The Delusion of Advanced Plastic Recycling

Recyling plastic has died for me. I read an article (probably posted on HN) that convinced me the act of "recyling" dumps enough microplastics into the water stream that it's all better off in a landfill. Finally that was it for me. Maybe on the odd day I'll throw # 1 PETE into the recyling bin, else it's into the garbage bag for me. Now we must simply focus on buying less.

> There are many flavors of this kind of accounting. Another version of free attribution would allow the company to take that entire 30-pound batch of “33% recycled” pouches and split them even further:

> A third of them, 10 pounds, could be labeled 100% recycled — shifting the value of the full batch onto them — so long as the remaining 20 pounds aren’t labeled as recycled at all.

Amusingly reminiscent of CDO tranches.

I see a lot of people despairing from the consumer side. Let me mention the producer side.

Making an outdoor-rated device with a radio, plastic is a hard material to ignore. Given that there’s little else that has the right characteristics at anywhere near the right price, I’ve done a lot of searching for easily recyclable plastics (ABS ain’t one of them). Most of those are not right for the product and would only doom it to the landfill quicker when they failed. So I focused on plastics that would keep the product in use as long as possible. For recycling, we’re going to experiment with doing it ourselves—take used product back, and have our injection molder regrind it for a future batch (this is why I picked a local partner, they’re down for it).

Given that all the real waste is produced by single-use plastics, I think this exercise has been the commercial equivalent of washing and sorting all my food packaging.

From an economic perspective, the problem with pyrolysis waste-to-energy is that it takes more energy to use the process than it produces [1].

This is a process that is harmful to communities around the plants, harmful to the environment, and does not benefit users of the process. I do not understand why organizations like Exxon-Mobil and the American Chemistry Council are promoting it.

[1] https://www.lboro.ac.uk/media-centre/press-releases/2019/may...

I've heard it summed up this way: "They lied to us 30 years ago. How can we trust they're not lying this time?"

Recycling technology has not advanced enough that what is promised is credible. If they were honest about the difficulties in recycling, it may be that we still might have carried forward with the plastic revolution - but we probably would have been less cowboy-ish in adopting it for everything.

>> If you turned all of what’s been made into cling wrap, it would cover every inch of the globe.

An interesting analogy but cling wrap is famously thin. Here is another perspective:

Worldwide plastic production is estimated at just over 400,000,000 tons, or 400,000,000,000kg. Not all plastic is the same but its density is roughly equivalent to that of water (once all the air-filled plastics like Styrofoam are crushed down). A cubic kilometer of water weighs in at 1,000,000,000,000kg, roughly double the world plastic problem. (someone please check my math ;)

So yes, you could wrap the entire planet in a layer of cling film. But you also could dispose of all the world's plastic in a single 1km x 1km landfill piled 400m deep, which would be barely a dot on the map and certainly a far better solution than dumping it in the oceans.

Just do like Vienna... they incinerate their plastic with almost no emissions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml0gXre_V-U&t=91s

Plastic recycling is a scam - see DeGennes or Florry-Huggins.

But there is no need to give up. As long as we can keep brominated, chlorinated and fluorinated plastics out of the input stream (by taxes and deposits) burning plastic for energy is not that bad.

Fundamentally, as I see it, consumers and regulators love their Gore-Tex jackets and their teflon tape too much to have viable plastic burning.

I may be missing it, but this article mainly talks about the issues of pyrolysis and advanced plastics recycling. But it provides data supporting traditional recycling, citing a 55-85% success rate. Are there any other issues with traditional recycling, or do we just need to make sure that the plastic being recycled is using the better/older method?

Let us have the damned plastic straws. If the (industrial?) compostable / degrades better plastic isn't a myth go ahead and require that as the material, but otherwise straws are too useful.

As for the rest? Regulations. Regulate the use of easy to clean and reuse durable containers. Make their sizes standard, interchangeable. Alternately, allow containers that are fully disposable. However the customer fee for a fully disposable container should be zero overhead. Yes this includes paper bags at the grocery store. That tech is super useful and should be encouraged over... heavy plastic BS bags.

I just throw plastic in the garbage. This after a life of bending over backwards to recycle.

The primary concern for everyone should be carbon in the atmosphere. Landfills full of plastic might be bad for the environment over time, but they are not going to cause a global mass extinction.

Probably the dumbest thing humanity can do is burn plastic for energy (i.e. convert sequestered carbon to CO2). Followed second by recycling it.

It seems to me that sticking it in a landfill is a kind of recycling. We take hydrocarbons out of the ground, polymerize them, use them a bit and then put them back in the ground where they came from.

Unfortunately the only answer is that we need to use less "disposable" plastic in the first place.

I think a better approach to this would be to improve packaging technology.

Are there ways to use less plastic or none at all in packaging?

Recently my township in southern york county pa made recycling a lot more costly and thus MANY are no longer are recycling. Society embraced the plastics industries (like the tobacco industry of the past.. smoking is healthy) drum banging that recycling is good, yet and of course years later we hear their drum banging was driven by money and greed ... such changed society into you must recycle to past few years we are hearing nothing is recycled. Thus I do not recycle (MANY others here no longer do too) because its costly now and as well was anything really being recycled (what to believe?).

