Plastic producers have known for more than 30 years that recycling is not an economically or technically feasible plastic waste management solution. That has not stopped them from promoting it, according to a new report.
“The companies lied,” said Richard Wiles, president of fossil-fuel accountability advocacy group the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), which published the report. “It’s time to hold them accountable for the damage they’ve caused.”
Penn and Teller did an episode of Bullshit on this in 2004. They also concluded that paper and glass recycling were similarly worse that throwing it away. Glass because the energy required to grind, melt, and separate the raw material, and paper because the process uses toxic solvents and produces just as much waste as throwing it away.
Also don’t be fooled by people claiming plastics can be burnt cleanly. That’s another myth that plastic producers push to prevent people reducing their plastic use.
I worked for a glass bottle manufacturer and using cullet (broken glass) lowers the melting point and saves a significant percentage of costs to heat the furnace. Before the lightweight single use bottles became the standard in the 80-90’s, bottles were thicker and heavier, made to be returned, washed and reused.
Yep. I’ve told people about that Bullshit episode so many times. I’ve even shown it to people. They don’t believe anyone would lie about it and since the episode is so old new tech has to have fixed the issue!
Maybe it’s energy intensive, but energy can be clean, especially now that renewable energy is starting to become the cheapest form of energy. You could even make up for the variance by only processing when there is an energy surplus.
If we use more nuclear to create electricity recycling becomes cleaner and cleaner
I just buy glass bottles and then re-use them for kambutcha
Not seeing why not. I did help work on a place that did that. Could you explain what you mean?
best case, you’re releasing extra CO2 into the atmosphere that would have at least been locked up in the landfills/seas of microplastics. worst case, you’re also releasing unstudied and most likely carcinogenic incomplete combustion products.
Yeah but that CO2 is already up here. Why is it better to pull up more oil instead?
As for the incomplete combustion products we had scrubbers.
I’m in favor of not using plastics at all (or at least only used in medical and scientific applications in which it is absolutely necessary). My point was that burning it is trading one set of problems for another.
Ok well that isn’t happening.
I have been in waste of all sorts for the bulk of my career. Deal with the world as it is not as I want it to be. So given that we do use plastic the question is what do we do with it. Recycling or burning it for fuel are possible answers. If/when it is pretty much banned then it won’t be a big deal.
Got to say I felt really good working on that project. I built the scrubber system, keeping all the nasty stuff out of the exhaust.
I certainly wasn’t intending to imply your work is not worthwhile, and I apologize if i came off as combative or dismissive. Plastic recycling is such a scam, I do think burning it makes sense in the short term (especially with the scrubbers you talked about, those sound cool and will at least help with the microplastic problem). I guess it’s just that the marketing push to conflate “clean” with “green” has been bothering me recently, and, while perfect should not be the enemy of the good, we’re running out of time (or possible have already run out of time, depending on how depressed i am when you ask me) for incremental change to be sufficient. But, you are right. We can only do what we can to make the world we’re currently in better, not simply will it into perfection overnight (despite how much I hate not being able to do that…).
No worries. I would like to point out that plastic broken down still has uses. Example we have been using it in sewage plants for the past few years with polishing ponds. Basically increases the surface area and gives the bacteria a place to hide out when there is a die off. The rough texture of shredded plastic pieces has a high surface to volume ratio. Decreasing the time it takes to process more poop. Part of the many reasons why modern wastewater treatment plants don’t smell as bad as they used to.
Yeah if you want to know about wet scrubbers just ask. Basically imagine a smokestack with nozzles. A liquid rains down as the gas goes up. The liquid picks up stuff from the gas. Then the liquid is processed. Devil is with the details with this stuff but the concept is over a century old.
For that plant I worked on the plastic was heated up with waste heat from another plant (cogeneration) in a low oxygen environment producing syngas. The syngas is scrubbed and then burned for fuel. Long term the plan for places like that is to convert the gas into liquid fuel.
Now I agree we use way too much plastic I would however like to point out that the same process we used to burn it could be used for pretty much all C-H stuff. Paper, wood, food waste, etc. the vast majority of household waste. According to the EPA IF garbage plants are run well they have the least environmental impact. It is is a big if granted.
Basically give me a trillion dollars and garbage will be solved. You do have a trillion dollars right?
That got me thinking about the plastic-eating bacteria that keeps getting discovered in landfills… Do you think the polishing ponds might also be a good place to look? Or maybe the evolutionary pressure just isn’t there like it is in landfills since there’s so much poop to eat, haha.
Using waste heat to generate syngas sounds cool. So we’re at least getting more out of the fuel, and i guess locking that energy away again, for a time at least.
I’m actually kind of jealous of you now. It must be nice to be making such a tangible difference. I’m a computational chemist, and while I wanted to work in materials (making better solar panels or better batteries, to be specific), I ended up in drug design and discovery. I know I am making a difference too; compared to what big-pharma is doing, our process reduces the amount of wet-lab work required to discover a new drug – so, less lab waste (which is mostly plastic), reduced usage of chemical reagents (which often require fossil fuels to make and need to be disposed of responsibly), etc. But it’s much harder to see the impact since it is so indirect.
I’m definitely game for this I have been looking for hemp based clothing, but it is always so pricey.
I’d totally be willing to spend twice as much if it was gonna last twice as long, and i’d spend three times as much if additionally no exploitative practices were involved in the making of the clothing. I’m still over here wearing 10 year old clothes, partially because they have outlasted a lot of my newer clothes, partially because i don’t care about fashion trends, and partially because i get paralyzed thinking about all the injustice that must have occured for this shirt to only cost $20 or whatever. Oh, and plastic-blend fabrics make me itchy and/or sweaty.
I started just buying stuff from Goodwill. At least that way i know sweatshop owners aren’t getting any of my money, and if it ends up being cheaply made i only spent a couple of bucks on it (though that seems to be a decently rare problem, cheaply made items tend not to last long enough to make it to Goodwill in the first place). It takes some digging, but i can almost always find something good. Some of my better finds even had the original tag still on!
I should check out the hemp socks/undies situation, though: can’t get that at Goodwill!
I just want hemp to become commonplace once more and not some expensive niche item
I was thinking about the plastic problem the other day and how humans could go about simply banning plastics cold turkey. I was curious what that would look like.
As a “fun” experiment, go through your place of residence and identify every item made with plastic. Now imagine each item eradicated or reinvented to eliminate plastic.
The alternative is many of those products would just never be made. Which, for a good many of them, is overall a good thing.
I don’t disagree. I just found it interesting to consider how much crap we’ve made with plastic. It’s kind of horrifying.
I think the takeaway is: everything is hopeless so our species should either go back to hunting and gathering or go extinct.
Nah, hunting and gathering is how we got ourselves into this mess. It’s a mentality that leads to fascism and hoarding of resources.
We need to try some things we haven’t before, like meeting the basic needs of every human, and being OK with being OK. Nobody needs a billionaire, and anyone seeking to consolidate that much wealth and power should be stripped of their lands and titles.