Americans' plastic recycling is dumped in landfills
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
We’ve known this for over 100 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality). And solutions to the problem have been proposed for as long (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax).
The problem with implementing these taxes are political; people with vested interests will argue long and hard against any new taxes, and any working solution needs to be global.
It looks to me like outside this we there is a significant bunch of people who do not know or accept this. Actually, at some point I was pondering whether the main distinction [1] between conservative-populist movements and "the elite" these movements are against is exactly the point that "the elite" understands and acknowledges the concept of externality and wants to address this market failure with something, while the populists refuse to understand or accept the issue.
[1] At least we can be confident that the distinction is not wealth, money or political influence, what one could naively think elite has and non-elite not.
If the populists refuse to understand or accept the issue, the population refuses to understand or accept the issue.
It really depends on the population. Green parties are often pretty strong in wealthy European countries. Unfortunately, Greens also tend to be leftists that refuse whole idea of a free market. They'd rather ban things than handling externalities with prices.
The other problem is that externalities are hard to price. If the price is too low, the problem isn't solved. If the price is too high, people won't want to pay it.
In any event, the underlying problem isn't free markets itself, it's what the people want (or think they want).
The purpose isn't to make people stop polluting entirely, but to make it so they will only do so when it brings them a benefit larger than the societal cost of the pollution.
Why spend $$$ promoting and supporting recycling if a landfill tax is paying your wages?
The minimally logical conclusion (to me) is the public doesn’t want to pay for the externalities of X. Taxing X—assuming the tax levied is an appropriate amount to cover the externalities of X—makes actor Y who is doing X pay for X and its externalities, alleviating the burden on the public while avoiding taking an actual stand and/or engaging an effort to reduce X. Y does X? Y pays for it, not the public.
How much taxes on X adds to public revenue is mostly irrelevant, so long as it is enough to cover the costs of dealing with X without shifting that burden onto the general public via other taxes. If the revenue from X is enough to cover the costs of X’s externalities and also pays for wages and/or other public needs, that’s a net win for the public. You likely won’t see a city starting up a campaign to increase undesirable thing X just because it’d increase revenues.
Now, if the public really wants to reduce X by means of taxing X, it will likely choose to levy heavy, punitive taxes on X as doing X increases/continues, hoping to make it financially painful to those doing X to have to pay for X—for example, look at cigarette taxes. That can only go so far, though, before you encounter those for whom the added punitive tax is not a sufficient deterrent. Then it’s either a choice between more increases to get X to zero, or some other type of concerted public or legal effort to curtail X.
The act of taxing X isn’t enough of a signal to conclude the public is using the tax as a reduction effort. But it’s certainly a signal that the public doesn’t want to pay for X via standard revenues—and the public absolutely should not bear the burden for the negative externalities of any X. There’s no doubt a built-in hope that, assuming the costs of X’s externalities are known, taxing Y to pay for X will encourage reduction because—especially if Y is a company—Y wants to keep their expenses low, and really doesn’t want to pay for X. A city levying such taxes, assuming it is even moderately well-managed, will hope to see that the tax revenue for X will hit zero in tandem with X itself hitting zero—the success state[0].
[0]: I’m going to ignore the real-world chance that revenues from X get allocated to previously non-existing programs that then need to find a new source of revenue—but that’s a different problem.
In that case, X=car accidents - any public red-light-camera advocacy will say they reduce X.
Of course, you're right to say that a tax on X doesn't prove people dislike X - a tax on income doesn't mean citizens hate income. You could even argue a tax on alcohol means citizens like alcohol too much! But a subset of taxes, such as fines and some sin taxes, are presented in the public discourse as about reducing X rather than making money.
[1] https://www.salon.com/2017/04/05/this-may-have-happened-to-y...
I’d agree that some taxes are presented in public discourse as at least partially being about reducing some X—though fines shouldn’t be lumped in with taxes. Fines are worth considering as a different thing with their own reasoning and goals that often make them distinct from taxes—particularly because fines are punitive and come after known legislated/regulated behavior has occurred.
Inertia dictates that the tax will be permanent. But I hope you're right of course.
Why not have these taxes and also have subsidies that cancel them? At least you're naming the problem then, which would be a great step forward.
> and any working solution needs to be global.
I suppose you could introduce import taxes to solve this problem.
Burning fossil fuels -> CO₂ emissions -> Climate change -> Widescale ecosystem collapse, people dying.
Disposable plastics under open sun -> Microplastics -> Unknown damage to the whole foodchain -> Possibly (we don't have good data to work off), widescale ecosystem collapse, people dying.
