I read somewhere that because recycling plastic isn’t profitable, under the capitalist system there’s no incentive to do so.
Most plastics due for recycling just gets shipped off to poor countries for “reclycing” but isn’t at all, and a lot of it just ends up in the ocean.
So you’re better off just throwing plastics in the garbage where it will at least end up in landfill and not in the ocean.
It’s just a bad material that’s cheap to make things out of.
Once used, to my knowledge, it can’t be reused as the same thing, so they “recycle” it into road surfacing etc, which I’m sure doesn’t end up fragmenting into tiny bits over the years and ending up in water sources…
And I’m not sure there’s a good way to get away from it completely. Even drink cans have a small layer of plastic inside to stop it reacting with the metal. Glass is probably the most environmentally friendly (if you just wash and reuse), but a bitch to get it back in one piece.
Time to tax the ever loving shit out of plastic tbh. And yes, prices will go up, but you know what? They go up anyway. They can only take as much as we have, and they’re already taking it.
Most glass is recycled into asphalt. Until fairly recently that was the only way to recycle glass.
Those countries stopped accepting it.
I read somewhere that because recycling plastic isn’t profitable, under the capitalist system there’s no incentive to do so.
Not just unprofitable in a capitalist sense, but inefficient. A typical plastic beverage container can be recycled two or three times before the plastic degrades too much to be usable.
Socialism won’t save you here. Unless said socialism bans plastic products.
It’s because you can’t recycle plastic really. Each time you heat it up to melt it it loses its properties. A recyclable material is for instance aluminium, which keeps on being awesome. I tried various recycled plastics for a business I run, none of it was strong enough. Recycled lego, recycled car bumpers, nada. And then the question is - why would I buy the recycled plastic that doesn’t work when it’s like 30 cents cheaper. Pellets are so cheap in fact, that I could buy a tonne, use up 100kgs, throw the rest away and still be fine.
Maybe with some additives? Or removing them, in the first place? But expensive i guess.
Maybe there is something, but tbh why bother when virgin pellets are better. The best plastic recycling strategy is to not make it in the first place. Or just use other types of packaging - alu cans, glass bottles, paper containers, whatever.
Also additives soak water like crazy. Moisture is a huge problem when making parts - you need to dry some types of plastic pellets in industrial dryers, which eats up a ton of electricity - since they are often running off of compressed air out of a compressor. Most plastic comes in natural colors to which you add additives to change to the color you want. Simply doing that (2% by weight) is a difference between not having to dry at all (since some plastics just don’t absorb water - i.e. polyolefins - which high density variant is what bottles for shower gel, shampoos are made of) and having to dry it for like 6 hours before use.
Once they touch the factory floor’s floor, plastics become filthy and cannot be used for high-quality applications - food wrappers, anything with body contact. Oils and heavy metals are the biggest contaminants, a plastics-producing company I used to work for concluded. They either sent it all to a recycling factory or used it for very low-quality stuff like trash bags.
Now with post-consumer plastics, not only are they extremely heterogeneous, they will also have even worse contaminants like mold which proved to be very resistant to cleaning, a EU study concluded. So you might want to pyrolyze them like you do with crude oil, but there’s just too much O, N, S and halogens, so the output will be too corrosive, but also too heterogeneous for it to make economic sense.What was it like working in plastics production? I imagine you were breathing in vapors all the time?
That’s a bit cynical take. In many countries, including mine, there are dedicate bins for plastic waste which is the majority of waste from your typical household. It’s all being recycled into new products, not being shipped anywhere. Also, when it comes to plastic bottles for example, close to 100% of them are returned and recycled into new bottles. I’ve got a tiny-ass bin for the stuff that ends up in landfill because I separate and recycle it all as does most other people.
EDIT: Nevermind then. It’s all apparently dumped into the ocean. Sorry about the attempt in some positivity.
Germany has the highest recycling rate for plastics with 65 %. Not everything you put in the recycling bin is being recycled.
Seems far more likely that the recycling rate is low because not every piece of plastic waste is put into recycling. Not that they simply don’t recycle it.
The problem is that there are quite some different sorts of plastics and that plastic containers are not standardized. If you mix different kinds of plastics or plastics with other materials you can’t use it anymore in an automated processing and it usually gets burned. Also mostly recycling is a downgrade, so usually if you recycle some packaging, it is not made into packaging again but into things like pallets or construction fence bases.
Even if you look the Scandinavian countries which generally does better than the rest of the world, you are looking at only a 25% recycle rate.
https://finland.fi/business-innovation/finnish-innovations-for-overcoming-plastic-waste/
Haha… yeah I live in the Netherlands. And my city started separately collecting plastics.
