All plastic waste could be recycled into new plastic: researchers | Hacker News Reader

All plastic waste could be recycled into new plastic: researchers

chalmers.se

249 pointsrahuldottech150 comments

Glad to see more innovation in plastic recycling. Reminds me of this interview about making medical devices from recycled plastic in Gaza[0]:

“Let’s talk about how your medical devices are printed on the ground in Gaza. 3D printers use plastic to create objects. Where do you get the plastic?

It’s recycled ABS plastic. Gaza actually has a 100 percent recycle rate because no plastic is allowed in.

Really?

Yeah, almost everybody’s plumbing in Gaza is made out of recycled plastic. It’s really quite wild. For the printers, we use recycled ABS and we mix in as much virgin plastic as we can get because you always need some virgin plastic — there’s no such thing as 100 percent recycled plastic — but sometimes it’s not very much.

Where do you get the ABS from? I’m imagining a bunch of plastic bottles.

You’re halfway there. Plastic bottles are made out of a material called PET. We don’t use PET; we use ABS, which is the plastic that’s in Lego pieces. It’s also in chairs and tables, picnic tables, shit like that. What happens is: you take those plastic parts, you grind them down, you wash them and dry them. Then you melt them and extrude them into spools of “filament,” which is what 3D printers use to make things...“

Article goes on to explain some of the machinery people are using.

[0] from https://logicmag.io/bodies/tarek-loubani-on-3d-printing-in-g...

" The fact that plastics do not break down, and therefore accumulate in our ecosystems, is one of our major environmental problems."

Not really. Landfills are safe and clean and plentiful. Ocean plastic is a problem, but comes almost entirely from intentional dumping. Litter is a problem, but it seems silly to assume that someone who cannot be bothered to put plastic in a trash can will put it in a recycle bin.

The real issue is the carbon footprint of making/transporting items, plastic or otherwise. I'd like to see how this compares in that regard. If this uses more energy than just making new plastics it will probably exacerbate a real problem (global warming) in order to help with a fake problem (landfills) which, unfortunately, is pretty consistent with modern environmentalism.

> Landfills are safe and clean

I'm admittedly no expert, but I'm _pretty damn certain_ this is not the case. (Do you know what leachate is?) I'm happy to be proven wrong by references to legitimate research backing up this claim, though.

The recycling industry relies on outdated ideas like that. Leachate was once a huge problem, but it was solved decades ago. Modern landfills are constructed with layers of barriers and collection tubing.

Here's a cool diagram from the EPA:

https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2017-09/landfill_...

Do you have "references to legitimate research" stating that modern landfills are unsafe or is that just your default belief?

Only one layer of synthetic liner, I think that says enough. All it takes is a single tear that could have even happened with installation, or maybe the sand layers aren't as thick as what's recommended and as garbage is put on top it digs into the sand and rips the synthetic layer.

How much extensive real world testing has been done with this synthetic layers? Is it meant to sit for decades bathing in a chemical soup? Or it is assumed that it'd only get wet? My guess is that they didn't use real world tests where people are throwing out chemicals that shouldn't be put in the garbage.

If the chemicals can dissolve plastic, the plastic wouldn't be a problem.

Synthetic layer could mean rubber, not just plastic. Also the chemical just needs to break down/ deteriorate the layer, not decompose it.

Quite a bit of testing is done. Mandatory groundwater tests are done near every single one. Your guess, that it wouldn't occur to scientists that people throw away stuff that they should not, is silly.

I've been conditioned to think that the waste management industry would have tests done by either paid or incompetent people in order to get a rubber stamp of approval. Cynical? Yes, but in this day and age with what we see corporations do I think it's best to be skeptical.

It continually amazes me that people like you think they have found a legitimate problem after 30 seconds of thought which the experts never imagined. I imagine at least one follow up which includes a reference to 'appeal to authority' yada yada yada will appear.

Especially one so obvious.

The lead issue in the water infrastructure in Flint Michigan tells me everything I need to know about the safety of these systems.

A human can design a perfect system and then someone else can come along and whether due to malfeasance or greed fuck that perfect system up.

No system is perfect for that very reason.

The solution is to generate less waste. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle -- in that order.

There won't be a problem if there isn't a problem to take care of.

>The solution is to generate less waste. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle -- in that order.

>There won't be a problem if there isn't a problem to take care of.

Sure, and in fantasy land I'm sure there's just a switch you can flip to make that happen. Back in reality where you can't just eliminate all these sources of waste in a day, don't you think it's worth looking for practical solutions that we can implement in the short term?

Besides, the only thing I responded to was an internet know-it-all supposing that scientists and engineers hadn't considered a tear or the fact that people may throw away things they're not suppose to.

As I've said in another comment, it's not that I think nobody would have thought of it, but that it's an intentional overlook. I've been conditioned to think that the waste management industry would have tests done by either paid or incompetent people in order to get a rubber stamp of approval. Cynical? Yes, but in this day and age with what we see corporations do I think it's best to be skeptical.

Are all landfills built that way across the world even in poor countries?

Are all people recycling across the world even in poor countries?

Let's focus on local conditions when looking for local solutions to local problems.

> Let's focus on local conditions

haha! landfill are cheap in third world country, and it's easy to guess they're unregulated... it's hard to be optimist here.