These two issues are frequently conflated together, to the detriment of the overall discussion. But it is true that they both ultimately are results of the same failures of market-based economy. If you do root cause analysis on both, you'll end up in the same place. But since it's (AFAIU) unpractical to address the root cause directly, we need to consider which of the two problems to focus on; I'd argue we should focus on the emissions first.
I do think part of the problem is that so many of our landfills are poorly managed. In high school I used to spend my summers working for the public works department in the rural community I grew up in. A few days out of the month we had to go out to the fields near the landfill and pick up plastic bags and other bits of trash that had blown out of the landfill before being covered.
I say this as someone who avoids single use plastics, drinks tap water, recycles, etc.
It's hard to say exactly which types of plastics do what, so maybe some are benign, but it's a large uncontrolled experiment at present.
For example this shows how plastics shed fibres that end up in sea creatures: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/nov/15/plastics...
Some info on plastic estrogen-mimicking leaching: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3222987/
Bisphenol A is only one type. Plastics likely have other hormonal effects from other components.
Increased intersex births from endocrine disrupting chemicals: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5017538/
Testicular cancer rates are rising in the developed world, and it's linked to endocrine disruption in the womb.
Waste is the focus, but I think it's misplaced. Our materials are everywhere in the environment.
Even synthetic clothing sheds fibers everytime it's washed, and the same for microfiber clothes.
(Note of course that plastics are not the only source of endocrine disruption)
Disentangling those factors would be exceedingly difficult, although longitudinal cross-cultural studies (possibly widely separated twins) might get you somewhere.
Animal model populations' medical institutional bias is somewhat lower.
There aren't just the social factors with coming out, but also the education around being being trans. Some people live their entire lives not knowing and only find out after watching youtube, meeting people in the community, or going to therapy (which is also becoming more commonplace and acceptable). The stigma attached to trans people as mentally unwell 'others' prevented people from even considering it for most of their lives.
Also, I do not believe there is an unbalance of trans woman to trans men. Trans women are more controversial (bathrooms) than trans men, which puts them in a public spotlight. Trans women often present themselves as stereotypical women, and if they've not fully medically/surgically transitioned yet, it makes them easy to pick out in a crowd. Trans men, on the other hand, wear men's clothes, which happen to be gender neutral if worn casually. They are often seen as 'butch' women if not fully transitioned, not trans men. You oftentimes probably wouldn't notice or identify trans men when you see them.
Disclaimer: I'm a trans woman.
So much of our identity is special to us. How would you feel as a gay man if someone told you that the reason your sexuality was not standard heterosexual was because your mum's womb was knackered from having seven kids and you were last in the line?
This is a thing, but, after spending a teenage coming out, it is just a bit of a harsh thing to be told.
Since we can't even discuss this yet, what chance is there that we will have the conversation about how pollution is messing up our fertility and gender?
Trans people were known in ancient Greece ffs, it's mostly thanks to the Catholic church and its "morals" that we ended up with imprisoning people for being gay or trans.
And I never said they didn’t exist, so I’m not sure why you seem to have an aggressive tone. I know they’ve always existed. But with research showing intersex births becoming more common than ever, I have to wonder if there’s a connection to rates of being trans as well.
That said, I think it's worth investigating. Here's a paper from Scott Kerlin, showing the results of survey from DES sons. It's a group of people born as male to women given DES, an estrogen affecting drug.
http://worldaa1.miniserver.com/~gires/assets/Research-Assets...
"More than 150 network members with “confirmed” or “strongly suspected” prenatal DES exposure status indicated they are either transsexual (pre- or post-operative, 90 members), transgender (48 members), “gender dysphoric” (17 members), or intersex (3 members)."
-------
A strong caveat to this would be that people don't just join a group called DES sons on a whim. A large number of women were given DES. Many more than 500 sons were born to them. People who joined the group are self selecting as having had some sort of problem or concern to discuss.
And that's almost all I could find on the topic. The only other thing that seemed notable is that the brains of transgender people resemble those of their chosen sex, not their birth sex. I.e. a MTF person had a brain typical of a women, not a man. But, this difference may only appear in adulthood, so it isn't clear if it is physiological or social.
If someone wanted to investigate this, investigating the testicular and endocrinal health of MTF people before transition would be a good start. If endocrine disruption had anything to do with it you would expect to see much more testicular cancer. The DES group had 5 out of 500 with this cancer, incidentally, while having a low cancer incidence overall.
I would categorize the published research on this topic as extremely slim. It's not even at the hypothesis stage, and your question isn't answerable without much further research.
