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New plant-based plastics can be chemically recycled with near-perfect efficiency

academictimes.com

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Re: New plant-based plastics can be chemically recycled with near-perfect efficiency

#41

Post by BariumBlue »

joshspankit wrote: post #32
jvanderbot wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe plastic recycling is not motivated by oil use primarily. I believe it is motivated by trash accumulation in oceans and the food chain (microplastics). There are a ton of areas of the world where plastic just piles up.

Off-topic, but sometimes I feel like we could harvest the plastic from the ocean, make plastic bricks, and build millions of houses. Edit: Just to be clear, I’m not trying to say that this is a viable solution to anything, or that it’s a good use of resources based on our current methodologies. I’m more just trying to say that there’s so much raw material out there and that it’s better if it comes out of the ocean. L…

There is a Kenyan Entrepreneur that is trying making bricks from excess and non-recyclable plastic: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-kenya-environment-recycli...

Re: New plant-based plastics can be chemically recycled with near-perfect efficiency

#42

Post by mnouquet »

tomcam wrote: post #6
swiley wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PLA can be recycled with near perfect efficiency and is available today. Also it's extremely biodegradable so throwing it out isn't the end of the world.

TIL. Can you tell me more about the recycling process for PLA?

Shred, heat and extrude.

Re: New plant-based plastics can be chemically recycled with near-perfect efficiency

#44

Post by mnouquet »

dheera wrote: post #10
swiley wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the part doesn't have to last long or is subjected to smaller forces and the robot is kept in a controlled place PLA is fine. We used them it to make parts for robotics competitions in college.

It really depends on what you're building. For controlled environments that's fine, but unfortunately I'm not building for controlled environments, and tend to do quite extreme things with parts. I need them to be subjectable to force and reasonable amounts of heat. There is no way around it in my applications. Point is PETG works, sometimes I need to go to CF-Nylon, I'm just looking for something that's as good mech…

> It really depends on what you're building. For controlled environments that's fine, but unfortunately I'm not building for controlled environments, ...

Sample size fallacy right here. Just because it's useless to you doesn't mean it's useless. Plenty are doing fine with PLA.

Re: New plant-based plastics can be chemically recycled with near-perfect efficiency

#45

Post by jrowen »

snarf21 wrote: post #39
TeamXe wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

REDUCE, Reuse, Recycle. People forget (or never realized) the order was intentional.

Although you are right, I don't think it is that people don't know this. Recycle is easy, through it in the blue bucket. Reduce requires a complete re-imaging of our society. This won't happen without substantial taxation on plastics and single use packaging. But that is a bad way to get re-elected and how will we get next day shippping?

To go a bit further, I feel like "reduce" just isn't really in the vocabulary of living organisms. Once any particular cat is out of its bag, it's not going back in (though I'd love to hear some examples to the contrary). It seems like our best bet really is an ever more Rube Goldberg-ian stack of attempted fixes for the problems we create.

Re: New plant-based plastics can be chemically recycled with near-perfect efficiency

#46

Post by pkaye »

joshspankit wrote: post #32
jvanderbot wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe plastic recycling is not motivated by oil use primarily. I believe it is motivated by trash accumulation in oceans and the food chain (microplastics). There are a ton of areas of the world where plastic just piles up.

Off-topic, but sometimes I feel like we could harvest the plastic from the ocean, make plastic bricks, and build millions of houses. Edit: Just to be clear, I’m not trying to say that this is a viable solution to anything, or that it’s a good use of resources based on our current methodologies. I’m more just trying to say that there’s so much raw material out there and that it’s better if it comes out of the ocean. L…

You also need to make it fireproof or use an outer layer of fireproof material.

Re: New plant-based plastics can be chemically recycled with near-perfect efficiency

#48

Post by radicalbyte »

ArkanExplorer wrote: post #34
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plastic disposal is a clear example of the failure of current economics. It's clearly bad for the environment and has long term costs, but there basically isn't any way economics to calculate that or incent it to not be done. So IMO, recycling is an exploratory exercise in seeing if we can socially engineer behavior that is "better". The cynic would say "it doesn't", but I could argue civilization is built on short t…

90% of ocean plastic comes from Asia and Africa: http://odinafrica.org/about-us/news/217-90-percent-of-ocean-... . We need to prohibit Western companies from packaging food and FMCG for the developing world in plastic - until both the disposal infrastructure and societal attitudes around pollution and environmental management change. Or, charge those polluters to build that infrastructure or change those attitudes. H…

A lot of that plastic is shipped in from USA/EU.

Re: New plant-based plastics can be chemically recycled with near-perfect efficiency

#49

Post by Covzire »

joshspankit wrote: post #32
jvanderbot wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe plastic recycling is not motivated by oil use primarily. I believe it is motivated by trash accumulation in oceans and the food chain (microplastics). There are a ton of areas of the world where plastic just piles up.

Off-topic, but sometimes I feel like we could harvest the plastic from the ocean, make plastic bricks, and build millions of houses. Edit: Just to be clear, I’m not trying to say that this is a viable solution to anything, or that it’s a good use of resources based on our current methodologies. I’m more just trying to say that there’s so much raw material out there and that it’s better if it comes out of the ocean. L…

There have been attempts at harvesting plastic from the ocean. I remember one fairly recently that built a system using crowd funding but I don't think it was as successful as hoped. If they keep trying I have little doubt they'll make it work and possibly even turn a profit.

https://www.sciencealert.com/that-ocean-garbage-collector-is...

Re: New plant-based plastics can be chemically recycled with near-perfect efficiency

#50

Post by benjohnson1707 »

As always, scale matters. Plastic will be superior to all the alternatives as long as it's a cheap waste by-product of oil refinement.

Make alternatives economically competitive to basically free oil refinement by-products, and we're talking.

EVs might help here, it seems.

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