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Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste

latimes.com

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Re: Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste

#201

Post by Tsubasachan »

shados wrote: post #100
butisaidsudo wrote: post #30

From what I understand, shipping containers are sent out from Asia stuffed with goods, but there isn't nearly as much going in the other direction. The containers need to go back whether they're full or not, which is why it ends up being so cheap to ship plastic. And the CO2 caused doesn't really change as a result. To the rest of your point though, I agree. My wife is a hardline recycler. I generally am too, but I h…

Is there really much of a point in recycling anything but reasonably clean paper/cardboard (I know stuff like greasy pizza boxes won't get recycled), and clean metals (like aluminum cans). Like, aside for those, will much realistically get recycled? Aside for the insane amount of amazon boxes I toss in recycling, so very little of my trash fits the bill of things that will reasonably get recycled...

You would need people to sort it by hand. There is no way you're going to find people who want to do that for a living in Western Europe. And even if you did you would have to pay them a decent wage.

Re: Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste

#202

Post by matthiasl »

hdfbdtbcdg wrote: post #194
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glass is another (the other?) material which is worthwhile to recycle. Like plastic, glass never decomposes. Unlike plastic and unlike paper/cardboard, it can be endlessly remelted and remade into new products without a loss in quality. It's a huge savings in material and energy cost to use recycled glass in the manufacture of new glass. If you have a recycling bin labeled "glass", absolutely do throw (place) glass b…

Remelting glass to make more glass is more energy intensive that making new glass. And waste glass is inert and doesn't e.g. enter the food chain. Reusing glass is the way forward.

"Remelting glass to make more glass is more energy intensive than making new glass."---hdfbdtbcdg

The first source I found on this subject directly contradicts your claim:

"The primary energy consumption totals are 17.0 x 10^6 Btu/ton of bottles with no postconsumer recycling, 14.8 x 10^6 Btu/ton with maximum recycling, and 15.9 x 10^6 Btu/ton for the current mix of recycling. The total primary energy use decreases as the percent of glass recycled rises"

    ---Energy Implications of Glass Container Recycling
    Argonne National Laboratory
    https://www.nrel.gov/docs/legosti/old/5703.pdf

Re: Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste

#203

Post by sgeisler »

pen2l wrote: post #6

This might be a dumb question, but: why don't we do glass-style bottles? I live in America now, but when I used to live in Pakistan 20 years ago, I remember that I would buy pepsi or coki in a glass bottle... and if I wanted to buy a second one, I would go back to the store and give them the old empty bottle, and they would compensate me a few pennies for it -- and the bottle then is presumably washed and reused. It'…

As a counterpoint: I live in Germany where we have such a system in place. When I went to the US for a few months not having such a system in place actually felt liberating. Suddenly I didn't have to worry about storing bottles, how to get them back to the store, etc. I just threw them into the recycling bin.

This might not be a problem for families or people that actually plan their grocery shopping and go there by car to buy for a whole week. But for me as someone who just stops at the store every day on the way home to get whatever I need it's really hard to bring empty bottles back to the store (I won't carry around empty bottles all day).

Re: Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste

#204

Post by hdfbdtbcdg »

matthiasl wrote: post #202
hdfbdtbcdg wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remelting glass to make more glass is more energy intensive that making new glass. And waste glass is inert and doesn't e.g. enter the food chain. Reusing glass is the way forward.

"Remelting glass to make more glass is more energy intensive than making new glass."---hdfbdtbcdg The first source I found on this subject directly contradicts your claim: "The primary energy consumption totals are 17.0 x 10^6 Btu/ton of bottles with no postconsumer recycling, 14.8 x 10^6 Btu/ton with maximum recycling, and 15.9 x 10^6 Btu/ton for the current mix of recycling. The total primary energy use decreases a…

Cool! I seem to have been wrong. I wonder how those numbers compare with reuse? One would have to look at TOC including transport (e.g. transportation of wine bottle back to growing regions).

Re: Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste

#205

Post by usrusr »

gwbas1c wrote: post #60
Scoundreller wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong in sending materials elsewhere for cheap sorting or re-manufacturing. Especially when ships and containers are going that way empty anyway.

The problem is mis-representing what's in the shipment. (There's probably a lot of plausible deniability in the system. People throw a lot of trash into recycling bins for lots of reasons, including ignorance or laziness. Trash companies don't take responsibility to make sure that's what's in the bin is actually what's supposed to be there.) Read the article. There's dirty diapers mixed in with so-called "recyclables…

It's a whole bidirectional cascade of misrepresentation I think: every time the materials change hands, the output side passes on the quality/purity promise from upstream, but more optimistic within an almost reasonable error margin. In the same transaction, the input side passes on the responsible handling promise of their downstream partner, but more optimistic, within an almost reasonable error margin.

How many intermediate subcontracting steps would it take to allow the original source tho pay for (supposedly) perfectly clean full reuse recycling of a toxic mess, and the final sink to dump (supposedly) perfectly harmless materials into the sea?

Re: Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste

#206

Post by tomxor »

mediaman wrote: post #119
tomxor wrote: post #84

I'm fed up of sorting and "recycling" plastic, it's such bullshit, it's a feel good activity for individuals or a check box exercise for governments. If anything it's damaging to continue pretending to recycle plastics, it makes it seem ok to continue producing them. One day in the future it will be banned at the source, packaging will be replaced with something non-hazardous and efficient to recycle or biodegrade, a…

As a counter-example, British Columbia recycles its post-consumer waste. There are state of the art sorting facilities near Vancouver that receive this material, sort it, grind it, clean it, and pelletize it. It's then bought and used to produce various industrial and consumer goods. The recycler receives a subsidy (set through open bid) because the cost of sortation, grinding and cleaning is somewhat less than the r…

> The idea that all plastic recycling is "pretend" recycling is false

It is a pretend _solution_ to plastic polution, because it is incomplete to say the least (like all types of recycling)... and while that is ok for other materials, it is not acceptable for plastic .

