To Make This Tofu, Start by Burning Toxic Plastic | Hacker News Reader

To Make This Tofu, Start by Burning Toxic Plastic

nytimes.com

15 pointsoftenwrong9 comments

Ugh. The image of a somewhat environmentally conscious westerner taking the time to sort their waste plastics into recyclable / not, only to have it be shipped all the way to Indonesia and then burned on an open fire to boil the tofu which they have been consuming in an effort to do their part to further reduce their negative impact on the planet.

Could have been written by Huxley.

The whole activity of consumer recycling is mostly pointless for materials like plastic - the solution lies with forcing manufacturers to utilise 'green' materials.

Although the article mentions some of it (the plastic) coming from the US, the public in general got hoodwinked.

We should have been burying that stuff in landfills, but someone saw an opportunity to create a new way to make money by creating a recycling regime that’s proven quite useless over the years -prone to fraud and resulting minor utility.

There's an appealing hypothetical alternative where the plastic actually gets used.

I had an opportunity a while back to work with a US company that gets paid to accept bulk HDPE from bottle recycling on one end of the plant, shreds, extrudes, and machines it, and sells composite building materials out the other end. It's really quite cool to see the system working as designed, and a lot of trash becomes useful and valuable.

However, there's a lot of situations where yeah, the landfill is a better destination... it's just not worth the effort to separate and clean some stuff.

I wish we could come up with a technical mechanism (preferred) or regulatory system (acceptable) that would make it profitable to separate recyclable waste.

> Nanang Zainuddin, 37, runs a small kitpchen just around the corner from Mr. Karanawi's chicken coop. He says he burns plastic because it is cheaper, sometimes only a tenth of the cost of burning wood.

> The process of making tofu begins by soaking and grinding the soybeans, placing it in a concrete tub and injecting steam from a boiler that is fed with burnt plastic.

Title is a itty bit confusing, any fuel could be used; plastic is just the cheapest because the US has been dumping it there for so long.

I'm all for calling out clickbait, but this is not clickbait.

The whole point of the article is about burning plastic.

I agree, the word 'clickbait' was too strong. I prefaced it with "lil" because my initial read was that the recipe involved mixing the plastic into the tofu.

Edit: oh hey the edit window was still open

non paywalled link - https://upnewsinfo.com/2019/11/14/to-make-this-tofu-start-bu...

This looks like a weirdly translated version that is nonsensical in many places. Everyone should just use https://archive.is/KzLVI

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