261–270 of 324 posts
https://www.curbed.com/2019/7/10/20688718/modern-house-hurri...
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Thank you for stating what should be obvious: most of the psuedo-green beliefs are the result of direct misinformation from the producers of human-harming pollution. It should make people more rabid to tear them apart, not less.
It can be flipped around a third time. Eco-campaigners that create hate campaigns against corporations doing useful work, without even the faintest idea of a proposal for what they want those corps to do differently, will inevitably produce nonsensical virtue signalling PR responses. What else are they going to do? As the article discusses, plastic recycling is hard.
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Every time I took a German course, my textbook had a section something like "was machen Sie für die Umwelt?" ('what do you do for the environment?'), and the first example answer in dialogues was always "Müll trennen" (sorting kinds of trash for recycling). It was amazing what a cultural force this habit seems to have for many Germans. I still remember that one of the textbooks even started an answer with "natürlich…
"what do you do for the environment?" This is a big part of the appeal and the problem. Recycling promised individual solutions to what is a collective problem: the misuse of resources.
Because it doesn't really matter how much trash you sort if you are flying around in a private jet and your house has the carbon footprint of a small village.
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Plastic does have a (significantly) lower carbon footprint per bag than paper to produce. This doesn't factor in disposability, of course, but that's probably where that message originated from.
That seems like the type of analysis where someone lumped in the coal fired power station as well. Those are always the most disingenuous ones.
The 'good' news is that the vast majority of plastic waste in the ocean isn't diffuse from around the globe; rather, it is concentrated in a few rivers in asia. The reason for this is that the countries these rivers pass through don't have modern waste collection and landfill infrastructure. It's not exciting to talk about, but this means that helping China, India, and the SE Asian nations build waste management facilities would do more to help the world plastic pollution problem than anything else by orders of magnitude.
(We still need biodegradable plastics. But, much like shale gas being helpful because it decommissions even-worse coal, simple proper waste management will put a huge dent in the problem before the ultimate solution becomes available.)
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This article makes it sound like the main bottleneck in the first-run recycling process is sorting. Could anyone with knowledge around ML, robotics and the like chime in on napkin math around novel labor-reducing approaches to improving the operating economics here? From the sound of it, this is not really a solvable problem short of some leapfrog technological advance. Even then, you don’t want to spend more energy…
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That's not true at all. The more valuable something is, the more likely it'll be recycled. Take cars for example. The entire frame is recycled. The motor oil gets recycled. The lead battery gets recycled. Heck, Tesla's ex-CTO recognized the business potential for EV car batteries and started a company for it. There are plenty of hidden arbitrage opportunities out there for recycling.
For the past 50+ years, frames have been integrated with bodies on all cars and some trucks (unibody). The exterior shell of car bodies is a mix of materials, including plastic. The interior shell of body interiors contain very little that's recyclable without an ambitious amount of disassembly that would be very costly. I don't see car recycling happening until something like another world war makes it worth the eff…
In the United States, more than 95% of the 10-15 million scrapped vehicles annually enter a comprehensive recycling infrastructure that includes auto parts recyclers/dismantlers, remanufacturers, and material recyclers (shredders). Today, over 75% of automotive materials, primarily the metals, are profitably recycled via (1) parts reuse and parts and components remanufacturing and (2) ultimately by the scrap processing (shredding) industry. The process by which the scrap processors recover metal scrap from automobiles involves shredding the obsolete automobile hulks, along with other obsolete metal-containing products (such as white goods, industrial scrap, and demolition debris), and recovering the metals from the shredded material. The single largest source of recycled ferrous scrap for the iron and steel industry is obsolete automobiles.
From Argonne National Laboratory report "End-of-Life Vehicle Recycling: State of the Art of Resource Recovery from Shredder Residue"
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Compared to other developed countries they are not the worst. Australia: 16.8 tons/capita/year Canada/US: 16.1 Germany: 9.1 China: 8.0 France: 5.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
https://www.statista.com/chart/19937/europes-biggest-greenho... Compared to other European countries, they are significantly worst.
Maybe it's just quibbling, but anyway, per-capita Germany is among the worst but not the worst.
I'm not convinced that it's actually a bad thing to dump plastic and paper into a landfill. You just cover it up with dirt and plants every 20 years and build a new one, pretty low impact as long as you have it properly sealed off. Even gets rid of some CO2. Probably better than putting lots of energy into recycling when it isn't actually efficient to do so.
You're not convinced... because you understand the component costs and you believe they add up favorably? Or you don't know and don't care? The answers to your suggestion start with knowing the volume of plastic, time to degrade, degradation byproduct toxicity, and alternative 'recycling' methods and their costs. There's also clear evidence that the 'current' model and practice for plastic disposal (that you endorse)…
If it is less energy intensive to create new plastics rather than recycling (which seems to be the case), why not just safely bury the old plastics and make new ones, it should be better for the environment anyways. Of course you should try to reduce and reuse before throwing out plastics, but if you have to get rid of them landfills seem reasonable.
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> 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.
I don't know where you live and how garbage disposal works where you live, but in general I would urge people not to do this. Proper garbage can bags are important because they don't spill out easily. This makes the job of the garbage disposal people much easier. Imagine having someone overworked and underpaid, working on autopilot and at fast pace, and suddenly your trash spills out. You will ruin that person's day.
> 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 sa…