Is Plastic Recycling a Myth?

Posted by EditorDavid

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  It's a waste product that lasts hundreds of years and is difficult if not impossible to recycle. It's just another con from the petrochemical industry. Good luck avoiding it, though. The shit is everywhere, including inside our bodies.

  • Re:

    Glass lasts for millions of years. "Long-lasting" isn't necessarily a bad thing. Plastics are mostly carbon, so it is better sequestered than dumped into the atmosphere as CO2 or methane.

    Maybe my memory is bad, but I recall recycling being pushed by greenies, not oil companies.

    Also, why is the plastics situation suddenly a "crisis"?

    • 2 hidden comments

    • Re:

      It isn't "suddenly" a crisis. And maybe your memory is bad.

      • It isn't "suddenly" a crisis. And maybe your memory is bad.

        My memory is good enough that I remember plastic being promoted as an alternative to cutting down trees for paper based packaging.
        
        I'm totally good with whatever though. Have at it.

        • So we don't need to cut down old growth forests

          For one thing reusable packaging works just fine. Large parts of Europe have started forcing even fast food restaurants like Burger King to use reusable packaging. Yeah you've still got to take away but you can reduce a lot of waste. Also and obviously plastic bags should be banned from grocery stores and retail. It's not just about the convenience stores like to have carrying the bags around with their logos. But we fill landfills with bits of microplastic has a result. Yes I know some people reuse the bag

          • Re:

            So I'm going to bring the packaging with me when I go shopping. I'll just keep a bunch in my car. LOL. Not feeling it.

            I'm fine with reusable shopping bags. Still requires me to buy bags for cat litter and kitchen waste when I used to get them for free, but again, whatever. Doing my part for the planet.

            • Re:

              In Germany they just have machines which accept the returned packaging. You take a bunch of plastic bottles back with you, give them to the machine and it gives you back your deposit. It's really not a problem.

          • Re:

            That only works to a certain level though. I mean. it's not as if they just grow on tr... ah.... hmm....

    • Re:

      My read on the situation is that the greenies were pawns of the oil companies. They were deceived, then propagated the lie.

      The only newly discovered impact is that we find microplastics in everything, including our bodies. We don't know the long term effects of that, but it's unlikely to be good. Though I don't know if that comes from plastic bottles--I can see the microplastics floating in the air from fleece jackets, and plastic bags can be expected to break down into very small pieces. I'd be interested

      • Re:

        Microplastics have nothing to do with plastic trash. Please stop perpetuating stupid fake news by saying it does. Plastic trash comes from wide variety of large plastic garbage. Microplastics mainly come from clothing as it suffers wear and tear.

        The problem with plastic garbage is that it's difficult to recycle, and when dumped en masse in developing countries tends to end up in large oceanic gyros. The problem with microplastics... we actually haven't found any yet. They seem to be biologically inert and t

        • Re:

          Wikipedia pretty much completely disagrees with you, though that doesn't necessarily mean you are wrong. (link [wikipedia.org])

          And if you can't see dust in a beam of sunlight, you may need glasses. That's what I see when I put on or take off a low quality fleece jacket.

          And while it's hard to quickly find a timeline of microplastics, this paper [geochemica...etters.org] suggests the current levels have only been around for a couple decades. It's too soon to rule out health effects. And the fact that it's inert is not a plus. Asbestos is totally iner

        • Re:

          I'm surprised you don't remember more of the recent microplastic articles that have been here on/. They are not "fake news" (stupid term anyway. If you want to discuss bad information try using whitewashing, greenwashing, disinformation, PR spin, propaganda, hype, or political agendaizing.)

          https://science.slashdot.org/story/22/04/06/2039204/microplastics-found-deep-in-lungs-of-living-people-for-first-time [slashdot.org]
          https://science.slashdot.org/story/21/12/22/1729224/no-mountain-high-enough-study-finds-plastic-in-cl [slashdot.org]

    • Re:

      The only reason it's suddenly a crisis is because it can no longer be dumped on China to be properly greenwashed. Chinese stopped accepting it.

