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

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

#221

Post by analog31 »

This is probably an aside, but due to the lockdown, I've been doing hardware development at my house. It's mostly great, but it means that I receive a lot of packages.

And the packaging, oh the packaging. I'm inundated with packing material. Let's say I order 10 different parts. Each part was made by a manufacturer and packaged in a little plastic bag. (If there are sub-parts such as attachments, screws, etc., they are in a sub-bag).

Each of those bags is placed inside another bag, often a thick zip-loc, with a sticky label indicating the part number and sales order number plus other desiderata.

A short (1 meter) USB cable was coiled up and secured with not one but two twist-ties, sub-bagged, and bagged. There were molded plastic caps on the ends.

All of those bags are in a big bag, tied at the top. That goes in a box with packing material filling half the box. I end up knee deep in trash by the time I've unpacked an order. I keep a few of the nicer boxes, but everything else goes into the recycling bin.

/rant

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

#222

Post by spodek »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #218
spodek wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding beverages, things changed a lot when I learned that for most of human existence, after weaning, our ancestors drank only water. I've come to see how I used to look at other beverages as entitled, the result of marketing. I drink some other beverages, but mostly water, and I've found my total joy from drinking higher . Sort of like how in college I drank a lot of beer. Now I sip whiskey sometimes -- less alc…

> buy what's in season at the farmers market, what the CSA delivers, and from the bulk section. I buy from the same farmers so we've become friendly and they give me a lot of free vegetables -- the ugly ones they take back to compost or the greens others decline when they buy beets or radishes and don't know they're edible. This is tangential but brings me to something I find hilarious. Farmers here don’t tend to giv…

The opposite of my experience. A couple weeks ago I got as many heirloom tomatoes as I could carry. They were slightly bruised. Most of the time, people buy beets, cauliflower, etc and ask the vendor to keep the leaves or the vendor takes off the outermost leaves from broccoli.

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

#223

Post by zbrozek »

snarfy wrote: post #215
irrational wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what happens to the 40 odd plastic bags I've accumulated? We always used them as garbage can liners. Now that stores no longer have plastic bags we have to buy plastic bags. So instead of reusing the plastic bags we brought our groceries home in, we are buying brand new plastic bags instead. The same number of plastic bags are entering the landfill. The only difference is that now we have to pay for them.

My wife has been hoarding them for the last 10 years. I agree with reuse, but at the rate we use them vs the rate we consume them we have enough for the next 200 years. I think it's more efficient all around to pay for them.

You could bring them back with you to reuse at the grocery store to balance use as liners vs new consumption. That's what I did before the plastic bag bans went into effect. Now I buy liners.

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

#224

Post by mschuster91 »

It's the same crap that BP pulled in 1971: https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sh...

Basically, both the plastics stuff ofthis submission as well as the co2 campaign of BP is shifting responsibility: from big industry/megacorps to individual consumers.

The worst thing is: even if all consumers would religiously follow recycling and co2 saving guidelines, it would barely make a dent in the global view. And that is the reason why humanity is blowing through all environmental targets... and politicians can sit in front of the cameras and straight tell people that "we did all we could".

Seriously fuck this. We need to get megacorps and fraudulent PR under control, and that soon.

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

#226

Post by rahimnathwani »

bobthepanda wrote: post #124
yborg wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't actually all that new, 25 years ago when I worked at a large Motorola facility, I was always amused when I worked late, which was often, of having the janitorial staff empty my wastebasket into the large bin they pushed around, and then dump the contents of the paper recycling basket into the same bin. It hasn't been economical to recycle paper waste streams in the US maybe ever.

When the whole Chinese banning recycling imports thing started, one of the few municipal recycling systems not affected was New York City, because they had taken the time to set up a full local supply chain for the recycling. About half of NYC's recycled paper gets turned into pizza boxes. https://citylimits.org/2019/09/17/other-cities-face-trash-cr...

"About half of NYC's recycled paper gets turned into pizza boxes."

That's not what the linked article says:

"The other 50 percent of the city’s paper waste is transferred to Pratt Industries’ paper mill on Staten Island, were much of the city’s waste paper is recycled into pizza boxes."

It doesn't say how much of the paper waste going into that mill is actually recycled, and it doesn't say how much of the portion that's recycled is recycled into pizza boxes.

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

#228

Post by Qwertious »

pfdietz wrote: post #117
closeparen wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no “beyond the environment.” Landfills count too.

Releasing plastics into the larger environment, especially microplastics, and confining them to landfills, are most definitely not the same thing.

Stuff often leaks out of landfills and into the environment.

As an above comment said, landfills can be done correctly so this doesn't happen, but often aren't.

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

#229

Post by m463 »

A friend - a chemical engineer - worked on a plastics recycling project years ago (90's)

They worked on recycling plastic, but the problem was:

- it was very expensive to clean the plastic

- even when the plastic was cleaned, it could only be mixed with virgin plastic at a very small ratio - single digit percentages

- even the small ratio would weaken the plastic considerably. Think laundry baskets which are flexible but break easily.

in the end I think they made giant logs for playgrounds out of the plastic.

He told me really the best idea was probably to burn the plastic cleanly.

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

#230

Post by andrewjl »

inglor_cz wrote: post #208
rvense wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know paper right now doesn't have a great environmental footprint, but paper does seem like a pretty good way to trick capitalism into planting lots of trees.

Traditional forestry in Europe was keen on preserving total forest area for future harvest. And after the general shift from burning wood to burning coal, forests actually expanded. In my country (Czechia) the contemporary forest cover is about twice as much as in the 18th century and several per cent bigger than in 1950. The problem is species composition. Those forests are mostly monocultural and prone to devastati…

Seems like an interesting computational ecology problem.
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