Leachate may be a local problem, however widespread use of single-use plastic that eventually makes it way into the ocean and food chains is a global problem.

But from the perspective of developed countries, if the root of the problem is elsewhere, then no amount of recycling will solve it. There is no amount of recycling or elimination of plastics I can do in the US that will keep plastics dumped into rivers in developing countries from reaching the ocean.

Just to be clear, I support the use of paper and heavy-duty plastic bags for a fee, because they are less likely to be caught by the wind and can be reused for a long time. I abhor littering. But I do not support guilt trips over landfill use in developed countries with highly regulated landfill designs.

Single use plastic mostly only makes it into the ocean when the third world countries we ship our recycling to decide to dump it. If you want to ensure your single use plastic doesn't end up in the ocean, put it in the trash.

Recent studies indicate that most of the plastic in the ocean comes from discarded fishing nets and gear. (Nets alone are almost half.) The idea that people are littering straws and water bottles and that that's what is clogging up the oceans is just way wrong.

I don't know. It probably varies by country. In my experiences in third world countries, they vary pretty widely when it comes to environmentalism.

I'd assume some are still using dumps.

Leachate is water that travels through trash and picks up nasty stuff along the way.

I used to build landfill at the end of the last century. Landfill regulations vary from place to place, but in essence new landfills are some of the worlds largest plastic bags. NY used a double liner system (a bag within a big). It was 1 foot of clay (water moves slowly through clay) at the bottom, bentomat and 60mil hdpe liner "welded" together into a big waterproof mat. They put corregated pipes along the bottom to funnel leachate out for treatment. sand and fill with trash. The top with 40 mil Hdpe. They do that even for old landfills without bottom liners. The have to vent because landfills produce flamable gasses.

I hope these systems work well.

And there are groundwater testing requirements in subtitle D, the same regulation that ended the era of dumps.

It's funny, it's been over 40 years since then (it was passed in 76) and people who weren't even born yet still think of landfills as dumps.

Modern landfills are sealed off from the soil underneath. Nothing leaks into the environment apart from gases from decaying matter. Once a landfill is full it can also be sealed at the top so that gases may be recovered and the landfill buried under clean soil e.g. to turn it into a park.

I didn’t see the article talking about landfill safety.

It’s fundamentally wasteful to dump millions of cubic meters of otherwise useful materials into holes in the ground. The long term costs are difficult to quantify, and ultimately becomes a public problem after landfills close.

Making waste plastic a commodity with actual value would address both the litter and intentional dumping issues through market forces.

Well, it's not that filling landfills isn't bad. But, what's worse for the environment than being wasteful is greenhouse gases. So if shoving all of that stuff in a landfill leads to less greenhouse gas emission than recycling, it's better right now.

That was exactly my point. When you actually dig into it, you find that current forms of plastic recycling (and, in fact, most materials) probably create more greenhouse gases than simply making new plastic, often by a wide margin. This article talks about how this new type of recycling might be more efficient in terms of reusing the old plastic, but not the net effect on greenhouse gases which is what we should be paying attention to.

If it takes considerably more energy to do this process then it does the old processes or just making new plastic, it could be a net loss for the environment.

If we're forced to choose between more landfills or more greenhouse gas emissions, landfills are an easy pick.

This is theoretically possible but factually incorrect. Recycling plastic is better than landfill in terms of greenhouse gases (and economics and a few other measures).

Burning the plastic for energy is also generally better than landfill, though that might change if we otherwise have a 100% renewable grid since it would no longer be displacing dirtier fossil fuels.

There's actual science I could link to but I'll just point out one obvious red flag that gets repeated a lot:

If you wash the plastic in water heated with electricity generated from coal as part of the recyclong process then it's got a worse carbon footprint than not recycling it.

Apparent solution proposed by the people who use this factoid: stop recycling plastic.

Solution for anyone not under the sway of the fossil fuel industry: stop burning coal for electricity.

Basically everything is bad for the environment if you use coal powered electricity to do it. Coal sucks as an electricity source.

edit to add actual science:

Bernardo, C. A., Simões, C. L., & Pinto, L. M. C. (2016, October). Environmental and economic life cycle analysis of plastic waste management options. A review. In AIP Conference Proceedings (Vol. 1779, No. 1, p. 140001). AIP Publishing. Available at: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/1.4965581.

Those studies always fail to take into account how plastic is actually recycled. They don't count the carbon footprint involved in a round trip to China, where most of it ends up burned, or dumped into landfill or oceans anyway. Or the carbon footprint of extra garbage trucks and sorting facilities. Etc.

It's definitely not economical. Talk to someone who works in recycling today. China stopped accepting it and it's backing up. That doesn't happen to aluminum because aluminum is economical.

They also base their results on methane production. It's increasingly being captured for use as a fuel, and the EPA has required it of larger facilities for decades.

Moving away from fossil fuels is the obvious solution regardless, no argument there. If we did that, it practically wouldn't matter whether we recycled it or not.

I don't understand the reference to methane? Is that relevant to plastic recycling or is that just throwing a reference to a random pro-landfill argument that anti-recycling people often use?

If you are then anaerobic digestion of separated food waste/organic material are far better (again both economically and environmentally) than throwing it all in a landfill and trying to capture the gas later (especially as there other valuable/harmful outputs too). And that's what every well run government in the world is doing, because they've done the sums.