---------
Oh also, while traditionally there were more MTF, recently gender dysphoria clinics are reporting more FTM.
Here are some numbers from the UK: http://gids.nhs.uk/number-referrals
The year on year referral increase is very large. So social acceptance/awareness must have a sizeable role. Endocrine dysruption can't explain a ~4x increase in 5 years.
---------
Edit: I should have included this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_transsexuality
Doesn't touch on endocrine disruption in terms of estrogen exposure though.
I haven't researched it further, but I heard a theory that female hormonal contraception is a contributor to people identifying as LGBT.
Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Austria all put less than 5% of their trash directly into landfills.
Functioning trash handling is far more effective at reducing the ecological impact of plastic than any attempt to reduce plastic consumption.
Personaly I think Switzerland is the best model on how to handle trash properly.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/fact-check_is-switzerland-the-w...
More and more polyethylene plants are being set up all the time.
I do take advantage of these almost-free flights, but often wish they'd be more expensive -- to make rail travel more competitive if nothing else.
It's up to the political system to to produce those, and it's proven incapable.
For example, we've known for a long time what will solve global warming most effectively: Carbon taxes. Preferably global ones, but local ones are the correct regional step.
And our political systems have spent decades doing everything except this simple thing that will actually work.
Markets only function because there are rules, we just argue about what they should be.
This is exactly why I see a ray of hope since Canada announced she will ban single use plastic in near future [0].
I hope international cooperations grasp this chance to abandon as much plastic as possible altogether in the global supply chain, not just to cater to Canada's upcoming regulations.
[0]: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/06/canad...
Not necessarily. Just thinking about total CO2 released, it should be better for the environment to release the energy in the oil you have currently (in plastic form) than burn extra CO2 extracting an equivalent oil from the ground, refining it, transporting it, etc.
The equation might be different if you're getting your energy from non-fossil fuels. In this case, the correct answer is probably to recycle it properly rather than ship it to a third country for an unknown fate.
EDIT: I'm assuming here that your incinerator is a modern one that generates energy and that you're not just burning things because they're inconvenient.
It will be as soon as plastic recycling becomes economically attractive. I think it'll take a ban on new plastic production and consequent shortage for that to happen. Until then, I'm sure there's a few of these dodgy "recycling" businesses that put plastic in landfills with the intent of mining it for resources again in a possible future.
You can use glass bottles and wash and reuse them.
You can package things in wax paper.
You can wear clothes made of natural fiber.
Plastic needs to be treated like asbestos: useful, but the uses do not justify the risk in most cases.
The reality is that plastics are great materials that are very useful, the flip side being that they need to be properly disposed of.
Yes, they are probably over-used in some cases, e.g. packaging, but that does not mean we should treat plastics "like asbestos".
For example, you mention glass bottles: They require a lot of energy to be manufactured, they are heavy (more energy needed to transport them), they require energy, water, and chemicals to be washed. Is that necessarily more environmentally friendly that plastic efficiently recycled?
You also mention wax paper, which (as far as I know) is not very recyclable because it's waxed. Probably better to use cardboard or a type of plastic that recycles well (and is actually recycled!)
Perhaps these criteria could be based on the ease and cost of recycling, with a huge penalty if not recyclable and a bonus if biodegradable/compostable.
The same argument could be made for rainforest deforestation, saying it's a good thing because it's feeding the poor!
Nonsense, tax the externality and then give back and support the worst affected through taxation or aid if needed. Inequality is at a record high, perhaps it wouldn't be so high if we made everything more expensive and then taxed the rich to pay for it.
In the US? Maybe, jury is still out: https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=696709717
In fairness, there is absolutely no way Dollar General is going to continue to source your product if it starts costing an extra 10-25 cents more per unit. You'd get cancelled quicker than your average Netflix Original.
If you think the Walmart process is bad behind the scenes, you definitely don't want to see how the Dollar General sausage is made. I'm pretty sure you could count on a switch to aluminum and paper containers in Dollar General fairly quickly.
They'd probably even market it as, "Eco Friendly".
They really are shameless.
If you want to buy a drink, bring a reusable bottle to the shop and fill it up from a dispensery or use glass bottles.
The culture simply needs to change - its a habitual problem, not a technical one. We have the technology.
I think Germany has their Pfand (plastic/glass deposit) system working really really well, although admittingly the plastic gets incinerated. I don't know why more countries don't adopt these methods or similar. Homeless people pick them up, and get 25c for it, then the bottles are washed and reused. Fantastic. We should invest in optimising these ideas so they become more ubiquitous and cheaper than plastic.