      The most fucked up part is that it's perfect to be burned. But for reason of Green PR, that's done less now.

      • Re:

        Well, no, not perfect to burn. There are a lot of toxic air pollution biproducts: dioxins, furan, mercury, lead, acidic gasses (NOx, SOx, HCl, HBr, HI), particulate matter, etc. Yes, with sufficient scrubbers, careful temperature monitoring and process management (and with excellent regulatory controls) these can be minimised (not eliminated) - highly unlikely and sure hasn't happened to date. And then you are still left with the ash and fly ash, also with toxic components.

        Not just green PR - I sure as he

        • Re:

          There is a waste incineration plant not far from me, at Tyseley in the city of Birmingham. I used to have an office/workshop near there, and I guess I got far more nasty pollution from smoking that I ever did from the waste disposal plant. I am well aware of the dangers of incomplete combustion of plastics. Though I am not a trained fire fighter, I have read that one of the major hazards in fires is toxic fumes. I presume that the Tyseley plant runs the incinerators at a sufficiently high temperature to ens

    • • Re: Plastic is evil

        Um, no, most glass can't be easily and simply re-smelted into a useful product.

        • Re:

          Road surfaces are useful products, as are glass bricks.

    • Re:

      Glass in the environment is not much different to rock. It does not float about in the sea and get into the guts of animals.

      What a silly argument. Cyanide is mostly carbon, too. The problem with plastics is that they don't break down naturally, unlike, say, paper and cardboard.

      Maybe because of the prevalence of microplastics in the oceans killing sea creatures, and upsetting vital ecosystems. You know, a mass extinction kind of crisis.

    • Re:

      > Also, why is the plastics situation suddenly a "crisis"?
      
      Seriously?
      
      https://www.forbes.com/sites/g... [forbes.com]
      https://nonplasticbeach.com/bl... [nonplasticbeach.com]
      https://www.ehn.org/plastic-en... [ehn.org]
      https://www.theatlantic.com/sc... [theatlantic.com]
      https://friendsoftheearth.uk/p... [friendsoftheearth.uk]
      https://www.genevaenvironmentn... [genevaenvi...etwork.org]
      
      Maybe you live under a rock. Plastic will get you there as well.
      But then it is more evident you don't read the news as this kind of stuff has been presented for some time now.

  • Re:

    Here we go again... another right-wing conspiracy theorist. Why would the government lie to us? They're here to protect us and we can trust them./s

    • Re: Plastic is evil

      Right, as opposed to the plastic industry, who is only bound by shareholders to make a profit, and would never lie in order to make a buck. Pick your poison - I know which one I choose.

  • Re:

    It isn't impossible to recycle. It's just more expensive to do than make fresh plastic out of ethane which costs almost nothing.

    • Re: Plastic is evil

      Making processes more or less expensive than others is something than governments can influence though, for example through tax policy and subsidies. Whether this makes sense or there is political will to do so is another matter, of course.

    • Re:

      It can be done, and we have the ability to do so. Nuclear power, and thermal depolymerization can take any plastic and "boil" it down to short chain monomers. There is a lot of research that can be done on this topic to make the energy required not as bad. It just isn't done because it costs money.

  • Re:

    No, you're wrong. Petroleum companies are evil. Plastic is just plastic.
    Come to think of it, plastic is pretty awesome stuff. It's a shame we didn't think about how to get rid of the garbage before we made so much throwaway stuff out of plastic.

    • Re:

      No, you're wrong. Nuclear weapon companies are evil. Nuclear weapons are just nuclear weapons.
      Come to think of it, nuclear weapons are pretty awesome stuff. It's a shame we didn't think about how to get rid of post nuclear holocaust wasteland before we made so many deadly nuclear weapons.

