All the plastic you can and cannot recycle
bbc.com
bbc.com
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9hee9n/what_mak...
Several different experts weighed in on the comment section. Plastics engineer, garbage collector, recycling machine salesman all had some thing to post.
I've always tried to sort my trash, but now I realize that tossing every type of plastic in same bin may not be helping as much.
Now I try to minimize plastic purchasing. Bulk dry food and produce without packaging seems to help, and it usually means learning to cook more which in turn saves money. I've been using the same $3 stainless steel liter canteen from Goodwill for the past year. Might last the rest of my life
All in all, plastics are really not needed in most of the things we buy.
The only reason to wash your recycling is so they don't attract bugs - because for some reason our culture don't put recycling in any kind of bag or proper refuse bin.
http://www.audiomatic.in/show/plastic-addiction-destroying-p...
Here is the film that allegedly was watched by the Chinese President for him to ban the plastic imports (and ban the film):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooRVhRt1p54
Even if you instinctively do your recycling and minimise your waste, this film is a true eye opener.
For instance, imagine you buy a plastic bottle containing some healthy juice type of drink, the plastic label around the plastic bottle as well as the plastic cap will have to be taken apart in China by someone with more dexterous hands than yours. You might have washed the bottle out and done your best to get it into the correct recycling bin but there is so much more to it than that. Someone else is doing the hard work of working out what the different plastics are, grading the things, getting everything washed and getting everything cut into smaller pieces that can then be processed into new goods. As part of this process a lot of small bits of plastic float off to end up in the sea.
Note in the video how cigarette lighters are used to burn a small corner of mystery plastic items to determine the type. This is particularly the case with those black plastic food trays. Imagine if your local council insisted your children do this before putting things in the recycling!
Some comments here have noted that plastics are lighter - you only need 1/20th the weight for a plastic container compared to glass - therefore plastics are 'greener' due to the lowered transportation costs. This we know.
Some have also commented that washing glass containers is a 'waste of energy', however this is a moot point given that plastics that get recycled get washed in China. This is after shipping the junk half way around the world. So I am not sure why this is better, it still costs money even if those shipping containers heading for China are empty and therefore the ride is 'for free'. This is merely 'Hollywood accounting', the journey to China is a lot more than twenty times further than the journey to the local dairy or other bottling plant.
I think it is time we re-evaluate recycled glass containers again. The recycling is reuse and not this human misery story shown in the film.
There are other things that can be done. For instance, the milk in plastic bottles comes with a blue/green/red plastic top that contaminates the white/clear plastic of the main bottle. Underneath the plastic top is a paper laminate piece that is a tamper proof seal. Normally this is a white piece of 'card'. If these small pieces of laminated card were coloured blue/green/red instead of the bottle top with the top being the same clear plastic as the rest of the bottle then we would have a solution to that.
This could work well for the industry but nobody has thought of doing it this way. Instead the industry has lightened the colours of the tops so there is less colour contamination in recycling.
Then, of course, should we be drinking 'liquid meat' in the first place? Or having this 'liquid meat' carried across mountain ranges to and from dairies when only a generation ago we had glass bottles and local dairies.
"Why are other countries dumping their crap in China? Because they can't handle garbage sorting. Oh please. They can build nuclear weapons but they can't handle garbage? All their stuff is disposable."
This really resonated with me.
So, within one generation, we went from that to the average house on my street discarding a massive rolling trash-can worth of plastic every week (roughly). I try hard to reduce my family's contribution to the problem, but it's really tough. For example, we buy organic produce, and every single one has plastic stickers, rubber bands, and labels. It's pretty depressing.
That is pretty uplifting actually.
I think whole foods lead the way by giving 5 cent discounts for bringing your own bags - at least they used to - do not live near one anymore :(
by making plastic more expensive either by taxation or by giving incentives to reuse would encourage businesses to take action
Except for the energy wasted to manufacture the glass bottle, clean it, transport it back to be cleaned, and the increased weight/fragility over a similar plastic container.
For example, the reusable canvas shopping bag must be reused 170+ times to actually break even with the environmental impact of choosing it over plastic bags. By the way, that's without washing it.
It's little different than a heavy duty dishwasher that you find at a restaurant. They get much more efficient as you scale up -- when a large brewery washes beer bottles the costs are negligible.
