Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic • Hacker News Board

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#171

Post by macinjosh » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 9:42 PM UTC

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…

There is nothing a new tax can’t solve! /s

gimmeabreak

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#172

Post by landemva » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 9:43 PM UTC

neltnerb wrote: post #73

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.

The main value would be keeping it out of the landfill, in my opinion. At least glass melts back down pretty clean, I just think given how easy it is to use either existing glass or fresh sand interchangeably it's worth a little extra to keep the pre-used glass out of the landfill.

I was working at a Waste Management landfill and noticed it had acres and acres of 10 foot tall mounds of glass. The workers didn't know the plan for it. I suppose eventually it might be valuable to recycle it. But somebody used energy to wash it out, sort it, and transport it. Seems like a marketing green wash. If it is not economical to recycle, let's admit the facts rather than pretend to make people falsely feel good about saving the planet while actually using even more energy to truck it around.

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#173

Post by dang » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 9:43 PM UTC

disown wrote: post #9

jpab wrote: post #6

Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24441979

It was on the frontpage since yesterday. And the minute it drops off the frontpage, it gets spammed to the frontpage again. Unbelievable. Not only that another NPR story got spammed to the frontpage at the same time. Now that's interesting. Edit: Looks like I touched a nerve.

It's perfectly normal. No one sees everything that gets posted or that appears on the front page.

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#174

Post by ouid » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 9:44 PM UTC

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…

The problem with recycling is that it's stupid. Our trash bags are plastic. It's not worse for the environment to put some extra plastic inside the plastic bag that you use to throw away your trash.

Recycling is for materials which are harder to process from the environment than from recycling. Plastic is precisely the opposite. It's essentially a byproduct of refining oil. It's so cheap to make that you would be hard pressed to find a single thing that could be replaced by plastic that hasn't been.

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#175

Post by macinjosh » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 9:45 PM UTC

Symbiote wrote: post #93

tootahe45 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As opposed to the company employees making it?

Laying off government employees is significantly more difficult than laying off someone in the private sector.

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#176

Post by TheSpiceIsLife » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 9:45 PM UTC

dathinab wrote: post #98

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.

> fresh and clean sand The thing many people don't know is that not all sands are equal. For example desert sand is not usable for cement or other building purpose. We are currently running out of sand usable for it and are scrapping it from the sea ground or islands, both doing MAJOR environmental damage. For glass the context is a bit different the sand needed for glass production seems to be readily available, at…

The regular sand article in English Wikipedia talks about types of sand early on in the article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#177

Post by ouid » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 9:47 PM UTC

dgellow wrote: post #69

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…

PET is also useful to put in a recycle bin (or in the PET bin, or bring back to the store, whatever is the correct thing to do where you live), it's highly recyclable. I'm always surprised to see that a lot of places don't seem to care about it and don't have special accommodations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PET_bottle_recycling

It is worth no additional effort on the part of any citizen to allow PET to be recycled, rather than simply buried.

It does no harm to anyone to be buried.

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#178

Post by macinjosh » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 9:49 PM UTC

henrikschroder wrote: post #106

noizejoy wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that will require a large number of new technologies to make such burning environmentally sustainable and cost competitive with other energy producing technologies. I don’t have enough science, engineering, or economic knowledge to even take a wild guess at the feasibility of such technology. Maybe that would be a better challenge for Mr. Musk and various other privateers and governments than running away to…

Plenty of countries have excellent trash burning plants already, all the technology exists. You only need to compete with peak oil burner plants, not the entire power producing chain. Same co2 emissions, a bit less electricity, but the trash doesn't go on horrible polluting landfills. Win-win.

Modern landfills don’t pollute.

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#179

Post by ouid » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 9:50 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #162

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…

The OP suggests: "There were too many different kinds of plastic, hundreds of them, and they can't be melted down together. They have to be sorted out." Asking the consumer to sort out hundreds of different plastic types -- to then be picked up by a truck that has hundreds of compartments to keep them separate somehow? Or dropped off at a facility with hundreds of labelled bins? -- does not seem any more feasible tha…

Infinitely less feasible, even. I swear it's like half of these commenters have never had to deal with a user.

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#180

Post by neltnerb » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 9:50 PM UTC

SahAssar wrote: post #102

neltnerb wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Metal and plastic are super easy to separate by density or by electrical conductivity. Batteries are considered hazardous waste and have to be disposed of separately, similarly for old electronics or CFL bulbs that contain mercury. But commingled recycling was one of the most predictably stupid moves in the area of environmentalism I've seen in a long time (well, prior to 2016 anyway), when I heard my city was moving…

> Metal and plastic are super easy to separate by density or by electrical conductivity Yeah, what I meant by better segmentation is not to separate them from each other (we do that) but rather by type. Some plastics are easier to recycle than others and I don't know if metals can be easily and automatically sorted from each other.

Plastic separation is tricky, they tend to have similar physical properties so you end up relying on small density differences or optical properties or computer vision which is obviously not so great. I think most places it's still more cost effective to do it by hand.

Metals are easy to separate from one another, they tend to have substantially different densities and electrical properties. Aluminum for instance is not magnetic while steel cans are, but aluminum is conductive so if it passes through a magnetic field it will still get slowed down.

Those are the two big ones in any case. Then you could get to things like nickel (magnetic but intermediate conductivity) or tin (light but non magnetic) or maybe zinc/magnesium, but basically the densities are more different and the properties are more different so it's easier to tell them apart. And for some things that it can't figure out it makes sense to just landfill it.

Plastics though, absolutely vastly harder. You can use density but it only varies by a few percent. You can use diffraction gratings and cameras to see crystals and maybe sort a bit by that. But really it's just very hard, especially since the same polymer has different molecular weights and crystallinity. Your milk jug is milky while the same molecule processed differently is clear.

But even that's a mess -- you can't generally "depolymerize" these things very easily, you are really melting them back together and reusing the melt. When you start from monomers you can control the molecular weight (chain length) which controls things like crystallinity and stiffness, so the quality is higher. If you melt a variety of different molecular weights back together even if they're the same exact molecule the physical properties will just by worse. It's just the nature of the beast, and it sucks.

Even if you recycle by perfectly melting all the PET with perfect sorting and no food residue you'll be guaranteed to increase the variability in the physical properties of the output. It's just chemistry, unless you can convert it back to monomers it'll never be as good even in the best case.

For metals at least you can count on a fairly full recovery if you invest in it, it's not like polymers where it's just not possible. Even with alloys like steel you can at least in principle go back to the raw materials if you wanted, even if they are quite tricky.