Burning plastics isn't great because of all the awful combustion products.
Plasma gasification sounds like a good alternative. The molecular bonds in the plastics are broken and you end up with mostly carbon monoxide plus hydrogen gas, itself a nice fuel source. Metals and other heavy elements are typically allowed to settle into some molten glass to keep them contained.
I talked to the owner of a local waste management company about plasma gasification. He was aware of the technology and said it cost too much for him to use. He'd have to be taking in trash from five New England states to have enough volume to keep the machine fed and make it cost effective. Sounded like an opportunity to me, but it seemed too risky to him. I'm not sure why he thought the technology could not scale down to the size of his operation, though I have read that it is something you want to keep going continuously, otherwise it costs a lot (in electricity or fossil fuel) to build up enough heat to start the process. Maybe it requires a minimum thermal mass to be self sustaining?
Even with this development in recycling, Styrofoam should just be banned for packaging. Aside from disposal, it's very brittle and you end up opening a box only to find smashed up Styrofoam that now escapes all over the house/outside/car which is nearly impossible to clean up adding yet more micro plastics to the environment.
There's nothing wrong with using formed cardboard packing instead of styrofoam and it can be recycled again, or at least if it ends up in a landfill, it'll biodegrade instead of still being there at the eventual heat death of the universe.
Styrofoam should absolutely be banned. It should be considered toxic waste at this point. There are incrementally more expensive solutions that companies can use instead of styrofoam, there's no excuse for its use anymore. It's literally single-use and no one else can use a piece of styrofoam efficiently. It often takes up so much space that it fills up your landfill garbage bin. As a planet we should ban its use with prejudice.
I'm really trying to think, but I don't think I've encountered styrofoam in years. All the packaging for mid-sized consumer products that would have used it in the past (small blender, air purifier, dust buster, etc.) seem to use either formed cardboard or else folded cardboard with cutouts.
The last times I remember seeing it were when I bought a window AC unit and a portable digital piano. Both of which weigh 25+ pounds, where I think only styrofoam is the only economical material which exists that is both protective enough but also able to support all that weight. I'd guess heavy blenders would also still need it.
So not sure we need to ban it if manufacturers have already mostly stopped using where cardboard is a viable replacement? Unless there are categories of products still using it that I'm missing?
Same with styrofoam for to-go food containers -- everything I see is plastic or cardboard now, haven't seen styrofoam in years. Unless this is regional?
I have encountered it as building insulation recently.
In my neighborhood, millions of styrofoam beads blew away from a construction site, then settled like snow on grass fields, in gutters, and in other nooks and crannies. I reported it to the city and they did nothing. Now that styrofoam will be out there forever.
But styrofoam is a great insulator for buildings and lasts over decades. Producing small dust by poor constructing is not good so should be fixed, but insulating significantly contributes to reduce energy usage. I think pros is far more important than cons unless constructor is bad.
> The team placed 50 superworms in a chamber with polystyrene as their only carbon source, and after 21 days, the worms had consumed about 70% of the plastic. The researchers then isolated a strain of Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria from the gut of the worms and showed that it that could grow directly on the surface of polystyrene and break it down. Finally, they identified an enzyme from the bacteria, called serine hydrolase, that appeared to be responsible for most of the biodegradation. This enzyme, or the bacteria that produce it, could someday be used to help break down waste polystyrene, the researchers say.
It is decomposed into simpler components that can be used by the bacteria itself for energy.
Gathering all the styrofoam is a problem. However, cardboard doesn't fit all the roles that styrofoam fills (in particular insulation).
There's certainly a need to use the most recyclable solution (rather than cheapest) of the practical options. It is also important to remember that not all recyclable solutions are practical.
For packing fill and protection, switching from styrofoam to cardboard increases its carbon footprint because of the increased weight of the cardboard needed for packaging.
Having better recycling with plastic products can mean reduced shipping footprint, reduced water usage (recycling paper products is water intensive) and a reduced demand for wood pulp meaning that planted trees can capture more carbon before they're needed as a resource.
Our current use of plastics (lack of recycling options leading to disposal in landfill) is not something that is sustainable but going with solutions like corrugated cardboard can hide other costs.
Well yes, we can't replace all usages of styrofoam with cardboard.
But that is why I said "such as cardboard". It would have to be on a case by case basis, such as the expanded corn foam.
Materials like styrofoam when it is lots of little balls compressed together are terrible as they always break up and would never be able to be all collected up.
The expanded foam plastics that are formed into the correct shape so they don't shatter into tiny pieces would already be better. The small ball form should be banned as it is the worst form of it.
Why don't we promote more single-use aluminum containers? Are aluminum cans considered a success in terms of recycling and not going into the landfill? Why don't we have aluminum yogurt containers, aluminum milk cartons, etc? Has the 5-cent deposit program by some states been a success? If so, this seems like a good solution for more products than just beverages.
