Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
1–10 of 219 posts
Re: Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
#2[deleted]
Re: Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
#3This is LUDICROUS. Recycling is harder than doing your taxes. We desperately need uniformity on this.
"BEVERAGE BOTTLES Recyclable. Be sure to remove the plastic film label, which isn’t recyclable." FFS. Have you ever tried to remove one of those labels? It's impossible.
"A bottle with a cap or an opening the same size or smaller than the base of the bottle is probably going to be recyclable." -- WTF does the size of the opening have to do with it?
"The How2Recycle label is showing up on more products at the grocery store ... GreenBlue says that there are more than 2,500 variations of the label in circulation" 2500 different recycling rules?!
This is not a consumer-level problem. It's completely ridiculous to expect millions of ordinary people to succeed at this kind of task on a daily or weekly basis. It needs to be solved further up the supply chain, or processors need to be centralized and standardized. Period.
Re: Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
#4[deleted]
Re: Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
#5I was wondering if we should put "seller unique rfids" on everything so the trash can be sorted and returned to the seller. Then we just add the cost of recycling to the cost of the product. Alternatively, add a "recycler unique rfid" and every seller has to partner with a recycler in order to sell a product.
Re: Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
#6This is LUDICROUS. Recycling is harder than doing your taxes. We desperately need uniformity on this. " BEVERAGE BOTTLES Recyclable. Be sure to remove the plastic film label, which isn’t recyclable. " FFS. Have you ever tried to remove one of those labels? It's impossible. " A bottle with a cap or an opening the same size or smaller than the base of the bottle is probably going to be recyclable. " -- WTF does the siz…
I've noticed that people aren't actually fully capable of just sorting the recycling correctly. There's always stuff in the wrong bins in my building despite an ongoing education effort to fix that and helpful illustrated rules above the bins. Rules about lids and labels is a joke.
Re: Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
#7I was wondering if we should put "seller unique rfids" on everything so the trash can be sorted and returned to the seller. Then we just add the cost of recycling to the cost of the product. Alternatively, add a "recycler unique rfid" and every seller has to partner with a recycler in order to sell a product.
Now you've got to ship everything back to the seller, and then the seller has to ship the waste to their actual processor. Plus the added cost/waste of the RFID tag.
Re: Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
#8I toured the Recology recycling facility a few months ago. The sorting technology is impressive, but the amount of material that they remove and send to the landfill had me questioning the efficacy of the program.
It sucks to push the packaging crimes of businesses onto consumers, but I think improving the public's understanding of what can and cannot be recycled can still have a massive impact on the effectiveness of recycling programs.
San Francisco has a great website to help you figure out what goes in which bin: https://sfrecycles.org/
(Note that you can recycle fabrics -- this isn't possible through most recycling programs!)
Re: Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
#9Someone has run the numbers and figure out energy cost and total tonnage and figure out what makes sense to streamline.
Plastics is a term which applies to thousands of different polymers. Some it makes sense to recycle, some don’t.
We can then begin to whittle down on the plastics we allow on the items which make most sense. For example we don’t needs tends of different plastics just because one vendor prefers the aesthetics of one over the other. Give them a select choice rather than an infinite choice.
Then label the packaging simply with simple easy to understand labels which are clearly visible. Avoid mixing incompatible plastics.
Re: Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
#10You can recycle polyethylene pretty easily on its own, and a lot of those plastic wraps that the article says aren't recycled are made out of LDPE. HDPE and LDPE are great materials for a lot of things that you might otherwise make out of wood or 3D-print. It's easy to machine, and it can be very strong and rigid for its weight.
Basically, you just shred the donor plastic, heat it to 300-350F, press the air out, and let it cool. With LDPE plastic wrap, you can fold and stack it instead of shredding it. You can also get cool tie-dye effects by using multiple colors in the same batch.
You can use plywood for the walls of your molds, and a toaster oven that you don't plan on cooking with ever again can be a reasonable furnace. To compress the hot plastic, try making a loose-fitting lid and tamping or clamping it down while the plastic heats.
But make sure that it is polyethylene - some plastics, like PVC, release highly toxic fumes. And others, like polypropylene, are often mixed with plasticizers which evaporate into nasty fumes and reduce the quality of the recycled plastic.