I find it strange that more people haven’t put it together yet. The stuff plastics are made of is literally toxic byproduct from the O&G industry. Yes some of the products have extremely functional uses, but for the rest of it, they’re literally selling us their toxic waste and trying to make us responsible for disposing of it.
They might as well be standing outside the grocery stores with a barrel of goo and offering you a portion of it (for a price of course!) on your way out. So then you take it home and try to figure out what to do with it, and feel bad when you realize there is no way to dispose of it in an ethical way which is why they’re shoving the responsibility onto you.
That’s why they should pay a tax for every pound of plastic they produce, with an equivalent refund for every pound they certifiably dispose of properly.
When you have to clean up your own mess you get good at it.
They won’t even clean up their own oil well sites. Look up how many oil companies hide all their profits and then declare bankruptcy so that they can get the taxpayers to clean up after a given oilfield runs dry.
I don’t have a lot of hope in them taking care of the other end of the process either, unless it’s by force.
It really is frustrating. Like we even have resin codes. Little numbers printed that should indicate what kind of plastic it is.
I’m in Seattle. We have a robust recycling system. I still can’t find anywhere what resin code plastics they accept. The website just says “plastic bottles and jugs.”
I pay to use Ridwell. They accept plastic film and, as of recently, “multi-layer plastic.”
The only way to tell these apart is just by judging the plastic for how it feels. Plastic film is stretchier while multi-layer tends to be crinkly? Half the plastic we dispose of does not fall firmly in either camp, so we just do our best.
Why does it have to be this hard?
Because recycling is not meant to be effective it’s meant to pass blame onto consumers
O&G?
Oil and Gas?
Oh wow duh, thanks lol
80% of the shit you put in your recycling bin goes straight into a landfill. plastic recycling was a giant greenwashing scam by the oil industry
Quite honestly, going to a landfill seems so so so much better than the alternative: going into the environment and oceans, turning into microplastics and getting into food chains.
At least landfills are contained. Bury the shit until we have the tech to deal with it.
Some day, between the plastics, nutrients from organics, e-waste, landfills are going to be a goldmine.
Quite honestly, going to a landfill seems so so so much better than the alternative: going into the environment and oceans, turning into microplastics and getting into food chains.
Eh, it pretty much does all that bad stuff from the landfills
How does buried plastic cause microplastics to leech everywhere?
Weathering (sun, exposure, abrasion caused by plastic being moved by wind and sea) is a significant part of microplastic formation.
Here you go:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2468584422001088
You may have a misinformed concept of what landfills are; most garbage is not buried and covered, it is mostly exposed in open pits and just plain old mountains of garbage everywhere. However, even buried, it still decomposes into microplastics as explained in the paper linked
I read the snippets and abstract. I’m not seeing how these micro plastics are getting out of the landfills.
Environmental risks of microplastics in landfills
In landfills, microplastics are not standalone pollutants. Generally, such tiny particles can adsorb various harmful chemicals due to its large specific surface area [54].
Never knew that!
In this case, microplastics generally served as the vector for migrating adsorbed pollutants including heavy metals, antibiotics and other pharmaceutical and personal care products [55].
That’s scary, microplastics can absorb and spread pollutants!
But I’m not seeing anything about how they’re getting out from a landfill. I even read a few of the referenced articles. But nothing about if or how they’re getting out.
Landfills leak all the time. There is no actually contain all the toxic pollutants in there, specially not the microscopic stuff
https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/2021/04/15/hidden-damage-landfills
Fair enough, there’s potential for landfills to leak.
But if its between that, dumping it in the ocean, or exporting it, the landfill wins.
Quite honestly, going to a landfill seems so so so much better than the alternative: going into the environment and oceans, turning into microplastics and getting into food chains.
Why are we full of microplastics then?
I recall a episode of penn and teller that goes over this in detail. Even talks about how landfills are engineer to gather the gasses that are released to reuse as fuel.
