Comment by sergeykish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sergeykish | Hacker News Reader

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> In recent years, it has been possible to make PET bottles from 100% recycled plastic which are qualitatively just as good as bottles made from so-called virgin plastic. [1]

Check your facts [2]:

> Greenpeace says plastic bottle recycling rates are ‘stalled’ at around just 59% in the UK.

> Danone brand evian is introducing 100% rPET bottles to the UK this week; the latest in a series of recycled plastic commitments from PepsiCo’s Naked Smoothies, Nestlé’s Buxton bottled water, and Coca-Cola GB.

> This week Coca-Cola Great Britain announced that all plastic bottles in its core brand portfolio – including Coca-Cola, Fanta, Sprite and Oasis – are made with 50% recycled plastic. This equates to removing more than 21,000 tonnes of virgin plastic, according to Coca-Cola.

> “One of the key challenges the industry currently faces is that there isn’t enough food-grade recycled plastic locally available in the UK to switch to 100% rPET across our entire range,”

I have at least one product

> Frosch packaging is 100% recycled plastic [3]

[1] https://www.plasticsoupfoundation.org/en/2018/02/pet-bottles...

[2] https://www.beveragedaily.com/Article/2020/09/24/The-journey...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frosch

PET being a 100% recyclable outlier and much of plastics use being inherently unrecyclable aren't necessarily contradictory.

Open questions would be: how much use can be replaced with recyclable variants on the application side? (perhaps some use cases are not doable with PET?) How much use can be replaced on the supply side? (can only a fraction of the crude extracted from the ground enter that PET cycle or does a percentage of the extracted mass have to become other kinds of plastics that are inherently unrecyclable?)

And as long as any of those questions stay answered "not all" and we are still burning some of the extracted crude for energy: how much efficiency does that energy conversion lose when the crude takes a detour as un-recyclable plastics application between getting extracted from the ground and ending up in the atmosphere after burning? If that efficiency loss is small, un-recyclable plastics use can be environmentally cheap if it happens within the envelope of unavoidable energy use and vice versa.

(edit: mis-posted before)

I've responded to food grade plastics. As I'm trying to stick to Reduce Reuse Recycle, I choose PET and stay away from PP. And we need good HDPE recycling.

There are also ABS, PVC and many others — construction, textiles, shoes, asphalt, consumer goods. But they are not sold as recyclable.

EDIT: can we incinerate trash instead of burning oil? It is a controversial topic.

Would it produce less CO2 than glass? Assuming green energy no, but in such case we could sequence carbon from air. Would it require less energy than recycling? I don't think so.

Many plastics used in construction tend to have much longer lifespans (years to decades) so their recycleability, whilst it shouldn't be dismissed, is a less immediate concern.

E.g., I'm adding PVC cable and pipe ducting in various areas of my house, and am using polycarbonate discs as spacers for shelf uprights on an uneven wall. Both will stay in situ at least until I move (which I have no plans to do at present).

When I get 35 kg bags of sand and gravel, I keep the bags and reuse them for years now. They are almost worth the price of their contents.

> EDIT: can we incinerate trash instead of burning oil? It is a controversial topic.

In many parts of the world even the question of incinerating trash instead of coal is still meaningful and that one should be far less controversial.

Looks like incinerator may leak toxins [1]. It is possible to construct modern incinerator that should not leak [2]. So Europe can afford it, can "many parts of the world"?

Still questions remain

* Should we mark it as clean energy?

* Should we subsidy it? Or should we subsidy recycling?

[1] https://www.no-burn.org/europewasteburning/

[2] https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/05/03/copenhagen-trash-...

This is called Waste Valorization and is common in Europe. The idea is to run efficicent incinerators (with good filters on emissions to catch various nasty things we don't want in the air/soil/water and use the energy for heating purposes.

I was just wondering if it is possible to just vaporize the matter and absorb/recycle the pollutants and toxic part and release the rest to the atmosphere. And I saw your post :)

I really wonder whether this is a US thing. Don't they separate waste? Don't they recycle their trash? To me, some of the other comments (that were posted a few hours earlier) read as if they were from the 1990s.

Depends on where you live, most cities have recycling programs where recycling is picked up, but as you get more rural you either have to take recycling in yourself or there’s just no good options

Out in rural areas there's also zero composting. I know, because I own a homes in both a major US city and a rural location.

