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.
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.
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.
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.
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 exposure
I'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.
Quite honestly, going to a landfill seems so so so much better than the alternative: going into the environment and oceans, turning into microplastics and getting into food chains.
At least landfills are contained. Bury the shit until we have the tech to deal with it.
Some day, between the plastics, nutrients from organics, e-waste, landfills are going to be a goldmine.
Quite honestly, going to a landfill seems so so so much better than the alternative: going into the environment and oceans, turning into microplastics and getting into food chains.
Eh, it pretty much does all that bad stuff from the landfills
Quite honestly, going to a landfill seems so so so much better than the alternative: going into the environment and oceans, turning into microplastics and getting into food chains.
I recall a episode of penn and teller that goes over this in detail. Even talks about how landfills are engineer to gather the gasses that are released to reuse as fuel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The recycling symbol for plastics was a great bit of marketing for the plastics industry. 'Just buy a new thing and no worries you can just recycle it.'
Future geologists are going to see a marine deposit of plastic and be able to date exactly the age of the rock layer.
Agreed, but there is also far too much consumer push back. Sunchips tried to make a more biodegradable bag, but people complained that they were too loud.
I'm saddened that Reuse has fallen by the wayside. I brought some cleaned liquor bottles back to my store for deposit, and the clerk admitted to me they'll just end up in the recycling chain - it's too much effort to locate transport/handling for the bottles.
Theoretically, there should be a lot of inward transit for cities and civic centers with not much going out. There's a very efficient mental image of dropping off 80 bottles, and picking up 80 empty bottles to bring back, but it would just take more logistics than people care for to do it that way.
It's all propaganda. They do that in japan and for those that are gonna say japan is a first world advanced small country, they do that shit in Mexico too. I've lived in a number of states across Mexico for nearly a decade and from big cities to tiny towns you can bring back your glass bottles to the shops and they forward it to the delivery people to be returned to be sanitized and reused. All the big companies do this, you pay a smidge extra on that first bottle and from then it's cheaper if you return the empty when buying a new one.
If the US based companies don't do it it's because they don't want to, not because they can't. I know for a fact coke does it in Mexico.
The problem with recycling/reusing plastics has been notoriously difficult in the past. That is why it's so often incinerated/dumped instead of reused/recycled.
I want to explain my view of this:
Reusing plastics is difficult because the bottles are often produced in a way that makes them as thin (and lightweight) as possible. That has the advantage of saving oil, but has the disadvantage that they are in turn so brittle that if you tried to reuse them, chances are high that the bottles would either break, or - more dangerously - abrasive effects would cause the bottle to get tiny cracks, which would set free microplastics and potentially additives, which could be really toxic; and nobody wants to be responsible for this, so they are dumped.
Then there is the problem with washing the bottles. A lot of the plastics is not made to be brought into contact with soap, as I understand it, because the soap severely impacts the plastics. So washing them thoroughly is difficult.
Recycling has a different problem. Recycling consumes more energy than simply producing new ones. In the past, that was the reason to dump them. With cheap solar energy, the game could change. Recycling still takes a lot of energy, but as energy is getting cheaper, industry could reuse the carbon atoms in the bottle; in other words: reuse the material that's in the bottle, not the energy that's in the bottle. This will require even cheaper energy prices though to be economical.
A lot of the issue there is everyone has to have their own unique glass bottle because marketing. A coke bottle has to go back to the coca-cola bottling plant. A Johnny Walker bottle has to go back to Scotland, etc.
Unfortunately, most plastics are useless to recycle - they either get incinerated or dumped straight into the landfill by the companies who collect and filter them.
Which is why my wife and I only bother with plastic bags, styrofoam, and the hard plastics marked types 1 & 2. These are the plastics which are easily recyclable, and therefore, have a non-trivial chance of actually being recycled.
We put types 3 through 7 straight into the trash, as they have about a 97% chance of not actually getting recycled.
Even if we - the end user, reduce our usage enough that manufacturers 'take note' and provide us non plastic versions they will still use so much plastic behind the scenes that it wouldn't make much of a difference.
Can't find for total glass but just current rates for glass:
"US’s roughly 33% glass-recycling rate"
"90% recycling rate in Switzerland, Germany, and other European countries"
In my area they don’t recycle glass. I was so surprised when I moved here and learned that. Glass and aluminum are the two most worth it/possible afaik.
not to mention it doesn't matter where it goes, most plastic can't be recycled or is not efficient to recycle it. Really need to just not use plastic as a whole
Right? Why do gatorade and pedialyte bottles have to be in crazy over engineered compared to cheap crinkly water bottles? Both one time use which isn't ideal but thinner bottles would save the company money right?
I wonder if it's a psychology thing, like having a high quality bottle means people thing whatever is inside is equally higher quality?
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.
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.
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 =)
This is absolutely correct but still not the whole story. Recycling for glass and aluminum and steel can be done essentially infinitely creating a largely closed loop (though for glass in particular we really need to return to our old reuse practices). By using the same language for plastic as we do for better recycling methods we still make plastic recycling sound better than it is, even when reduction and reuse are emphasized.
I imagine that goes the other way, too: by conflating the scam of plastics recycling with recycling in general, some people are probably discouraged from recycling anything at all, including aluminum.
Plus the whole system was created with the idea of getting people used to recycling so when better, more efficient forms of recycling came into use, people would already be recycling.
