New polymer additive could revolutionize plastics recycling | Hacker News Reader

New polymer additive could revolutionize plastics recycling

sciencedaily.com

100 pointschmaynard38 comments

For our personal behavior, let's remember than reducing consumption reduces pollution more than reusing, which reduces pollution more than recycling. By the time you're relying on recycling, you've already polluted a lot more than you needed to, all the more so at the poor efficiency the article reports.

If you don't create the plastic bottle you don't have to figure out how to undo its pollution.

We probably can't avoid all plastic use, but we're orders of magnitude above minimal use, considering plastic didn't exist for most of human history, and most current use doesn't improve anyone's quality of life.

From the final paragraph of the article:

"If you could make a milk jug with 30 percent less material because it's mechanically better, think of the sustainability of that," he said. "You're using less plastic, less oil, you have less stuff to recycle, you have a lighter product that uses less fossil fuel to move it."

In effect this could help to reduce consumption as you suggest (and as I agree).

The milk jug is so light and thin already, any more improvement is lost in the noise. Consume (waste) less milk, you're doing an order of magnitude more good.

Millions of pounds of plastic are made every year for milk jugs. A 30% improvement would not be lost in the noise.

Lost in the noise of producing milk. There is an astronomical amount of environmental resources to get to the point of filling the jug. Just wasting less milk (buy only what you can use to avoid dumping what has gone bad) would blow 'lighter milk jug' out of the water by many orders of magnitude. And using 30% fewer jugs saves 30% right out of the gate.

Isn't this reasoning essentially comparing a drop-in replacement with an ideal, though? Assuming this is a new technology that can actually make it through to manufacturing changes, the possible 30% reduction in plastic by using hybrid PE/PP is controlled by the relatively few milk producers and should be much more tenable than the societal change required for 30% reduction in milk use. Both reduce plastics usage, but one is a relatively quick change and the other requires change from many independent agents over a long time, so I don't understand why one is being trivialized. The perfect is the enemy of the good.

Sure, go ahead and do it. But it hardly matters. We could also arrange a system to collect fingernail clippings and compost them to make fertilizer for public gardens for the poor. Its just that everybody's time is better spent on things that have larger marginal impact.

I do agree with reducing consumption in general, but less plastic per bottle certainly helps in this regard. I think drinking less or no "milk" (or any other drink) by itself is not a practical solution on its own.

Plus you may found out you are part of a population getting healthier with less milk input, and it's always good to know. It can take a lot of time to notice, and no doctor is going to advice for it but the effects can be important. It's worth a try.

The 3 R's... Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. The order of them is intentional.

The PSAs that I've seen have always been "recycle, reduce, reuse". Doing a Google search on both shows your order having about 435,000 hits and mine having 214,000.

It seems like an education problem; I don't think it's ever been pointed out to me that the more-common ordering was intended to also express the favorability of the options (although it makes sense, looking at it).

I wonder what the balance of increased e-commerce (packaging materials) to reduced shopping gas consumption is like for resource use.

I am very skeptical about recycling (I do recycle though) - it seems like a tremendous about of CO2 is spent just moving the recycled goods from homes to the recycling facilities + the energy spent recycling the product + the energy used shipping the product to a plastics distributor. The option of filling our landfills is also costly but is it offset by recycling?

Does anyone know how recycled plastics stack up against new plastic once you consider the energy used in the entire recycling chain?

It's not only about CO2, burning plastics produces other harmful compounds, and without burning they stay for very long.

> I am very skeptical about recycling

I am too. I really despise that they push the burden onto the customer, instead of hiring people or robots to pick bottles or other shit out of the trash stream and recycle it. As a homeowner, I'm paying them for trash service. If there's a cleaner way (recycling - which isn't necessarily any greener, as you pointed out) , the waste management industry should be forced to do it for the greater good, just like coal plants are forced to run their exhaust through scrubbers to remove pollutants. They shouldn't profit, or burn millions more gallons of diesel driving huge recycling trucks around, by forcing (or guilting) us to do unpaid labor.