      Of course what matters is what people do, but what people do with plastic 99.9% of the time is absolutely awful for the future of humanity.

• Penn & Teller had a Bullshit episode about recycling years ago. It still holds true today.

  • Re:

    John Oliver just did one too. It's kind of frustrating that about the only place you can go to in our modern pro corporate media for any sort of actual truth or comedians and a handful of YouTubers

  • Re:

    Yep. It costs nothing for CocaCola to print "please recycle me!" on their bottles and place the onus on us.

    The question is: How many products does CocaCola sell in recycled plastic?

    Until these companies use recycled plastic in their packaging then it's all Bullshit.

    • Re:

      In Europe they are forced to recycle it since decades...

• My parents quit recycling a few years ago in an earlier wave of stories about how recycling is fake. The thing is, aluminum and cardboard really do get recycled. (At least industrial streams. I don't know how to check up on household recycling in different areas.)

  I also think incineration should count as recycling if it is offsetting additional fossil fuels being pumped from the ground.

  • Re:

    Post-consumer cardboard is rarely recycled; the contamination factor is too high.

    Where I live about 6-7 years ago they admitted that it is better for them to burn waste (waste to energy) than attempt to recycle it. Sadly even glass was only even barely attempted to be removed from the stream because it clogged the trash burning boiler.

    Landfilling costs are very rarely reported accurately, and a huge part of it is just how much stupid crap we throw away every day. We started composting household waste at h

    • Re:

      My friend that works in an adjacent field (more knowledgeable than average but not an expert) says cardboard boxes and mail/letters are high grade materials are the best paper products to recycle.

      Furthermore, in many poorer parts of the world, some people collect used boxes to earn a little money. The fact that they are able to sell it to recyclers is strong proof they are gainfully recycled. Of course this "proof" is region-specific.

    • Re:

      And about composting--worms are great for apartment dwellers. A small compost bucket may not get hot enough to work in any reasonable time, and without leaves and leaf clippings it may have too much nitrogen for proper composting. The solution to all these problems is putting worms in the compost bucket. However, DO NOT let them get outside as they are an invasive species that eliminates the organic matter on forest floors. The vermicompost should be used for indoor potted plants only, or for a region that

    • Re:

      A lot of landfills eventually end up as parks. Just sayin.

    • Re:

      Burning most consumer plastics releases toxic gasses so far as I remember. Also we need to get away from burning things to generate electricity, it's already gotten us into a mess we may never get out of.

  • Re:

    And glass, steel is recycled.
      It's just post-consumer plastic recycling that is a scam.

    • Re:

      Yep. I'll believe plastic recycling exists when I see bottled water, soda, etc. being sold in recycled plastic bottles.

      Until then it's all lies.

  • Re:

    Recycling means re-use of the material itself. Not (for example) burning & re-use the CO2 that comes out. But I do agree that incineration is a good option if a) the feedstock is from a sustainable source - eg. bio based plastics, b) the incineration process itself is relatively clean, and c) incineration happens to have a lower environmental impact than sorting & recycling the same material(s). Which brings us to an important reason why plastic recycling is so difficult in practice: the sheer # of

• Surely we can do our own recycling? Easy way to pay too - If it don't fully bio-degrade then have the makers pay for full recycling costs. Same as with appliance packaging.

  • Re:

    Because plastics are very heavy on sorting and cleaning if you actually want to recycle them. They're also uneconomical and anti-environmentalist to recycle if you need to do as much as wash them with hot water before recycling them, due to energy costs. I.e. "what is the environmental impact of recycling vs the impact of burning it". Most people forget that recycling also requires significant resources, and if those resources are greater than what you save by recycling, it's the environmentally destructive

    • Re:

      All solved easily by the product makers footing the bill. Same as for appliance packaging. No-brainer really.

      • Re: How come we default to off-loading?

