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Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste

latimes.com

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Re: Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste

#51

Post by tomc1985 »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #42
tomc1985 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but can't you have a closed system that compacts the exhaust into solid matter?

It's hard to convince the upscale NIMBY crowd that the .00-whatever parts per billion of nasty stuff that get past the filter system of a modern incinerator plant isn't gonna give everyone cancer and make the frogs bi-curious. Then you have to figure out what to do with the waste and you'll face the same problem.

If its a closed system there are no emitters. Just solid waste, to be trucked off to a landfill or something

Re: Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste

#52

Post by ryanianian »

pen2l wrote: post #6

This might be a dumb question, but: why don't we do glass-style bottles? I live in America now, but when I used to live in Pakistan 20 years ago, I remember that I would buy pepsi or coki in a glass bottle... and if I wanted to buy a second one, I would go back to the store and give them the old empty bottle, and they would compensate me a few pennies for it -- and the bottle then is presumably washed and reused. It'…

There is a company called Loop that is shipping and re-using packaging. Much of it is aluminum. (Personally I'm looking forward to laundry detergent not coming in an extremely thick single-use plastic thing I know will end up in a landfill.)

Glass is very heavy relative to other materials so you've got to include the added shipping weight into CO2 calculations. Glass makes a lot of sense for things you don't buy very often where the ratio of product-use-count vs weight is high (condiments, cleaning products, personal-hygiene, etc).

Re: Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste

#53

Post by goda90 »

pen2l wrote: post #6

This might be a dumb question, but: why don't we do glass-style bottles? I live in America now, but when I used to live in Pakistan 20 years ago, I remember that I would buy pepsi or coki in a glass bottle... and if I wanted to buy a second one, I would go back to the store and give them the old empty bottle, and they would compensate me a few pennies for it -- and the bottle then is presumably washed and reused. It'…

We could even do reusable plastic bottles. I saw it a lot in Chile. They'd have a deposit on 3-liter coke bottles with a thick plastic. You'd exchange the old bottle when you bought a new one to avoid the deposit. Then they'd take those, clean them, and refill them. Often the bottom would even be a bit banged up from multiple uses.

Re: Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste

#55

Post by UI_at_80x24 »

pen2l wrote: post #6

This might be a dumb question, but: why don't we do glass-style bottles? I live in America now, but when I used to live in Pakistan 20 years ago, I remember that I would buy pepsi or coki in a glass bottle... and if I wanted to buy a second one, I would go back to the store and give them the old empty bottle, and they would compensate me a few pennies for it -- and the bottle then is presumably washed and reused. It'…

I'm ~45 years old. When I was a child this was the case. As a side note Milk came in plastic bags even then. But all carbonated beverages came in multiple sized glass bottles. In the Mid-80's (IIRC) there was an attempt to sell Coke-a-Cola in 2L size bottles but the glass couldn't handle the pressures and were apt to explode easily.

2L plastic bottles don't have this limitation.

Re: Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste

#56

Post by cybersnowflake »

The real story, is not that China is simply refusing waste, what nobody is really talking about is how the omnipresent dogma we've been indoctrinated with since childhood, that all this recycling is doing all this good is a flatout lie. And its mostly just been going to dumps in China.

I mean it would be as if the whole world suddenly discovered one day that Santa wasn't real. At the bare minimum this angle deserved a few months at frontpage billing but it just passed by without any notice in favor of continuing 24hr coverage of the latest mean Trump Tweet.

Re: Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste

#57

Post by [deleted] »

goda90 wrote: post #53
pen2l wrote: post #6

This might be a dumb question, but: why don't we do glass-style bottles? I live in America now, but when I used to live in Pakistan 20 years ago, I remember that I would buy pepsi or coki in a glass bottle... and if I wanted to buy a second one, I would go back to the store and give them the old empty bottle, and they would compensate me a few pennies for it -- and the bottle then is presumably washed and reused. It'…

We could even do reusable plastic bottles. I saw it a lot in Chile. They'd have a deposit on 3-liter coke bottles with a thick plastic. You'd exchange the old bottle when you bought a new one to avoid the deposit. Then they'd take those, clean them, and refill them. Often the bottom would even be a bit banged up from multiple uses.

[deleted]

Re: Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste

#58

Post by hexis »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #45
pen2l wrote: post #6

This might be a dumb question, but: why don't we do glass-style bottles? I live in America now, but when I used to live in Pakistan 20 years ago, I remember that I would buy pepsi or coki in a glass bottle... and if I wanted to buy a second one, I would go back to the store and give them the old empty bottle, and they would compensate me a few pennies for it -- and the bottle then is presumably washed and reused. It'…

The US was gearing up nicely to require deposit and reuse schemes in the 50s or 60s. Vermont was about to require drinks be in reusable bottles. Pepsi, Coke, Budweiser, Philip Morris and others got together, conceived the idea of, funded and launched "Keep America Beautiful". Vermont was lobbied and the deposit scheme died, consumers were blamed for the whole problem via campaigns on littering, and industry could do…

Bottle and can deposit has been going on in Massachusetts since at least the 80's (when I was growing up there) - https://www.mass.gov/deposit-bottle-can-recycling

Re: Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste

#59

Post by umvi »

opportune wrote: post #3

As far as I can understand it, the recycling industry is a well-intentioned waste of resources. It would be much better for the environment for all this waste to be sequestered in a landfill than for people to pay to ship it around the world only for most of it to be dumped or rejected (which, even when the Asian countries in question do accept it, they are likely to do anyway). These materials (plastics) are so chea…

So what you are saying is we need to create more plastics since they sequester carbon better than plants!

Re: Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste

#60

Post by gwbas1c »

Scoundreller wrote: post #33
chrisanthropic wrote: post #14

The first time I really started thinking about this was years ago after watching the recycling episode of "Penn & Teller: Bullshit" where they essentially warn that many recycling programs consist of shipping our waste elsewhere for someone else to deal with and that some day the countries we send our "recycling"/waste to will likely get sick of it and start rejecting it and we'll be fucked. That was almost 10 years…

I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong in sending materials elsewhere for cheap sorting or re-manufacturing. Especially when ships and containers are going that way empty anyway.

The problem is mis-representing what's in the shipment.

(There's probably a lot of plausible deniability in the system. People throw a lot of trash into recycling bins for lots of reasons, including ignorance or laziness. Trash companies don't take responsibility to make sure that's what's in the bin is actually what's supposed to be there.)

Read the article. There's dirty diapers mixed in with so-called "recyclables."

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