Also, most of the plastic the city takes, the rural location services won't.

Homes in rural areas have lots of land where you can compost yourself. Plastic recycling can be expanded by increasing the bottle fee and expanding some form of it to all plastic.

Hm, mine and my neighbors don't. There are communities with small lots like ours that simply don't look or sound like giant farms with acres of land to burn your own trash or create your own composting. In fact we look darn near suburban. We have neighborhoods and small towns. It's not all prairie and farm land when one describes rural life.

This is absurd. Yes rural lacks a government run composting program because it would have a negative benefit but plenty of people do there own composting and use it for gardens or such.

In rural areas many people feed their table scraps to chickens.

Don't lose sight of the forest for the trees. The whole environmental problem with plastic in well managed landfills is filling up city landfills where land is expensive. Rural landfills will never run out of space. It's a non-problem as long as it does actually make it to the landfill and not washed down a river or something.

When COVID-19 hit, the only local rural recycling option stopped accepting anything except corrugated cardboard.

Of course, who knows what happened to the recycling before that -- but right now, almost all of my recyclables go into the trash.

I'm keeping "don't you know?" mood

> Coca-Cola to switch to 100% rPET

> December 2019 - in Sweden

> October 2020 - in the Netherlands

> first half of 2021 - in Norway [1]

Meanwhile

> Coca-Cola currently has an average of 20% rPET in bottles sold in California.

But

> California will make it mandatory for plastic bottles to contain 50% recycled content by 2030. [2]

[1] https://www.cocacolaep.com/media/news/2020/coca-cola-in-west...

[2] https://www.beveragedaily.com/Article/2020/10/02/California-...

When I was living in Japan and shared a homestay with an American fellow from Missouri, it shocked me that he would throw all his recyclables in the general rubbish. As an Australian, despite how my country isn't the best in that field, I've always taken recycling seriously (even with the more challenging rules in Japan). It took him a while before the Japanese host and I could train him to recycle properly. It's not like he wasn't a decent guy, he just wasn't used to it. It made me wonder if recycling just wasn't a big thing in the US, and to hear that California, as a more liberal state, is still on 20% seems to confirm that.

It definitely isn’t a big thing here. It’s made worse by the fact that our recycling infrastructure is generally inadequate.

Part of the problem is that recycling is a state-by-state thing, and some states will simply never care about recycling.

When I was growing up in NYC recycling was even part of the curriculum, but there were definitely contexts in which recycling was difficult (for example, sidewalks usually had street garbage cans, but not street recycling cans)

Maybe you haven’t seen those trash bins with two holes, one for recyclables and one for general rubbish, and they both empty into the same bag?

I've seen those in other countries too, actually. My random optimistic theory is that the designer of such bins is trying to "train" people into recycling before the local government entity offers proper recycling infrastructure. But the reality is probably just that they want to look "green" without doing the hard part.

Missouri has shockingly bad recycling service, so it doesn't surprise me. Before I lived there I meticulously separated recylables but soon adopted the local habit.

(St Louis. Kansas City has pretty decent service in this respect)

Actually some plastics are not worth for recycling so some local gov finally firing it. (plastics work for fuel)

The habits run deeper than the recycling.

I am a tea and coffee drinker with a preferred mug and a travel mug which has a lid on it. If I go out for a stroll I fill the travel mug with coffee and take that.

Never do I wake up in the morning and think I need some drink in an aluminium can or plastic bottle. Nor do I wake up and wish my beverages were laced with corn syrup. Or advertised on TV.

If they stopped selling fizzy drinks tomorrow then I would not notice for a long time.

I am also out of the habit of drinking alcohol, however, when I do drink beer I prefer it to be in a pub where the glass is not just recycled but is re-used.

My additions to the recycling bins are small compared to those of a normal person that drinks beer, wine or other alcoholic beverages every day. I am also quite partial to citrus fruits so I have no aspiration to buy 'orange juice'.

For whatever reason I have not adopted the habits of buying these tin cans and plastic bottles in the first place. I am set in my ways and no amount of TV advertising will suddenly make me start the day with an energy drink or have a moment with Coca Cola mid afternoon. I just am not interested.

In the USA there is this culture of drinking fizzy drinks that the advertisers have been working on for decades. The default drink comes in a can or other single use container, not a preferred mug.