Plastic in a landfill releases methane, which is a very potent greenhouse gas if not burned. The studies comparing greenhouse gas emissions of recycling vs landfill/replacement (including the one you linked IIRC) rely on that for their argument that recycling is better in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.

It definitely takes less energy (and thus fossil fuels and thus carbon) to landfill a plastic bottle and make a new one or plastic bottle makers would be much more adamant to recycle. We can safely rely amoral corporations to do what's cheapest.

I'm not anti-recycling and can't imagine who even would be. I'm in favor of whatever reduces greenhouse gas emissions the most. I just think that the biggest problem in modern environmentalism is that they are optimizing for something that isn't much of a problem (landfills) at the expense of something that is (greenhouse gases) without even thinking about it. It's well-meaning, they just don't even know that certain materials and recycling programs are making that trade.

I think they are talking about plastic not recycled or collected in a landfill.

"Only around 1 per cent was left uncollected and leaked into natural environments. Though only a small percentage, this nevertheless represents a significant environmental problem, since the amount of plastic waste is so high overall, and since the natural degradation of plastic is so slow, it accumulates over time."

Ah perhaps. I feel like we can assume the same people who don't put plastic in the recycle bin or trash can today will continue to do so no matter how efficient plastic recycling is.

Fair enough. But if plastic can be recycled more efficiently the price should go up on used plastic, so in theory some people won't just walk past it on the ground.

I admit that is a lot of supposition and pie-in-the-sky thinking though.

Right, so the real problem is that the end consumer doesn't get paid to recycle plastic. We've seen that can/bottle buyback programs (where the user gets a deposit back) work wonders.

You don't get paid because the economics of recycling plastic are bad. You can simply make new plastic for cheaper.

So it is possible that a sufficiently efficient recycling process would lead to greater demand (and thus the willingness to pay) for used plastic, which would lead to more people recycling. That's basically what happens with aluminum.

But, you still find aluminum cans discarded by litterers all the time, because at the end of the day it's only worth a couple cents. And at the end of the day, 50% of those end up in a landfill anyway. So I don't think any amount of recycling tech is going to make too much difference in reducing that.

It might help a lot with ocean plastic though. That's made from fishing nets and (ironically) recycling plastic just dumped into the ocean.

> Landfills are safe and clean and plentiful.

I’m sure they can be. Here in New Zealand we made loads in river estuaries, on rivers and coasts. They break in disastrous ways. We are wrecking the place. https://i.stuff.co.nz/environment/114750318/erosion-continue...

Why did you jump to the claim that landfills are the only environmental concern for plastics? (Granting your brief aside on oceanic plastics.)

There is plastic in our biological waste: https://time.com/5431668/microplastics-human-waste-study/

There is plastic in some of the most remote places on the planet: https://www.npr.org/2019/04/15/713561484/microplastic-found-...

There are microplastics in our soil: https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/story/plastic...

And the ecological impacts of this are only beginning to be researched: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/12/worms-fa...

It used to be thought that the only evidence of humanity that might still be visible on Earth in a million years is a thin layer of slightly radioactive material around the globe, a result of nuclear weapons testing. Now we have written another, even more obvious and long-lasting signature into the planet: a thin layer of plastic pollution that in all likelihood will outlast anything resembling modern humans. (And I say that with an overall optimism about the lifespan of modern humanity.)

> Why did you jump to the claim that landfills are the only environmental concern for plastics?

Because you can only recycle plastic that is collected. And the alternative destiny for collected trash is a landfill.

New recycling technology will do absolutely nothing to any of those other problems you pointed.

You quoted a line about the persistence of plastic being a major environmental problem, and said "Not really."

If what you meant to say was that recycling is only a solution for plastics that are currently going to landfills, that's a different discussion, but it's not what you said.

Maybe you want to read the OP again, because he says exactly that, with all letters, while you and the GP come with your tone-death comments.

> Ocean plastic is a problem, but comes almost entirely from intentional dumping

Right, like microplastics from the tires whenever anyone drives anywhere?

I was just talking to someone who was convinced that if you throw a plastic bag into the trash it ends up in the ocean.

There's a lot of work to do in explaining to people how waste management works.

> Landfills are safe and clean and plentiful.

Some landfills are mostly safe. In less well-off countries, where the is not enough funding to properly build and care for the myriad of ever-growing landfills, or without sufficient protection from corruption and greed, they are quite the opposite of safe and plastics play a huge part in it.

We have permanently smouldering dumps near almost every town. Some 20 or more years ago it wasn't much of an issue, as most trash burned reasonably well, and it reduced the volume, so it was practical. It wans't good or clean, but now there is so much plastic that it creates toxic clouds spreading through the town. Burning plastic makes horrendous smoke, and its impractical to extinguish the dump fire both politically and physically.

Recycling has helped a bit, but our landfills are not safe. They are literally poisoning everyone in the area.

A dump and a landfill are two different things. Landfills don't smolder (they're never on fire).

Nobody would claim dumps are ok for the environment.

The press release is a lie.

Looking at the diagram at the top, and reading just the abstract of the linked study, it's clear that the whole idea is to degrade plastic waste (through pyrolysis and/or oxidation) and use the degradation products in existing petrochemical plants. Unfortunately, plastics don't degrade only to valuable, reusable chemicals.

