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TylerE

It's really pretty simple if you actually care about results.

Is it aluminum? Recycle it.

Is is not aluminum? Don't recycle it.

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Plastic bottles are pretty much all included according to this site. There's no reason not to include them too.

It takes more energy to ship and reprocess them than you save. That's why you don't.

If you do, it's explicitly because it makes you feel good - it's worse for the planet.

In my city, plastic bottles are shredded and converted into filament for 3D printers: https://www.greenbatch.com/

Maybe it takes more energy because of the diversity of materials? If we used an order of magnitude less types of plastic than we currently do, it might become more economical because it wouldnt require as much mechanical labor to sort and process. Removing shipping from the equation seems like the removal of quite a bit of carbon.

When you melt plastic down, you get lower quality material than what you fed in. It's not a closed loop. Plus, the wide variety of available properties are what makes plastic so useful in the first place.

Source?

This is what the big kerfuffle is all about.

All we’ve been doing is paying the Chinese and Malaysians to feed our plastics to the dolphins for us.

Now they won’t take it, and people here get upset if you feed the animals, we’re realise the whole deception for what it is.

Edit to add sources:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/03/whale...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/29/malaysia-to-se...

Self evident that if it were economically & environmentally sound to recycle we wouldn’t be shipping it around the planet to do so.

Asian companies undercut all the domestic recyclers, putting them out of business. This is why you might not want to trust say Chinese companies with prices that are too good to be true (because they are probably cutting huge corners somewhere). The same thing happened with rare earths (very dirty to refine, but China didn’t really care about their environment giving them a huge price advantage that shut everyone in the developed world down).

Thomas Kinnaman was interviewed on Planet Money recently and mentioned roughly this conclusion based on his 2014 study. More details here: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2019/07/15/why_its_pro...

Plastic and Glass recycling can be borderline and it depends on the specific local implementation. Either way, the savings are never going to be massive and it is an open question if it is worth the effort. (Glass re-use is different)

Aluminum is completely different. Prices for aluminum recycling per ton is an order of magnitude higher than other recyclables.

What's even better than putting your plastic bottle in recycle is not using plastic bottle at all. Is there any use case where plastic bottle is better or required?

Apparently manufacturing glass uses way more resources/energy and has a much bigger carbon footprint. (No source at hand, sorry.) It also weighs more so is more expensive to transport. Plastic is good for some things, no doubt about that.

I'm under the impression glass is worth recycling as well. Prove me wrong.

Earlier this year, Arlington County, Virginia removed glass from their curbside recycling program, "A significant drop in the market value of glass recyclables means it is no longer economically or environmentally sustainable for the County to collect them via single-stream recycling."

They have two drop-of locations, where residents can drop off glass "for crushing and reuse as construction and landscaping material."

(https://newsroom.arlingtonva.us/release/arlington-shifting-g...)

The answer, unless you want to check the price of commodities each morning, is to recycle glass and bottles anyway and let the recycler decide if it’s economically efficient to send it to the landfill or to reprocessing.

Depends on the area, or so I learned recently upon moving to Montana, where they don't recycle it. Apparently most recycled glass is crushed up and used as roadbase. In MT, gravel is dirt cheap, and so it's not economical to use glass for construction, so into the landfill it goes.

As for recycling glass into other glass, I can't say.

Making glass from scratch is incredibly energy intensive, and glass impurities can be handled (purified), so it always makes sense to recycle glass. Don't let your officials tell you any different.

I heard on a recent podcast from a Dutch recycler that recycling glas only saves ~10% of energy creating new glass. Melting the glass requires heat, and the raw material is not much more expensive than collecting used glass.

You're not filling a landfill and you're not gathering more raw material. Both seem like a win, especially if it's cheaper, even by just a little.

> Making glass from scratch is incredibly energy intensive

Not much more than melting existing glass. It's not like aluminum, where melting is much cheaper than refining in the first place.

> glass impurities can be handled (purified)

It's much easier to handle impurities when you start with clean sand.

Not in single stream recycling. The problem? Glass gets crushed and ruins other recyclable materials.

Also glass is very heavy when compared to a similar strength container made of plastic. That is why plastic took over the market.

Don't forget about steel ("tin") cans too.

Steel can be recycled many times with virtually no degradation.

Also good quality cardboard or nice letter paper, I'm told. (Not junk mail & phone books)

That’s not an entirely terrible idea.

Could all(?) packaging intended for recycling by made from aluminium?

Well aluminum does take a whole lot of energy to manufacture, so if it doesn’t all get recycled there would likely be a lot of waste there.

Heaps of energy. Here in Tasmania the aluminium refinery consumes something like 56% of the states electricity.

This site https://www.aluminum.org/industries/production/recycling claims that 75% of all aluminium is recycled and that over 70% of all aluminium ever produced is still in use.

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