The inefficiency introduced are externalized costs that get accounted for. Instead of paying a bulk hauler or the city to haul, acquire landfill, etc, you end up with a closed loop.
The same thing with other packaging. Plastic clamshell packaging reduces shrink for the retailer (thus providing ROI), but the inconvenience of cutting it open and cost of dealing with disposition of the waste is a consumer/local government problem.
The department of public works guy who picks up the discarded bags at the roadside or in bushes costs the taxpayer $30-50/hr. What’s the cost of the cubic yard of the earth lost for hundreds of years?
When my county was voting to ban on styrofoam, Walmart and Sam’s club put up posters about how the weight of styrofoam was saving gas vs paper cups. Supposedly a hypothetical tractor trailer loaded with a full load of styrofoam would save some quantity of carbon and diesel.
End of the day, waste is waste and it is difficult to account for the cost of discarded materials in a meaningful way.
WRT the parent comment, glass bottles can too be litter. I don't think they're relevant here.
Even the modest $0.05 deposit in many states results in 80% recycling rate for soft drink containers, versus about 35-40% for other plastic containers. At the co-op that I used to work at, reusable glass milk bottles had a $1 deposit and 95% return rate.
When I volunteered on an "adopt a highway" program through an employer when I was in college, we'd clean up a couple of thousand yards of urban highway shoulder and collect around a thousand gallons of trash. Plastic bags, plastic bottles and coffee cups were about half of the objects picked up. The rest ranged from the gross to the unusual (an iron bath tub).
Local music festivals have also started introducing a ~$1 deposit on plastic cups. It really helps clean up in front of the stages.
As far as the canvas bag's footprint, 170+ times is like 3 years of shopping (assuming 1 trip/week) - which doesn't seem unreasonable at all. Do heavy canvas bags really last less than 3 years? And how much is washing maybe once a month going to add to that? You're not running the whole machine just for one bag right? You don't even have to toss it in the dryer after because lint isn't an issue - air-drying is fine. And drying is where most of the laundry electricity is used.
My grandparents spoke to all of the different services available in our small city. Instead of paper towels, rags was were sold and collected off of your porch. The milk guy sold eggs and break as well.
Even in the market, plastic is often an inferior packing medium. Potatoes stayed fresher in paper bags and mold out in plastic.
My mom remembers this time, too. And I've seen these in at least one grocery store in Seattle.
In researching[0], it turns out the only farm currently providing milk in glass bottles near Seattle is in Lynden, WA - about 170 miles north, near the Canadian border. So not only do the glass bottles weigh more and need more energy to transport, they're so rare around Seattle that they must be transported 10x further than milk encased in paper or plastic.
Additionally, there is some cost and difficulty in owning, cleaning, and managing an inventory of glass bottles. There is only one producer of glass bottles in North America, Stap said, in Ontario, Canada. Another challenge of bottling in glass is keeping an inventory to accommodate the bottle return process and the reality that some bottles never come back. This learning curve added another aspect of trial for Twin Brook Creamery, and for every one bottle they send to a grocery store Stap said they need from eight to 10 bottles at the farm.
While researching this, I found this from another local farm - they view milk boxes very positively for numerous reasons, and suggest recycling them: Cardboard cartons are the best packaging for fresh, high quality milk. Cartons protect milk from harmful exterior light, and also retain the temperature better than plastic or glass. Our milk cartons are also recyclable. Using cardboard is the best material for packaging milk, and it's the right decision for the environment.[1]
[0]http://grownorthwest.com/2012/12/twin-brook-creamery-by-the-...
these plastics are doped with chemicals to help them withstand rodents, cold weather, or excessive heat/UV. The panels from a 1993 Saturn, while revolutionary in their dent resistance, are landfill fodder. No one will touch them. Certain parts near the ECU will also come doped with electromagnetic shielding.
The PHB's at BMW apparently got pretty fired up around fibre reinforced plastics around 2010 as well...so much so that most components like radiators, pumps and switches are all glass fibre reinforced polyplastics. These cant get recycled, even though they contain metal parts that often can.
Well, you can grind up the entire part and density separate the metal. Of course, you have ground up plastic stuff now.
Michigan - All soft drinks (and similar beverages) carry a $0.10 fee a the point of sale that you recoup when you recycle them. A few states seem to do $0.05, but at $0.10 people seem to start to care a lot more. Growing up there, almost everyone kept a pile of cans in their garage that they would take in to recycle. Almost all supermarkets had machines that you can deposit your cans/bottles in to get refunds. After parties in college, students are meticulous to recycle the cans because it would mean 10% off the price of the next party.