There are three types of bottle deposits: glass bottles 8c 29.2% market share (ms) (probably almost entirely beer), reusable plastic bottles 25c 13.6% ms, single use plastic bottles 52.2% ms and aluminum cans 25c 3.2% ms (2016, numbers are up now). [0]
The single use plastic bottle deposit was introduced as a measure to REDUCE market share and support use of glass, but instead people got used to paying more for their water bottles and returning them or "donating" them to poor retired or just plain poor people and might even feel good about themselfes which is not a great incentive. Reusable plastic bottles got more and more replaced by single use and glass bottles water vanished almost entirely. Every grocery store in Germany had to install huge sorting-and-compressing machines for all the different bottle deposits. For some years (long before plastics deposit I believe) a deposit for aluminum soda cans worked quite well but I get the impression products are increasing (I guess bcs people got used to pay the extra 25c.).
This all boils down to one solution in my opinion: Regulation. The 'free' market is not willing and/or able to factor in environmental variables but is forced to ramp down prices no matter what to nuture their shareholders and growth.
There is literally no need to buy bottled water. There is probably not a single town in Germany where you are not able to drink tap water. So yes, a change in mentality would be necessary. But banning single use plastic bottles (as a start) instead of "taxing them properly" wouldn't change our lifestyle one bit.
This troubles me because I am pretty certain we all have to change our lifestyles drastically if we want to somehow limit the environmental impact.
[0] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/themen/neuer-tiefststand-imme...
Plastic can be recycled, but only into lower grade plastic. Eventually it gets burnt or buried.
Burning plastics is an option especially if plant-based (to be carbon neutral) but it then raises the issue of land use.
Biodegradability/compostability is another option with new types of plastics and/or GMO bacteria.
The point is to look at the full picture instead of claiming that all plastics should be get rid of without considering if the alternatives are any better.
For example, the article is very explicit about why recycling is not working - it has to do with economics - and y’all talking nonsense about GMO bacteria and energy use.
https://www.waste360.com/plastics/look-new-plant-will-produc...
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/24/almost-no-plastic-bottles-ge...
There is a major, qualitative difference between Reduce, which is strategic and lowers pollution, and Reuse and Recycle, which are tactical and mostly just shuffle pollution around.
If your strategy is in place and people support it, use all the tactics you can. But if your strategy is not in place, tactics often backfire. As this article points out, people think they're being virtuous by recycling so they buy plastic profligately -- the opposite of the strategy. I'm starting to think we should change the phrase "Reduce, reuse, recycle" to "Reduce".
I treat this more in detail in my Leadership and the Environment podcast episode 183: Reusing and recycling are tactical. Reducing is strategic http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/rants-raves-monologues-volume....
On another note:
We can each reduce our consumption and therefore demand significantly, while improving our lives. When I cut out nearly all my packaged food, my food costs went down and quality of life and food went up. The last two times I emptied my garbage were September 2018 and July 2017.
Some might say it's hard or only one person, as I would have before experiencing the change, but it was rewarding and improves my life, as it will yours. That it reduced my garbage by about 90% is a side effect. http://joshuaspodek.com/year-emptied-garbage.
I'm not saying only individuals should change or suggesting not doing other things. I support institutional change and pricing extraction and waste with taxes since the public pays for the cleanup. But everyone right here right now can cut their consumption and waste, which will lead to faster implementation of institutional change, legislation, etc.
Asbestos kills people. What plastic risk are you referring to, environmental pollution?
Plastic likely has all sorts of medical complications, that we will probably start to see manifest here in the near future now that it is now in the food and water we consume [1], now in the air we breathe [2] and even in our poop [3].
>Ingested microplastic particles can physically damage organs and leach hazardous chemicals—from the hormone-disrupting bisphenol A (BPA) to pesticides—that can compromise immune function and stymie growth and reproduction. Both microplastics and these chemicals may accumulate up the food chain, potentially impacting whole ecosystems, including the health of soils in which we grow our food. Microplastics in the water we drink and the air we breathe can also hit humans directly.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/from-fish-to-huma...
[1] https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/news/were-literally-eating...
[2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/04/micro...
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2018/10/22/guess-what-...
Whilst rich people on hacker News get to eat quality produce, most people aren't as fortunate.
They are exposed to higher levels of pollution. I mean, the west basically dumps their trash in South East Asia now with little care or regard. Do you think this doesn't pollute the land, animals and people?
Consider:
hydrocarbons -> energy
vs.
hydrocarbons -> plastic product -> possible recycling -> energy.
