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The Era of Easy Recycling May Be Coming to an End

fivethirtyeight.com

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Re: The Era of Easy Recycling May Be Coming to an End

#81

Post by mietek »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #34
yostrovs wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one gets paid for returning bottles in Nordic countries. They get the deposit back that was paid during purchase.

If you return other people’s bottles because they are willing to forego the deposit, then you do make some money. One of the ways that I survived my time as a skint foreign student in a Nordic country was picking up bottles in the city center on a Friday or Saturday night when everyone was drinking in the street and couldn’t be arsed to hold on to their bottles and take them back for the deposit. (I hear that now stu…

Here’s one from my student days:

We define the derivative of a party as the amount of alcohol that can be purchased by returning the empty bottles left after the party. A good party is a party such that the second derivative of the party is positive.

Re: The Era of Easy Recycling May Be Coming to an End

#82

Post by gruez »

coliveira wrote: post #52
NorthOf33rd wrote: post #3

From a linked nat geo article: “I never thought plastic recycling would work,” says Roland Geyer, an engineering professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of the study “Production, use and fate of all plastics ever made.” “There is a viable business model around metal, but plastics never has had that. It’s too low-value, too contaminated, with too many different polymers mixed together. And…

The oil industry is interested in the maximum amount of use of plastics. The less reusable glass and other materials we use, the higher the profits for the big oil and chemicals conglomerates.

>the higher the profits for the big oil and chemicals conglomerates

is that relevant if plastic is still the cheapest option? should we pay more just to spite them?

Re: The Era of Easy Recycling May Be Coming to an End

#83

Post by jeffbax »

forkLding wrote: post #7

Wonder what would happen if plastic bags and straws were just no longer used, I already pack my groceries in a school bag when I go shopping because the plastic bags are flimsy. Straws aren't also necessary, I don't drink coffee I buy with a straw and I'm managing fine. Soft drinks can probably just have those coffee caps and then gradually transition.

Straws and plastic bags get all the heat, but they are actually a pretty small proportion of plastic produced and littered. Straws are like .001% of plastic in the ocean, vs. 50% for discarded fishing equipment.

Those "flimsy" plastic bags in particular have a ~65% re-use rate in the US, whereas the heavy duty "reusable" bags often take far more plastic and energy to product, so you have to re-use them at far higher rates than the flimsy ones to make up for the cost to produce them.

40% of shoppers who have those bags forget them, so there's a world where we are actually producing more plastic and incurring food born illness from people not washing out their re-usable bags.

People not even trying to recycle is a huge pet peeve of mine, but I think the plastic bag bans tend to be kind of stupid. Nevermind that now people have to buy garbage liners instead of just re-using the bags.

https://reason.com/archives/2015/09/01/plastic-bags-are-good...

I would like to see something to get the soda industry back to aluminum, but even moving to glass the costs of it all are not very easy to track, because the significantly higher impact on energy required to move glass in bulk vs. plastic.

One good move you can make is do things like purchase bar-form soaps and shampoos for your bathroom… but ultimately we've got to get people off of K-Cups and buying so much plastic bottled water when they can just re-fill something, or bring your own container to a coffee shop.

And maybe give up on 2-day shipping from Amazon, or try to bulk-ship your order instead of placing a new one for every item you think of 30 minutes apart…

The closest solution will probably come from some kind of plastic-consuming bio engineering, or energy-harvesting incinerators like in parts of Europe and Africa: https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/21/africa/reppie-waste-to-energy...

That, and maybe move away from the "big blue bin" which has made people think they can just throw anything in there which has had the unintended consequence of causing recycling to cost much more and have way more contaminants.

Re: The Era of Easy Recycling May Be Coming to an End

#84

Post by KozmoNau7 »

gruez wrote: post #82
coliveira wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The oil industry is interested in the maximum amount of use of plastics. The less reusable glass and other materials we use, the higher the profits for the big oil and chemicals conglomerates.

>the higher the profits for the big oil and chemicals conglomerates is that relevant if plastic is still the cheapest option? should we pay more just to spite them?

Yes. Doing the right thing is often less convenient and more expensive than doing the lazy and easy thing. So we have to stop being so lazy and cheap.