Cambridge, MA - Single stream recycling. Just throw everything in to the same recycling bin and the city sorts it. Makes it much easier to recycle but I'm sure this is expensive.
Egypt - When I was there, a coca cola from a corner shop came in a glass bottle and cost about $0.25 (USD). But you had to drink it there so they could recycle the bottle. If you wanted to take it with you, you'd pay twice as much. Personally, I loved drinking it out of the glass bottles, which are also very easy to clean, sterilize and reuse.
Miami, FL - Basically no one recycles. I've been in vegan cafes (not to stereotype, but the sorts of places you'd expect to see eco-consciousness) that don't have bottle recycling bins. My apartment building doesn't provide a means to recycle bottles, so if I wanted to do so, I'd need to drop them off somewhere (which I'm pretty sure isn't close by). As a result, I don't recycle plastic.
Interestingly, more and more buildings in Miami are recycling boxes. What I recently learned is that because of online delivery, cardboard boxes have proliferated causing a whole industry of recycling companies for these. People will actually pay you (I think about $100/pallet) for used boxes, so all of the apartment/condo buildings are getting in on the action.
In any case, I wish we would address the root cause of the problem, which is too much packaging. I've had Amazon packages with boxes inside of boxes inside of boxes. Every time I buy cereal, I'm buying a thick bag inside of a box. Our culture has too much packaging.
What about tetrapak boxes and milk boxes? Shirt bags from dry cleaning?
Things might be different where you are in the world.
On that note, plastic bags from grocers (labeled carrier bags in the article) are almost never accepted by recycling centers for the above reason. However, there is likely a grocer nearby that will accept those bags for recycling. I think all Wal-Mart stores will accept these bags.
Some of the supermarkets do take them but I have to suspect that they just truck them to a landfill.
Likewise, we are in the heart of our state's wine country. Wine comes in glass bottles. Our city has never (?) had glass recycling because it was deemed not-cost-effective, as the nearest glass recycler is a four hour drive away.
Point is: it's the economic incentives/disincentives for municipalities, it's all they care about.
It starts with detection and sorting robots (one example: https://www.amprobotics.com). Add sensors to tell organic materials from plastics, sort into cleaning. Once cleaned use sensors to detect one type of plastic from another, then sort plastic types.
If one type of plastic is bound to another with a metal screw, use a disassembly robot to get the screw out.
Once sorted, use standard techniques to turn single plastic parts into bulk plastic materials ready for reuse. (Ex. of do-it-yourself version for HDPE https://www.instructables.com/id/Making-Blocks-out-of-HDPE-m...)
Using machine learning and the latest in robotics, this entire cascade could be accomplished but the business model is broken. The machinery would be too expensive to pay back with the value of the recycled materials. Instead we need to value the effort of keeping these pollutants out of the general environment. Carbon credits are a great example of how this value can be created.
Create a plastics pollution credits marketplace where you get paid to keep plastics out of landfills. Now maybe the robots, sensors, and recycling technologies are cost effective.
Seriously, with all the talk about automated cars, and robotic this-and-that, you'd think we'd just have robots do all the sorting.
Robots are large and expensive, humans are small and cheap.
but it may change in the future, hopefully.
Inconsistent disposal/recycling between boroughs/counties - there should be a countrywide mandate for recyclability types for the consumer, regardless of how those types are actually disposed of. Eg. Everyone has a food wastebin even if the council has to throw it with the rest (it doesn't have the facilities).
Educating people to recycle is difficult enough without the inconsistencies.
edit Taxing packaging by weight and type would theoretically work to minimise packaging and encourage eg. Bringing a tupperware container to the shops. You'd also need to (countrywide) standardise container types so then you could eg. Put your standard coffebean container under the supermarket dispenser and do away with packaging.
The above is a thought experiment btw. Usual dicussions about personal freedom vs state apply, but the driving force there is valid :)
As far as non-homogeneous packaging goes, if it takes longer than 5sec to separate each bit into homogeneous parts, then I'd class it as non-homogeneous.
Recycling cardboard/steel/glass is cheap (you can even make money).
Recycling Styrofoam is expensive (you'll probably lose money).