Plastics can also be made from cellulose. If this route is taken and becomes more popular, you could grow stuff, make it into plastics, use it, then bury it to store rid of carbon. Possibly turn plastics it into cubes and drop them into some deep place in ocean without volcanic activity where it stays inert hundreds of millions of years.
It may be possible to burn it into charcoal, which would be safe to sequester? But the noxious flue gases would need to be cleaned.
Someone answered me that most plastics can be recycled because he worked in a recycling plant, meaning this was a bad idea. I linked him a forbes article after a few comments and he stopped answering. It's hard to know if that guy was just astroturfing me.
Second paragraph seems a little conspiracy theorist-y to be honest!
I agree, though it's always worth remembering 1) that AI and automated marketing and responses will only get better as time goes on, and 2) there are a lot of unemployed people who can, could, and will shill for things on the internet. If there is a profit motive 1 & 2 will likely happen.
The problem is separating idiots from deliberate misinformation.
There's some poorly run landfills, but how about we campaign to somewhat improve landfills instead of trying to reform all of modern society?
Also, you aren't thinking in deep time. Plastic waste needs to be managed indefinitely if it isn't going to be incinerated, because plastic becomes more dangerous, not less, as it becomes finer particles. Which also penetrate containment more readily.
We can regulate our own landfills and we can regulate which countries we export to. This is a far more realistic prospect than just banning most plastic products outright, as you suggest.
> Plastic waste needs to be managed indefinitely if it isn't going to be incinerated, because plastic becomes more dangerous, not less, as it becomes finer particles.
Yes, waste needs to be managed indefinitely, and we will always have to manage waste. We can do that.
How many years will it take until the plastic is no longer able to get into the food chain?
And a little more concerning
>What matters most is whether these physical and chemical impacts ultimately affect an organism’s growth, reproduction or susceptibility to illness. In a surprising study published in March, not only did fish exposed to microplastics reproduce less but their offspring, who weren’t directly exposed to plastic particles, also had fewer young, suggesting the effects can linger into subsequent generations.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/from-fish-to-huma...
It took decades to understand asbestos was bad as it is and even then it took direct exposure (generally with you working with the stuff). Plastic is building up in the environment daily, and the levels have only really start to increase.
Plastic is also effectively forever, there is no practical plastic abatement like there is with asbestos. One great way of dealing with asbestos removal is keeping it damp, microplastics though are just going to spread with water. Microplastics are in the air and water, it's effectively falling like snow from the sky which is documented in the NatGeo article I linked.
Concentrations of microplastics is only going to go up as more and more of the plastic we've created starts to break down into smaller and smaller pieces. When you get small enough, like nano-scale, particles can get extremely dangerous as they can cross the cell membrane.
Plastic pollution is likely going to be far worse than asbestos and for incredibly more species.
Someone else's problem.
In all seriousness, by then either we have solved waste disposal through automation, or we will be living in landfills.
Spread the word.
If you could be assured it would be burned, then separating it would make some sense, but as long as we're looking for a cheap feel-good moment from the recycling bin, there is no assurance of what will happen to it. A properly designed landfill is the best place for plastic right now, unless it can be shredded and mixed with bunker oil to provide a cheap fuel -- that might actually make it more valuable.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20433851
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19889365
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19399543
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19346342
Not quite as recent:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18893252
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17841584
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17677698
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17409152
"Times we've talked about this before...
...
-Love, Repost Bot"
"Between January and October 2018, Germany exported 114,000 tons of plastic rubbish to Malaysia, an increase of 125 percent"
"Germans are great at separating their household waste, and the country is not allowed to export plastic unless it's for recycling. So why are there piles of German garbage all over Malaysia?"
https://www.handelsblatt.com/today/politics/the-plastic-trai...
That's about 3 cent per package if the average package weighs 42g. That's dirt cheap for a pretty clean solution. We suck as a society.
Plastic is a huge problem because it is a different beast and technology isnt there to efficiently recycle a lot of different plastics economically at nationwide scale.
Some plastic needs to be used as ignition help when burning other garbage in power plants (where filtration massively reduces negative effects from burning in a centralized manner).
If you had to pay $1 for your coffee cup, and $1 extra for the lid, you might consider foregoing the lid. Or maybe you would even bring a reusable coffee cup from home.
If it costs $1 to clean it up, but only $0.50 to collect and recycle, problem solves itself.
And don't forget to keep that taxes up to date so recycling still costs less than cleaning in the future :-)
With biochar the land is improved for growing crops where as landfills are unlikely to be useable in any form in the near term.
Likewise a lot is the “sorting” people do when they throw out their trash is pretty bad. For example, a plastic bottle the cap on can’t be properly cleaned so it doesn’t get recycled. A pizza box in a stack of cardboard ruins the entire batch.