Do you have a source for that?
sorry, it’s 50% to the landfill, 22% illegally dumped or burned, and 19% incinerated.
that 8% more than i thought
That’s 90% off of where I believe we should be before the end of the decade.
9 percent seems high.
I’ll be honest, that’s actually more than I would have guessed (ballpark would have been 5% or under), sad as that is.
I’ll bet the term recycled is actually open for interpretation, and the official use differs from our (pleb) expectations.
That could be fixed with “virgin nondegradable plastic” taxes, deposit/return fees, and regulations on single use plastics.
But unfortunately the fossil fuel industry calls the shots in most places.
Reduce, reuse, recycle in that order. Recycling should be the final option to dealing with our trash.
I believe the focus for most people should be reduce (including myself).
I’m saddened that Reuse has fallen by the wayside. I brought some cleaned liquor bottles back to my store for deposit, and the clerk admitted to me they’ll just end up in the recycling chain - it’s too much effort to locate transport/handling for the bottles.
Theoretically, there should be a lot of inward transit for cities and civic centers with not much going out. There’s a very efficient mental image of dropping off 80 bottles, and picking up 80 empty bottles to bring back, but it would just take more logistics than people care for to do it that way.
It’s all propaganda. They do that in japan and for those that are gonna say japan is a first world advanced small country, they do that shit in Mexico too. I’ve lived in a number of states across Mexico for nearly a decade and from big cities to tiny towns you can bring back your glass bottles to the shops and they forward it to the delivery people to be returned to be sanitized and reused. All the big companies do this, you pay a smidge extra on that first bottle and from then it’s cheaper if you return the empty when buying a new one.
If the US based companies don’t do it it’s because they don’t want to, not because they can’t. I know for a fact coke does it in Mexico.
A lot of the issue there is everyone has to have their own unique glass bottle because marketing. A coke bottle has to go back to the coca-cola bottling plant. A Johnny Walker bottle has to go back to Scotland, etc.
Except when you reuse you’re subjecting yourself to micro plastics
Unfortunately, most plastics are useless to recycle - they either get incinerated or dumped straight into the landfill by the companies who collect and filter them.
Which is why my wife and I only bother with plastic bags, styrofoam, and the hard plastics marked types 1 & 2. These are the plastics which are easily recyclable, and therefore, have a non-trivial chance of actually being recycled.
We put types 3 through 7 straight into the trash, as they have about a 97% chance of not actually getting recycled.
Reduce needs to be the focus of manufacturers.
Even if we - the end user, reduce our usage enough that manufacturers ‘take note’ and provide us non plastic versions they will still use so much plastic behind the scenes that it wouldn’t make much of a difference.
Refuse, reuse, riot.
That is a way higher number than I expected.
not to mention it doesn’t matter where it goes, most plastic can’t be recycled or is not efficient to recycle it. Really need to just not use plastic as a whole
Easy in principle, tough in practice. Plastics are extremely useful in a huge range of applications.
Yeah plastic is great for a lot of stuff. Car parts, backpack clips, buttons, trash cans etc. But one time use plastic is EVERYWHERE.
My testicles agree 👍
sure, but do we really need plastic wrapped apples
Right? Why do gatorade and pedialyte bottles have to be in crazy over engineered compared to cheap crinkly water bottles? Both one time use which isn’t ideal but thinner bottles would save the company money right?
I wonder if it’s a psychology thing, like having a high quality bottle means people thing whatever is inside is equally higher quality?
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In my area they don’t recycle glass. I was so surprised when I moved here and learned that. Glass and aluminum are the two most worth it/possible afaik.
NGL that’s more than I thought, but nevertheless: don’t use plastic if you can avoid it. It’s not easy to recycle.
For instance, for beverages, prefer cans or your own glass / metal water bottles.
That said, 9% is a huge lot better than 0%. edit or considering the amount of plastics we use, a huge lot better than 8% too.
The older i get the more disgusting i find plastic. I would never buy plastic tupperware ever again, drinking out of plastic bottles just feels wrong.
don’t use plastic if you can avoid it. It’s not easy to recycle.
