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91% of plastic isn't recycled (2018)

nationalgeographic.com

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Re: 91% of plastic isn't recycled (2018)

#141

Post by TylerE »

barney54 wrote: post #139
tuatoru wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glass also takes a lot of energy to produce. In many (most?) cases more fossil fuels will be consumed making a glass container than the plastic equivalent. The same sorts of issues apply to coated paper or card containers.

Glass is also somewhat difficult to recycle. The actual recycling is easy, but different colors of glass needs to be sorted. And glass is heavy, so it’s costly to transport.

I think if you really wanted to go all in on glass recycling you'd have to ban everything except maybe 3 colors (Something like clear, a light green, and something quite dark).

Re: 91% of plastic isn't recycled (2018)

#142

Post by hosh »

I knew that plastic recycling were not as big but I did not know it was 91%.

I started looking up stuff like this: https://leapsmag.com/plastic-eating-mushrooms-let-you-have-y...

I mean, if the corporate community won't do what they say, then I'm going to look for a practical way to do this locally, onsite.

Re: 91% of plastic isn't recycled (2018)

#143

Post by hiisukun »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #19

The Plastic recycling process as a whole is an incredibly succesful cost externalization for the petro-chemical and packaging industries. Governments and consumers need to get serious with these lobbies: - Ban ALL single-use plastic (except for medical supplies). - Heavily tax plastic packaging - Tax breaks for glass and paper packaging - Force plastic return deposit schemes at supermarkets _payed for by manufacturer…

In South Australia (one of the eight states/territories in Australia), they have just banned many single use plastics [1]. The rules are a little delayed - coming in next year instead of now because of COVID - and are staged to include smaller items (straws) now and larger items (takeaway containers) later.

That state has had a ban on plastic bags since 2009, around ten years before some of the more populated eastern parts of Australia.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-09/sa-first-state-to-ban...

Re: 91% of plastic isn't recycled (2018)

#144

Post by lightgreen »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #19

The Plastic recycling process as a whole is an incredibly succesful cost externalization for the petro-chemical and packaging industries. Governments and consumers need to get serious with these lobbies: - Ban ALL single-use plastic (except for medical supplies). - Heavily tax plastic packaging - Tax breaks for glass and paper packaging - Force plastic return deposit schemes at supermarkets _payed for by manufacturer…

> - Ban ALL single-use plastic (except for medical supplies).

This is just naive and irrational.

What if I really need a single use plastic thingy because for example, it is a wire buckle, and making it multi-use would make it effectively expensive single-use wire buckle?

Banning ALL is rarely a good solution.

Just tax it and that's it. And it doesn't matter, if it's single use or multiple use, because eventually all of them end up in the garbage.

Re: 91% of plastic isn't recycled (2018)

#145

Post by konjin »

gruez wrote: post #60
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #19

The Plastic recycling process as a whole is an incredibly succesful cost externalization for the petro-chemical and packaging industries. Governments and consumers need to get serious with these lobbies: - Ban ALL single-use plastic (except for medical supplies). - Heavily tax plastic packaging - Tax breaks for glass and paper packaging - Force plastic return deposit schemes at supermarkets _payed for by manufacturer…

> The Plastic recycling process as a whole is an incredibly succesful cost externalization for the petro-chemical and packaging industries. At the risk of sounding like an industry shill: why is it being characterized as an cost externalization by the petrochemical/packaging industries, rather than the consumers? I agree that any pollution generated during extraction and manufacture can be attributed as an externaliz…

Were asbestos manufacturers externalizing the cost of asbestos? Are car, plane and ship manufacturers externalizing the cost of CO2? Are cigarette manufacturers externalizing the cost of cigarette butts?

The difference between your examples and examples like plastic and the ones above is that yours are a one time cost with little to no negative externalities - hell most of them have positive externalities. I would pay money for a sewer system and electricity (and do!) - whiles the ones like plastic, asbestos and CO2 have no positive externality to anyone, including the people consuming them and stick around for basically ever. We then need to pay to remove them sometime down the line if we want a livable world.

