Precious Plastic Version 3.0 aims to fix plastic pollution
preciousplastic.com
preciousplastic.com
Here's some things to think about:
The "packaging" industry, is in fact a nice way of saying the "garbage manufacturing" industry.
At least in Australia, the "recycling industry" is owned by the "packaging industry". Hmmm.. why is that? It put it to you that the garbage manufacturing industry has in fact worked out how to "own" the environmental movement by pushing "recycling" as the "balance" to the spewing forth of garbage from the packaging industry. The packaging industry must be laughing so hard at how easily it has owned the environmental movement.
Have you ever wondered if all that packaging you put in your recycle bin gets recycled? It's a question worth thinking about.
I have come to believe that recycling, which environmentalists embrace deeply as a core value, is in fact just a smokescreen that allows everyone to feel OK about the garbage manufacturing industry creating an unending quantity of plastics that have made their way into every nook and cranny of our ecosystem.
Please, stop believing in recycling.... if you recycle, then you do not question the unbelievable, and unrecyclable, quantity of plastic packaging that you consume.
One you stop believing in recycling, you start to ask the question, "why the heck do we permit the packaging industry to create this unstoppable flow of garbage"
Seems to me that world MUST eventually move to a solution which is a set of standardised containers for all products, which are durable, washable, have a refund value attached, and may have paper corporate brand stuck on them after being washed.
Another strategy worth bringing forward is the idea of "garbage brands"..... showing off all those precious brands but in their true context... as garbage in our creeks, rivers and oceans, drains and footpaths. Once brands start to become associated with garbage, they might rethinkg whether they want their names and logos on the digusting mess destroying our environment.
Please, stop believing in recycling and the smokescreen will clear and you will start to ask questions about the packaging industry and our community/commercial system that supports it.
Asbestos, tobacco, sugary foods, packaging - all industries that have fooled us into believing things that are wrong but served their own ends. The packaging industry has fooled us into thinking that it is OK because recycling exists.
Say for example maybe 150 different sizes and types of containers.
Companies would be legally required to ship their products in these standardised containers, or pay some penalty somehow that is a strong disincentive not to make products that do not fit the standard packages.
Why "also"? It's not about wasting resources, it's about producing poison. When you spill milk, you waste resources, but you do zero lasting damage. When you produce plastic and other things and they, say, end up accumulating somewhere in the food chain, that's an entirely different ballpark.
Germany prevents local beer from being transportable (as it reduces the flavor and protects local breweries)... has it made German beer less successful?
"Reduce, reuse, recycle, in that order". Recycling is a last resort.
It simply doesn't happen except perhaps in the case of aluminum, glass or paper.
The amount of shit we waste, to be processed is crazy.
Another example of a smokescreen it "biodegradable". It's complete BS. For an experiment I buried a biodegradable tray in the dirt. Years later it still looks like brand new with no visible degradation.
Northern Europe seems a bit better; I understand that in Germany shippers have to accept their shipping material back, which have let them to package with actual popcorn which can be fed to live stock or simply buried in the ground.
We're told to put plastic/metal in one bin and paper in the other. But this includes pizza boxes with bits of food on it; things like pringle cans which are a mixture of paper and metal. And there is all sorts of plastics.
It's simply not believable that they have an efficient means of separating and recycling this mess.
They even have trouble recycling glass; surely the easiest to recycle. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-07/recycling-companies-fo...
Also relevant: http://theconversation.com/australian-recycling-plants-have-...
I believe there's regulatory capture or at least heavy revolving door activity. Politicians retiring and then being put on the board of recycling companies.
And we subsidise them: http://www.epa.nsw.gov.au/working-together/grants/business-r...
If the environmental movement can come to understand how its belief in recycling in fact subverts its goals of environmental protection then the world will start to change.
"I feel OK, I recycle, it's the best we can do."
You have both done well to articulate that it doesn't feel right, but do you have any actual proof against the value of recycling? And I don't mean trade-offs, I acknowledge recycling isn't perfect, but there are plenty of statistics that prove it is worthwhile.
If you can't find them ... that would tell you something.
Societal mismanagement has turned plastic in to an environmental disaster/burden. We have only ourselves to blame, not "demon materials".
Recycling is an important tool in material management in a global context. It is not "the solution" and it is not misinformation, or a conspiracy perpetuated by the packaging industry or the plastics industry, or anyone else.
Society was not prepared for the growth or complexities of plastic waste. However, we are perfectly capable of innovating through and out of the current circumstances. This is particularly true as renewable energy becomes more accessible and less expensive. Technologies such as depolymerization, pyrolysis and anaerobic digestion are all viable, scalable and in practice to varying degrees. Waste to energy or incineration has a long way to go, but it may prove to be worthwhile through further innovation. I've previously posted about carbon capture as well, which could work on it's own or with processes mentioned above.
It appears to me that the Precious Plastic people are doing good work. I don't think it's fair to diminish or dismiss that good work because we have collectively created a less than optimal system for resource management.
