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Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It

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Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It

#111

Post by beowulfey »

mc32 wrote: post #77
Animats wrote: post #38

Automated sorting works fine. The newer recycling plants need no human pickers. It's not the robotics startups that are the ones to watch. It's companies like Bulk Handling Systems, from Oregon, which integrates different kinds of machines into a recycling line where mixed junk comes in one end and bales of useful stuff come out the other. They view the robotic grabbers as "automated quality control units". The mecha…

It’s the economics. So they can sort things well. It means they can put them in a dump neatly. Most things that get put into recycling don’t make economic sense to recycle -except aluminum and some other metals. Most plastics under cheap (but still uneconomic) recycling suffer from heat history and becomes less useful.

That’s where the reduce/reuse part of the old term comes into play. Recycling was never meant to be the end-all solution. We need to reduce use of waste that is NOT easily recycled (plastics) and focus on using materials that are (metals, glass)

Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It

#112

Post by wongarsu »

vegetish wrote: post #100

Bighead thought: Can't we just melt everything down to a big soup and suck out the different fractions/layers and then further chemically and/or mechanically separate all the stuff that sticks together?

Most plastics become unusable when they are heated.

The simplest workable system would be to burn everything (producing electricity) and filter the metals from the ashes.

Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It

#113

Post by dnh44 »

_Microft wrote: post #95
javajosh wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> developing countries around the world that have extremely good reuse programs for their bottles, and it works extremely well. In fairness, Germany is a developed country with extremely good reuse programs. Glass beer bottles are often totally reused. You can, if you want, avoid plastics entirely and just buy drinks glass containers. The local supermarkets all have return bins; all restaurants will take them, althou…

Milk in returnable bottles exists here. The bottles usually look like this: https://contentpool.wirtschaftsverlag.at/files/uploads/image... From the look it is a half-liter bottle (we usually buy cream like this), there are 1 liter bottles for milk that look almost the same.

In the UK we get milk in those bottles delivered by the milkman. We leave the empty ones out as well to be collected.

Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It

#114

Post by the-dude »

swiley wrote: post #69
mirimir wrote: post #36

If only three plastics were used in packaging -- say, polyethylene, polyethylene terephthalate and polycarbonate -- recycling would be much easier. If they're clean and well separated, they can just be reused. Iffy polyethylene makes great "lumber" for decks, or roofing tiles. Iffy polyethylene terephthalate is great for fleece. Iffy polycarbonate plus carbon black is great for structural applications.

PLA is pretty awesome as far as recycling goes. Also I’m under the impression that cellophane (the “plastic” used for food packaging) is digestible by earthworms. I’m not sure restricting things like that makes sense.

As far as I know, cellophane burns clean.

Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It

#115

Post by beowulfey »

lacker wrote: post #8
pythux wrote: post #4

This is a source of anxiety for me lately. We use plastic everywhere and yet seem to not know what to do with it. Plastic is cheap they say, but would plastic be so cheap if we had to factor in the price of recycling it or at least handling its after life? Would it be realistic to ask to think about what to do with wastes of the products sold?

The cost of landfill is really low, so it wouldn’t make any difference if it were added to the cost of plastic. The world has a lot of important environmental problems, like climate change. Landfill space is not an important environmental problem. You should spend your worrying energy on something else.

A lot of toxic chemicals leach from landfills because there is hardly any proper training on what should be disposed that way for the public

Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It

#116

Post by wongarsu »

CogitoCogito wrote: post #89
Shalle135 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Export it to Sweden https://www.trtworld.com/europe/swedish-recycling-so-success...

That article says that 99% of waste is recycled in Sweden, but also points out that a large part of that is incinerated. I don't really understand how incineration can be called recycling. The cycle literally ends at that point. That's not to say it's better than many alternatives (the article claims it's better than most landfills), but let's call it what it is.

If you replace an oil-fired power plant with an incineration plant you save oil that you can now use to make high quality plastic. If you squint hard enough that is recycling trash to oil.

Of course oil-fired power plants aren't really used anymore (at grid scale), so it's more like recycling trash into coal or natural gas.

Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It

#117

Post by rad_gruchalski »

javajosh wrote: post #93
grecy wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It always staggers me that people in many developed countries are so proud they recycle. Recycling is the worst good thing we should be doing. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. In that order. I've been to many, many developing countries around the world that have extremely good reuse programs for their bottles, and it works extremely well.

> developing countries around the world that have extremely good reuse programs for their bottles, and it works extremely well. In fairness, Germany is a developed country with extremely good reuse programs. Glass beer bottles are often totally reused. You can, if you want, avoid plastics entirely and just buy drinks glass containers. The local supermarkets all have return bins; all restaurants will take them, althou…

I buy milk in glass bottles in Germany: Kaufland, Rewe, organic shops all have it.

Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It

#118

Post by sornaensis »

sjwright wrote: post #50

There’s an easy solution: tax landfill by 1,000+%. If consumers had to pay a significant amount for each load of trash removed from their home, you’d see the market for ultra low waste products skyrocket. And then the economic value of recycling—from careful sorting by homeowners to the processing of material by recyclers—would immediately make sense.

Easy by what possible metric. Even if you did do this in someplace all you'd get is a bunch of pissed off locals who get rid of those ordinances. Any anti-wasteful packaging strategy would have to go after the businesses producing these products by hiking taxes on them. Which we could easily do in the US if we had something like a comprehensive tiered VAT instead of the nightmarish sales tax system we've got instead.

In my view, we should be building more effective landfilling infrastructure and stop telling people that putting their garbage in the yellow bin is somehow better or more moral or environmentally friendly. We have plenty of land that can be used to sequester waste, the issue here is people have been tricked for years into thinking that recycling is better or somehow good for the environment while ignoring the effects of energy intensive recycling plants and waste incineration because it's a feel good talking point.

Plastic you throw in the recycling either gets burned or sent somewhere it might be processed and apparently end up free in the environment. We should just be sticking it in the ground until we can enact policies to limit waste.

Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It

#119

Post by dEnigma »

_Microft wrote: post #95
javajosh wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> developing countries around the world that have extremely good reuse programs for their bottles, and it works extremely well. In fairness, Germany is a developed country with extremely good reuse programs. Glass beer bottles are often totally reused. You can, if you want, avoid plastics entirely and just buy drinks glass containers. The local supermarkets all have return bins; all restaurants will take them, althou…

Milk in returnable bottles exists here. The bottles usually look like this: https://contentpool.wirtschaftsverlag.at/files/uploads/image... From the look it is a half-liter bottle (we usually buy cream like this), there are 1 liter bottles for milk that look almost the same.

That is a one litre bottle of milk as sold by SPAR in Austria.

Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It

#120

Post by vorpalhex »

sjwright wrote: post #76
vorpalhex wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you want the poor to be gouged?

The economy is already massively skewed against low income people; they’re already “gouged” in a dozen other ways. The solution for that is UBI, not giving up on the environment.

Oh, very practical, so we'll just gouge them until we get UBI sorted then?
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