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California aims to ban recycling symbols on things that aren’t recyclable

nytimes.com

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Re: California aims to ban recycling symbols on things that aren’t recyclable

#221

Post by ZeroGravitas »

honksillet wrote: post #130
Cd00d wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making an interesting point, but I do wish you'd support it. You're making a a counter-claim to TFA, but you don't have more credibility than the Times. I would love some validation that our exported plastic waste goes into landfills, as you're stating, but I'm also skeptical that all the places we ship waste to have well designed landfills with proper water runoff management.

Well when waste is shipped, it is compacted and bailed. If it ends up not in a landfill, recycled or incincerated it is a deliberate act of illegal dumping.

The loophole was that people didn't ship recycling, they just shipped trash.

People still pay good money for recycled plastic, but apparently it was too much of an incentive for people to knowingly ship in mixed trash, use low cost workers to extract a few highly valuable elements in hazardous conditions and burn or discard the rest.

Yes, most of the consumer trash in local rivers will be from locals, but its still not great to have a mismanaged landfill of plastic near you thats full of inported trash.

Re: California aims to ban recycling symbols on things that aren’t recyclable

#222

Post by denton-scratch »

billytetrud wrote: post #174

I was thinking about this yesterday when I saw a pizza box with the recyclable symbol on it. It's infuriating that intelligent people can't seem to understand that pizza boxes aren't recyclable after they've had pizza in them. What about oil soaked cardboard says "recyclable" to people?

What infuriates me (along with all the other things!) is the practice of making packaging that consists of plastic bound to something else, e.g. foil. Or wrapping a plastic bottle in a film made from some other kind of plastic, that has had promotional material printed on it.

Here, I can only recycle clear, colourless plastic (with the right recycling label). Of course, the promotional film has no recycling label, only the bottle itself. The printeed film can't be recycled. And it's the very devil to strip the film off the bottle.

I have here a triangular sandwich pack made of cardboard; but with a plastic window glued to it. The window has no recycling label, but also it renders the box non-recyclable.

I'm perfectly willing to sort my rubbish; but I'm not prepared to dismantle packaging that obviously wasn't meant to be dismantled - especially given that most "recycling" actually goes for incineration or landfill.

Re: California aims to ban recycling symbols on things that aren’t recyclable

#223

Post by JeremyNT »

jacknews wrote: post #86
Robotbeat wrote: post #60

I hope they don’t get rid of the symbol entirely! It’s useful to know what resin a product is made of. Things like PLA (which is kinda sorta compostable) are not often recycled, but they can be. If you don’t know what resin the plastic is, then it’s even harder. Keep the resin symbol. Remove the arrows on it. We get better with recycling stuff over time, so eventually more resins could be recycled. But. Part of me wo…

Yes, I've come to the conclusion that it's better to bury most plastic waste. Most plastic comes from oil, which means 'biodegradable' plastic is essentially the same as burning the oil. Actual recycling can work in some cases, but even after all the expense and energy of recycling, the recycled product is usually much lower grade plastic, so it's not sustainable. Better just to bury it (in leak-proof pits), where it…

In a world where fossil fuels are still a thing, how does burying it stack up against just burning it as fuel?

I get that it's sequestered if it's in a landfill, but it seems like it might be more efficient to burn the carbon already extracted and turned into plastic than it would be to dig up new stuff and burn that (i.e. you get to leave more of the already-sequestered oil-carbon in the ground rather than digging it up and sequestering the plastic-carbon).

Re: California aims to ban recycling symbols on things that aren’t recyclable

#224

Post by nybble41 »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #213
Robotbeat wrote: post #60

I hope they don’t get rid of the symbol entirely! It’s useful to know what resin a product is made of. Things like PLA (which is kinda sorta compostable) are not often recycled, but they can be. If you don’t know what resin the plastic is, then it’s even harder. Keep the resin symbol. Remove the arrows on it. We get better with recycling stuff over time, so eventually more resins could be recycled. But. Part of me wo…

If you make plastic by pulling CO2 out of the air, then it would still be more efficient to recycle that into new plastic. You'd still be storing the carbon, just in things that are in active use. There's some potential methods when you can just extract the carbon, which in turn you could also bury, but why not use it for something instead? I feel the "lets put it in a hole" thing has been artifically boosted by foss…

> You'd still be storing the carbon, just in things that are in active use.