The study admits the lie: 100% recycling of plastics isn't expected, and they only get to "100% recovery of carbon" by first electrifying the plant and then "sequestering" the CO2 that forms anyway. Of course, 100% recovery of carbon in this meaningless sense can already be achieved by landfilling the plastics.

I agree, the 100% part is an exaggeration. They say that some part of the plastic will go to CO2 and it can be later transformed to plastic, but this transformation needs a lot of energy and is expensive. They propose an alternative o store the CO2 in a safe place, that is also expensive.

With this type of creative accounting, you can have a gasoline truck with zero CO2 emissions, because you collect somehow the CO2 in a giant tank and then transform it back to fuel (with a big cost of money and energy).

Now all we need to do is make the plastic manufacturers pay the cost.

We could solve it overnight if every government agreed to tax single use plastic production and sale then use the funds to pay for recycling. Organizations like The Plastic Bank pay people in communities of high polluting regions to recycle plastic preventing it from entering waterways. It can be solved in many ways but sadly getting every country to agree on something like that is difficult.

So that actually sounds like a way we can’t solve it.

Ask for an certain percentag of recycled plastic in every new plastic product. Increase said percentage over time.

That's a good way increase the value. I believe now it's just not profitable to do all the sorting. Maybe it would become viable if everyone had to incorporate a portion of recycled plastic and there was this sudden demand.

I think maybe you mean plastic consumers.

In many places consumers do pay a recycling fee for plastic bottles.

It’s the same thing really, manufacturers would pass on the cost but as there are less of them it’s easier to administer.

The consumers should pay. Every piece of plastic should have a recycling cost, like they do in some states with bottles and cans.

https://theintercept.com/2019/10/18/coca-cola-recycling-plas...

"Leaked Audio Reveals How Coca-Cola Undermines Plastic Recycling Efforts"

Unfortunately technical solutions don't solve the social problems. :(

A link to the study:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221499371...

I watched a really good TED talk on recycling plastics. The biggest issue they faced was that separating like plastic was the hard thing, as they all feel like plastic, all look like plastic and weigh pretty much the same for the volume. The challenge in processing recyclable stock was separating types.

You can melt it all down, but there are lots of chlorides and other elements bound onto polymer chains to elicit different properties in the original plastics, In the video I watched these seemed like the biggest impediment to their approach because they wanted to consolidate stock of like materials. They opted for a optical/mechanical sorting approach which I thought was pretty impressive at the time.

The article does suggest that types need to be segregated to different pathways so it may be an issue.

The pathways the paper suggest seem practical. It'll be interesting to see which countries are willing to take this on. It's a very heady industry. And the intent is a carbon neutral outcome.

I wonder if we will just trade the CO2 of making plastic for the shipping cost of plastics from point A to B.

Even if it trades all the CO2 produced by production to shipping that is a net win. It will mean less plastic in the environment. Over time we can make the shipping more efficient which will reduce CO2 and other costs further.

Or maybe we just need biodegradable plastics.

Getting rid of plastics is already a huge cost for cities.

Right now, many large cities burn their platics which also generates co2.

They also burn oil and gas. Burning plastic waste for energy isn't too bad in the grand scheme of things. Sure, not having pumped up the oil and not having turned it into plastic would have been best. And recycling that plastic into something useful would have been better. But burning it as fuel is still pretty good.

Well, shipping could be made using energy from renewable sources, thus removing any need for oil extraction - which I assume is the end goal here (and the truly sustainable outcome we're after).

They can theoretically recicle a lot of the plastic, but they get the 100% assuming that they can transform the part that is transformed to CO2 back to plastic. This part requires a lot of energy, and including it is almost cheating.

Is this for thermoplastics? Or does it include thermosetting plastic and rubbers?

It would be interesting if they could actually recycle car tires, I believe what currently happens is burning or shredding into mulch.

Pretty upsetting that it's used to mulch. We're intentionally putting and think it's a great idea at the same time, go figure.

Why is it upsetting? Lots of playgrounds around here, especially at schools, have moved entirely to shredded rubber instead of wood mulch, almost entirely due to safety concerns.

I don't see the concern over safety, given all the rough housing I did as a kid at just such a playground, but if it brings peace of mind, I don't see why it would be upsetting to anyone.

I once visited a shredded rubber playground at 10,000' on a midsummer day. The sun was intense, and as a result the offgassing from the tire chips was so dramatic you could literally see a layer of gasses hanging over the mulch. (They were colorless, but your eye could pick up on the disturbance & shifts in the light) It reeked.

I think it's more likely you were seeing refraction caused by the change in density of the layer of hot air: "heat haze". Any dark colored material would have the same air-heating effect.

Maybe, but I've never seen "heat haze" curl & wisp, and it doesn't reek of tires & chemicals.

I don't about safety, but back in the day my nieces used to get their clothing covered in black residue from their park's new rubber mulch.

> Lots of playgrounds around here, especially at schools, have moved entirely to shredded rubber instead of wood mulch, almost entirely due to safety concerns.

That's pretty ironic considering reports that it's less safe (toxic).

I wonder how much pollution will this new process of recycling plastic bring. There is so much unnecessary plastic going around in our society, let's start there first.

