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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

#111

Post by chongli »

maxk42 wrote: post #68
xyzzyz wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Specifically green and brown bottles are cost-effective to recycle. Clear bottles typically are not.

Clear glass bottles are great for reusing though. I know of at least a few local breweries that reuse their clear glass bottles. When you buy the beer you pay a ten cent deposit per bottle which you get back when you return them. It’s a great system!

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#112

Post by regularfry »

neltnerb wrote: post #64
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…

No, plastic degrades each time it is recycled. They knew that, every materials scientist knew that, and it is just not possible to fully reclaim recycled plastic. What really pisses me off is the use of the recycling number as marketing. Which is still ongoing and being modernized. Leave a complaint card any time you see compostable plastic being used in a city that doesn't have specialized industrial composting plan…

It depends if fully reclaiming it as plastic is the goal. That's the current model, but there are other routes available. Two options that don't quite work yet (but have moderately promising potential) are either to break the plastic down to useful precursors with enzymes, or pyrolise it down to biochar.

To my knowledge, the enzyme approach has shown a modicum of promise in labs but is still impractical, while making biochar is really, really easy. We just need a market for it. Unfortunately, the very group of people who could make the biggest use of it (and are most likely to) are blocked by policy: you can't have an Organic label on your farm produce if you put biochar in the soil.

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#114

Post by greedo »

maxk42 wrote: post #68
xyzzyz wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Specifically green and brown bottles are cost-effective to recycle. Clear bottles typically are not.

One of the dairies nearby sells their milk in heavy glass bottles. They charge a $2 surcharge that's refundable when you return the bottle, and they reuse all the bottles they get that aren't damaged. I wonder how many cycles they typically get out of a bottle before it's no longer useful.

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#115

Post by regularfry »

MattGaiser wrote: post #11

I see the solution as just a better recycling symbol that a machine can easily recognize. Instead of the 7 broad categories, have 1000 highly specific categories and tag each piece in such a way that a machine can read the tag and sort it accordingly. Number 1 plastic with water and number 1 plastic with yoghurt should have different tags because one may be contaminated and one not. The former might still be #1. The…

Digimarc have a product for exactly this. Not sure if they do the 1000 categories thing, but machine readable definitely.

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#117

Post by the_cat_kittles »

aaron695 wrote: post #89

I'm sick of stupid people. This was never a secret. If you were dumb enough to think recycling works for anything other than aluminium you are the problem. Penn and Tell even did a Bullshit, for pre internet times. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0771119/ ( although it was a awful episode )

guess you are stupid, since it works for pp, hdpe, e waste as well (i literally do that for a living)

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#118

Post by SahAssar »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #81
SahAssar wrote: post #66

When I first heard that in the US they just throw all "recycling" in the same bin it sounded insane. I'm used to sorting into colored glass, clear glass, paper, cardboard, metal, compost, batteries, plastic and "general". I'm pretty sure the metal and plastic (if it actually is ever recycled) categories could benefit from better segmentation too.

Why? Separation actually works pretty well, I'm not sure why we need to "fix" that. What doesn't is people still leave food in things and don't do basic things like not throw in little bits of plastic like straws.

Separation is another step that needs to be taken somewhere else if not done by the consumer. The person throwing out garbage is the person responsible for the garbage and also the person that has the item in it's hand so they are both the best suited to sort it and the person that we should incentivize to do it.

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#119

Post by franciscop »

pfdietz wrote: post #104
saddlerustle wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Recycling is a hack to try to fix the downside of another hack. The other hack is that the cost of trash disposal is artificially depressed to reduce the incentive to dispose of refuse by illegal dumping. But this means refuse is overproduced. Recycling is an attempt to reduce this increased volume of refuse going into landfills. The better strategy would be to charge a fee, up front, for all goods that reflects thei…

A fee up-front like _taxes_ (VAT)? It is the government that subsidizes the disposal, and does it through the taxes that they charge everyone, so in fact exactly what you are saying it's happening.

If the tax depended on e.g. volume of packaging vs volume of content, or weight of packaging vs weight of content, that might be a different story and more useful. But even then not all trash is done equal, a paper envelope or cardboard is way better than a plastic one, even if it's bigger/heavier.

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#120

Post by regularfry »

henrikschroder wrote: post #18

Who cares? Burn the plastic trash! You get the plastic item use out of it, and you get almost all the energy from it as if you had burned the oil directly.

And the CO2 ends up in the atmosphere, rather than getting sequestered in the ground...
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