'Horrible hybrids': the plastic products that give recyclers nightmares | Hacker News Reader

'Horrible hybrids': the plastic products that give recyclers nightmares

theguardian.com

55 pointsxdze240 comments

I wish there was some sort of scoring system for product packaging that would take into account the quantity and environmental impact of the packaging. Like, if the product comes in a small cardboard box it gets a good score, but if that cardboard is lined with a plastic film (effectively making the cardboard non-recyclable) then the score goes way down.

That score could then be used by consumers to make informed decisions or maybe it's used to charge producers to cover the cost of safe disposal of the packaging when it reaches its end of life.

Given that paper bags have a worse environmental impact than plastic bags, I would suppose cardboard is worse than those plastic containers that are so annoying to open.

Paper bags do not have a worse environmental impact than plastic bags.

Paper bags have a worse impact in a very few, small, narrow metrics such as "ocean de-nutrification".

Everyone blurts this out because of a study done in Europe that looked only at a very limited range of environmental factors specifically suited to the country that commissioned the study.

Also, the vast majority of "savings" plastic bags realized over other forms of bag is the energy density of the petroleum used to produce them and the fact that that energy could be recovered by the massive network of refuse-to-power incineration stations in (the country that did the study, I can't remember).

But most plastic bags don't end up mindfully collected, sorted, and incinerated.

When taken as a whole, paper bags are much, much better for the environment than plastic bags.

In 100 years, the paper bag I (HYPOTHETICALLY) threw out my car window is long gone, worm food, turned into soil.

The plastic bag I (HYPOTHETICALLY) threw out my car window is now several billion flakes of microplastics and the world is struggling with the health ramifications of a century of build-up in the environment.

For that matter, the glass bottle is now harmless beach glass or sand (or a valuable collectible on ebay-next), and the aluminum beer can is now its 10,000th reincarnation-- having been picked up by a bum and traded in for cash.

My favorite "HOT TAKE" from that study is that "yOu HaVe To ReUsE a ClOtH bAg 500 tImEs" for it to be more efficient (in a very narrow spectrum of categories, remember) like that's an insurmountable hurdle.

My made-in-USA cotton totes I got on Amazon for $13.99 in 2010 have been used once a week since I got them.

You do the math.

Personally, I find hard plastic fabric bags (multiple use, not foil) to be as good. Some of those have 40 years now and I'm not the first user (nylon). (Formerly known as potato sacks.) However, you do have to be diligent and not leave them lying about and they have to be durable enough to not tear, or mended. Hard polypropylene fiber bags are also good and durable, take less energy to make. PET is not durable enough, even thick.

A good cotton or linen or jute bag will live for some years of use too though. Main trade-off is water resistance. Only waxed woolen bags and leather (obnoxious for other reasons) are waterproof.

Another travesty are packing filler "peanuts", "airbags" and foam and plastic tape.

> Paper bags have a worse impact in a very few, small, narrow metrics such as "ocean de-nutrification".

Paper bags require more reuse, that's the core finding of the study:

https://www2.mst.dk/Udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...

> Everyone blurts this out because of a study done in Europe that looked only at a very limited range of environmental factors specifically suited to the country that commissioned the study.

I wasn't aware that Denmark is a huge player in the international plastic bag trade, but perhaps I'm just uninformed.

> But most plastic bags don't end up mindfully collected, sorted, and incinerated.

Actually, they do - at least in the EU.

> The plastic bag I (HYPOTHETICALLY) threw out my car window is now several billion flakes of microplastics and the world is struggling with the health ramifications of a century of build-up in the environment.

The world doesn't even know yet if microplastics are a serious health problem, but if they are, then we've already reached the point of no return.

> For that matter, the glass bottle is now harmless beach glass or sand (or a valuable collectible on ebay-next), and the aluminum beer can is now its 10,000th reincarnation-- having been picked up by a bum and traded in for cash.

What about the added weight of the glass bottle requiring more fossil fuel to transport? What about all the energy required to reuse that aluminum? There's good arguments for either of these materials - I don't want to drink my beer out of a plastic bottle - but helping the environment isn't one of them.