Too bad that whole "better, more efficient" part never really happened.
I was looking for this post. If someone hadn't already posted his video I was going to. This is information that people really fucking need to know. The plastics industry is full of lies and those lies are stuffing our landfills with toxic waste.
Like, I can't deal with these videos. They are literal populism. They tell the people what they want to hear, put forward some "bad guy" to blame everything on, and then move on.
Reality is much more complicated, and especially, much less one-sided and much more interesting than that.
For example, the common narrative among "climate studies" graduates seems to be that oil = bad, and the oil industry is a bunch of greedy old guys who exploit the planet for profit. Thing is, that is a very narrow-sighted thing to say. There's so much more truth and beauty in it than just that. Plastics is literally one of the best inventions humans have ever come up with. It's formable into every imaginable shape and literally has the potential to transform our material world in any way that we can imagine, in any way that we want to. That people put so much blame on plastics today sickens me. It's wrong to blame plastics, just as it's one-sided to say "well yeah oil companies are just plainly bad entities who only brought harm onto our society and planet". Truth is that the oil production has been widely supported by both politics and society for the most part of the 20th century because oil is just an incredible substance with incredible value and brings a lot of improvement, benefits and progress to the society. We should be glad that we had it, and we should be thankful for the oil companies for producing it in mass quantities. It is only now that we start seeing the downsides to it, and it has to stop. Still, I can't stand videos that just simplify things down to saying "oil is bad, plastics is a scam, ...". It is not, it's just outdated.
If you make a plastic bottle you get taxed. If you put something in a plastic bottle to resell, you get taxed. If you import a plastic bottle for any reason, believe it or not, taxed.
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.
... well, in its defense, if it weren't subsidized, renewable plastics would indeed be cheaper, but only at the expense of huge areas of farmable land and the rainforest. So it's either "consume 300% of the planet's fertile land to produce plastics" or "subsidize oil".
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.
I have gradually wondered if the issue has not been in our obsession with plastic specifically, but our need for sanitation of every object. "We need a material that will preserve its shape in transit and operation; but we then want it to gently break down into nature when we're done with it." No matter what materials of what strength we invent, that's always going to be an oxymoron. There's a reason people criticize biodegradable materials as often falling apart.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure medicine has made tremendous advances through the preservation of sealed instruments and drugs, especially for those with sensitive immune systems. But the 3000% thorough sanitization we keep of every single object we interact with has had a very gradual impact on our planet. I kind of want to envision just how fatal of a health risk it would carry if so much of our food wasn't triple-secure-wrapped, and whether that's comparable to the current impact of widespread plastic.
No, the problem has never been us at all. We don't run Coca Cola Co. We don't decide how laundry detergent is packaged. We don't manufacture excess plastic drums and lined tanks for unnecesary use cases. We don't flood the market with cheap dinnerware, plates, cups, bowls, etc.
Big corporations do all of that. Run by dozens of people who do not care what we think.
We're always trying to optimize and reduce loss/waste. Being able to have food sit on shelves for months without oxidizing or rotting has been a huge improvement in terms of food loss but it requires these biounavailable materials. If we use compostable materials for packaging then the clock starts ticking on them and storage facilities need to maintain stricter standards (i.e. keep humidity down).
The medical aspect is a big issue. You see what is consumed in an ER and surgery and then multiply that by a million/day and you wonder how much of this trash is being produced. Lawsuits over every little medical issue don't help reduce this. Fishing industry waste is another big issue for the oceans.
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.
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!
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?
For anyone interested in increasing that number in any way they can, check out earth911.com for hundreds of ideas and ways to help recycle, reduce, and reuse things in your everyday life.
Here's a link to learn about how to properly recycle or dispose of things. Categorized into nine kinds of materials.
And here's a link to their Recycling Solution Search, where you can select the thing you desire to recycle and then enter a zip code.
Think of all the energy used in collecting the plastic (gas, oil, and emissions from dump trucks that pick it up, for example), sorting it, disposing of what isnt recyclable, and actually recycling the stuff.
Im no expert but I believe that overall recycling as we do it is actually a net negative on the environment. We're probably doing more harm than good.
Well we can move cars with electricity so i guess it could do some good as some point
That said I'm in the train of let's actually accelerate climate change it's not like no one is going to move a finger till it gets really bad so why should we extend the suffering
Part of me thinks we'd be better off just burning most of it at this point. Maybe work on bacteria that can break down the plastics in specific environments like seawater.
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
So. We have been making plastic for something like 75 years now. We have been recycling for about half that. Have the recycling plants ramped up to anywhere near the level of plastic production? What precisely is the point of this?
None of the garbage companies want to spend money processing/seperating plastics, Doesnt matter how much you ramp up recycling plants if the plastic gets diverted to the dump/incinerators instead cause its cheaper/less cost for the waste company.
Especially with how cheap plastic is to make from scratch.
I want to hate your comment so much but reality is reality.
Plastics just don't really get recycled. Despite the efforts made (the company I work for included), recycling is such a joke because it's hard to even FIND sources that WILL recycle certain things because at the end of the day it likely doesn't exist because it's more expensive and sometimes has an even greater impact on the environment to recycle than to just keep buggering on.
That said, I don't like you burning plastics. I grew up burning paper trash in barrels but we were still mindful of not releasing toxic fumes into the local environment. So, fuck you for that one.