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Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

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Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#51

Post by xyzzyz »

hesdeadjim wrote: post #36
blululu wrote: post #10

It 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…

I get doubtful looks from friends when I explain to them that the only waste worth sticking in the recycling bin is aluminum and glass. These articles that have popped up on this topic are hugely useful to refer people to. I don’t enjoy being right, I just want there to be an open understanding of the lies that have led us to this situation so new solutions can be developed. It might just be that burying it in the gr…

Not even glass, actually. Glass is pretty much just molten sand, and there's scarce value in recycling glass, when you can get fresh and clean sand instead. It makes sense to reuse glass bottles, but recycling glass into new ones is pointless.

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#52

Post by throwawaydad101 »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #31
chrischen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel Americans tend to over-consume and undervalue reuse. I always get made fun of for selling my used things on ebay and also buying used instead of new.

Tons of countries want our dollars and flood us with with plastic shit to try to buy those dollars.

So don't buy plastic shit?

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#53

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

microcolonel wrote: post #46

Non-aluminium recycling doesn't make a whole lot of sense in North America. For plastics, you can make some case for PET recycling, but little else is at all practical. Paper recycling is doable, but basically pointless when we have such high volumes of farmed pulp trees, and new pulp is more efficient than ever. The one thing I could see working well is a subsidized glass reuse program. I know a lot of people who pr…

Your measurement of "efficiency" appears to exclude the cost of the externalities associated with handling paper as waste.

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#54

Post by criddell »

xyzzyz wrote: post #51
hesdeadjim wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get doubtful looks from friends when I explain to them that the only waste worth sticking in the recycling bin is aluminum and glass. These articles that have popped up on this topic are hugely useful to refer people to. I don’t enjoy being right, I just want there to be an open understanding of the lies that have led us to this situation so new solutions can be developed. It might just be that burying it in the gr…

Not even glass, actually. Glass is pretty much just molten sand, and there's scarce value in recycling glass, when you can get fresh and clean sand instead. It makes sense to reuse glass bottles, but recycling glass into new ones is pointless.

Aren't we running out of sand too?

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is...

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#55

Post by microcolonel »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #53
microcolonel wrote: post #46

Non-aluminium recycling doesn't make a whole lot of sense in North America. For plastics, you can make some case for PET recycling, but little else is at all practical. Paper recycling is doable, but basically pointless when we have such high volumes of farmed pulp trees, and new pulp is more efficient than ever. The one thing I could see working well is a subsidized glass reuse program. I know a lot of people who pr…

Your measurement of "efficiency" appears to exclude the cost of the externalities associated with handling paper as waste.

What are those costs? My general understanding is that it may break down in a gassy way, but is that really so significant that it justifies the energy and opportunity cost involved in sorting and processing it for recycling? How does the cost of paper recycling compare to the cost of scaling up landfill gas recovery (something most operators are looking to do anyhow)?

Far as I can tell, some of the most popular recycled paper products, such as paperboard and molded pulp, actually require somewhere around twice as much energy to produce as virgin paperboard and molded pulp products.

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#56

Post by redis_mlc »

flenserboy wrote: post #30

I 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).

It's #3 because there's too many molecular types of consumer plastic (so melting it isn't good enough to reuse), food contamination is a problem, and it's usually cheaper to make new plastic than move it and recycle it.

In addition, at least in North America, there is no consumer recycling - it's all landfilled unless a private contractor is paid vast sums to recycle it, or a local city council lucks into a good deal.

(I read newspapers until recently, and about once a year there's a short article on the inability to find a recycling partner, so off to the landfill it all goes. Doesn't matter what city. I have seen video of New York using a recycling barge that looks legit for at least some streams.)

The best you can do is burn plastic for electricity today, unless you redesign everything with a sane master recycling plan tomorrow.

The only benefit of consumer recycling in NA is that we've trained people on awareness and how to separate trash, kinda. There was a time when even that was unknown.

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#57

Post by tootahe45 »

saddlerustle wrote: post #20
blululu wrote: post #10

It 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.

Doesn't matter how stupid it is, once a govt employee's job depends on it good luck getting rid of it.

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#58

Post by earthboundkid »

flixic wrote: post #35
mirekrusin wrote: post #24

If 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.

Same in Japan.

I also noticed that only PET plastic was recycled in Japan.

Is PET really more recyclable or is that just PR?

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#60

Post by tastyfreeze »

armSixtyFour wrote: post #26
ceejayoz wrote: post #3

Not 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.

If consumers were compensated for recycling materials they would be much more inclined to sort properly. Recycling centers that take materials that cost too much to recycle likely have a government contract to "take care of it". They dont have a lot of incentive to be efficient. They get paid to make it disappear.
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