Re: The Era of Easy Recycling May Be Coming to an End

#85

Post by manicdee »

brownbat wrote: post #74
manicdee wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disposables are only the better option when you move some part of the entire planet outside the system you are measuring.

Is your worry that we'll convert every inch to landfill? Rest assured, at the rate we create landfills, the tectonic plates will push our landfills below the surface of the Earth and create new untouched landmasses before we run out of space. There are unintuitive results in this domain. Highly recommend you check out some of the lit, like Hocking mentioned above.

Have a talk to any marine biologist about how effective landfill is as a means of disposal. Single use plastics are a hair behind AGW when it comes to existential threats to humanity as a whole.

We’ll poison the oceans long before landfill becomes an issue.

Re: The Era of Easy Recycling May Be Coming to an End

#86

Post by NorthOf33rd »

anonymous5133 wrote: post #43
NorthOf33rd wrote: post #3

From a linked nat geo article: “I never thought plastic recycling would work,” says Roland Geyer, an engineering professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of the study “Production, use and fate of all plastics ever made.” “There is a viable business model around metal, but plastics never has had that. It’s too low-value, too contaminated, with too many different polymers mixed together. And…

That's why plastic should just be "recycled" in a waste to energy plant.

That would raise an entirely different set of issues in Salt Lake City.

Re: The Era of Easy Recycling May Be Coming to an End

#87

Post by Yetanfou »

askver wrote: post #39
NorthOf33rd wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man, the Nordic nations. I remember studying abroad and being the industrious-borderline-alchoholic I am, taking the empties from any classmate I could, so I could re-up the beer supply for free. Here in salt lake, however, we actually have to pay extra to have a glass collection bin at home. There are a dozen or so sites in the city that one could dump the glass, if they were so inclined, or into the general tras…

A new giant type of automated recycling station has been installed around Sweden during the past couple of years, called the "Pantamera Express". I like this thing. You dump your stuff, it processes all kinds of things at a quite decent rate (~100/minute) and in the end you get a value check that can be redeemed in a grocery store. Here's a cheesy video demoing it (turn down the volume): https://www.youtube.com/watch…

The bigness is a good thing, most of it consists of storage space for (compressed) returned packaging. One of the more frustrating issues with the common variety of bottle/can recycling machines is that I nearly always get confronted by the 'machine full - call store clerk' message while feeding it. This takes up my time, the store clerk's time and that of the person waiting behind me with a bag of bottles/cans.

Re: The Era of Easy Recycling May Be Coming to an End

#88

Post by askver »

Yetanfou wrote: post #87
askver wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A new giant type of automated recycling station has been installed around Sweden during the past couple of years, called the "Pantamera Express". I like this thing. You dump your stuff, it processes all kinds of things at a quite decent rate (~100/minute) and in the end you get a value check that can be redeemed in a grocery store. Here's a cheesy video demoing it (turn down the volume): https://www.youtube.com/watch…

The bigness is a good thing, most of it consists of storage space for (compressed) returned packaging. One of the more frustrating issues with the common variety of bottle/can recycling machines is that I nearly always get confronted by the 'machine full - call store clerk' message while feeding it. This takes up my time, the store clerk's time and that of the person waiting behind me with a bag of bottles/cans.

Exactly. That's been one of the core problems with the 80s-style in-store "chewers".

Re: The Era of Easy Recycling May Be Coming to an End

#89

Post by FullyFunctional »

cc439 wrote: post #73
NorthOf33rd wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man, the Nordic nations. I remember studying abroad and being the industrious-borderline-alchoholic I am, taking the empties from any classmate I could, so I could re-up the beer supply for free. Here in salt lake, however, we actually have to pay extra to have a glass collection bin at home. There are a dozen or so sites in the city that one could dump the glass, if they were so inclined, or into the general tras…

>I'd love to return the glass to the brewery for cleaning and reuse This is one of the few cases where glass "recycling" makes sense. Unfortunately, glass is stupid cheap in terms of base material and production process so the only way to make recycling glass products worthwhile is to put the used product right back into service in its whole form (after cleaning of course). I'll try to find the study I'm thinking of…

> force bottling operations to standardize on a handful of containers in different sizes

And voila, that's exactly the case in Denmark

(I live in silly valley now and it makes me nauseated to have to deal with all the waste here - I refuse all the packaging I can but rarely plan well enough to bring a stainless steel container)

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