151–154 of 154 posts
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Until someone creates a machine that can pulverise anything into a fine powder and progressively sort each granule into their constituent metal, plastic, silica and organic type.
You use that machine on better ore.
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You use that machine on better ore.
That doesn’t make chemical sense. There is a huge energetic cost to smelting ore to remove the oxides, vs. landfill material that is exactly what you need but just needs to be sorted and cleaned.
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The first link is a "meta-analysis" where they only found three studies on point with wildly different methods that disagreed in their conclusions. One of the studies said the costs of sorting made the benefits of plastic recycling negligible to iffy, confirming parent's claim that aluminum drives recycling value and plastics are a wash. They shouldn't be allowed to call it a meta-analysis if they just read three stu…
I think you've misread that, they only found three recent economic analysis of recycling that dealt purely with plastic. (Quite possibly because it makes no sense to set up a recycling system for just one output, since the additional cost once you've started is minimal) They also found 20 papers that dealt with the climate change emissions and total energy use and ranked them on those factors as well. The comment I r…
> You seem to doubt that governments made decisions based on facts,
It's actually the reverse, I've become more skeptical because so many recycling programs are now just landfilling plastic because the costs no longer justify recycling it.
The price of oil should tell us something about the relative efficiency of recycling plastic. It would be weird if there was zero relation.
Oil prices being consistently low for a decade probably contribute to shifting efficiencies here.
I worry more generally about reuse and recycle heuristics since early environmental impact studies showed they frequently produce bad results. But that doesn't mean they always do.
Maybe you're right and those input factors haven't changed enough to affect the total cost math.
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Efficient leachate control is an interesting area, but there are various families of techniques to do it and methods for monitoring effectiveness that have emerged from the last several decades of focused study. Current facilities are way better equipped than the old solution of uncontrolled municipal dumps.
Still, leachate control is nothing but a cost center to the people running a landfill. It's likely that plenty of landfills are not as compliant as they report, through intention or ignorance; and when the landfill operator goes bankrupt nobody takes over the maintenance. In a sense, leachate control is the low-tar cigarette of waste disposal
A lot of these fixes are more expensive to fake to code than to just implement, and isolating sources of groundwater pollution can take a few years, but not decades. Also a lot of these people live there and know the risks to their kids' safety.
The environmental engineers who consult on these projects didn't generally go into the field to poison people.