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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately glass isn’t recycled here. I’ve been trying to figure out why. Probably more common in places that have glass production.
Glass is sand. Even for all the separating and such, most of it is "recycled" by using it for fill, because sand is plentiful. The best thing for glass is reuse .
(1) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29803096/
(2) https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230427-glass-or-plastic...
Is there no value in merely separating and gathering this material, even if it's all dumped in a "plastics only" landfill, as opposed to one containing other types of trash? Isn't keeping different types of waste sorted inherently useful in other ways?
Probably, but, separating is actually a really hard problem. People do not do as good of a job separating their own recycling as they think they do. Others don't care at all. MRFs are expensive due to maintenance, labor, and other operating costs, and if there's no cost recovered from the recycling there's little to fund their existence.
https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2020-11/documents/20...
I could phrase this as "never above 9.0%" or I could look at pg 6, Table 2. Materials Recycled and see:
1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2005 2010 2015 2017 2018
Plastics Neg. Neg. 0.3% 2.2% 5.8% 6.1% 8.0% 9.0% 8.5% 8.5%
Simple Excel fit of dots: https://i.imgur.com/4txVyqr.png
If this was a business speak chart about market dominance, business folks would be happy. It's mostly second order upward. Little bit of a slowdown in the last 2 years, yet 0 to 9% of the market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably, but, separating is actually a really hard problem. People do not do as good of a job separating their own recycling as they think they do. Others don't care at all. MRFs are expensive due to maintenance, labor, and other operating costs, and if there's no cost recovered from the recycling there's little to fund their existence.
Valuable considerations. Seems like a perfect machine learning/robotics application, but probably not one that will receive funding if it's pitched with the objective of, "look now all of this problematic crap is in one place."
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Or glass, or paper, and almost all types of metal.
I mean from like an energy perspective. Glass and paper are not significantly more efficient to recycle than to manufacturer new stuff. Paper is like 2x more efficient to recycle. Glass is... somewhere around there I forget. In both cases you can recycle all of the stuff, but it costs comparable-ish energy. For paper it's sometimes a clear win because trees. Aluminum is like 20x more efficient for energy use.
I have no idea about glass industry economics, but 30% energy savings would seem significant for any industry.
Is cost what prevents more things from being packaged in aluminum?
Aluminum also gets lined in plastic so... Glass is the idea when we're talking about liquids.
I call it bullshit. PET used in plastic bottles can easily be depolymerized or even used as fuel. I live in a poor ex-USSR republic, and plastic recycling is a popular business; it were a scam no one would do that, as government neither mandate nor sponsor recycling.
Another thing in the article is richer countries with higher environmental regulations just export to poor countries where the pollution is less regulated. Just exporting the problem to you. I have been to Kyrgyzstan most their electric is hydroelectric but in general it seemed their environmental regulations were lacking especially in the villages they just had heaps of waste, in the past it would be mostly comparable but lots of single use plastic means the waste is permanent.
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"Deadly" is the operative word, as that would cause incalculable suffering and damage.
Cars do cause absolutely untold amounts of death and suffering. Something like 60-80 millions deaths and 2 billion injuries have been caused by cars. It's one of the major causes of early death. Most of our fire departments' time in the US is spent dealing with the carnage and bodily mutilation caused by cars, and only a tiny fraction spent on actual fires.