> My favorite "HOT TAKE" from that study is that "yOu HaVe To ReUsE a ClOtH bAg 500 tImEs" for it to be more efficient (in a very narrow spectrum of categories, remember) like that's an insurmountable hurdle.

It's not insurmountable, but people just don't do it. These bags get disgusting after a while. People are throwing them away. Same with "reusable" PET bags.

> My made-in-USA cotton totes I got on Amazon for $13.99 in 2010 have been used once a week since I got them.

You deserve a burial at Arlington for that.

Whoever told you that is mistaken.

Even in “incineration-friendly” countries, less than a quarter of all trash is incinerated.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

In the EU, most plastic trash is either incinerated (39%) or recycled (30%).

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/201...

The study considers both the recycling and the incineration scenario and in either case the plastic bag comes out on top.

Paper (dead tree) bags are worse because they tend to rip apart after a few uses. It doesn't matter so much what bag you use, as long as you re-use it.

Plastic in the oceans is an issue, but for the most part The plastic in the ocean doesn't come from developed countries.

To add to kilo_bravo_3 8's comment: Almost all plastics, even non-BPA variants, have been found to leech synthetic estrogen https://www.npr.org/2011/03/02/134196209/study-most-plastics...

> I wish there was some sort of scoring system for product packaging that would take into account the quantity and environmental impact of the packaging.

It already exists: https://www.greenlivingtips.com/articles/recycling-by-the-nu...

I think that regulation is the only measure that works. Asking people to track the level of recycling of each item they buy is too much of a task. Minimum legal standards assure to remove the worst cases, and then information may help for conscienced individuals.

Goddammit. I've been buying the plastic bags of Tide Pods because I just assumed it was less waste than getting a plastic tub every time. Definitely less space taken up in my recycle bin. Blergh.

It's not like it's 1953 and the world is just discovering the wonders of plastic. We should be doing better. I don't understand why it's even legal to produce disposable plastic containers today that are not 100%, easily recyclable - without some sort of express permit for exceptional needs.

Or at the very least, tax them.

Taxation enough to matter would be tantamount to a ban, with exception of a few specialty uses.

Exactly. But it has the advantage that nobody at the government needs to figure out what the exceptional cases are.

But they have to figure the amount, and it's lobbied down or out. So it won't be an effective measure.

> I don't understand why it's even legal to produce disposable plastic containers today that are not 100%, easily recyclable

It's because it's completely harmless to landfill them.

Litter is bad. Full stop. Landfill however is not.

I've noticed a trend in these types of articles that conflates the two things as if they were the same. Then they tend of mix in info (plastic in the ocean) that applies to countries that dispose of trash in their local rivers.

You know where landfill ends up in when not properly sealed?

Groundwater and rain runoff.

Drinking partially degraded plastic is not exactly neutral to health. Poisoning wildlife with the added colorings or plastics themselves, neither. Especially insidious are plastic fibres - partially synthetic textiles. These should all be burned clean at very high temperatures first.

Litter is easy to remove and even burn, micrometer level plastic dust is not. Standard water treatment at best can sediment some kinds of microplastics but not all. The cutoff levels that are safe for health for some plastics are miniscule for chronic intake. (Urethanes especially - kidney toxicity and cancer, probably others too. BPA is a joke compared to base PET stock at micrometers chronically.)

> You know where landfill ends up in when not properly sealed?

So then don't do that?

And realistically, are landfills in the US and Europe leaking or not?

Water runoff and sludge from landfills is treated, however only final very time consuming steps of biological sedimentation and treatment can remove most of them. Or very fine reverse osmosis or treatment with micron level filters, very energy intensive. So they do tend to end up in clean drinking water. There are many sources and no norms.

Sometimes even metals bordering on norms can be detected near landfills.

Sample efficiency ranges: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00431...

I had a link with site in Sweden barely keeping norms for lead and cobalt... due to organic decomposition and incomplete runoff collection. Bad enough that I wouldn't build a well within some 10 km radius.

Read up on what happens to all this thing called leachate.

This is a main reason why European Commission wants the landfills to remain as exception.

> And realistically, are landfills in the US and Europe leaking or not?

