Legos were expensive, hard to get and treasured when I was a kid so result was much undesired.
Solvent-based methods have some unfortunate side-effects, and are difficult to scale [1]. Low and slow heat appears to work. I'm still trying to find reports of anyone who takes end user styrofoam and turns it back into desired styrofoam shapes with carbon dioxide as a foaming agent, entraining it into the closed cells. I've yet to hear of people who reduce styrofoam into polystyrene being able to turn it back into styrofoam again, but can't tell if that is an outcome of the chemistry/thermochemistry (very difficult to address), or lack of foaming equipment (addressable with enough expertise, space and capital).
Ideally, I'd like to figure out a way to take all styrofoam entering say a neighborhood as end user packing gets continuously turned into standardized insulation interlocking blocks that is continuously, incrementally installed into buildings that are pre-built with say, 2-4 meter thick wall cavities for incrementally build up the insulation over time. The styrofoam that enters our lives as packing material for a brief period and becomes unwanted detritus ends up in multi-decade and hopefully multi-century building insulation.
I want to do the same with the polyethylene used for most bags, though for those I'd want to turn them into sheets and use them for endlessly making Kaizen foam to organize, protect and store my tooling.
Somewhat. There's multiple types of foam board used for insulation in buildings. The most common types are EPS, XPS, and polyisocyanurate. EPS and XPS are Expanded and eXtruded PolyStyrene, respectively. Both are closed-cell foams.
EPS is styrofoam, and is made by putting a bunch of polystyrene beads in a container, and then heating it up so they expand into a big block either in the desired final shape, or later cut into the desired size and shape.
XPS is foamed up with a blowing agent, previously an hyrdoflourocarbon gas (I don't know what's used currently), and then extruded into its desired shape.
Polyiso is its own animal, but I know little about it, other than it's not polystyrene.
They used to have a wax coating, in just the past decade that has disappeared almost entirely and any recently manufactured cups have a polyethylene (not styrene) lining. Many cups made for hot drinks have polystyrene on the outside, some are multi-layer paper and some have a cardboard sleeve.
> Not really, it's not worse compared to many other things people consume.
Yes really. Other things being worse is whataboutism to derail from the issue.
Coke, specifically, from can bottle. If you drink the brown sugar suspension that is fountain soda, you are just marching toward diabetes. The chemistry is unique between these products.
> Could this mean it's a bad idea to drink Coke from a styrofoam cup?
> It's generally a bad idea to drink coke
All coke colas (and most other products) are insanely high in fructose. The distinction to "drinking coke" is that it's a coke carbonated cola product. The conversation isn't nuanced that a distinction is being made.
If you look at my posts, I seem to be on the "downvoted every post list" from a few unhappy members as I frequently find my posts instantly downvoted for no reasons...
This admittedly might be pedantic however when it comes to acids "weak" and "strong" are reserved words, if you will, in chemistry; phosphoric is a weak acid. This may be a confusing notion at the outset as hydrofluoric acid, for example, is terrifically corrosive yet considered "weak".
The distinction lies in whether the acid's molecules fully disassociate into ions in solution, or only partially.
Coke contains phosphoric acid whic is a weak acid. It is just an acid that is pretty good at removing rust and other oxides in a relatively safe way. Phosphoric acid is also really good at decalcifying your teeth... Leave a tooth in coke for a few days if you want to see what I mean.
Polymer degradation of polystyrene through chain scission, if I recall correctly. Phosphoric acid results in a whole bunch of H+ ions floating around in the coke. Those can attach to the C of both ends of each piece of a broken polymer chain or to the aromatic rings on the chain. So the styrofoam breaks into shorter and shorter chains until they are simply floating in solution invisible to the naked eye.
Since polystyrene has only carbon and hydrogen in it, the number of problematic chemicals you can make from it is quite limited.
Not zero certainly, I'm sure a chemist could find some, but starting from polystyrene (which is very stable) and ending up at a problematic chemical is unlikely because the mealworms are using the polystyrene for energy, so I would assume they fully oxidize it, leaving just CO2 and Water.
Doable, yes, but as the parent said you need lots of energy, because you need to tear the chemical bond apart again, and that is quite strong in polystyrene and thus doesn't easily depolymerize. If I remember right the industrial process for it is at a few hundred degrees C and high pressure.
(solvents etc will do all kinds of weird things to polystyrene, but it won't just fall apart into styrene molecules again easily)
Not making Styrofoam in the first place is a better answer.
Among other problems, Wikipedia states: "The EPA and International Agency for Research on Cancer reported limited evidence that styrene is carcinogenic for humans and experimental animals, meaning that there is a positive association between exposure and cancer and that causality is credible, but that other explanations cannot be confidently excluded." (with links to EPA reports)
That's a pretty cool article. Would be limited to potentially fertilizing gardens with their leavings. Couldn't eat the worms since there would be plastic particles still in their guts.
Keeping hundreds of thousands of worms is pretty practical. Commercial mealworm growers are storing at least that many. You could easily keep a couple thousand at home. The real barrier to styrofoam recycling is transporting it (it takes up so much volume) and cleaning off food from it. This can be easily done at home and requires no washing of the styrofoam so it eliminates both of those issues.
Funny, the comment I posted was one line: "Used to feed mealworms to pet chameleons as a kid." Got immediately dinged with a DV. I was merely recalling a childhood memory of "mealworms". Maybe someone thought I was suggesting some kind of remedy to a potential invasive species problem? Nothing of the sort. I am all too familiar with real world invasive species problems and the historical remedial failures associated therewith. Totally different subject.
Who knows why you got downvoted, but please don't be so sensitive that you delete comments you'd stand by. It's annoying to find deleted/edited comments that have replies.
I did not downvote you, but I figured I’d let you know that based on what you said I’m pretty sure you were downvoted because your comment brings nothing to the conversation. People on HN tend to prefer informative contributions to the discussion, just for future reference.
Article link is returning a 403 so haven't read it; Does this release carbon in the form of CO₂? If so it's better to leave it as-is, or recycle it into other products in ways that don't release carbon.
The answer to which question, though? Sure, some organisms can eat styrofoam, and raising vast quantities of them is one outbreak away from a massive invasive species problem. So yeah, in the lab this is "a" way to get rid of a small amount of styrofoam, but it doesn't solve the styrofoam problem. Banning styrofoam is half the solution there, and the other half is un-economically expensive.