        Yes. It would make a lot more sense for recyclers to do the washing at scale with recycled water not necessarily of potable grade, and large solar water heaters, for example, rather than having consumers do it and spend time and their water bill and water heating costs doing so. Especially if 95% of it still isn't going to get recycled.

        • Re:

          It would make a lot more sense to reuse rather than recycle.
          Years ago drinks used to come in glass bottles for instance, which you returned to the store to be cleaned and refilled.

          • Re:

            And in some EU countries you pay a "deposit" for plastic or glass bottles, which you then get back when you return them. The glass bottles are probably washed and reused, plastic bottles are crushed though (but it better be in perfect condition when you return it).

            Interesting in that at least in my country, nobody wants glass jars. You can throw them in a glass waste container to be recycled, but nobody reuses them.

• We, by and large, did not actually wash or sort the plastic to be recycled, and that's the primary reason China cited for no longer accepting it from us.

  • Re:

    If we did all of the hard work ourselves, then we would not have had to send it all to somewhere with cheap labor.

    • Re:

      If you did all the hard work yourself when it comes to recycling plastics, it would likely be more destructive to environment than simply burning it. Remember that recycling processes also require things like energy to happen.

      • Re: Washed it? No, we didn't.

        Those recycling processes can and should use renewable energy sources, though.

• Go and watch the "Penn & Teller: Bullshit!" episode about Recycling. Their conclusion was basically that Metal recycling is VERY effective, Glass recycling was pointless (but at least it kept trash off the street), and Plastic recycling was borderline at best (can be recycled a few times, but not economically, and with reduced quality each time). These guys are VERY liberal, but not afraid to call BS when they see it.

  • Re:

    When I volunteered for a few garbage collection dives while on a holiday, they always told us to collect the plastic and metal trash, but leave the glass bottles because:
    1. They're heavy, and you're better off spending your energy collecting as much plastic/metal/etc as possible.
    2. Glass bottles turn back into "sand" in the long run anyway.

    Fixed that for you.

    • Re:

      In my country, when you buy a drink that comes in a glass or plastic bottle, you have to pay 0.1EUR "deposit" for it. When you return the bottle, you get the money back (plastic bottles are crushed, while I think glass bottles are reused). This dramatically reduced the amount of trash on the streets - even if you do not care about the 0.1EUR, someone poor can earn money by picking up all the intact bottles.

• • Re: The biggest perk to recycling...

    That you and I are of course footing the bill for.

    Also, around here, the utility sends you nastygrams in the mail if regular trash ends up in the recycle bin, too. Clearly, they have a process in place to track this.

• Plastics can be recycled, but it's a hard problem. For recycling to be feasible, discarded items need to be both clean and sorted by the type of plastic they're composed of. Clean in this case means that all non-plastic debris has been removed. That covers not just washing off food residue but also removing the cardboard inserts from plastic packaging. Since very very few consumers bother cleaning their plastic items before discarding them, the recyclers would have to bear that cost and it's non-trivial for the volumes they deal with. Consumers also don't sort plastics by type, another cost the recyclers have to bear. Combined those costs are enough to make it just not profitable to handle plastics for recycling.

  On top of that, there's bulk vs. weight. Most plastic items have a lot of empty interior volume. It takes up much more room in collection bins than it's weight would suggest it should, which makes it expensive to collect compared to it's value. Some common forms, like expanded polystyrene, are even worse to the point where, despite polystyrene being a very high-value plastic for recyclers, it's just not worth it to collect and compact it.

  If we want plastics recycling to actually work, we need some sort of process that can take in unsorted, dirty/contaminated plastic and turn it into clean, compacted material either of a single type or automatically sorted by type, and which can be scaled down to the point where it can be installed in a home or business. There's lots of processes that can handle reducing plastics to basic hydrocarbons and that can deal with the waste products (for instance cardboard contains enough carbon that the right process can convert those cardboard inserts into the same hydrocarbons it's going to reduce the plastics to, reducing the waste stream in the process). Getting them to fit in a small enough package for a home at a price people can afford is the problem they haven't solved yet (mainly, I think, because it wouldn't benefit the big oil companies who're the owners of the big manufacturers of raw plastics).