Yes, they are. See https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs-040-03/. A key quote:

> The USEPA has concluded that all landfills eventually will leak into the environment

We can minimize the amount of material that leaks, but it seems that all landfills will eventually leak at least some of their contents.

Landfills are funded by the public. Public money has to be spent to fix problems caused by private companies. Is that not a problem?

People are lazy and selfish. If government doesn't give them a disincentive: fines for littering, high taxes for buying unrecyclable plastics or banning them outright, people flat out do not change their behavior. If everyone on earth consumed and trashed as much as the average American, the whole planet would be a toxic waste dump. And we've seen that in the early part of the industrial revolution in the U.S., toxic rivers and streams, that took decades and billions of mostly public funds to clean up those superfund sites.

Most Germans don't bring back racks of glass beer bottles and bags full of plastic water bottles because they care about the environment so much - they do it because there's a 0.08-0.15 EUR deposit on reusable glass, 1.50 EUR on the plastic racks and 0.25 EUR on one-time use plastic drink bottles, and big stores that sell bottle drinks have developed automats for accepting the empties and tallying up the refunds because they have to accept all standard bottles, even if they don't sell that particular item.

Any other recycling that happens is mostly because trash bins are only emptied every two weeks, and more than a 60L bin for a household is punitively expensive. Even if you don't care about the 3.10 EUR you'd get back for the rack of beer, you do care about having to pay to get rid of something that large.

Went on a garbage plant tour a few months back and we were advised not to practice optimistic recycling for this matter.

With plastics, if it's not hard plastic, don't hope it will be recycled. Soft plastics like bags end up gumming up the machines. Sure you can bundle the bags together in a ball and supposedly the waste collector will process it separately (i.e. outsource it to someone else), but the general public is better served with fewer exceptions. Just assume that any plastics aside from bottles and cartons are not recyclable.

Reduce, reuse, then recycle.

"Discarded single-use plastics have become an international environmental flashpoint, as they have turned up in the bellies of birds and fish, flooded pristine beaches in remote countries with litter and even been detected in microscopic quantities in rainwater."

Ironically, this is almost certainly due to recycling being so uneconomical that trash gets shipped to foreign countries, where less diligent actors will simply dump in the ocean.

Landfills are the best solution, let the trash robots of the future figure it all out.

> due to recycling being so uneconomical that trash gets shipped to foreign countries

This isn't true. No one is shipping trash to other countries, it's way too expensive to do that.

Other countries pay to buy recycling, and recently they haven't been as interested.

This isn't true either. The US was shipping badly sorted recycling (aka half-trash) to other countries because return shipping to Asia is dirt-cheap (aka trade imbalance). Other countries were sorting the recyclables with miserable labor and dumping our trash byproduct due to lax environmental laws in said countries. Recently, they haven't been as interested in this deal.

1) The US press followed this for decades.

The Chinese govt. allowed trash shipments for a long time, but nobody in business wanted to really do the trash shipments because they slowed down the return trip.

Finally the Chinese government realized banning the shipments was an easy way to improve air quality in China, since often trash mountains are burned to isolate metals.

2) There's an erroneous belief that we do recycling in the US. Aside from vehicle recycling, about 99% effective, most trash is landfilled since there's no way for private companies to make money on the trash stream.

If you read local newspapers, there's often an article on the municipal council being asked for $1 million payments from recyclers, so dumping is chosen instead.

Australian recyclers have been been caught shipping to Malaysia, where the receiver is not a recylcer and illegally received the trash and just dumped it there.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-29/malaysia-to-send-tonn...

Yes, it has happened and is happening.

You clearly didn't read your own article. It confirms what I said.

Illegal recyclers in Malaysia bought recycling from the UK. But the government wasn't happy about it and forced it to go back.

It's exactly like I said: It's not the UK paying to ship garbage, it's people in Malaysia buying low quality recycling.

Ok, but put things in perspective. A musical greeting card is typically a $5-10 purchase. People presumably pay this money because they expect someone to get that much enjoyment out of it.

The amount of recyclable paper in a greeting card is probably worth about 1/100th of a cent, if that.