On my local supermarket, to buy 4 peaches they come in a plastic container fully covered with plastic sheet, I'm not kidding.

Something that really stuck out to me in Japan was seeing the bananas at the supermarket wrapped in plastic. If only bananas had some NATURAL WAY of protecting themselves from the elements...

they even remove the skin?

no, they wrapped the skin in plastic

It is more complex than that.

Japan is not a producer of fruits. They come from far away. This means they have to transport it economically, that means they are transported by sea.

That means bananas are green when collected and sent to Japan, because transporting it by sea takes a long time.

Bananas naturally release CH4 that actually makes the fruit mature and spoils it. So they have to absorb it or diffuse during transport, then add it in Japan.

But if they add it in Japan, the fruit does not mature entirely, only the external side, so it is a good idea to add an artificial atmosphere of some kind.

Thank you for this info - very interesting.

Nitpick: it's C2H4, ethene. CH4 is methane. You can power rockets with that, but not ripen bananas.

In the UK they come in large boxes by ship unwrapped. They are green when they arrive. I’m sure japan can manage that.

I suspect it’s a social thing rather than a necessity.

Exactly, people can start simple like reusing their plastic bags for fruits, that's what I'm telling people at the supermarket. Most of the time, I just take some cardboard boxes or sheets in the supermarket and fill it with fruits, then later throw them in the recycle bin, or nothing at all for legumes

At least, people bring their own shopping bags, because plastic ones at the checkout are not free, a good thing. There many other more or less useless products, like soap/shampoo plastic bottles, a soap bar does the job so well, for everything

Recycling comes with a cost: energy, pollution, transports

No idea about those peaches specifically but wrapping vegetables in plastic generally reduces the environmental impact since it prevents them from spoiling.

Exactly.

> But research shows that a wrapped cucumber lasts more than three times as long as an unwrapped one. It will also lose just 1.5 per cent of its weight through evaporation after 14 days, compared with 3.5 per cent in just three days for an exposed cucumber. A longer life, Aldridge writes, means less frequent deliveries, with all their consequent energy costs, and, crucially, less waste. Globally, we throw out as much as 50 per cent of food, often when it perishes. It typically goes to landfill and gives off methane, a greenhouse gas.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/feat...

It may reduce the environmental impact by preventing spoiling, but at the same time it increases the environmental impact because now the vegetable can (and are) shipped across vast distances.

Maybe we should be rethinking our entire food infrastructure and concentrate on delivering food to local markets, not markets 1000s of miles away.

Good luck telling people they can’t eat avocados because they don’t live close to where they grow.

How did people live without Avocados before they became a thing about like five years ago?

Where are you from that you think avocados "became a thing" recently?

It feels like in Germany they are somewhat "hip" only in the last 5 years or so. Barely heard anybody talking or eating some before, but nowadays they are quite popular.

Apparently (can't find a source) but it is actually better for the environment to ship stuff around in certain circumstances. E.g. apparently it is lower carbon to ship tomatoes to the UK from Spain than it is to grow them locally in the UK (due to the energy needed to grow them in the UK).

I know the inevitable kneejerk response that this will trigger: "people in the UK should not eat tomatoes". I don't think it is realistic to start insisting that people stop eating fruit and vegetables that have been a cheap and plentiful part of everyday life for the past couple of generations.

Perhaps it makes sense to do so (indeed perhaps we need to do so), but good luck trying to get people to agree to only eating what they can grow in their immediate 5-10 mile radius without artificial heating/cooling/lighting/watering/ventilation/fertiliser/etc (and only in season too!). I suspect it will just be too big an ask for huge swathes of the population to give up staple foods that our societies have been based on for several generations while container ships each generating the same amount of pollution as 50,000,000 cars (1) are still shipping in cheap rat from china

We don't need to go back to the stone age - instead I think we need to tackle the big polluters (eg. Container ships, home heating in the UK, diesel in cities, coal etc etc)

1 - https://inews.co.uk/news/long-reads/cargo-container-shipping...

I work at a big box home improvement store (Lowe's). We throw away more plastic in a day at work then I go through at home in probably a year. Fridges are some of the worst offenders (except GE which uses mostly cardboard). As much as I try and reduce my plastic consumption and pick up the trash people throw out on my street, it doesn't matter one bit. I find that it's much more important to get these companies to change than any number of individuals.

And this is in part behind the renewed interest for removing plastic in the oceans, probably. Is a plastic mine waiting for miners

No, that cannot possibly be practical, just from the value of the recovered material for recycling.

The plastic is not sufficiently concentrated. Would have to scrape the whole ocean and at various depths.

The garbage gyres are quite concentrated.

Also, they are becoming a danger for humans and fishes. At some point we need to pay that cost.

Maybe this particular technology is not fully applicable in oceans, but at least it's a start.

Sorry, my point is that when harvesting plastic from the ocean, the garbage gyres become a rich “mine” as they are very concentrated

They are not very concentrated. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch

> The plastic concentration is estimated to be up to 100 kilograms per square kilometer in the center, [...]

That is .1g/m^2 (0.3moz/ft^2 [1]). The weight of the plastic cap of a bottle is approximately 2.4g (85moz). So you need to sweep an area of 24m^2 (260ft^2) to recover the equivalent of a plastic cap. That's approximately 18 plastic caps in the area of a basketball court.

