Recycling has had the unintended consequence of increaseing consumption. I wouldn't be surprised if the world would be better off if we never attempted to recycle plastic. It allowed People to buy Single use plastics guilt free because they were going to throw them in recycling. They have done more harm than good. Also a lot of cities had to buy a second set of trucks once they started recycling programs.
The cost to recycle and repurpose a plastic bottle into new resin/plastic bottles is almost exactly the same as using new raw material.
"Recycling has had the unintended consequence of increaseing consumption" that's bang on and this is my issue with recycling. it affects nothing on the behaviour side - which is 100% of the problem with waste imo.
is interesting. Reduce/Reuse/Recycle on the day a major company is seeking to boost consumption, with a good deal of the materiel being consumed coming from the country which is no longer taking it and/or its packing material back as recycling fodder.
We really just need to reduce one-use plastics.
What are the top two reasons to do so?
I'm not going to lie, it's been a bit difficult to get used to. I don't like that I'm essentially required to carry around a tote bag.
Went to a baseball game recently and they'd banned plastic straws. Even the paper ones were only available upon request.
the environmental impact of a cotton tote bag is worse by an order of magnitude than a plastic bag because of the relative water-intensivity of production. The economists they interviewed estimated charging people $0.05 a bag was actually more effective than bans.
DC banned straws recently but before that my local coffee place went to paper and “shark safe” straws. The former have obvious drawbacks; the latter can’t stand up against the star-puncture lids. Starbucks and a few other places have started offering cold drink lids that don’t require straws. But I went and bought a Yeti tumbler with a hard plastic straw and have it filled with iced coffee. Bonuses include I get extra coffee because baristas like the tumbler so they fill it to 22 oz every time and it doesn’t sweat from condensation.
I know that I save at least $1 at my local convenience store when I bring my own mug. The coffee stays hotter longer as well.
The entire world is a hellscape.
I have plastic reusable bags that have lasted 5+ years and hold lots more stuff than the flimsy disposable bags provided at my supermarket.
I have no idea what to do.
sensitive to the issue.
I started a recycling venture in 1998 to recycle the blight of scrap rubber
tires from the face of the earth.
I had an innovative, engineered, customized, economical, ecologically safe
solution with the sanction of our State Legislature and support of a
nationally recognized engineering institution.
A pox on the narrow minded capitalists with no vision.
The difficulty is that the viewers are the problem, not the material. The
difficulty is that the difficulty is viewed as a material handling
problem for the large waste disposal companies, and not as an energy and
new-product development opportunity.
Pyrolisis.
Idiots. Capitalist pigs. It will be 200 years before these fucks get it.
So, fuck the fucks who run the system that perpetuates the problem and not
the only reasonable solutions.
Flash
will fund ideas and vison.
Outcomes in the case of my enterprise were caused by the malfeasance of decision makers.
Decision makers make the decisions.
People with money are the decision makers.
Decision makers decide what is a good idea that will make THEM money.
It the idea will not make them money, then it must not be a good idea.
Welcome to my world.
Flash
The interesting thing is that a lot of cities that are now having to landfill recyclables are sticking with their collection programs, including fines, because of a significant fear that if people stop recycling, they won't go back to doing so again once we either can ship to China again or develop another country/domestic recycling infrastructure.
I kind of agree with the sentiment--human behavior is extremely hard to change and it took almost thirty years to really get people to recycle with frequency.
streams for efficient recycling. Aluminum with aluminum, newsprint with newsprint, clear plastic unpressurized (no fizz) bottles with clear plastic unpressurized bottles. (Pressurized are a much bigger problem because they're made in layers of different molecular structure; bun 'em.)
The problem is that either the producer does this, and the public is both hard to train and hates the task, or the recycling stream does this, and it costs more money than the material is worth unless the labor is very, very cheap.
Take newsprint: it tears easily in one direction, raggedly in the other because the wood fibers are both long and lined up in one direction (the easy tear is parallel to the fibers). It's either make it that way or the modern high-speed press doesn't work because the paper fails. No other paper has such long fibers; those fibers break every time the paper is returned to pulp and reused.