  • And not systems. You've been conditioned to put all the responsibility on the consumer and none of it on the business. So you aren't thinking about things like packaging that's designed to be recycled and therefore would be convenient to be washed. Let alone something like reusable bottles. I mean I have plenty of plastic cups I keep around the house, there's absolutely no reason why the soda I buy couldn't come in a reusable plastic cup that I returned to the store after washing. People say we can't do that like we used to with glass cuz glass is too heavy but there's no reason we can't do it with plastic.
    
    Again the problem is we've all been conditioned to think first and foremost about individuals and not about the community as a whole and the businesses operating in that community. We're not thinking about externalized costs because we're not supposed to think about externalized costs. Otherwise the companies couldn't externalize those costs on to us like they have been doing for decades the great success and profit

    • Re: You're still thinking in terms of individuals

      A better solution is of course not to drink soda at all, which solves all the bottle recycling problems, along with many others. But since that'll never happen, perhaps having standardized refillable containers, like we already do for things like small propane tanks, makes sense.

      Now, back to my Pinot Grigoo that was bottled in Italy in a glass bottle, not made of plastic, which I'm sure poses no recycling problems whatsoever.

      • Re: You're still thinking in terms of individuals

        Grigio. I'm not sure I can blame this typo on autocorrect.

    • Re:

      That's a completely different problem, however. You're talking about "How do we reduce the amount of stuff we need to recycle?" rather than "How do we make recycling feasible?". IMO your approach is a better one, making things more reusable so we don't need to recycle as much.

    • Re:

      Actually, my analysis is the opposite. Businesses largely supply what people want, or they won't stay in business. If people want to buy stuff in fancy packaging, which they discard in the trash, then that is what suppliers will provide. There is some evidence that supermarkets are offering greener packaging, using cardboard instead of plastic, for example, but that is in response to what consumers, such as me, want to buy.

      The problem very much comes down to the consumer. There was obviously considerable su

  • Re:

    In my country, there's a sort-of working plastic recycling network. Multiple containers in each town to dispose your plastic. 'Clear' instructions which plastics are allowed and which not ('clear' because the list is so long, it's not clear at all).

    The result? People indeed collect bin-bags full of plastics. A full bag weighs about 200-300 gram (half a pound). Then, in order to save the environment, people get in their car and drive a few km to recycle it. By doing so wasting more energy on fuel than that's

    • Re:

      Then the collection point is in a bad location. Either such points need to be close to where people live or they need to be close to stores (so that you can take the trash for recycling when you go shopping and would burn the fuel anyway).

  • Re:

    This sorting is damn near impossible, even if consumers carefully sort plastic items into a separate waste container. You can't just melt it all down to make new plastic, unlike metals, for example. I came across this incompatible melting down with a product I designed, that had a fitting friction/melt welded to a plastic tube. The tube was polypropylene, and for the weld to work, the fitting had to be the same type of plastic. Unfortunately, the prototype was made of polyethylene by mistake, and the weld d

  • Re:

    Wouldn't doing it in an industrial scale be more economical or efficient?

• We — the "consumers" (ugh) — bought it. We bought the plastic, sure, but we bought the puffery, too. We sorted our plastic, washed it, set it out on the curb. 90% of it was never recycled. 90% of it never will be.

  "We" didn't buy the puffery. Idiots in government bought the puffery and made laws that started the recycling industry to which we now are obligated to contribute.

• The problem with the articles linked is that they have no actual data or science. The only important fact I learned was that exporting plastics counted as recycling in the US, which is of course a stupid practice and shouldn't have happened.