[1] 0.3 milliounces per square foot, I don't know the best unit to show this.

As I was doing research in response (thank you for the citation), I realized I stated an incorrect fact that the gyres are very concentrated, but still stand by the statement that they would be excellent “mines” for plastic. Part of what makes the volume so hard to determine is the current which carries all the garbage in a circle. At a certain stage it would be worthwhile to simply “park” something in the current and have the plastic come to you. Be it a boat or something like an oil rig, there’s very little “sweeping” required in order to collect the plastic.

It's amazing how it is unrelated to the level of concentration that is seen in the photos that illustrate the press articles https://www.google.com/search?q=Great+Pacific+garbage+patch&... I tried to find the source of the first one, I guess it's from a bay or some place that concentrate garbage. There are some kind of mountains or islands on the left ...

Probably it is more effective to clean the stream of a few rivers that carry most of the plastics to the sea. The concentration in higher and it's easier to setup, repair and operate the nets.

> at various depths.

This could be an advantage in fact in my opinion. The same type of plastic have similar densities so water layers in the ocean could act as a plastic classificator.

Is just a theory. I could be wrong and can be impractical if the plastic is tainted with biofouling.

...while burning bunker oil in the ships' engines

Nothing precent us to build hybrid electric ships, solar powered in part. Anything that would reduce the combustible bills would be more than welcomed.

->prevent

As a former resident of Gothenburg, I’m glad to see Chalmers on the front page :)

The thing that peeves me is that at least where I live they won't let us recycle black plastic. They say it is because you can't use black plastic to make any other kind of plastic.

So... they would rather make new black plastic than simply separate the discarded black plastic into recycled material for new black plastic things. An ever increasing supply of new discarded black plastic is at hand. And we do use a lot of black plastic.

This to me, suggests there is a very strong plastic lobby, because otherwise it's just nonsensical.

What would be a good strategy to start small with an alternative to plastic. Without bumping into the trillion dollar industry head on and losing?

There's solutions out there but it's a chicken and egg problem. They're more expensive because of low quantities because nobody wants to commit to them, but if the industry as a whole would switch them you'd have economy of scale to make it competitive. There's also multiple solutions so it's a question of which one to go with. This would also be a good initiative to subsidize but instead we give those for sugar products and gas.

In Germany, for beverages, we have a system where you pay a deposit for a plastic or glass bottle and receive it back when you return the empty bottle[0][1].

That creates monetary incentive to collect those bottles and they thus hardly contribute to litter. There are single- and multi-use bottles in circulation.

I find it to be a very successful system and believe that it could be expanded to all packaging. I'm somewhat perplexed that even in Germany this idea isn't talked about more often (or at all).

[0]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfandsystem

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_vending_machine

EDIT: The systems are called "container-deposit legislations": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container-deposit_legislation

Adidas is doing some pretty good work recycling plastic. https://youtu.be/pJBRqespiOA

I find myself much less worried about plastic waste than about climate change.

Yet I observe on Twitter and other social media that these problems are considered equally important, sometimes people even treat them as equivalent.

Am I missing something?

Plastic degrades into tiny tiny little pieces that get absolutely everywhere and some of the compounds are active inside biology and because they are new, there isn't much for evolved mechanisms to deal with them.

For example "BPA-free" is about bisphenol A which has similar hormone effects as estrogen.

You end up eating enormously large amounts of plastic particles that just get stuck in you forever.

Apparently plastics micro-particles is harming life in the soil, in oceans, rivers, everywhere

We know for example that microplastics in the oceans causes brain damage in fish.

Right now, we have no idea how it affects humans.

I see them both as symptoms of the same underlying problem: an economy based on generating enormous amounts of waste for short-term profit.

All of these worries churn, like any other fashion. Through a cycle of short attention span, and craving for novelty.

5-10 years ago in the grocery store line, myself and half the people in front of me were bringing our own reusable grocery bags. I feel guilty acknowledging this, but we all just seemed to... stop. Because it was a mild hassle, and the novelty wore off. I can't remember the last time I've seen someone with with their own bags, and I imagine that younger store clerks would be confused by them.

We're still concerned about plastic (that worry comes and goes like a pendulum). We just got bored and lost our attention span for one of the most direct things we can do to reduce plastic.

10-15 years ago, myself and most of my political peers were more upset about Guantanamo Bay than plastic or climate change. Nothing ever changed there, but I can't recall the last time I've heard it mentioned. The average anti-war protestor of the post-9/11 years probably understands little to nothing about U.S. action in Syria over the past decade.

Not necessarily a universal solution, but our family primarily shops at Aldi. You have to pay for bags, so you either bring your own or use the empty cardboard boxes from stocking the goods.

I love reusing empty cardboard boxes. They are useful for around the house too.

Most Australian states require grocery stalls to charge for bags.

While a nice idea, instead of reusing my grocery bags as bin liners, I have to buy bin liners as well as the occasional bag when I forget. The net result is more plastic waste for me.

How does this result in a net-increase in plastic waste? Were you somehow getting the exact number of bags you needed to use as bin liners, and now you buy extra?

Some of these eco-rules result in inconveniencing your life and increasing your costs with at most a zero change of the overall plastics use.

I usually had no more than 3-4 disposable plastic bags saved up as bin liners.