The same is true about almost all other items that are recycled for their material. The gold in electronic gadgets? Deposited in thicknesses measured in atoms and damned difficult to recover because there is such a tiny amount compared to everything else.
Yes, recycling can reuse valuable material, but only if you can separate it. And separating it is labor intensive which is a synonym for "expensive."
None of this is really related to my post unless you are just suggesting that Americans are just too stupid to figure out recycling, which, well, yes, they have generally been too stupid to figure out recycling so municipalities don't really want the equivalent of the summer slide of trash to happen.
There are solutions. They only need to be accepted. Recycling is like
cancer. There are cures, but the cures are repressed by the vested interests.
C.R.E.A.M. get the money
Here we here we go
Dolla dolla bill y'all
I think I'm supposed to be. How can I be sure?
[leaving now to dump a week's worth of plastic bottles in a nearby lake]
Because this is not remotely related to what I posted and also ???? in general.
...to open a plastic recycling business here. They will receive the plastic items in bales that they feed into a machine that converts it to a resin which can then be re-used as another plastic product.
is that the Chinese companies we used to sell our plastic to aren’t buying anymore.
They're looking to invest North America but we're horrible recyclers. There's no supply here. Their facility in Rio recycles 1.5 billion plastic bottles a year back into food grade plastic bottles.
They have a facility in Spain and are building one at the request of Danone and Nestle in France.
Not because they are Chinese, but because they have an answer.
The trouble is like renewable energy or any alternative to the vested
interests of the hydrocarbon industry. They are powerful and they will
never permit an answer to the "virgin material" commodity industries.
Sorry.
Tell the Chinese to save their energy and spend their money in Korea, where
recycling as been accepted in a big way.
gasoline" with lots of hydrogen bonds. The problem with other recycling processes is that each plastic molecule has specific advantages so the plastic involved in each application has to be separated from all the others for efficient recycling. With bottles having multiple layers with different plastics in each layer, especially in the fizzy drinks, that get's real hard.
Paper is a similar issue. Newsprint is a specific product. Printer paper ditto. In both cases, there are tight requirements on the finished product that contains the recycled fiber that are real hard to meet if the percent of reused material gets very high.
Aluminum and copper are the most advantageous to recycle. Iron/steel is good. None of those are quite as easy as might be hoped, however, because even the metals are very specific alloys. You can't just melt all the iron together and end up with something that's ready for the next step unless it's a low-value application.
Glass doesn't really work at all well. One bottle the wrong color screws the batch up.
Plastic ain't plastic; paper ain't paper, metal ain't metal, glass ain't glass. Those generic categories are meaningless from a resource recovery point of view. Separating the waste streams into very specific materials is the first step to actually reusing stuff.
The Chinese got tired of using our trash, in part at least, because the waste stream was extremely unreliable ... they never knew load to load what would be there and so were having more and more trouble with it. Rising wages made separation more expensive. Add trade wars to that, and you lose the customer.
Bottom line is that the religious view of recycling everything is economically a problem and one that destroys the economics of the process.
How does this stack up against recycling? I haven't done any research yet, but it seems like a better solution. I am shocked that California hasn't gone this route yet.
I know, very few plastics are compostable. The problem is that the molecules are long and composting really only attacks the ends of the chain. Thus it takes a very long time for the entire molecule to degrade.
There are bioplastics but, as far as I know, they don't offer much improvement in this area as it is the length of the molecule that matters and it's long molecules that give most plastics their strength.
also lead to the creation and emission of dioxin.
Coal is loaded with toxins. Depending on the source, oil has lots of sulfur.
There are a lot of good regulations out there ...
Only reason I bought a Soda Stream was to stop bringing disposable plastic bottles into my home. It works. Now most my trash is just vegetables I bought with the best intentions, got them home, and I realized I don't own a fuckin rabbit.
This is my new fuckin haircut!
I'm in the fucking zone.
But you have to do a lot of chopping and hacking. It helps to have a good wood chipper...and, of course, the ability to wipe the image of that charming smile from your mind as you toss the head in the chute.