Planet Money did a really interesting two episode series on recycling. That goes into why things are ending up in landfills and why we continue to practice the ritual of splitting our trash.
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/12/741283641/episode-926-so-shou...
The rest actually doesn't go to landfill, but gets incinerated.
Here's a TED talk (from 2011, not sure what's changed if anything) about this: https://www.ted.com/talks/mike_biddle?language=en
And a key quote: "Now when you see these mountains, most people think of garbage. We see above-ground mines. And the reason we see mines is because there's a lot of valuable raw materials that went into making all of this stuff in the first place."
From a realistic POV, yes, make people put plastic in a “landfill” bin, from a psych POV, make them do busywork so we feel better about ourselves.
https://liveworkgermany.com/2017/05/how-does-the-german-pfan...
I wonder hoy effective this Pfand system is against littering. When I go to germany for a trip with the family I always find the streets clean, and I bet this is not because the germans clean streets lot, but as a consequence they don't litter instead.
Which is terrible. They could be putting that effort into actually doing something that helps. Or at least have their time back.
You can apply backpressure to the stream by buying things not wrapped in plastic in the first place. It’ll take some time for the signal to have an impact, but if enough people selected less-packaged goods, the market would fix the supply chain over time.
Also, if you pick items with less packaging up-front, then you don’t need to do as much work sorting waste on the back end!
Not only was this supposed to be sorted between paper/plastic/glass/metal, but also between different types of plastic? That was never going to happen on an individual basis. And what about huge apartment buildings and hotels?
The only way recycling would have made sense was if it was all being sorted at the waste facility, which if it was, wouldn't have required people to sort it individually. Hence, the whole thing was a sham from the beginning.
Thermal Depolymerization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization
Even better: Molten Salt Oxidation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_oxidation this is an exothermic reaction!
I wish I had the gumption to make a start up out of MSO.
That plant had problems due to welds that weren't capable of handling the pressure. The smell was horrible and the neighbors considered it a nuisance. And the company went bankrupt. Ten years ago.
Has anyone else tried TDP since then? If so then please update the article.
> The pilot plant in Carthage was temporarily shut down due to smell complaints. It was soon restarted when it was discovered that few of the odors were generated by the plant.[14] Furthermore, the plant agreed to install an enhanced thermal oxidizer and to upgrade its air scrubber system under a court order.[15]
> According to a company spokeswoman, the plant has received complaints even on days when it is not operating. She also contended that the odors may not have been produced by their facility, which is located near several other agricultural processing plants.[16]
> As of August 24, 2006, the last lawsuit connected with the odor issue has been dismissed, and the problem is acknowledged as fixed.[19] In late November, however, another complaint was filed over bad smells.[20] This complaint was closed on January 11 of 2007 with no fines assessed.[21]
To me that sounds like people complained speciously.
It also says,
> In April 2013, CWT was acquired by a Canadian firm, Ridgeline Energy Services, based in Calgary.
So who knows? In any event, that's why I used "scare quotes" around "solved": TPD needs work; MSO is used to dispose of munitions and stuff but there's no mass plastic recycling center in the world (yet) using it.
There's a commercial plant in the UK that's going to come online this year that breaks down plastics into hydrogen, methane and other gases.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/20/how-plas...
Reminds me of the "cookie dough" smell in Palo Alto: http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/20130404/in-search-of-...
> So it was that while running, but not so much as to force my body into open rebellion, I noticed something odd. When I was heading down the gently sloping hill on Peter Coutts Road towards Stanford Avenue, I turned right as usual to head back home, passed along the edge of a grassy area, and smelled...cookies. But not really cookies. Raw cookie dough. Outside.
but then how do you get rid of the salt afterwards when it is fully saturated?
Salt disposal could be a problem if it contains heavy metals, or if it contains something you want to recover (possibly phosphorus). Either way, MSO ended up concentrating the material in question and transforming it into a simpler chemical form, reducing the disposal problem, or making the recycling easier.
That's the floor. The ceiling would be some sort of automated chemical/mechanical filter and recovery system. Technically all those "waste" molecules (chlorine and stuff) are useful industrial material, just in the wrong place.
In the long run we should retire most toxic stuff, just stop using it as much as we do now. Spend out "pollution budget" on rockets and such.
Here is a good summary of SOTA - https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/searching-for-biodeg...
From the article (quote by the inventor of a biodegradable foam) - ’I see now that the main hurdle we face is financial in the sense that if you want to go large you need to have financial guarantees because you are not yet selling the product,’ he says. ‘That is still very hard to find – there are very few actual risk investments in the field of chemistry… it’s very traditional.’