Remember, if possible, reduction to zero use is best of all! Imagine how much better off the world would have been if we hadn't found cures for polio and small pox and minor bacterial infections - and reduced the incidence of many more - if we hadn't eliminated the earth's human-filtering effect of starvation through the green revolution. The world, she would be so much more sustainable then!

I'm gonna consume all your resources, bitch

> ""What's exciting about this," he said, "is we can go to as low as 1 percent of our additive, and you get a plastic alloy that really has super-great properties.""

The properties of a polymer are specific to the application intended. "Super-great" doesn't appear on a spec sheet [0]. If you're making plastic for high pressure natural gas pipe, you go with a polymer that is different from a film resin. Plastic producers work closely with the end users to craft polymer that matches very specific applications. It's possible that this additive can be crafted for different applications, but combining polyethylene and polypropylene is already starting from different beasts.

In the world of polyethylene, I previously worked at a plant that made ~50 different grades/resins ranging from low to medium to high density PE for wildly different applications (pipe, blow molding, film, etc.). Of those 50 resins, they were made from 2 different catalyst systems and multiple actual catalysts. All of our end product was nominally "polyethylene". That detail worked to ensure you made exactly the polymer you wanted for the application. It is this specification of properties that prevents recycled material from ending up in the critical high volume applications.

If you're making millions of milk jugs a day, it doesn't matter that a single milk jug is worthless. You're using machinery that is custom tuned to the polymer you are running. That tuning relies on the polymer having specific, repeatable properties. We had customers complain when an identical resin was made from different plants at the complex.

> ""If you could make a milk jug with 30 percent less material because it's mechanically better, think of the sustainability of that," he said. "You're using less plastic, less oil, you have less stuff to recycle, you have a lighter product that uses less fossil fuel to move it.""

Plastic producers can already make stronger polymer that requires less material. Presumably the milk jug folks don't want to pay the premium for it. The same is true of this additive. What does it cost? It's the reason we don't make everything metal out of titanium.

[0] http://www.cpchem.com/bl/polyethylene/en-us/tdslibrary/Marle...

I wish I could ask the chemists this question:

How does your innovation fare when it ends up, in large quantities, in one of the oceanic plastic gyres? Is it better / worse / the same than the equivalent mass of polypropylene or polyethylene?

I'm asking specifically about longevity and environmental impact both of the new "alloy" itself and its degradation products.

We're still asking the wrong question.

The frustrating thing is we were doing miles better in the 80s, even though to be evironmentally aware then meant you were thought of as some sort of hippie or anarchist type.

Lots of supermarkets still sold milk in glass bottles as used by milkmen. You returned the empties to the store/milkman and they could be reused indefinitely. Milkmen delivering to door were still common.

A couple of supermarkets had bio-degradeable carrier bags that were just as good as plastic, they just had a slightly different (nicer tbh) texture. They had mysteriously disppeared by the 90s, so presumably cost a fraction more.

Most products had yet to succumb to the insanity of plastic and packaging. Lots of pop (soda) came in glass bottles or cans, just a few preferred plastic. Sealed packs of 3 slices of ham or one apple were still in some dystopian future. Paper, card and greaseproof paper were still common packaging.

A typical family would get nowhere near the amount of waste an average family generates in these "environmentally aware" times.

In Germany water bottles have an automatic markup of 25 eurocents/bottle. Every supermarket has special devices that will scan the bottle barcode and give you back 25 cents for each compatible bottle you put in - the money is delivered as a coupon you can use at the cashier to pay for stuff (you can also ask for cash if you want).

Sometime in the 80s or 90s there was interest in introducing the same as plastic was starting to be used for more bottles. From memory it was very popular with the public at the time. Nothing ever came of it, so presumably the Thatcher govt considered it an unfair imposition on businesses.