The Precious Plastic shipping container setup clearly is not out to pad the pockets of Big Packaging. It (albeit on a small scale) takes plastic waste and makes various end products, all while being completely transparent to the end-consumer. I think this is a good thing.
Each moment humanity is without plastic is a moment hundreds of millions of people are suffering beyond contemporary compare. If the waste is unacceptable, we have to find something to do with it, because we won't (and shouldn't) stop producing plastic.
Personally I think more paper could be used, and advancements could certainly be made in paper and metal foil manufacturing to reduce reliance on disposable plastics, but painting plastic manufacturers as simple villains is childish and absurd.
I get the core of your message, I think. We should consider the inputs to the processes and minimize those. Focus on the outputs (recycling) does not greatly improve the situation and in fact a fixation on it is counterproductive as it steals focus away from efforts to 'reduce' and 're-use', which are more beneficial in the long run.
I ask about pyrolysis because, although it still focuses on the third R, it does seem to offer a (potentially) clean means to return plastics to their original crude state. This offers some promise that the environmental impacts of waste plastics could be removed by reprocessing, rather than the current option of reprocessing into other plastic products.
In the UK, for example, around 40% of plastic packaging waste is successfully recovered or recycled [1]
It's obvious that this percentage must become higher, and that packaging waste overall should still be reduced. But by taking steps such as standardising materials, reducing colorants and promoting better treatment of recyclables by consumers, there's no obvious blocker to this percentage increasing further, with recycling remaining a useful tool to reduce the environmental impact of plastic consumption.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm... – p19
Recycling is a smokescreen that distracts us from what the packaging industry is doing, which is filling the earth up with garbage.
Recycling is the excuse mechanism via which we allow ourselves to ignore the packaging industry filling the world with garbage.
It is precisely because recycling is half effective that it is such a good excuse for the packaging industry to hide behind. It's not entirely false! How perfectly magnificent for the packaging industry.... a distraction/smokescreen that isn't entirely untrue!
You have made EXACTLY the argument that the packaging industry wants to hear you saying: "what the heck are you talkign about? Recycling is pretty darn good!". Now the focus is back on recycling, and yet again, the focus is AWAY from the industry that is constantly pouring garbage into the world.
YOU want us to stop looking at the packaging industry and instead praise how 40% good recycling is. I won't do that.
Consider not recycling, but all the garbage that doesn't go into recycling.... into the oceans, the drains, the streets etc etc etc.
YOU are permitting them to get away with it by defending recycling, which is EXACTLY what the packaging industry wants and needs... people like you to stick up for recycling loudly so they can hide behind your loud defense, so the focus is now OFF them and back on recycling.
Without these pointless arguments about recycling, people would be asking the question "Hey, why are we letting this industry pour a never ending supply of garbage into the world".
You, sir, have been played like a guitar by the packaging industry. Please stop playing their game and instead hold the packaging industry to account.
I won't response to the general ad-hominem, but I will point out that I said the exact opposite of that – that we need to reduce excess packaging.
Here's a solution at scale - CarbonLite's plastic recycling plant in LA.[1] Bottles turned in for recycling go in, and food-grade plastic pellets for making new bottles come out.
Separating items in mixed recycling is heavily mechanized, and the advanced systems use computer vision rather than humans to pull out unexpected junk. There are many cool videos on line of big plants where trash goes in at one end and gets separated by machinery.
From what I've been told, it's much more practical to buy a used Chinese made plastic shredder off of eBay.
More importantly, my eating is more
- Delicious
- Convenient
- and Cheap
than ever. Plus more social, in that I met the farmers who grow most of my food, more people come to my place for meals, and get-togethers are friendlier.
It took a while to learn to prepare food from scratch, but worth it.
http://joshuaspodek.com/?s=farm
http://joshuaspodek.com/?s=fly
http://joshuaspodek.com/?s=packaging
To answer your questions: I buy dry legumes, nuts, seeds, and grains in bulk with containers I bring to the store.
Most fruit and vegetables I get from a CSA, which means picking it up weekly from a drop-off point a few blocks away. I get a lot from the local farmers markets, where I also drop off my compost.
Yes, I eat seasonally and locally, not that I decided to. It just worked out that way.
I didn't buy anything to start the change, but buying a pressure cooker enabled cooking lentils and beans in five or ten minutes, which facilitated things a lot. I don't buy a lot, but the pressure cooker is one of the best purchases I've made.
I didn't plan to get into food and cooking. It's just that with every change I made, my food got more delicious, more convenient, cheaper, and created more community.
The results, in my friends' words: http://joshuaspodek.com/food-world-reviews
edit: the one on the front page doesn't, clicking through to the interactive one has it.
The bottom line is that grinding and pelletizing and then extruding even pure PLA post-use for use in the same machine is nigh impossible. It degrades, it gets dust in it, you block your 3d printer nozzle and damage your hot end.
Is there a $1M prize for solving this problem?