  So the first question is, does any of the recycling actually work? That 5-6% figure, does it have any actual recycling? If it does, what makes that particular recycling work? Can this recycling be extended to more plastic products? Because even if just half of that is true recycling it means billions of tons of plastic are recycled per year.

  The second question is, can recycling become better? I often see science articles about plastic-eating bacteria and their potential to quickly decompose plastics. It suggests that there are solutions on the way, that recycling can become better.

  tl;dr: Plastic recycling might currently not work or is far from sufficient, but if it can be made better, then that's a good direction to push for.

  • Re:

    Yes and yes. Just focusing on the extreme failings of the USA doesn't make the problem itself unsolvable.

    Many countries do far better with plastic recycling. Even the previous "root of all evil" company covered here on Slashdot in the last plastic article provides Coke here in 100% recycled plastic bottles reprocessed here in Western Europe, collected here in Western Europe.

    Plastic recycling can work just fine if you:
    a) get people on board (expecting people to go out of their way to recycle is hard, telling

• Build incinerators. Reclaim the energy and metals from your trash, destroy all those nasty chemicals.

  Stuffing all your trash in a hole, leaving a time bomb for future generations to deal with is...trashy.

• It's a simple process to pressure cook plastic waste back into fuel and oil.

• The more plastic is not recycled and buried, the more oil would have to be converted into plastic instead of CO2-ing up the atmosphere by becoming fuel. Think of it as carbon sequestration.

  • Re:

    ...carbon sequestration that's killing off the oceans and turning the entire planet into a pile of trash.

    (just so we can drink water that's transported thousands of miles in tiny bottles and don't have to remember to take bags with us when we go shopping)

• https://www.plasticsnews.com/a... [plasticsnews.com]

  i spent an entire day touring the centre in taipei, in absolute awe of the committment these people have to recycling.

  because many taiwanese people are short they could not get safety shoes in small sizes, to protect themselves during humanitarian crises after hurricanes or earthquakes, so Da Ai Technology *designed and manufactured* puncture-resistant safety shoes for their volunteers.

  PET bottles were assembled into tables and chairs for use as temporary furniture for refug

  • Re:

    Yes, but you won't change people. However, you can design a system that does not ignore human nature. Since I am not willing to work for free, I would rather pay (as tax on the item or whatever) for it. Probably the best way to do it would be to make the manufacturers pay for the recycling of the product (and packaging). Yes, they would push the costs down to the consumer, however, it would also incentivize them to make the product and packaging easier and cheaper to recycle (use some slightly more expensiv

• I seen it being chopped up to bits and mixed with some sort of epoxy and pressed into bricks like paving stones
  
  I bet it can be used in many ways that dont harm the environment
• ... which is to say that plastics degrade when being recycled. Molecule chains break and impurities reduce the mechanical properties of the resulting material to the point that one single bottle of PLA in a million PET bottles will make the result unusable.

  But there are ways of making recycling work. Use HDPE (which is almost always processed via blow molding, so all HDPE in the waste stream has very similar properties) and sort it by color, as is being done by Envision Plastics [envisionplastics.com]. The result is a purity of

• I have been saying this for a while. Plastics should go into a landfill. Somewhere away, possibly in a desert, and buried for the next thousand years.

  Basically:
  - Glass
  - Metal
  - Paper
  can be recycled. And with ease (and no, those greasy pizza boxes cannot be recycled. They contaminate other clean batches, don't)

  Food:
  Should be burned or composted. Either, we should prevent methane, could potentially use the compost, or the heat energy to actually run recycling plants.

  Anything else:
  Landfill. It is a downer, but

• We have to constantly increase our consumption to feed capitalism or it will fail. More disposables! More planned obsolescence!

• A lot of the case against plastic is that it accumulates. A lot of the case FOR plastics is that it's cheaper (meaning less costly (=energy intensive) to manufacture and transport).

  Then, which is an easier problem to solve? CO2 accumulating in the environment and warming the earth, or little bits of plastic everywhere? Which is easier to deal with?