What i do rather is buy a few Fuji waters and reuse them throughout a month. OVerall when i was recycling or whatever i was doing i would drink 6 small bottles of water a day and put them in the recycle bin. Im definitely now using a ton less plastic.

Honestly the best thing is to just bury the plastic in a modern landfill just like other garbage.

Modern landfills are very good and containing all the bad stuff. There is actually plenty of room for them. And you sequester the carbon in the plastics.

Win win all around.

Does anyone familiar with molecular recycling know current state of the art, tradeoffs, etc.? Curious to see how that's coming along, especially given the seeming failure of mechanical recycling.

Has recycling done any net good at all? The old mantra of "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" is in that order for a reason - Recycling was theoretically acknowledged as the "least bad" option. But in practice, I think many people viewed it as a get out of jail free card - consume whatever you want as long as you recycle the packaging.

Now it turns out that it was (mostly) a farce all along. Most recycling ends up in landfills, and the recycling process has terrible pollution side effects of its own. The shocking part of it to me is that it has taken us forty plus years for this to even approach mainstream conversation. The idea that "recycling is a sham" sounded like a conspiracy theory up until recently.

The level of effort that has been put into marketing recycling, just to enable ever-increasing consumerism is staggering.

Every time this comes up I find myself so angry that we cant have a truly circular approach with legally mandated standard sized containers. Put labels on the damn things to market whats inside. You could even do the same thing with plastic utensils. This profusion of package sizes and shapes is the true insanity.

I no longer care about plastics recycling. I only care that they get to the dump.

I think plastic should be labled as carbon sequestration method and dumped into old mines to wait for some generation in the future that can figure out how to properly used it for something.

There should be a way to turn plastic into something we use a lot like bricks or road support material.

The second point of that article - that with creative accounting, 10%-recycled material turns into a small batch of "100%-recycled" material and a large pile of "0%-recycled" material - is kind of funny. Although it's interesting that we take this fungibility for granted when talking about money, but not plastic pellets.

By the way, the "carbon offsets" industry does this and more. It's a general problem with industries that sell warm-and-fuzzy-feelings with no one particularly interested in looking under the hood. Also extends to some charities, etc.

Anyway, the first claim of the article - that in the pyrolysis process, not all plastic is turned into plastic - seems... kind of nitpicky? So some of it is turned into fuel or paints - so what? A lot of consumer recycling is actually "downcycling". The glossy newspapers you put in the recycling bin probably don't end up as glossy newspapers - more likely, they end up as cardboard.

One thing that I would really really like to emphasize: the biggest source of micro polymers, those that you can find in antartica, oceans or the everest comes from car tires.

If we want less plastics pollution, this has to be handled first.

The world desperately needs a tax tied to how polluting things are.

If money's on the line industries and people will quickly adapt. Without it? There's way too much convenience to prompt looking for serious alternatives.

Minimalisim is what the world needs.

Pyrolysis is dumb. It’s relatively easy to recycle Polyethylene using compression molding (google CTC Plastics)

The delusion of thinking you can change consumer behavior via blog post...

It seems like the solution is to tax the producer.

Where I live, it's required that I have both recycling and trash picked up every week.

How much more pullotion is added by that second truck driving around?

Also instead of forcing me to get trash picked up every week why can't it be bi weekly?

I know I know, money. But guh.

Let's start to talk instead how to need less plastic. The most commonly discharged plastic is for packaging. Let's start observing the activity, usage who consume the most quantity of plastic: ready made food, small pack of anything.

It's then about time to stop vending machines of micro-dose ultra-transformed "food", individually package fruits and vegges not to preserve them but to sell them at a higher price, the proliferation of sugar+gas added water to sell more since many in the western world have access to public clean water at home and so on. Let's star selling the as prepared leaves in a significant quantity instead of pre-dosed individually envelop mini-bags, mini-bags of sugar and so on.

This will IMMENSELY reduce the quantity of disposable plastic we drop every day. We can't get rid of anything of course, but we can get rid of many. Even for milk we can start to redistribute it in the classic way instead of in the modern long-range shipping who need plastic to preserve it.

If you follow this idea you'll realize a thing: we need to delete modern dense cities. They are the biggest consumer of such packaging because the fast life in tight space demand them. I'm really serious. Try imaging you as a remote worker or an in person worker in a remote spread are how and what kind of food you buy there. You are at home, no need for packed single-dose bags of sugar, you have you own favorite tea in pots, you have plenty of space to stockpile food and buying in big quantity allow to save some time and money, also you might have time to cook at home and so on.

Oh, yes, it's just a slice of the total plastic we use, but it's a very big one, used for things we can avoid. Surely we have also much plastic for dress, and that's again can be reduced if we live spread because there is far less "need" to dress ourselves in gazillion of different outfit to go downtown, but we can't avoid that completely, let's start what we can start.