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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

#51

Post by 29athrowaway »

ArkanExplorer wrote: post #7

Plastic recycling seems heavily motivated by emotion and virtue signaling. In reality, only about 5% of our crude oil use goes towards plastic. If we rolled out EVs, and then just burned all the plastic trash (using waste-to-energy plants), we would still be far ahead. The biggest challenges with plastics are hormone disruption, and microplastics (particularly in the 3rd world without sufficient landfill or W2E infra…

> The biggest challenges with plastics are hormone disruption, and microplastics (particularly in the 3rd world without sufficient landfill or W2E infrastructure or societal environmental concern).

Do we live on the same planet?

The biggest challenges with plastics is the proliferation of plastic pollution.

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

#52

Post by jariel »

8note wrote: post #24
jariel wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

? Oil being used to make plastics was never a problem. Oil is not evil. It's the Co2 bit that's a problem. The problem you missed was at least to some extent recycling: we can't reuse the material at all, and while theoretically burning is practical, we still don't separate everything and burning still leaves a byproduct that has to be buried. I suggest the alternative is going to have to be something that truly disi…

Burying it as is makes it a carbon sink. If we take plant, turn them to plastic that doesn't regards quickly, then bury them, we're sequestering that co2

Oil for plastic use just is not a CO2 issue, it has nothing to do with sequestration.

Oil for plastics is more akin to the use of any other natural resource in a product or good.

The above commenter indicated 'issues with extraction', well yes, but we have the same issues with extracting everything else. Also, frankly, most oil extraction is not very damaging directly - if we were only using oil for plastics, we'd probably only use the easiest to access oil, like from the Middle East where we pop a straw in the ground and that's it aside from refining.

Burned 'anything' that we put in landfills is actually better than raw garbage as it's considerably reduced and more dense - but it's still landfill.

We should strive for a solution that doesn't require landfill.

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

#53

Post by thret »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #35
ArkanExplorer wrote: post #7

Plastic recycling seems heavily motivated by emotion and virtue signaling. In reality, only about 5% of our crude oil use goes towards plastic. If we rolled out EVs, and then just burned all the plastic trash (using waste-to-energy plants), we would still be far ahead. The biggest challenges with plastics are hormone disruption, and microplastics (particularly in the 3rd world without sufficient landfill or W2E infra…

I think we should recycle plastic if we can, or better yet, switch to other materials that are easier to recycle. For example, glass bottles can just be sent back to the factory, washed and reused. This is already done for beer and wine AFAIK. It could be done for milk and every other kind of drinks as well. However, if we fail to recycle plastic, isn't burying plastic in a landfill, in a way, a form of carbon captur…

My mother used to say this happened with milk. They'd deliver it daily and collect the used bottles to be washed and reused.

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

#54

Post by thret »

loosetypes wrote: post #11
dheera wrote: post #2

"Mobile phone case made with 3D printing, using recycled plastic." I do a lot of 3D printing and I always feel bad every time I have a bad print or design error and need to throw it in the trash. I really hope we can see some of these filaments on the market soon especially considering how popular 3D printing is becoming.

Agreed. If you print a dinosaur skull out of ABS, I wonder if the cast would survive longer than a real fossil.

That is a sombre thought.

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

#55

Post by legulere »

ArkanExplorer wrote: post #7

Plastic recycling seems heavily motivated by emotion and virtue signaling. In reality, only about 5% of our crude oil use goes towards plastic. If we rolled out EVs, and then just burned all the plastic trash (using waste-to-energy plants), we would still be far ahead. The biggest challenges with plastics are hormone disruption, and microplastics (particularly in the 3rd world without sufficient landfill or W2E infra…

Plastic consumption is still growing exponentially though while burning oil is declining.

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

#56

Post by roywiggins »

pkaye wrote: post #46
joshspankit wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, if you aren't careful plastic building materials have some grim failure modes, the cladding that burned Grenfell Tower was made of aluminum and polyethylene, which more or less acted like a candle.

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

#57

Post by da_big_ghey »

mnouquet wrote: post #40
joshspankit wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> [...] build millions of houses ... slowly leaching endocrine disruptors in the environment for generations to come.

This would also cut reproduction rates, which is not pleasant but is necessary to stop climate change.

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

#58

Post by alistairSH »

thret wrote: post #53
tachyonbeam wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we should recycle plastic if we can, or better yet, switch to other materials that are easier to recycle. For example, glass bottles can just be sent back to the factory, washed and reused. This is already done for beer and wine AFAIK. It could be done for milk and every other kind of drinks as well. However, if we fail to recycle plastic, isn't burying plastic in a landfill, in a way, a form of carbon captur…

My mother used to say this happened with milk. They'd deliver it daily and collect the used bottles to be washed and reused.

AFAIK, you can still get daily milk delivery in rural Scotland. My grandparents certainly did through the mid-90s. Some homes even had a little door where the milkman could place the bottles straight into the kitchen.

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

#59

Post by alistairSH »

orev wrote: post #16
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…

There definitely is a way to deal with this in economics: taxes. If you tax the companies making the plastics, the price will go up, and they have an incentive to do things differently. Taxes are a crucial pillar of even a purely capitalist society, it’s just that they are not easy to implement politically.

LOL @ the downvotes. Not sure why, what orev said is true - taxing externalities is generally considered (at least by economists) the best way to manage the externality. Set the tax at a level that makes it cost prohibitive to use plastics and the market will find an alternative.

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

#60

Post by rahimiali »

ArkanExplorer wrote: post #7

Plastic recycling seems heavily motivated by emotion and virtue signaling. In reality, only about 5% of our crude oil use goes towards plastic. If we rolled out EVs, and then just burned all the plastic trash (using waste-to-energy plants), we would still be far ahead. The biggest challenges with plastics are hormone disruption, and microplastics (particularly in the 3rd world without sufficient landfill or W2E infra…

disposing of plastics isn't so simple. burning plastic for energy is ok for some plastics, but plastics that contain chlorides produce dangerous gases. we don't have cost effective ways to capture those gases. even if we addressed that issue, the economics of w2e are poorer than those of landfills.
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