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.
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?
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.
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.
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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/
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.
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.
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.
Those countries stopped accepting it.
Gets burned here, same result like with oil it is made of.
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9 percent seems high.
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
Y, I had an adopted papi (rip) by the by (as in found family) and he was a custodian too before he retired. And he worked at a hospital and did very well for himself. I guess one more is that I knew a guy who once was attending university, dropped out and now sweeps floors for a living and he’s WAY happier doing that than keeping up with the joneses like you have to do at a private university. I myself have worked all sorts of gigs, and enjoy a solid sweeping or three =)!
One last one, little sneak in here - in that I have always been good at flitting too and fro and some of my favorite people to talk to growing up were custodians, because they were like the invisible folks of the school but depending on if I was “in hiding” or “visible” I could always find comfort and fun stories with the custodians =)!
My buddy is a TA, and does well for themselves even though they struggled for years to find a place to fit in. People always talk about what a nightmare it is to be in the school system but I know a handful of people who really love it. I think you’ve got to just be a realist in this department. Either way, high-five =)!
Meaning almost 90 percent of everything ever made of plastic is still around
Most of plastic trash is burned, so it’s around only in the form of CO2 and other chemicals in the atmosphere.
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.
O&G?
Oil and Gas?
Oh wow duh, thanks lol
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.
Aluminum water bottles are an option. I was at an airport recently where they only sold water in aluminum bottles and it was awesome.
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.
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?
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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.
Paper products are better than plastic at least.
And they have know about it for a long time… https://climateintegrity.org/plastics-fraud
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!
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.
And I just realized, this wikipedia page linked is almost 10 years out of date!
You know what must be done.
That’s 90% off of where I believe we should be before the end of the decade.
I just burn it.
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.
I make sure the chimney takes it out of the environment.
How’s that then?
Oh, I’m sorry. Well, I could put the trash into a landfill where it’s going to stay for millions of years, or I could burn it up and get a nice smoky smell in here and let that smoke go into the sky where it turns into stars.
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It’s a long chimney.
I wonder if it’s anything like this lighthouse I’m showing your mum right now?
My mother just passed away last week and I’m still pretty sore about it.
You miss out on a last chance or something?
9% sounds a lot higher than I’d previously heard
thats globally, though, in America its only about half that.
Yea I was about to mention. Japan is probably propping up that number since they recycle pretty much everything.
Noooooo, noooooo. Where’d you hear that?
Japan packages EVERY.THING. in plastic. They have a plastic problem, actually.
Edit: downvote all you want, but: https://www.iges.or.jp/en/publication_documents/pub/reportchapter/en/12341/PlasticAtlasAsia2022_en_WEB_1.pdf
Yea I’m aware they use plastic for everything, but they also recycle everything possible.
https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/focus/en/features/z1304_00252.html
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 don’t need food packaging to last 1000 years
You say that but if we went back to clay pots you could up that number to 4,000 years.
Yeah but who’s gonna sign responsible for potential traces of dirt on your food?
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.
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.
Don’t forget nuclear fallout. There’s even a term for when humans started to irrevocably fuck Earth: the Anthropocene.
The committee recently pulled the plug on the Anthropocene unfortunately. It was never official and they just rejected it this year.
Yeah, I feel like this Wikipedia graphic puts it quite well why that was rejected:
You see that “Pleistocene” vertical bar? And you see that tiny sliver of “Holocene” at the top. Yeah, the Anthropocene folks were basically arguing that so many riveting things happened in the Holocene already, that we need to declare a new epoch for what’s happening now.
Besides, if we do continue to irrevocably fuck Earth and the current mass extinction event continues to wipe out a big chunk of life on Earth, then a future sentient species might declare our entire existence as just the geological event that ended the current era (Cenozoic).
And heavy metals from burning fossil fuels.
Just a thin, oily, radioactive, toxic smear in the record.
Followed by the layer of shoes, then nothing.
Survivors of the resource wars will send their children to the plastic mines to work for bottle caps
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They purposely made their symbols for non-recylable types of plastic look like the recycling symbol.
80% of the shit you put in your recycling bin goes straight into a landfill. plastic recycling was a giant greenwashing scam by the oil industry
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.
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
How does buried plastic cause microplastics to leech everywhere?
Weathering (sun, exposure, abrasion caused by plastic being moved by wind and sea) is a significant part of microplastic formation.
Here you go:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2468584422001088
You may have a misinformed concept of what landfills are; most garbage is not buried and covered, it is mostly exposed in open pits and just plain old mountains of garbage everywhere. However, even buried, it still decomposes into microplastics as explained in the paper linked
I read the snippets and abstract. I’m not seeing how these micro plastics are getting out of the landfills.
Environmental risks of microplastics in landfills
In landfills, microplastics are not standalone pollutants. Generally, such tiny particles can adsorb various harmful chemicals due to its large specific surface area [54].
Never knew that!
In this case, microplastics generally served as the vector for migrating adsorbed pollutants including heavy metals, antibiotics and other pharmaceutical and personal care products [55].
That’s scary, microplastics can absorb and spread pollutants!
But I’m not seeing anything about how they’re getting out from a landfill. I even read a few of the referenced articles. But nothing about if or how they’re getting out.
Landfills leak all the time. There is no actually contain all the toxic pollutants in there, specially not the microscopic stuff
https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/2021/04/15/hidden-damage-landfills
Fair enough, there’s potential for landfills to leak.
But if its between that, dumping it in the ocean, or exporting it, the landfill wins.
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.
Why are we full of microplastics then?
Most microplastics come from car tires and washing of clothing with plastic in them. (both abrade the plastic causing uncountable tiny pieces of microplastics to enter the water or the air)
Then there are a lot of places that dump plastic into rivers or the ocean instead of into landfills.
Yep. I don’t even bother recycling plastic anymore. It’s fucking pointless. I just recycle glass and tin cans.
Do you have a source for that?
sorry, it’s 50% to the landfill, 22% illegally dumped or burned, and 19% incinerated.
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?
Easy in principle, tough in practice. Plastics are extremely useful in a huge range of applications.
My testicles agree 👍
Yeah plastic is great for a lot of stuff. Car parts, backpack clips, buttons, trash cans etc. But one time use plastic is EVERYWHERE.
sure, but do we really need plastic wrapped apples
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.