Here’s the kicker: because there is no more plastic in our waste, the energy value of the waste went down. The city sold these waste “rights” to an incineration plant that reclaims heat and energy who now cannot use the waste. So to avoid contractual fines, our city now imports plastic waste from elsewhere in Europe to be mixed in with the waste and then incinerated.
Well fuck me!
- This is more expensive for the city (separate bins, separate collection, separate processing, buying plastics from elsewhere and getting it here)
- All the extra transport and shipping movements is worse for the environment.
- I’m stuck with an extra fucking bin, and with both a greens bin and the rest bin that are collected once every 3 weeks instead of 2… stinking up the place even worse.
But I’m sure they meant well.
In my country (Aus), last I heard our recycling was mostly shipped off to Indo or somewhere else in SEA (previously China before China banned it).
I suspect very little ever sees recycling, but the neoliberal model means privatised companies paid by government, so they’re out to cut expenses to maximise profits and shipping it off to someone else to do the illegal thing where it’s not illegal isn’t illegal.
It’s all being recycled into new products
I’m afraid its not. There are many plastics that don’t have any method of recycling, and plently more that require specific machinery for their “one time” recycling that just isn’t being used.commercially.
when it comes to plastic bottles for example, close to 100% of them are returned and recycled into new bottles
Even the PET bottles can only go through the process once or twice before becoming too degraded. That’s not even taking into account that most manufacturers want white or clear plastic, and recycled does not work that way.
The separation and recycling that you do is mostly gaslighting and green washing.
It’s amazing we stopped using the “plastic” from plant matter, which is renewable vs petroleum plastic.
Well yeah, “renewable” in itself is only good in certain contexts, such as solar and wind energy.
When it comes to renewable biomass, which by definition is renewable too, it’s not so friendly to the environment anymore. It consumes huge areas and destroys the rainforest to plant even more economically usable plants. Such as soy, cotton, …
So i’d rather see huge amounts of underground oil being consumed, than the same amount of biomass out of the rainforest being consumed.
Petro-plastics got (and continue to recieve) massive government subsidies in order to be “competetive” against bio-plastics.
This is why I pretty much ignore whatever my recycle pickup says is “not recyclable”. They say for example not to put used pizza boxes into recycling, even though pretty much every pizza box says “please recycle”. Fuck that, If something has that arrow label on it, I don’t care what number it is it’s going in “recycling” and they can deal with it.
Those arrow cycle logo are part of the problem. It’s a plastic classification system and has nothing to do with recycling; the industry made them so similar to the recycling logo to confuse people into thinking all plastic can be recycled
Meaning almost 90 percent of everything ever made of plastic is still around
The other 10% is also still around just in different shapes.
That could be fixed with “virgin nondegradable plastic” taxes, deposit/return fees, and regulations on single use plastics.
But unfortunately the fossil fuel industry calls the shots in most places.
I find it strange that more people haven’t put it together yet. The stuff plastics are made of is literally toxic byproduct from the O&G industry. Yes some of the products have extremely functional uses, but for the rest of it, they’re literally selling us their toxic waste and trying to make us responsible for disposing of it.
They might as well be standing outside the grocery stores with a barrel of goo and offering you a portion of it (for a price of course!) on your way out. So then you take it home and try to figure out what to do with it, and feel bad when you realize there is no way to dispose of it in an ethical way which is why they’re shoving the responsibility onto you.
Yes some of the products have extremely functional uses, but for the rest of it
Don’t you think most plastic products are used because it’s convenient?
I fight against it, but it is hard to not recognize how a plastic bottle is much lighter than any other bottle material, how convenient it is to get a plastic bag at the shop when you forgot yours, how convenient it is to get a ready meal in a cheap plastic box instead of an expensive and/or heavy washable container that you may have to bring back etc. Even compared to paper bags, plastic bags are more resistant, lighter and more compact.
There are probably much more similar convenience uses in the industry.
Plastic is mostly used because it’s convenient, not because of a big plastic conspiracy.So to solve the issue, we need states to make it expensive enough that people will overcome the inconvenience. Making people pay for plastic bags at shops works very well, for example.
I speak as someone horrified by the over-abundance of plastics in Japan. Some fruits have 3 layers of plastic around, even bananas come in plastic bags, because modern Japan is all about looking clean and being convenient, zero fucks given to ecology.
Yeah it stinks.
