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Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

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Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#71

Post by pfdietz »

microcolonel wrote: post #46

Non-aluminium recycling doesn't make a whole lot of sense in North America. For plastics, you can make some case for PET recycling, but little else is at all practical. Paper recycling is doable, but basically pointless when we have such high volumes of farmed pulp trees, and new pulp is more efficient than ever. The one thing I could see working well is a subsidized glass reuse program. I know a lot of people who pr…

I'm pretty sure iron/steel recycling makes sense too, since that can be easily separated from the waste stream magnetically.

Glass, I don't think makes sense, except for downcycling to aggregate.

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#72

Post by JamesBarney »

tootahe45 wrote: post #57
saddlerustle wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If cost of recycling is high, what is the benefit? It's not significantly reduced carbon emissions (a person's average annual plastic usage is priced at only tens of dollars worth of carbon emissions under a system like the EU ETS), and in the US it's not land shortage (an order of magnitude more land is used by golf corses than landfills), and modern landfills don't pollute the surrounding environment.

Doesn't matter how stupid it is, once a govt employee's job depends on it good luck getting rid of it.

I've seen several municipalities try to reduce how much they recycle. And everytime it was brought back by popular demand.

The issue is that the green movement has focused on recycling, and lots of people think it's morally good to recycle despite all the science saying aluminum is the only clear win.

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#73

Post by neltnerb »

xyzzyz wrote: post #51
hesdeadjim wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get doubtful looks from friends when I explain to them that the only waste worth sticking in the recycling bin is aluminum and glass. These articles that have popped up on this topic are hugely useful to refer people to. I don’t enjoy being right, I just want there to be an open understanding of the lies that have led us to this situation so new solutions can be developed. It might just be that burying it in the gr…

Not even glass, actually. Glass is pretty much just molten sand, and there's scarce value in recycling glass, when you can get fresh and clean sand instead. It makes sense to reuse glass bottles, but recycling glass into new ones is pointless.

The main value would be keeping it out of the landfill, in my opinion. At least glass melts back down pretty clean, I just think given how easy it is to use either existing glass or fresh sand interchangeably it's worth a little extra to keep the pre-used glass out of the landfill.

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#74

Post by noizejoy »

henrikschroder wrote: post #18

Who cares? Burn the plastic trash! You get the plastic item use out of it, and you get almost all the energy from it as if you had burned the oil directly.

I think that will require a large number of new technologies to make such burning environmentally sustainable and cost competitive with other energy producing technologies. I don’t have enough science, engineering, or economic knowledge to even take a wild guess at the feasibility of such technology.

Maybe that would be a better challenge for Mr. Musk and various other privateers and governments than running away to Mars to escape the mess we’re making of our own planet.

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#75

Post by pfdietz »

henrikschroder wrote: post #18

Who cares? Burn the plastic trash! You get the plastic item use out of it, and you get almost all the energy from it as if you had burned the oil directly.

Trash can act as an energy store, to produce power during times when solar and wind production are low. If the plastics were ultimately produced from non-fossil carbon (as paper/cardboard are), what's the problem with this?

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#76

Post by beefield »

armSixtyFour wrote: post #26
ceejayoz wrote: post #3

Not just touted, but actively pushed legislative requirements that lied to consumers. > Industry documents from this time show that just a couple of years earlier, starting in 1989, oil and plastics executives began a quiet campaign to lobby almost 40 states to mandate that the symbol appear on all plastic — even if there was no way to economically recycle it.

The blame is always shifted to the consumers, the logic being that consumers would make more sustainable decisions if they really cared about it, totally ignoring that it's either prohibitively expensive for many or almost impossible to judge the sustainability for many products.

> The blame is always shifted to the consumers, the logic being that consumers would make more sustainable decisions if they really cared about it

There is something funny in this common corporatist argument trying to get rid of responsibility by saying that "we just produce and sell what our customers demand". Namely, for some reason any proposal that would somehow increase the requirements for the corporations to disclose what, exactly, they are selling and how, exactly, that is produced, is vehemently opposed by the very same corporations.

To me, either you give full an unbiased disclosure about your products so that the customers can make their minds properly, or the ethics of your supply chain is your problem, not your customers. You just can't cherrypick here.

(sorry, no sources, just anecdotal impressions from public discussions during last decades.)

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#77

Post by LordDragonfang »

tastyfreeze wrote: post #60
armSixtyFour wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The blame is always shifted to the consumers, the logic being that consumers would make more sustainable decisions if they really cared about it, totally ignoring that it's either prohibitively expensive for many or almost impossible to judge the sustainability for many products.

If consumers were compensated for recycling materials they would be much more inclined to sort properly. Recycling centers that take materials that cost too much to recycle likely have a government contract to "take care of it". They dont have a lot of incentive to be efficient. They get paid to make it disappear.

I don't know about where you live, but in California, we have a "bottle deposit" on both glass bottles and aluminum cans (~$0.10 per item), which gets returned to you if you bring it to a recycling center. The only people I see actually bothering to sort and return these are very low income people and homeless people that go through public trash cans.

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#78

Post by KoenDG »

Same with batteries, far as I'm aware.

Can't actually be recycled. Just gathered and put in very large warehouses and nothing is done with it.

That's what our chemist teacher told us about 10 years back, anyway. So for me that remains in the "no idea what's actually true" camp.

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#79

Post by microcolonel »

pfdietz wrote: post #71
microcolonel wrote: post #46

Non-aluminium recycling doesn't make a whole lot of sense in North America. For plastics, you can make some case for PET recycling, but little else is at all practical. Paper recycling is doable, but basically pointless when we have such high volumes of farmed pulp trees, and new pulp is more efficient than ever. The one thing I could see working well is a subsidized glass reuse program. I know a lot of people who pr…

I'm pretty sure iron/steel recycling makes sense too, since that can be easily separated from the waste stream magnetically. Glass, I don't think makes sense, except for downcycling to aggregate.

> I'm pretty sure iron/steel recycling makes sense too

Oh, sure, forgot that. Though steel and iron are not that common in household waste where I'm from.

I specifically point to glass reuse rather than glass recycling. As soon as you have to process glass, the energy costs are massive.

Re: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

#80

Post by neltnerb »

saddlerustle wrote: post #20
blululu wrote: post #10

It is always a little surprising how naive people are when it comes to recycling. The majority of the cost and difficulty comes in sorting. Back in the good old days most US municipalities used to require people to sort their recycling by type, but over the years we have switched to a more wasteful system. For aluminum cans the material is valuable and relatively easy to sort. For plastic the material is cheap and so…

If cost of recycling is high, what is the benefit? It's not significantly reduced carbon emissions (a person's average annual plastic usage is priced at only tens of dollars worth of carbon emissions under a system like the EU ETS), and in the US it's not land shortage (an order of magnitude more land is used by golf corses than landfills), and modern landfills don't pollute the surrounding environment.

It makes consumers feel better about using single-use containers. It was really not very long ago that my university cafeteria had real plates and silverware and just washed it.

Now it's all faux-compostable plastic and polystyrene for some unfathomable reason which all has to get thrown in the trash even though they have "compost bins" that I know from calling around can't even handle the "compostable" plastic provided in the cafeteria.

Probably literally millions of containers thrown in the trash over the last fifteen years because they didn't want to pay a dishwasher... just doesn't even make economic sense...

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