Aluminum seems like a really cool material for packaging. One obvious downside though is that aluminum is not clear.
One drawback of aluminum is that it still has to be lined with plastic, which is burned off before recycling the aluminum. The plastic also leeches into food.
Agreed, though some folks will remind us that alu cans are lined with plastic (which is more a health argument than recycling), but similar to paper cartons, that may need to be stripped prior to recycling.
>> Its a weird phenom that we are conditioned to be "proud" of the amount of fill in our recycle bin.
I really believe the subject of banning plastics has been hijacked by oil interests to ecourage "recycling" knowing that it's a broken model. Just like the ESG stocks where you have oil companies being on top of the sustainability chart due their diversity score and high wages.
Aluminum is no panacea - its expensive to mine both ecologically and energy wise, and its energy intensive to recycle.
I'd be more interested in reusable containers.
Not a panacaea but another benefit of aluminium (the correct term for many of us around the world :) is that the process acts as electricity storage, providing a useful way to soak up excess power when it is cheap.
> Electricity in Iceland costs about 30 percent less than what Alcoa might pay in the United States. That’s a crucial consideration, because the Alcoa smelter alone uses more than five million megawatt-hours of electricity each year — about the same as the half-million people and all the businesses in the city of Colorado Springs.
> Recycling aluminum saves 90% to 95% of the energy needed to make aluminum from bauxite ore. It doesn't matter if you're making aluminum cans, roof gutters or cookware, it is simply much more energy-efficient to recycle existing aluminum to create the aluminum needed for new products than it is to make aluminum from virgin natural resources.
> So how much energy are we talking about here? Recycling one pound of aluminum (33 cans) saves about 7 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity. With the energy it takes to make just one new aluminum can from bauxite ore, you can make 20 recycled aluminum cans.
> Putting the energy question into even more down-to-earth terms, the energy saved by recycling one aluminum can is enough to power a television set for three hours.
Aluminum is extremely recyclable and energy efficient at doing it. Estimates put it at 75% of all aluminum that has ever been created is still in circulation having been recycled because it is so easy to do it.
> Recycling aluminium uses about 5% of the energy required to create aluminium from bauxite; the amount of energy required to convert aluminium oxide into aluminium can be vividly seen when the process is reversed during the combustion of thermite or ammonium perchlorate composite propellant.
> Aluminium die extrusion is a specific way of getting reusable material from aluminium scraps but does not require a large energy output of a melting process. In 2003, half of the products manufactured with aluminium were sourced from recycled aluminium material.
That wouldn't be the case if it was intensive to recycle.
It's still far cheaper to produce a plastic bottle, energy wise. Or, imagine, reusing a glass or metal container multiple times instead of crushing and smelting the same aluminum can every time it's contents are depleted.
From what I know aluminium is also not safe to use with all kinds of foods, especially if they are acidic. Among your examples, this might be a problem with yogurt.
Plastics recycling is a sham, invented by the plastic industries to defuse criticism for an explosion in single-use packaging.
The vast majority of plastics are never recycled and end up in landfills or dumped at sea.
It's not economical to recycle plastics because separating plastics is expensive, the percentage of material that has to be chucked because of contamination (food, chemicals, labels, etc) and the recovered material itself has little to no value due to degradation of the polymers.
Methods like these are important, but what's more important is replacing, reducing, etc.
This is a claim that's often repeated ad nauseum: plastic recycling doesn't work and it's a sham.
There's an element of truth to it: plastics recycling in the USA today is, in aggregate, in a sorry state.
But it's become "common knowledge" that there's no way to make it better. That's not true.
Turn, for example, to British Columbia, which passed an Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) law several years ago, which created a system to stabilize the prices of recycled plastics so that recyclers could raise money to build the facilities to process the material.
Now they have the most sophisticated sortation and recycling centers in North America. Laser-based systems identify plastic types and use shots of compressed air to automatically direct plastic onto the proper conveyor.
Each stream is shredded and ground, and then hot washed and dried. Then it's sorted again, this time for color, by computer vision and more compressed air to create streams of clear material and streams of green or other colors.
The result is that 56% of rigid plastic packaging in BC is recycled. That's not perfect, but it's pretty good, and definitely not a "sham".
The problem we have in America is that, broadly, we need public-private partnerships to invest in the sort of equipment that can do this. The technology exists, it works, and it's already being used. Virgin plastic should be taxed and then that tax should subsidize and stabilize the price of recycled material so that private capital can supply the equipment financing. And regional authorities should organize recycling so that enough material can go through one facility to amortize the $30m in equipment over the poundage. (These contracts can be bid at auction to keep them fair.)