And I know plastic hurts all of us… but can’t we hear it now, any plan to fix this is going to:
hurt the poor the most
Any tax whose cost it passed on, any system to use reusables (unless it decreases costs)…
Cannot think of a single easy answer to this enormous planet-wrecking problem.
The European carbon tax is doing pretty doing good at making the European energy system greener by making fossil fuels less competitive. Renewables are now very competitive.
If the taxes are redistributed to help the poor buy more sustainable product it may work.
Aluminum water bottles are an option. I was at an airport recently where they only sold water in aluminum bottles and it was awesome.
It really is frustrating. Like we even have resin codes. Little numbers printed that should indicate what kind of plastic it is.
I’m in Seattle. We have a robust recycling system. I still can’t find anywhere what resin code plastics they accept. The website just says “plastic bottles and jugs.”
I pay to use Ridwell. They accept plastic film and, as of recently, “multi-layer plastic.”
The only way to tell these apart is just by judging the plastic for how it feels. Plastic film is stretchier while multi-layer tends to be crinkly? Half the plastic we dispose of does not fall firmly in either camp, so we just do our best.
Why does it have to be this hard?
Because recycling is not meant to be effective it’s meant to pass blame onto consumers
O&G?
Oil and Gas?
Oh wow duh, thanks lol
That’s why they should pay a tax for every pound of plastic they produce, with an equivalent refund for every pound they certifiably dispose of properly.
When you have to clean up your own mess you get good at it.
They won’t even clean up their own oil well sites. Look up how many oil companies hide all their profits and then declare bankruptcy so that they can get the taxpayers to clean up after a given oilfield runs dry.
I don’t have a lot of hope in them taking care of the other end of the process either, unless it’s by force.
Toxic waste in the soil, toxic waste in the products. Whee! I actually constantly do wonder what we could do to pump the breaks as a people. It’s a difficult thing to think about, because I think the first step is getting people used to two things (at least here in America)
a) Things will not always be available when you go to the store
b) Things will not last as long as they typically have due to exposureI’m not really sure how to get people on board because most are reactive not proactive and they tend to not react to things that can’t directly correlate themselves or witness with their own eyes. I mean, also a lot of people are like me shrugging at what they cannot actively change.
I just try to buy intelligently, ride my things to their grave, and recycle and repurpose what I can. Shrugs.
Use glass, wood, and metal. The actual recyclable materials.
I think all of those (well outside of tin) are pretty expensive and that’s why they’re not being used as often as they were in the past. I’ve been thinking of some kind of paper material, but I guess that’s bad for the environment too. So idk…I just figured there could be something simpler, lighter and if it found its way to the ground wouldn’t be as much as a detriment as a piece of plastic. Is all.
that 8% more than i thought
9% is only recycled once, only 1% has been truly reused multiple times, so you’re close enough.
Also:
Of the remaining waste, 12% was incinerated and 79% was either sent to landfills or lost to the environment as pollution.
They’re the same thing. Incinerated is lost as pollution, it just happened to have one more use on the way there.
And I just realized, this wikipedia page linked is almost 10 years out of date!
And I just realized, this wikipedia page linked is almost 10 years out of date!
You know what must be done.
Incinerated plastic releases green house gases and some amount of micro plastics in the uncombusted ash.
Landfill plastic seemingly just erodes into micro plastics over long time scales.
That’s 90% off of where I believe we should be before the end of the decade.
In my area you have to pay a lot extra for a recycling bin, and they only accept two kinds of plastic.
Then it came out they were just shipping it overseas to be recycled but sometimes it was ending up in landfills anyway. There are only a few houses on our street with a recycling bin out each week.
I worked at a university at one point in my life, and they were quite proud about their recycling plan. The janitors though, would just take the trash and the recycling and put the two bags together and throw them both away. I never really lived anywhere that recycled outside of the West Coast. But is it actually being recycled here? Is this the 9%?
I feel like the bulk of the plastic that gets recycled is done in other developed countries that spend significant money on doing it. Like when I lived in Japan they were very stringent about separating your trash, same thing in Germany, and not for nothing those economies that do recycling at scale generally prefer glass over plastic because recycling glass is more efficient.
custodian checking in: if your university is anything like the school i work in, custodians are dumping it in the trash because nobody seems to know what can be recycled and the staff fill their recycle cans with trash. it’s not worth the time picking through it to salvage what you can.
most of the stuff in the recycle bins in the rooms i clean cannot be recycled. food wrappers, Kleenex, etc. it’s a sham meant to make people feel better about themselves
I always figured it was just because it was a sham as a whole and they didn’t really give a puck and nobody ever seemingly was watching them. Thank you for your input though, this is good stuff =)
it’s possible they also didn’t care, but we do recycle the best we can in our district :)
Oh yeah, I feel that too. Also feel your nickname ;D!
