Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 324 posts

Re: How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled

#131

Post by rapnie »

djcooley wrote: post #103
Aunche wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it was all just shipped to China and then dumped into the oceans. I've heard this a lot of times, but I've never seen any source that claimed the recycled material sent to China gets dumped in the ocean. As I recall, they had paid a small amount of money for it, so it doesn't make sense why they would just throw it away. I agree that landfills are underrated. It's much more effective to build landfills in poor…

I lived in Shenzhen from 2007-2011 and can confirm that large amounts of recyclables were shipped to China. Open-air facilities hired pickers to go through the material and pull out whatever they could before disposing of the remainder (by who knows what means). This all happened within eyesight of my condo building.

Couldn't the remaining waste be efficiently used to generate energy in a waste incinerator? They are still high-energy oil products after all, and no longer mixed in with all kinds of wet biomass.

Re: How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled

#132

Post by rapnie »

Aunche wrote: post #87
nostromo wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most cases it seems US municipalities paid firms in China to take their recycling, not the other way around. https://phys.org/news/2018-07-trash-piles-china-door-recycli...

I don't think that's what the article is saying. They're paying people to take trash because they no longer can sell it to China.

I saw in a recent documentary that significant amounts of this trash are now shipped to Africa and just about dumped everywhere.

Re: How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled

#133

Post by ShroudedNight »

toast0 wrote: post #95
Alex3917 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For decades the message was to recycle for the environment. The message is and has been "reduce, reuse, recycle." Recycling has been sold from the very beginning as being the option of last resort.

I recall the message in the catchy jingle as "recycle, reduce, reuse" Realistically, it probably makes sense to reuse plastic waste as fuel, if it's not economical to recycle it. But burning plastic is frowned upon.

> I recall the message in the catchy jingle as "recycle, reduce, reuse"

If it's the one I remember, resolving the words of the next line was surprisingly ambiguous, with the two popular options being "...and close the loop" or "...and don't pollute"

Re: How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled

#134

Post by trickstra »

They are doing the same about hydrogen right now. Notice that hydrogen is promoted as green fuel by oil companies. Why? Because 95% of our hydrogen is produced from natural gas. But they always talk about electrolysis, just like they used to talk about recyclability. Producing all the hydrogen we need by electrolysis would be way too inefficient, there are too many losses and we would be much better off if we just stored all the required electricity in batteries. Oil companies are promoting hydrogen because they know it will allow them to keep drilling oil and gas. It's like "Thank you for smoking" all over again.

Re: How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled

#135

Post by octoberfranklin »

> Smith allowed people to put two plastic items in their bins: soda bottles and milk jugs. He lost money on them, he says, but the aluminum, paper and steel from his regular business helped offset the costs.

Wait, what?! He should've just said "aluminum paper and steel only" and earned greater profits. It's not like people have a choice of recycling providers.

The plastic recycling catastrophe wasn't caused by advertising. It was caused by entities irrationally subsidizing plastic disposal, for political reasons. Like this guy at a municipal waste facility. And like China.

People get finite-sized trash bins, and they must pay if they want a larger size. Make them put the plastic in the trash bin and they will get annoyed by plastic packaging. I know I do.

Re: How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled

#136

Post by octoberfranklin »

> oil and plastics executives began a quiet campaign to lobby almost 40 states to mandate that the symbol appear on all plastic

Yeah, but this was a really good thing (probably the only good thing the oil+plastic lobby has ever done).

Those symbols are a godsend for DIYers; before we had them you could never know if a piece of plastic could be glued to (and if so, with what glue) or what kind of chemicals it could safely hold (as demonstrated in _Breaking Bad_!)

Everything else they did was evil. But not this.

Re: How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled

#137

Post by Dylan16807 »

jessaustin wrote: post #39
wyldfire wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still remember that one of the textbooks even started an answer with "natürlich trenne ich Müll" ('well, of course I sort my trash...'). Here in the US many communities use "single-stream" recycling (and we applaud ourselves for the effort too). But I wonder how many communities really deliver those contents back to production, especially since China stopped importing it.

At this point, "wondering" about this is willful ignorance. Municipal recycling programs in USA don't recycle much of anything. Valuable materials such as some metals don't make it into the blue bins; those are sold at actual recycling depots. Whatever is in the blue bins, is not recyclable in current economic conditions.

Is not recycleable for free. Always say that part. Because it can always be recycled for a little bit of money if we care a tenth as much as we pretend to.

Re: How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled

#138

Post by Dylan16807 »

labster wrote: post #127
cameldrv wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as someone who cares about the environment, I think that environmentalism in Germany has parallels to religious practice. I don't think that it's a coincidence that Germany is extremely areligious, and that sorting trash is taken to such an extreme. Sorting trash is a ritual, it is slightly sacrificial in time (especially returning bottles to the store), and it can be seen as a penance for the sin of purchas…

I suppose the truly religious environmentalists can buy indulgences in the form of carbon credits. Airlines offer them so the people guilty about travel can pay the owner of a forest to do nothing. Not perfect because you still make carbon, but at least you don’t have to pilgrimage in a sailboat like Greta Thunberg.

If carbon credits are implemented without massive fraud, I don't think it's fair to call them indulgences. If enough people bought carbon credits under a working system it would be a flood of money toward restricting carbon release and recapturing carbon.

Re: How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled

#140

Post by ppf »

rapnie wrote: post #131
djcooley wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lived in Shenzhen from 2007-2011 and can confirm that large amounts of recyclables were shipped to China. Open-air facilities hired pickers to go through the material and pull out whatever they could before disposing of the remainder (by who knows what means). This all happened within eyesight of my condo building.

Couldn't the remaining waste be efficiently used to generate energy in a waste incinerator? They are still high-energy oil products after all, and no longer mixed in with all kinds of wet biomass.

Exactly what I've been saying for years. Public perception of incinerators is pretty poor though.
Post reply on HN