Is there maybe an opportunity to use machine learning and vision here to perhaps create a business ? Anyone working on this ?
Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic
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Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic
#22It is always a little surprising how naive people are when it comes to recycling. The majority of the cost and difficulty comes in sorting. Back in the good old days most US municipalities used to require people to sort their recycling by type, but over the years we have switched to a more wasteful system. For aluminum cans the material is valuable and relatively easy to sort. For plastic the material is cheap and so…
If cost of recycling is high, what is the benefit? It's not significantly reduced carbon emissions (a person's average annual plastic usage is priced at only tens of dollars worth of carbon emissions under a system like the EU ETS), and in the US it's not land shortage (an order of magnitude more land is used by golf corses than landfills), and modern landfills don't pollute the surrounding environment.
The landfill here supports recycling (on site) because it reduces their operating costs.
I believe one of the more effective diversions is cardboard (where recycling it at slight income is better than spending resources burying it).
Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic
#23Reduce, reuse, recycle - meaning recycling is the last option. It's better to not consume plastic in the first place, but if you must, find additional uses for it. It takes more of a lifestyle change though than to simply put your cans in a different barrel. Which is probably why few people are willing to try it.
Many plastics can't safely be reused.
Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic
#24If you go to Switzerland it opens your eyes a bit - there's no plastic recycling, there's only PET plastic recycling. If the bottle/whatever is not PET, it's not recycleble and you have to buy special, taxed bag that's used for "everything else" that gets burned/whatever. PET plastic can be recycled to lower grade plastic used for outdoor mats etc.
Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic
#25Is there maybe an opportunity to use machine learning and vision here to perhaps create a business ? Anyone working on this ?
https://www.youtube.com/c/Bulkhandlingsystems/videos has demos of automatic sorting machines.
Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic
#26Not just touted, but actively pushed legislative requirements that lied to consumers. > Industry documents from this time show that just a couple of years earlier, starting in 1989, oil and plastics executives began a quiet campaign to lobby almost 40 states to mandate that the symbol appear on all plastic — even if there was no way to economically recycle it.
The blame is always shifted to the consumers, the logic being that consumers would make more sustainable decisions if they really cared about it, totally ignoring that it's either prohibitively expensive for many or almost impossible to judge the sustainability for many products.
Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic
#27Is there maybe an opportunity to use machine learning and vision here to perhaps create a business ? Anyone working on this ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_sorting
There is an opportunity to improve this tech with better vision recognition systems. Already being worked on, but hasn't been implemented at large enough scale yet.
Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic
#28I wonder what the world would look like now if there never was any oil. We’d have missed out on a lot of industrialising. Would we have had as many wars? I guess we could still have got into space using methane. Will all the positive stuff oil’s given us be undone by just how bad the climate gets? Interesting thought experiment!
Just realised it would probably just be a world filled with coal smoke, but at least less plastic pollution!
A jump from coal straight to nuclear and renewables would have been possible.
That said, there are an innumerable number of side effects from cheap fossil fuels that would change present reality as we know it were they removed.
Removing cheap fossil fuel energy could have drastically slowed down emigration from cities to the burbs, so it’s also fun to imagine a different present where there’s dozens of New York Cities spread around the nation, connected by mass transport, and separated by vast swaths of mostly empty land. As EV tech and internet became widespread, it’s likely that the development of suburbia would only just begin to be happening now. Or not. Like you say though, fun thought experiment.
Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic
#29It is always a little surprising how naive people are when it comes to recycling. The majority of the cost and difficulty comes in sorting. Back in the good old days most US municipalities used to require people to sort their recycling by type, but over the years we have switched to a more wasteful system. For aluminum cans the material is valuable and relatively easy to sort. For plastic the material is cheap and so…
Living in a city, we get two bins: trash and commingled recycling. They get picked up once a week. Anything that is not obviously “garbage” goes into recycling. I believe that most but not all of it can be recycled. I have no idea what they actually do with it, or why they do it this way, but the logistics of pickup are dead simple.
Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic
#30I remember plenty of ads, 20 or 30 years back, showing how they would be able to easily & cheaply break down & reuse plastic (they compared it to un- & re-zipping a zipper). Was that vision / promise simply abandoned, put on hold, or not true in the first place? (I'd put my money on #3, but the idea was cool).