Maybe these costs seem irrelevant, but still -- they seem to be expecting people to bypass the card for a more recyclable one, when the recyclable value of a greeting card is so, so, SO tiny. The more realistic advice is, if you get one of these cards, don't try to recycle it, put it in the regular trash. It's not the end of the world. (and no, we aren't running out of space for landfills.... of all the environmental damage we are doing, modern landfills are one of the least significant)

At the end of the day, recycling is more to make people feel good than anything. Sure, aluminum recycling makes sense. Recycling large amounts of paper (like cardboard boxes) makes sense. But the majority of things that go in a recycling bin just need a bunch of people to pick through it, so they can eventually send it to the landfill.

How about not buying the trash card and instead opting for regular paper or fully electronic?

Each tiny piece of complex trash adds to a horribly polluted landfill...

Recycling indeed is not cost effective or even impossible. Even cardboard can be contaminated with wax or paint enough to prevent recycling or require use of expensive and dangerous solvents.

Perhaps Asian way of outright banning bad packaging and products is the solution.

Fully electronic cards don't count as cards.

> don't try to recycle it, put it in the regular trash. It's not the end of the world

The batteries are going to pollute the landfill.

> For instance most spray cleaners come in bottles made of high-density polyethylene, which can be readily recycled. But first consumers must remove the spraytops, as they are made from different plastics and are not recyclable. Then consumers must find a way to pry off the brightly-colored, printed plastic wraps that packagers are increasingly wrapping around bottles to make the labeling more attractive.

> “Who does all that? Nobody,” said Sanborn.

I do! It's a little fiddly, but any sharp knife with a point you can slip under the label does a good enough job of slicing those off.

Good to know that helps, actually - I've often wondered whether I was wasting my time bothering with it.

I do too! Glad I'm not the only one. I also remove labels when possible and pull plastic tape off of corrugated cardboard boxes.

The one problem is with deposit beverage containers, plastic or glass, that have those plastic wrap labels. The proof of deposit is on the label, so you can't remove it or the recycler won't accept it. So now plastic is added into the glass recycling stream, or 2 different plastics are mixed in the plastic recycling stream.

I think packaging should be regulated. No mixed materials, printed not glued label, or only glue that can be removed. Plastic number stamped on every piece of plastic produced anywhere in the world. Mandate use of recyclable paperboard packaging instead of plastic wrap. No fake bio-degradable packaging. No embedded electronics or batteries.

Also education: everyone is responsible for their trash. Strip out the recyclables, keep them clean, minimize other trash. In the example of the singing birthday cards, it should be trivial to tear or cut out the electronics and put the paper card into the recycling.

If we had sensible regulations and responsible consumers, then with only a bit of effort, we could have valuable clean recycling streams and minimal landfill.

Are properly lined landfills really that much worse than the trouble and expense of recycling? Especially with clean landfill technology?

I think people tend to underestimate the cost and inconvenience of proper recycling. The value regenerated is so low that, personally, I'm ok with sacrificing a couple plots of land to be later reclaimed and turned into parks/preserves.

Edit: downvotes are not intended to signal disagreement. Recycling is not free and I am just looking for a reasonable cost/benefit analysis. Zero environmental footprint is not practical. There is a happy medium somewhere.

> mix their own cleaners

Links to a page with ingredients of vinegar & isopropyl alcohol, both of which come in plastic containers.

I've been trying to find bath soap that comes in a non-plastic container, but no luck.

I just found this link about creating liquid soap from a bar, so I may give that a shot! https://clark.com/family-lifestyle/make-liquid-hand-soap-bar...

We have chosen as a species to destroy the planet. We know we're doing it. We could stop. We won't. So why keep making a fuss? Enjoy it! You're the last people to see a real sea turtle or a rainforest or a glacier.

It's not nice but it's true.

> plastic pouches .... are apt to end up in the ocean

Say what now? No they are not apt to end up in the ocean. Where do they get that idea from?

Plastic in the ocean is two things: fishing gear, and household garbage in certain Asian and Oriental countries.

> The program allows consumers to mail in their razors to be recycled.

Now why would they do this, sigh. Mailing them is going to consume more resources than just throwing them away.

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