For most other recyclable materials it is merely unfortunate, a lost opportunity to reduce sourcing of virgin materials: most metals, glass, wood, cardboard, paper - if they go in the ground it is at least not toxic and even biodegradable short and long term, (and some quantity will always go in the ground, to say otherwise is wishful thinking).

> , damaging and encourages adoption of environmentally damaging alternatives or use of virgin plastics.

No, the idea that it is "pretend" allows us to break the delusion that we are ever going to stop plastic pollution by recycling and move forward: acknowledging that the current solution is woefully inadequate due to the nature of the material means environmentalists and policy makers can focus their efforts on the source of the problem.

> We should either use more bins and pre-sort everything (which will result in lower recycle rates, but much more economic streams) or subsidize processors to sort streams out and turn them into useful material to be re-used.

You keep doing that, for the few parts of the world that have the luxury to care about sorting their rubbish with more granularity, and can afford to actually recycle some minority of it... globally we will continue dumping vast quantities of it in the ground and ocean, the world will never be able to recycle even 50% of plastic waste (honestly 50% would be an incredible feat), so yeah... stop pretending this is going to work, if even 10% of plastics keep going in the ground each year we have failed.

Alternatively imagine what might happen if all the effort focused on attempting to recycle plastic went into forcing packaging manufacturers to switch to biodegradable alternatives. Subsidize manufacturers materials research into viable alternatives, that's an investment that will eventually eliminate plastic pollution, not just stem the flow by subsidizing plastic recycling.

TL;DR Plastic is pollution, paper isn't, keep recycling what paper we can, but don't pretend recycling plastic stops pollution. Plug the hole in the boat and stop bailing out water... otherwise we will definitely sink because the hole is much bigger than any bucket you can make.

Re: Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste

#207

Post by nosianu »

taneq wrote: post #182
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glass is another (the other?) material which is worthwhile to recycle. Like plastic, glass never decomposes. Unlike plastic and unlike paper/cardboard, it can be endlessly remelted and remade into new products without a loss in quality. It's a huge savings in material and energy cost to use recycled glass in the manufacture of new glass. If you have a recycling bin labeled "glass", absolutely do throw (place) glass b…

Everything I've read recently indicates that "recycled" glass is generally just crushed and used as road base instead of being melted down and re-used as containers etc.

I grew up in the GDR (East Germany).

We only had a few kinds of bottle designs, standardized across the whole country. I worked in a brewery over the summer, in the filling section. The whole day trucks would arrive full of empty bottles collected from various stations. They would go through a large washer, with a visual inspection afterwards (the most boring job there was, that was before that could be reliably automated, 1980s). Occasionally new bottles were fed into the system, but very few, I also had a relative who owned a recycling station where people brought paper (mostly newspapers and magazines), cardboard, and lots and lots of bottles, and got money for it. The amount (of money) was significant enough that those shops were pretty busy, and especially the young (like me) could quite significantly add to their pocket money.

The main point was the standardization. Germany today also has lots of stations to receive cans and plastic and glass bottles in exchange for a bit of money - but it is a PITA because not just have the bottles to fit, but even the labels!! The machines at the retailers only take back bottles of brands that they sell. Crazy!

Re: Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste

#208

Post by cr1895 »

codedokode wrote: post #196
markdown wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not toxic or hazardous, except when it's freshly shattered, but these super sharp edges weather relatively quickly, after which they aren't any sharper than natural found rock. Glass actually takes a long time to lose its sharp edge unless it's dumped in a river or the ocean, which is in fact a great way to dispose of glass. There really is no better way to dispose of garbage than dumping glass in the ocean...…

If you throw it into a water then somebody can step on it and hurt their feet.

Presumably they don't mean to scatter freshly shattered glass along swimming beaches. There's a lot of ocean where people aren't walking.

Re: Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste

#209

Post by cr1895 »

SomeOldThrow wrote: post #183
nkurz wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Trains are much more efficient than ships in this regard Is that really true? At least for CO2 emissions, other sources seem to imply the opposite, with ships being much more efficient than trains: https://truecostblog.com/2009/11/23/is-local-really-greener-...

I'm referring to an electric train powered by green energy—an ideal, not a current reality. As far as I am aware, shipping lanes are just as difficult to green as planes are, maybe even more so.

>an ideal, not a current reality.

Dutch trains run on sustainable power.

https://www.ns.nl/en/about-ns/sustainability/energy/sustaina...

Re: Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste

#210

Post by gambiting »

nosianu wrote: post #207
taneq wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything I've read recently indicates that "recycled" glass is generally just crushed and used as road base instead of being melted down and re-used as containers etc.

I grew up in the GDR (East Germany). We only had a few kinds of bottle designs, standardized across the whole country. I worked in a brewery over the summer, in the filling section. The whole day trucks would arrive full of empty bottles collected from various stations. They would go through a large washer, with a visual inspection afterwards (the most boring job there was, that was before that could be reliably auto…

This seems like something that could be brought back through legislation instantly, and I cannot understand why we're prioritizing the freedom to make your own unique bottles over this. There is 0 reason why all beer cannot be sold in identical bottles - after all, the label can still be unique and identifying your brand. Then the bottles just get washed and reused.
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