So now we have towns and hedgerows full of discarded plastic bottles.

Finland has the same system. A nice side effect is that since the bottles are supposed to be reusable, they are thick and sturdy plastic instead of the paper thin disposable ones.

Miles better in one sense (waste accumulation/environment) but miles worse in at least one other: convenience.

Guess which one is more important to the general consumer? People voted with their wallets.

I'm not absolutely sure it was better environmentally either, cleaning those returns has a cost, poorly packaged food means more food wastage right from the farm to the consumer.

It is so hard to buy lunch in NYC without ending up with a frightening amount of plastic (and paper) waste.

There is a start-up-esque thing called Eatsa that is sort of an "automated take-out" place: I go there a lot - not because the food is mind-blowing or I hate interacting with people, but because I can just take the cardboard bowl of food (with a thin plastic top: not good, but "least bad") and not be forced to have a plastic bag, 50 napkins, tonnes of plastic cutlery (fast-moving lines means it's hard to opt-out).

There was a couple of cafes in Australia that were doing "waste-free" (maybe it was http://lupiicafe.com/ ) operations - I hope that this catches on, because I feel like an asshat every time I throw an industrial-strength plastic food container in the bin.

It's even worse. Many composite packages we get today (cardboard / tin + plastic cover inside and outside) are notoriously hard to recycle in terms of energy and waste produced.

Plus, they leach plastics into food.

Returning to glass would be a huge step forward. I think the key would be get glass cans and bottles refilled in warehouses close to the customer, as it happened before with small producers.

Glass bottles are heavy. Trucking all that extra weight (compared to plastic) around uses more fuel resulting in more CO2 emissions.

They also have to be thoroughly washed and sanitized before re-use, which uses more energy.

There is a reason that plastic replaced almost all use of glass bottles for beverages.

Except no.

Plastic milk containers and bottles have to be thoroughly washed before recycling as the plastic is incredibly easy to corrupt with contaminants. Every roadside recycling scheme I've been a part of has required all tins, bottles and glass to be washed before recycling. (Seems pointless in the case of tins as the food debris will be burnt off along with paint etc as the metals are melted).

PET washing in a recycling line needs to be higher temperature as they also use the washing to disolve the glues used for outside labels etc.

The integrated washing of all bottles joining a reusable glass bottle line likely used a fraction of the cleaning energy now expended.

Is the resultant polymer recyclable?

> "Only 2 percent of the 78 million tons of manufactured plastics are currently recycled"

Is there any info/stats on what happens to the rest?

What happens to the rest is mentioned in the article as well.

From the article:

   2% recycled
  33% lost 
  40% landfil
  14% incinerated
  89% total?

I don't know what happens to the rest.

11% still in use?

It's stuck in abandoned homes or under crawlspaces?

"Sadly, nearly a third is leaked into the environment, around 14 percent is used in incineration and/or energy recovery, and a whopping 40 percent winds up in landfills."

It's in the second paragaph.

Nice work, I hope they can commercialize it.

One of the challenges I discovered about plastic recycling is that you can't easily separate plastics and people do a lousy job of it. With aluminum cans (70% recycled[1]) you can use ferrous metal screening to separate and a lot of other impurities burn off when smelting it.

But with plastics if you mix two incompatible types (polypropylene and polyethylene) the result is a crappy plastic that is brittle and weak. And there is no simple way of splitting them apart when they are mixed together. As a result it is really hard to get nice clean recycle plastic of a single 'type' and that limits its uses tremendously.

The ideal solution would be to be able to mix some magic mojo into a plastic and turn it into the finished product (which is what these scientists propose AFAICT).

[1] http://www.aluminum.org/news/study-finds-aluminum-cans-susta...

by definition plastics are recycled crude oil, they'd only end up burned if not turned into plastic.

the way we recycle is still broken, we separate it from our garbage thinking it'll be recycled but it's still burned.

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