Re: 91% of plastic isn't recycled (2018)

#146

Post by acituan »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #95
makecheck wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not against these ideas but you do have to zoom out a bit to fully realize the impact of each alternative. It’s not as simple as replacing a “bad” one with a “good” one, because there are side effects. (I haven’t added up the total impacts of every option either; this is just something to consider.) For example, glass is much heavier than the plastic used for bottles. If you have trucks/etc. hauling millions of b…

All the cost/energy benefits listed are exactly the type of short term business arguments that enabled companies like Coca-Cola to transition from glass bootles to producing 110 _billion_ PET bootles, every, single, year. [0] There are a number of long-term costs not captured in these business decisions: - The energy cost of recycling a PET bottle is much greater than producing a brand new one from crude oil. This cr…

I’m with you with your conclusions but not only you are not responding to OPs point about the complexity of cost calculations, you are adding further data that is irrelevant. “This is what Coca-Cola said” is not a valid rebuttal.

Re: 91% of plastic isn't recycled (2018)

#147

Post by knappe »

jariel wrote: post #69
jolux wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They lied about the recycling potential to encourage widespread adoption of plastics. I don’t think consumers are blameless, but you can’t get everyone in the world to change their purchasing behavior without regulation, which is necessary when lower prices are subsidized by huge externalities that have negative consequences for the world at large.

"They lied about the recycling potential to encourage widespread adoption of plastics." ? Plastics are an absolutely incredible technology, to the point of revolutionary. They are used absolutely everywhere, in everything. Nobody needed to be convinced of the utility of plastics, it's one of the most utilitarian things ever created.

Give this episode of planet money a listen: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/912150085/waste-land

It discusses extensively the knowledge the petro chemical lobby knew about the ability to recycle plastic and how little could really be recycled.

Re: 91% of plastic isn't recycled (2018)

#148

Post by jay_kyburz »

chmod600 wrote: post #35
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #19

The Plastic recycling process as a whole is an incredibly succesful cost externalization for the petro-chemical and packaging industries. Governments and consumers need to get serious with these lobbies: - Ban ALL single-use plastic (except for medical supplies). - Heavily tax plastic packaging - Tax breaks for glass and paper packaging - Force plastic return deposit schemes at supermarkets _payed for by manufacturer…

A ban seems foolish. First you need to categorize things as "single-use" versus reusable, and people will argue about that distinction. Then, you need do deal with the inevitable unintended consequences from miscategorized items or bizarre alternatives companies choose to replace plastic. A tax would be much more straightforward.

Tax just makes things more expensive, and is very slow to elicit change.

Taxing plastic bags while grocery shopping just makes your groceries a tiny bit more expensive. If you ban plastic shopping bags altogether they disappear overnight.

update: I agree that trying to define "single-use" is difficult, instead I think governments should just choose an item that has good alternatives and ban them.

Re: 91% of plastic isn't recycled (2018)

#149

Post by jolux »

gruez wrote: post #114
jolux wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fraud was in denying the externality, which is on the environment in the form of massive amounts of material that can’t be recycled and which do not biodegrade.

>which is on the environment in the form of massive amounts of material that can’t be recycled Why is that bad? It's not like we're running out of landfill space (at least in the US), and it's not like plastic in a landfill leeches chemicals into the drinking water or something. > and which do not biodegrade I don't think anyone was fooled into thinking that plastics were biodegradable.

>Why is that bad? It's not like we're running out of landfill space (at least in the US), and it's not like plastic in a landfill leeches chemicals into the drinking water or something.

Because it's not all going into landfills, it's ending up as litter and giant floating pallets of plastic in the middle of the ocean.

>I don't think anyone was fooled into thinking that plastics were biodegradable.

No, but metal, glass, and paper are all either recyclable or biodegradable or both.

Re: 91% of plastic isn't recycled (2018)

#150

Post by tekdude »

gruez wrote: post #60
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #19

The Plastic recycling process as a whole is an incredibly succesful cost externalization for the petro-chemical and packaging industries. Governments and consumers need to get serious with these lobbies: - Ban ALL single-use plastic (except for medical supplies). - Heavily tax plastic packaging - Tax breaks for glass and paper packaging - Force plastic return deposit schemes at supermarkets _payed for by manufacturer…

> The Plastic recycling process as a whole is an incredibly succesful cost externalization for the petro-chemical and packaging industries. At the risk of sounding like an industry shill: why is it being characterized as an cost externalization by the petrochemical/packaging industries, rather than the consumers? I agree that any pollution generated during extraction and manufacture can be attributed as an externaliz…

> why should they be on the hook after it leaves their hands? Consumers are using the said products

Consumers aren't typically buying plastic packaging. They're buying whatever the plastic packaging contains.

When regular people buy plastic packaging and throw it away, then yes they are culpable (as in plastic bags and wrap for food storage, which I'll admit that I do use on occasion).

The rest of the time, it's not really the consumer's decision.

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