Plastic bags, styrofoam, and those hard plastics marked types 1 & 2 are the ones most likely to be recycled into new products. They are easy to break down and recycle into new containers.
Hard plastics marked types 3 through 7 are most likely to be filtered out and either incinerated or dumped straight into the landfill, as it costs more to recycle them than to just create new straight from oil.
How is it difficult to recycle? The temperatures requires to do so are less than metal, the 3D printing communities has people that recycle them into filaments all the time. I don’t think the problem is the plastic so much as it is how it is still treated as a disposable container and that neither companies nor governments pay for or provide reclamation means like recycling machines that pay for each bottle collected. In other words, the problem is more cultural than material.
Others have pointed out the degradation issue, but you’re also assuming that all plastics are thermoplastics. They are not. There’s huge variation in chemical composition and material properties between different plastics, and most of them can’t be melted and reformed.
But then the problem isn’t with all plastics, it’s with certain plastics, and around 70% of global plastic production are concentrated around commodity plastics, all of which are thermoplastic. The greatest degradation issue occurs with biodegradable plastics, which is perceived as a good thing for them, though even biodegradable PLA has toxicity concerns.
And how many times do they recycle the filament until it’s too degraded to use?
Depends on what you consider degraded, the only reason it would stop being recyclable is if it became too contaminated with foreign substances or exposure, which applies to anything.
Repeating plastics tends to damage them on a chemical level. The polymer chains break and shorten. This ends with the plastic being more brittle. Since 3d printed parts have already been remelted once, they have even more degradation than injection moulded parts.
I believe the recommended amount of recycled plastic is around 30% for PLA. Any more and the parts lose significant strength.
I personally would prefer us to accept that plastics aren’t really recyclable. It’s better to move towards renewable plastics like PLA, and treat the waste as biomass (either composted or burnt for energy.
I personally would prefer us to accept that plastics aren’t really recyclable. It’s better to move towards renewable plastics
Err … getting mixed signals …
What you are describing is exposure. There are plenty of build with 100% recycled plastic, so not sure where you are getting that 30%. I think you are perhaps thinking of the marketing material of PLA filaments that sell themselves as particularly ecofriendly because they include recycled materials, while I’m talking about builds made entirely out of things like recycled water bottles, which are made out of PET. PLA is more susceptible to exposure to sunlight, heat, and moisture, so rather than using it to hold beverages at that point you might want to skip plastic entirely. PLA itself is not recycled that much, but it is more biodegradable.
Exposure can cause similar effects. However, the act of heating the plastic to the temperatures needed to melt it and defirming it also damages the structure. It’s particularly obvious with pla, but all plastics suffer from it, to an extent.
Plug for Climate Town’s great video about plastic recycling
Bonus: if you’ve never used Nebula before (or you’re already a subscriber), here it is ad-free from Nebula: https://nebula.tv/videos/climatetown-plastic-recycling-is-an-actual-scam-climate-town
I was looking for this post. If someone hadn’t already posted his video I was going to. This is information that people really fucking need to know. The plastics industry is full of lies and those lies are stuffing our landfills with toxic waste.
That’s significantly more than I was expecting.
In my area you have to pay a lot extra for a recycling bin, and they only accept two kinds of plastic.
Then it came out they were just shipping it overseas to be recycled but sometimes it was ending up in landfills anyway. There are only a few houses on our street with a recycling bin out each week.
Almost like plastics recycling has been a scam all along perpetrated by the corporations to greenwash their business.
Reduce, then reuse, and if the other two cannot occur; recycle.
This is absolutely correct but still not the whole story. Recycling for glass and aluminum and steel can be done essentially infinitely creating a largely closed loop (though for glass in particular we really need to return to our old reuse practices). By using the same language for plastic as we do for better recycling methods we still make plastic recycling sound better than it is, even when reduction and reuse are emphasized.
I imagine that goes the other way, too: by conflating the scam of plastics recycling with recycling in general, some people are probably discouraged from recycling anything at all, including aluminum.