I think a lot of people who are just trying to survive never really cared that much about a lot of things - recycling included.
*Mind you, I know you can also get paid some solid $$$ for being a custodian cause I dated one and she made bank ass bucks.
more people should consider being a school district custodian imo. i get health benefits, all federal holidays and weekends off, a union and a pension (yes, a pension. not 401k)… it’s hard work if you do it right, but can’t beat it for the benefits as an entry level job
9 percent seems high.
That’s a lot of plastic.
The situation looks better in EU according to this article
NGL that’s more than I thought, but nevertheless: don’t use plastic if you can avoid it. It’s not easy to recycle.
For instance, for beverages, prefer cans or your own glass / metal water bottles.
That said, 9% is a huge lot better than 0%.
don’t use plastic if you can avoid it. It’s not easy to recycle.
Plastic bags, styrofoam, and those hard plastics marked types 1 & 2 are the ones most likely to be recycled into new products. They are easy to break down and recycle into new containers.
Hard plastics marked types 3 through 7 are most likely to be filtered out and either incinerated or dumped straight into the landfill, as it costs more to recycle them than to just create new straight from oil.
How is it difficult to recycle? The temperatures requires to do so are less than metal, the 3D printing communities has people that recycle them into filaments all the time. I don’t think the problem is the plastic so much as it is how it is still treated as a disposable container and that neither companies nor governments pay for or provide reclamation means like recycling machines that pay for each bottle collected. In other words, the problem is more cultural than material.
And how many times do they recycle the filament until it’s too degraded to use?
Depends on what you consider degraded, the only reason it would stop being recyclable is if it became too contaminated with foreign substances or exposure, which applies to anything.
Repeating plastics tends to damage them on a chemical level. The polymer chains break and shorten. This ends with the plastic being more brittle. Since 3d printed parts have already been remelted once, they have even more degradation than injection moulded parts.
I believe the recommended amount of recycled plastic is around 30% for PLA. Any more and the parts lose significant strength.
I personally would prefer us to accept that plastics aren’t really recyclable. It’s better to move towards renewable plastics like PLA, and treat the waste as biomass (either composted or burnt for energy.
I personally would prefer us to accept that plastics aren’t really recyclable. It’s better to move towards renewable plastics
Err … getting mixed signals …
What you are describing is exposure. There are plenty of build with 100% recycled plastic, so not sure where you are getting that 30%. I think you are perhaps thinking of the marketing material of PLA filaments that sell themselves as particularly ecofriendly because they include recycled materials, while I’m talking about builds made entirely out of things like recycled water bottles, which are made out of PET. PLA is more susceptible to exposure to sunlight, heat, and moisture, so rather than using it to hold beverages at that point you might want to skip plastic entirely. PLA itself is not recycled that much, but it is more biodegradable.
Exposure can cause similar effects. However, the act of heating the plastic to the temperatures needed to melt it and defirming it also damages the structure. It’s particularly obvious with pla, but all plastics suffer from it, to an extent.
Others have pointed out the degradation issue, but you’re also assuming that all plastics are thermoplastics. They are not. There’s huge variation in chemical composition and material properties between different plastics, and most of them can’t be melted and reformed.
But then the problem isn’t with all plastics, it’s with certain plastics, and around 70% of global plastic production are concentrated around commodity plastics, all of which are thermoplastic. The greatest degradation issue occurs with biodegradable plastics, which is perceived as a good thing for them, though even biodegradable PLA has toxicity concerns.
The older i get the more disgusting i find plastic. I would never buy plastic tupperware ever again, drinking out of plastic bottles just feels wrong.
Probably a terrible idea, but melting the plastic and extruding the plastic in underground abandoned mines, filling up the empty spaces like icing on a cake from floor to ceiling. There are abandoned lead mines in Oklahoma, where the town was vacated because of the toxicity and the ground collapsing underneath. A place like that seems ideal.
That assumes the plastic is already being collected, so why not just make new products from it instead of dumping it into the ground and then using even more oil to make new plastic?
In Finland one mine had broken the law and dumped all their waste in the back of the mine and they were ordered to clean it up and they raised their hands up and said they couldn’t because it was too dangerous to work there. Govenment’s mining superviser dude turned out to be paid by the mining company, surprise!
I’ll be honest, that’s actually more than I would have guessed (ballpark would have been 5% or under), sad as that is.
I’ll bet the term recycled is actually open for interpretation, and the official use differs from our (pleb) expectations.