I think there are VC scale returns to be made if the stuff took over conventional plastics but it seems largely overlooked by venture capital. I think regulation could help here too.
A 35 square mile landfill could accommodate the total waste of the United States for the next thousand years. https://books.google.com/books/about/U_S_Wastepaper_Recyclin...
It would be great to develop technologies that would allow us to efficiently recycle plastic. We don't have them yet, and until we do, landfilling plastic is better for the environment and the climate than recycling it.
[1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2017/02/18/environment/was...
[2] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/2019/04/29/special-supplements/...
[3] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3016801/shan...
[4] https://qz.com/1650893/japan-wants-to-become-southeast-asias...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exide_lead_contamination#Los_A...
Well, when corporations and governments say "it's properly lined and safe" and then years later the groundwater gets contaminated, people start creating controversy.
It's true that it is possible for it to be done badly. It seems a lot more likely that the public will care, and pressure people to make sure it is done right, if they aren't spending their energy sorting their supposed recyclables and thinking everything is taken care of.
I mean, yeah, if people don't care, negligence will happen because no one is watching. But people apparently care, in fact that why so many people are bothering sorting their refuse, because of their fear of landfills destroying the planet.
There is no guarantee that the check you made while building was exhaustive.
People may not have payed attention, officers may have been bribed, certifications may not have accounted for problems that were not known at the time, unexpected geological activity may cause disruption etc.
We have a few thousand years of managing construction, and we still have bridges that collapse all over the world. Sure, it's a small percentage of the bridges we build, and we should not stop doing that.
I am not against landfills a-priori, they have their role, but considering them without issues is oversimplifying.
So is nearly every other public works projects. By the time the bridge falls down the builder has had plenty of time to folds the company and cash out.
Verification during construction mostly solves this problem.
4th result on "landfill leak groundwater" and first solid looking, non biased answer. Yes, modern, but that's a scope on an already scoped excuse.
Second, it's not limited d to landfills. Any corporation claiming they've handled things usually means "until we can disband our Corp structure and eliminate liability". See Superfund sites for other examples, or ask why my family's creek runs orange instead of clear.
That's a pretty impressive story for modern technology.
Plastic has a lot of energy, burn it and use that energy. Then you don't need to dispose of it, and you can pump slightly less oil.
As someone who thinks they're pretty well-informed, I was under the impression that it would heavily pollute; so assuming what you're saying is true, it's a perception / education piece.
Long term it seems that carbon-resource extraction should be expensive and hard. At least harder than solar/wind.
Is that why people are against it? They think there are fumes?
After living under these conditions for many years, it'll be hard to let go of stereotypes.
Also as the other comment stated, much of it will no doubt be shipped to burn plants that aren't upgraded with the latest and greatest tech. Even then you also have to worry about proper maintenance of the systems. Sure, you can create regulation to cover all these angles, but I highly doubt that will happen.
Authorities are not incentivized to be transparent about it, and waste management companies neither.
We should also look for low resistance ways to work in container/packaging reusability into the product supply cycle. Are there cases where collection could be done at the store with minimal effort and spare truck space could be used to transport reusable containers back through the supply chain to the originating factories? Are there ways this could be made to work for mainstream products (premium milk products sold in glass are the only case where this is being done where I live)? In Canada they return beer bottles to the store, maybe we should do this in the US if a cost/benefit analysis shows it would worth it.
I must not be the only one that thinks of this sort of thing regularly when taking a product off the shelf.
I think he said something that not all plastic is recycled or something.
the issue is that they are not widely known and to be honest they really should be at least getting kids in school in on the act if not the schools themselves. Used to be schools had aluminum and paper recycling bins but those long left as people abused them with general junk. Now some fire stations do the same.
I think more people would play along if it were easier and more well known. Get corny if you have too, fire station drop offs, we save lives and you are saving the planet.
That's because they are garbage. Anything that can't be re-used without expending more resources than can be reclaimed is garbage.
This equation changes all the time, and it will change in the future, depending on technology and market rates. Today, Chinese labor might not want deal with the plastic. Tomorrow, some other country might. The day after tomorrow, Garbagebots can do the job.
That's why stockpiling and and landfilling is exactly the right thing to do, for the time being. Even burning for energy isn't necessarily that bad, modern incinerators can be relatively clean.
Makes me vomit honestly as a resident of China.