Now I have to buy bin liners, as well as the occasional reusable plastic bag. The reusable plastic bag has 4x the plastic content of the disposable ones.

What happened to the other disposable plastic bags you took home? Presumably your garbage output was less than your grocery input?

And yes, having to buy a new reusable bag if you forgot yours is frustrating. Which makes it memorable, and less likely to happen again - though that may be more of a personal thing.

If you have a lot of extra reusable plastic bags, perhaps you could push your local grocery store to put in a "take a bag/leave a bag" box? To ensure they get put to good use

Maybe it's the area where you live, but where I live it would be weird to not have reusable bags with you. Pretty much everyone has them.

I live close to montreal and we have a lot of environmentally conscious people here.

I agree - I've lived all over eastern Canada, and most people everywhere use reusable bags. The only people I've observed who consistently don't are those in for a single bag/a few items

That is weird. One ends the world in ten years or less and the other just does damage to the world.

>One ends the world in ten years or less

Al Gore, is that you?

Plastics are doing incredible damage to the ecosystem, and potentially our own species is included in that. Not much point in avoiding climate change if we destroy the ecosystem that sustains us anyway. Not to mention the carcinogenic potential of microplastics that are now in our food supply.

I think "plastic in the ocean" is more easily imaginable. Until very recently climate change was pretty abstract and in many ways it still is, even though we see the effects.

Not to be forgotten: Obviously the two are related, the petrochemical industry is a huge contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and ultimately a part of the oil industry. If people cut down unnecessary plastic use because they're worried about plastic particles in the ecosystem, they're also doing something good for the climate.

>If people cut down unnecessary plastic use because they're worried about plastic particles in the ecosystem, they're also doing something good for the climate.

If the oil isn't turned into plastics then it's just going to be burned instead. Plastics sequester carbon out of the atmosphere. Abandoning plastics without first introducing a carbon tax will harm the climate.

They're both massive ecological disasters that can cause extinctions. They have a qualitative equivalence in that sense.

They aren't separate issues! Plastics production produces a lot of greenhouse gas emissions. And both are concerned with pollution.

We can’t solve GHG emissions without restoring ecosystems, and if we are destroying them then we have at least two problems.

One of the micro plastic sources nobody talks about is clothing. Every trip through the wash adds micro plastics to municipal wastewater. Every trip through the dryer puts some in your back yard. It’s one of the reasons I’m going back to cotton clothing, as horrible as the manufacturing process of those are.

That said, ask those twitter people what they’re doing about their shoes, car tires, stretchy jeans, spanx... there’s not really much we can do right now, except keep asking scientists and manufacturers to do research. We know more about green house gasses. Practically speaking it’s the problem we can make more progress on.

> Yet I observe on Twitter and other social media that these problems are considered equally important, sometimes people even treat them as equivalent.

How are you even judging that?

We can all help stop this. Everyone can reduce their contribution. I cut out nearly all packaged food, which reduced my garbage to where I empty it less than once a year (I last emptied my trash in September 2018) http://joshuaspodek.com/avoiding-food-packaging-2. I was pleasantly surprised that doing so cost less, reduced food preparation time, increased diversity of food, and led to more social interaction with friends and farmers. It's more accessible for people in food deserts and without time. For the record, it took a couple years of practice to go from weekly garbage to monthly to yearly.

That's just one example. Everyone can reduce some. The more you start, instead of just accepting and throwing your hands up, the easier each next step.

The producers will see the trend and stop buying plastic.

Of course there are other ways to act: legislation, creating healthier alternatives.

The point is: everyone can act starting here and now and they will find joy in it. It may take time, but acting on one's values is rewarding.

It would be motivating to know cases where "everyone can act now by themselves" really worked. I don't know any. Big change usually happens through organizations lobbying for something. Organization is the keyword here. Individual change rarely makes a difference if not organized.

> organizations lobbying for something

The more generic term is politics.

Why not both? You can stop personally contributing to the problem while you also advocate for system-level changes. Also, there's likely personal benefit (e.g., improved health, decreased cost) that comes with making these changes.

I agree. But without tools, marketing, lobbying, policy-making, etc., it's hard to make lasting changes.

Don't worry about lasting change, worry about what your contribution to the problem is. I think the veg*n community is a good example where a proportionately small group of people stuck to personal commitments to not eat meat or animal products, and have (decades later) gotten mainstream acceptance for that. You can now have a vegan meal at Burger King, but only because a group of people weren't worried about making lasting change they were just worried about living in line with their values :)

I poked around on your blog for a bit, but couldn’t find any practical suggestions. How can a city-dweller with an oven, chest freezer, instant pot, and fridge acquire meal without packaging and without 8 hours of administrative overhead per week?

My opinion: just use steel cans.

Steel has a 80%+ recycling rate, and even if thrown in the garbage... steel is one of the easiest materials to "mine" out of a garbage pit. Just shove everything into a blast furnace, and the things that don't burn is probably steel.

Obviously a bit simplified: but that's the secret to glass, aluminum, and steel recycling. The high-temperature "purification" process of these materials makes for a very easy recycling process, even if there are contaminants in the material. In contrast, paper and plastic becomes useless due to contamination very easily.