The idea is to extract carbon from the air, make something useful out of it, and then bury the plastic when the item reaches the end of its useful life, thus sequestering the carbon. Recycling the plastics would compete with pulling more carbon from the air and reduce the amount being sequestered. The energy-intensive recycling process might also release more CO2 as a side effect, offsetting the amount captured in the plastic.

The goal is to get the carbon into the ground, not to create a closed cycle reprocessing previously captured carbon. Immediate burial would also work, of course, but then there wouldn't be any economic incentive to extract the carbon from the atmosphere in the first place.

Re: California aims to ban recycling symbols on things that aren’t recyclable

#225

Post by q1w2 »

mywittyname wrote: post #151
q1w2 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Resin code was designed to help with recycling to determine what can be recycled. It says so in the article you linked. It's the last column on the first chart.

In reality, it the resin code was a deliberate attempt to confuse consumers by the plastics industry to prevent consumers from making an informed decision to move away from plastic packaging on the grounds of it's bad for the environment. Similar to how the junk food industry is all about telling people to "balance what you eat and what you do", and shrinking portion sizes while also selling "shareable" packs. They a…

This is a cynical opinion that isn't based on any facts.

unless you have evidence of this "great resin code conspiracy"?

Re: California aims to ban recycling symbols on things that aren’t recyclable

#227

Post by denton-scratch »

snarf21 wrote: post #175
bzbarsky wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we need to be recycling only aluminum and cardboard And glass?

There are concerns about the weight of glass (energy cost), the energy required to create and recycle, the likelihood that even things like "reusing beer bottles by just washing" have risks with glass chipping or having cracks that extra costs to reuse. I'm less up to speed on all of these costs and risks so take with a grain of salt.

> energy cost

It takes less energy to melt recycled glass than to make new glass from sand.

Re: California aims to ban recycling symbols on things that aren’t recyclable

#228

Post by nybble41 »

alistairSH wrote: post #103
twoodfin wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Letting the price mechanism work (externalities accounted for) is a great way to do this.

I agree - but that isn't a consumer decision (not a decision made at the time of consumption). A government agency has to determine the cost of the externalities (where the science and economics isn't easy) and then set taxes accordingly (not always politically viable).

Taxes are not the right answer. If you are impacted by a negative externality then you have legitimate standing to sue the source of the externality in civil court (individually or as a group) in accordance with how much the side effects of their actions cost you. If you can't demonstrate that you were actually affected, or the damage is too trivial to be worth taking to court, then for all practical purposes there is no externality and the government has no business getting involved.

Re: California aims to ban recycling symbols on things that aren’t recyclable

#229

Post by rvense »

horsawlarway wrote: post #61
burkaman wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way to incentivize recyclable packaging would be to make it illegal for companies to put a symbol on their non-recyclable plastic packaging that 98% of consumers associate with recycling.

Further - I don't understand why we don't just have mandated bottle/jar form factors. We broke the fucking loop by claiming that people could just throw plastic containers away and "somewhere, somehow (over the rainbow!!!) people will recycle them into new goods". That story is bullshit - even for most plastics that can actually be recycled. I want legislation that lays out a set of standardized form factors that are…

Denmark used to have a system for reusing glass beer bottles. There was one standardized size that all the breweries used, and they were reused.

At some point in the last decade or so, the system was changed so now the glass gets recycled instead. The bottles are thinner now (lighter to transport, less material used) and allegedly it works out to less impact, based on some model.

(Though I've also heard it was mainly because breweries wanted to be free to decide the look of their bottles, for branding reasons, and something about EU harmonization to make it possible to sell imported beers.)

Re: California aims to ban recycling symbols on things that aren’t recyclable

#230

Post by conistonwater »

chrisseaton wrote: post #176
coryrc wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because people near Ireland use an obtuse definition of million/billion. Engineering notation is precise and unambiguous.

Nonsense. > The meaning of the word "million" is common to the short scale and long scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1,000,000

If you're going to use the scientific notation for billions, you should just use it for everything. I don't think it's so obtuse anyway, it's exactly how I'd spell that number in code.
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