In other words, this is not an area where a pure free market works, and it typically requires coordination across regional population centers of 7m+ to get enough poundage through the system.
If we can do what BC did, the rewards are big: plastic is, by far, a lower emitter of GHG than paper-based packaging, does a better job reducing food shrink than any other material, and offers massive weight savings (and GHG savings) versus glass.
Today, of course, it's become much more en vogue to pursue high GHG packaging solutions ("because everyone knows plastic is bad!") rather than build public pressure to adopt the political steps required to implement already proven production technology.
> The result is that 56% of rigid plastic packaging in BC is recycled. That's not perfect, but it's pretty good, and definitely not a "sham".
Or, we could say with all of the advanced systems possible, massive subsidies, and creation of large amounts of inferior recycled product, still 44% is rigid plastic packaging is wasted (let alone all the other kinds): "Sham" seems fair.
I was just reading about TheOceanCleanup [1] and its depressing. It is hard to collect the garbage, it cant be disposed off, and there is a huge ongoing flow of new garbage.
Can we at least recycle plastics into other low-quality plastic which can be degraded/mix-quality/blended or something? I am not an expert.
"Plastic recycling sits quite low in the waste hierarchy as a means of reducing plastic waste. It has been advocated since the early 1970s,[11] but due to severe economic and technical challenges, did not impact plastic waste to any significant extent until the late 1980s. The plastics industry has been criticised for lobbying for the expansion of recycling programs, even while industry research showed that most plastic could not be economically recycled and simultaneously increasing the amount of virgin plastic, or plastic that has not been recycled, being produced."
It's pretty much a well known fact. Recycling is extra hard due to the need to separate the plastics and then the molding new plastics requires specific type of plastic molecule. Many plastics are even blends, e.g. ABS + PC, or glass fiber filled ones.
"Plastics" are just so many types, different in all kinds of ways. So separating them and using them in anything sensible doesn't happen often at all.
Would be very nice to have many worms and bacteria who start to eat away the synthetic garbage. However, the will als start to eat solar panels and your shoes.
But I'm still very much for the engineering of such creatures.
> If polystyrene is properly incinerated at high temperatures (up to 1000 °C) and with plenty of air (14 m3/kg), the chemicals generated are water, carbon dioxide, and possibly small amounts of residual halogen-compounds from flame-retardants.
> When polystyrene was burned at temperatures of 800–900 °C (the typical range of a modern incinerator), the products of combustion consisted of "a complex mixture of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from alkyl benzenes to benzoperylene. Over 90 different compounds were identified in combustion effluents from polystyrene." The American National Bureau of Standards Center for Fire Research found 57 chemical by-products released during the combustion of expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam.
Yes, you can burn it... but the things you make out of it unless you are really trying to burn it (and then its a burn it to dispose of it rather than get energy from it) leave some less than desirable compounds.
Yeah there may be awful byproducts at burn temperatures required for optimal power generation but if they can be captured/condensed/solidified they can be collected as solid waste and buried.
The energy to condense out and capture the undesirable products becomes comparable to the energy capture it.
Japan's approach isn't because they need energy but rather that they are trying to minimize landfill (as its an island and space is at a premium).
The resulting products are carcinogenic toxic waste - which comes with additional challenges for disposal. In the US, it is likely more desirable to bury the inert polystyrene rather than trying to deal with the PAHs ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycyclic_aromatic_hydrocarbo... ) and other byproducts.
The article is describing a process where UV light and a catalyst break down/transform polystyrene into diphenylmethane ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diphenylmethane ) which is a feed stock for many other (useful) processes.
Is there currently a bottleneck that prevents burning it at 1000°C and getting energy out of it ? Sounds like business opportunities ! Make an practical incinerator ?
Wouldn't it be better to bury plastic in landfills? Keep the stuff out of the ocean, but I don't understand the harm in landfills. Put that carbon back in the ground where it came from.
That's the solution of the Japanese, and they are very efficient on it, burn them and turn them to electricity and the extra waste get used as land fills.
Plasma gasification sounds like a good alternative. The molecular bonds in the plastics are broken and you end up with mostly carbon monoxide plus hydrogen gas, itself a nice fuel source. Metals and other heavy elements are typically allowed to settle into some molten glass to keep them contained.
A publicly traded company called StarTech trying to do this was getting lots of publicity as recently as 2007 (https://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2007-03/prophet-garba...) but went bankrupt in 2013 after the death of its founder, Joseph Longo (https://www.ctpost.com/news/article/Wilton-s-environmental-d...).
A company called InEnTec claims to have the technology deployed in a few places (https://inentec.com/pem-technology/deployed-pem-technology/) but overall one doesn't hear much about this possibility. I wonder why not.