It looked exactly the same as when I put it in there. Interesting experiment but that's what I was already expecting, based on the very small amount I'd read suggesting that one needs to put plastics marked "compostable" into some kind of weird high-temperature bioreactor in order to get them to break down. nkurz's article seems to delve deeper into this topic.
That makes putting plastic in landfill first step towards recycling with more steps to come later.
So I think we can call it recycling.
> A Guardian investigation reveals that cities around the country are no longer recycling many types of plastic dropped into recycling bins
So I am suggesting, on the premise that there is a system in place to separate trash, but it is being sent to landfill - to keep it separate WITHIN the landfill, so that a future us can potentially mine it once we have efficient recycling tech.
Or, corporations are far far more effective at tax burden reduction than governments are at revenue maximization, all things held equal.
All is not lost. Consumers can be responsible by radically cutting consumption.
If I drop my consumption by $20k, I believe my extra investment of $20k will get consumed elsewhere in the economy.
If I spend that $20k on eco-friendly shit, I believe that the people I spent it on spend the majority of that on non-eco friendly shit (e.g. international travel holidays).
I want a better answer - one that isn't some simplistic catchphrase.
Another way might be to accept a smaller salary and work less. The salary economy requires a lot of consumption compared to just sitting at home doing nothing.
Independent of that, you can make specific decisions to avoid plastic-wrapped things. I’m visiting the US at the moment and I’ve seen plastic-wrapped corn, individually plastic-wrapped potatoes (!?!), eggs boiled shelled and in plastic, plastic cutlery individually wrapped in more plastic, straws given with every water at a restaurant (for adults?), plastic cups with plastic lids and plastic straws for every child, motel breakfasts with disposable plates and cutlery (they use a styrofoam cup for five seconds to get waffle batter and pour it in the cooker).
So people buy a coffee in a paper cup, or even worse a recyclable plastic cup. But the cup is less than 5% of the ecological impact of the coffee.
The growing of the coffee is where the impact is.
Generally we all get sidelined by recycling the packaging, as an anodyne to salve our consumptive guilt. Purest poisonous propaganda that we mostly willingly swallow.
As I asked: I want some answers for ways that I can help, backed by science and facts, not lies wrapped in plastic tinsel to misguide me.
Educating respectfully will accomplish much more than disdain and ridicule.
You want an answer that lets you consume coffee and not affect the environment. That's not possible in this world.
The demand for coffee is causing fragile native forest areas to be replanted in coffee.
And a lot of "eco-friendly" consumption is pure green-washing. I know people that provide eco friendly services, and I know what they spend their money on, and it is mostly just normal consumer consumption (e.g. international holidays which is clearly pure "waste"). Or eco-friendly people with 5 kids - who just can't see that children are a multiplier effect on current and future consumption.
I'm thinking supporting tree-planting NGOs might be a good start for example. This goes directly towards carbon-sequestration.
For example: Virtually every food item is packaged in plastic. And it’s not consumers who decided it was more cost effective to use disposable plastic than wash a reusable container.
Is it? Most of what I buy (vegetables, fruits, bread, eggs, milk, pasta, flour, sugar, salt, oil) is not.
Meat, fish, rice, and cheese are the things that require some plastic, afaict, but do not constitute the majority of food.
I don't think I've ever seen pasta not in a plastic wrapper?
For milk, it's usually in a plastic bottle, but often in tetra-pak type containers (don't honestly know what they're made of!).
With oil, it's usually in a plastic bottle, occasionally a glass one for more expensive EV olive oils, and rarely in Europe I've seen shops with oil dispensers that allow you to fill your own container.
For eggs, they are usually in a cardboard box, but occasionally in a plastic one.
For salt, I think I've only ever seen it in plastic bottles or bags.
It's layers of plastic, aluminum and paper glued together. The first two can't be separated, but they claim it's reused somewhere in construction.
It’s a chemistry advance you need to pray for.
Where is all the plastic in the oceans coming from???
The plastic created and received in Asia often lands in landfills and subsequently in rivers. A handful of major streams transport massive amounts of plastic waste into the Pacific ocean [1].
That's at least where a good chunk of it is coming from. That's how you get US or European plastic running down rivers in China into the Pacific.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...
I think a better method would be to incentivize using a more environmentally responsible product ( glass? ) where applicable. Perhaps a tax break for companies that start taking new initiatives to promote this.
A good example would be soda: being able to fill up a glass container of even your own reusable plastic bottle. Just like many do with water at the grocery. I've often wondered why we don't do this as a society and it ( like many things...) boils down to cost.
Incentivize this cost and it will start happening.
Starbucks has done this with straws, and even their hot and cold cups. It would be great to start seeing others do the same in more areas.