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The amount of food available in steel cans is quite significant. Tuna, Salmon, Chicken, Peas, Carrots, Corn, Apricots, Peaches, Spinach, Pineapples, Beans, Potatoes, tomato paste... to name a few.

Subsisting on canned food is boring, but doable. You've got meats, every major veggie, starches and fruits. Mix it up with some grains (ex: Rice, Flour), fresh starches (Potatoes keep well and don't really need to be in a can), fresh veggies (Onions keep well).

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A combination of fresh fruits + cans manages to keep my trips to the grocery store down to once-per-week. Most fresh foods don't keep for a whole week (ex: Fresh Peppers, Fresh Basil, only stays good for a few days... while fresh ground beef / fresh chicken only stays for about 2 or 3 days).

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The counterargument to steel is that it is heavier than plastic. So it arguably takes more energy to ship steel cans than plastic containers. I haven't done the math however, but I assume steel is overall better for the environment.

Steel cans have a plastic liner (acrylic and a polyester, usually.) Reusable glass with bottle deposit is probably the way to go.

The amount of plastic liner in steel cans is minuscule compared to plastic-packaging. And since its bonded to the Steel, you don't have to worry about disposal issues (ex: bags getting stuck in conveyor belts or whatever).

> Reusable glass with bottle deposit is probably the way to go.

I would bet that the lid on a glass bottle may have more plastic in it than a steel can, for example.

But glass is definitely a highly-recyclable material. But you don't really find as much stuff in glass as in steel cans, and certainly not at the same prices.

I can get 15oz of peas (or corn) in a steel can for roughly $0.70 for example. I don't think that sort of stuff comes that cheaply in glass containers.

We learn through experience.

I've found that when I answer what I did or offer suggestions, which I've done hundreds of times, the answer is almost always, "Oh, but that wouldn't work for me," followed by their reasons for keeping doing what they've been doing, with an air of "Ha, checkmate! Your special case doesn't apply to me."

By contrast, when someone acts, they find answers for themselves.

You described resources and constraints almost identical to mine except I didn't yet have a pressure cooker, which made everything easier. If you challenge yourself to go a week without food packaging, you won't die. You will figure out solutions that work for you. You will answer your question better than I could.

In my case, I took about six months from conceiving that challenge to taking it on. I planned and analyzed but didn't actually act. When I acted, I did what I couldn't plan for lack of experience. Specifically I said I would buy no packaged food for a week but could finish what was in my cupboards. I made it 2.5 weeks. Now I find answers for new challenges everywhere because of my experience.

If you take on the challenge, I'd love to hear how it goes. I believe you'll be amazed at what you can solve beyond your expectations.

I suspect if I took on the challenge, it would induce enough life-administrative stress that I would be at serious risk of losing my job and being kicked out of the country.

I felt that way too. Doing it changed everything. For example, I was pleasantly surprised to find cooking from scratch saved time and money and led to more social interactions. Now I often host heads of corporations for dinners, a Nobel Peace prize winner, etc.

If you change your mind, let me know, though I probably won't find it in this thread. I'm easy enough to connect to from my web page, http://joshuaspodek.com.

> Now I often host heads of corporations for dinners, a Nobel Peace prize winner, etc

Okay, if you have the social connections that you're hosting Nobel Peace Prize winners and heads of (implicit: larger than 200 employees) corporations for dinner, then there is definitely something you're not saying about the resources you have available to accomplish this.

Like, I don't even know what country you live in. I don't know how far your house is from a grocery store. I don't know what percentage of the food in that grocery store is unpackaged. I don't know how many farmers/gardeners you have a relationship with. I don't know how much time you have to spend gardening. I don't know how bad of a headache your wife would have if dinner wasn't ready until 9:30pm. I don't know what ADHD medication you're trying to titrate.

So all I have to go on are my circumstances. When I spend 30 seconds predicting what I'd have to do to "avoid all food which comes in a package", a list of like 10-20 problems comes to mind. Could I solve all of those problems? Probably.

But in the 1.5 years it takes me to solve them, there is a good chance that I would be fired from my poor performance from my visa sponsoring job and get kicked out of the country.

> By contrast, when someone acts, they find answers for themselves.

Are you saying that you don't have any highly-distressing personal problems for which you've been seeking answers for half a decade?

Get rid of your car for starters. Shop at markets where they don't cover anything in plastic. Adjust what you eat around avoiding buying plastic, as much as you can.

I live close to central London. I don't have a car.

This is so far out of what I, a west-coast american, can actually accomplish its kind of funny. I know you are being serious and those are all great suggestions that I would love to implement, but to address them: things are so spread out here I literally can't get to work/a grocery store without a car, there's a single farmers market, which runs for 4 hours every Sunday once a week and doesnt cover everything in plastic. Its literally unobtainable for someone living here. Maybe directly inside the city its possible to go carless and shop only at farmers markets, but being downtown would be way too expensive.

Comparing one's individual waste to something like 1 cruise ship is like a grain of sand to a beach. It shouldn't be the focus.

I think of it more like comparing running a marathon to taking a single step. I've run many marathons, each a single step at a time.

Or maybe it's more like comparing one post of mine to my strategy. This podcast episode describes a lot of my strategy: https://shows.pippa.io/leadership-and-the-environment/episod.... It might give you more context than just one response to an article. I'd appreciate your thoughts on it.

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