Separating waste might be a habit that needs to be worked on by some people, however, there is this deeper habit of using single use containers all the time.

Fizzy drinks are perfectly functional in fountains. And dirt cheap for the restaurants, to the degree that the soda companies restrict their availability to consumers.

The single use drinks are sold at massive profit.

I joke that restaurants are almost universally places that break even on food, if they are lucky, and make all their profit on hard/soft drinks.

The US had a big push toward single-stream recycling, where everything is thrown in one bin, and the recycling facility sorts it out.

It's been something of a disaster, because of the way it's changed how individuals "recycle". The bins are frequently full of contaminated and non-recyclable materials that the facility's equipment is incapable of sorting back out. Since it's all commingled in the collection truck, one person who's sloppy about how they recycle can spoil not only their own recycling efforts, but those of their neighbors as well. In my own neighborhood, the recycle bins are frequently full of things like greasy pizza boxes, single-use paper cups, EPS, even yard waste and broken (particleboard) furniture.

Chicago's current program is an illustrative example. After the city introduced it, the percentage of waste Chicagoans placed in the recycle bins roughly doubled, while the percentage of Chicago's waste that actually gets recycled was halved.

Covid shows how difficult it is to implement any effective policy in America above grade school intelligence, and that probably insults grade school children.

The populace is simply too poorly educated, lazy, and propagandized to resist government policy.

Another issue is the bins themselves. They give 0 indication what is acceptable or not. That varies widely on who picks up your garbage. The second part is china stopped importing a lot of it. Turns out many were just bundling it up and shipping it to china. That ended a couple of years ago. That imploded the whole recycling market. The money in it dried up except for very particular items (usually metals). Everything else, no one really wanted it.

To make people want to recycle you need to positively enforce it. If you goto a negative (such as a tax or fine) the incentive to do it falls off quickly. America used to recycle/reuse tons of stuff. Pepsi and Coke figured out a decent cost to their system was the reuse of their bottles. So they funded groups that worked against that. People would put a deposit on the bottles and containers. If you returned it you got the deposit back. If you tossed it someone else usually would find it and return it and get the deposit. It was a positive incentive. Instead now we have this weird thing where companies produce garbage and blame the customers for not 'taking care of it'. We have no real reason to do so other than feeling good about yourself. In some cases the ability and economic reality is not really there.

Most single stream systems are basically 2 trucks. One picks up the garbage. The other picks up the recycling. Garbage goes straight to the dump. The recycling goes to a sort center. They dump it all out on large conveyor belts with a bunch of people standing next to it picking out what they can and slicing open any bags/boxes they see. Pulling anything that is obviously not for the stream (pizza boxes, magazines etc). The magnets pull out anything metal. The plastics and glass are sorted out usually by weight color and symbol if they have the machinery for it. Otherwise it is manual. This all takes time and money. If you are making 50cents for a 2ton bail of plastic the economics is not there. But if you say make 500 dollars for a bail then maybe it is there.

In a neighborhood I once lived in the recycling guy decided he was not going to pick up anything except pop cans and newspaper. Everyone was mostly recycling correctly. Suddenly my neighbors and I had 2x the garbage to deal with. They all dumped it into the other bin and never recycled again for years. It took only one small negative thing to change from 'happy to help' to 'meh not doing it'. The boxes they had it in were obvious. One week everyone was doing it, then almost none. I would drive around the neighborhoods near mine and he had done it there too. They had to change the way they pickup garbage to undo what 1 guy did in 1 day.

Yea, this is a big one. Every time I move, it's different recycling rules to learn. Do we put paper in the blue bin or the green bin? Can we recycle cardboard in this city? What kinds of plastics are OK here and what kind aren't? It changes from city to city.

At one place I lived, I watched the truck come along and they just dump both bins in the same section of the truck. So you've got me agonizing over which bin to sort things into and then the waste management people just re-combine them. I guess I'm the sucker here!

As usual, the USA's un-coordinated "let the states and local governments figure it out" strategy fails again.

It can get even worse than that.

In the town where my parents live, waste collection services , including recycling, are contracted out among several private companies. So the rules can vary among neighborhoods.

In Chicago, the city supplies recycling services for single family homes and apartment buildings with up to (if I recall correctly) 4 units, and anything larger than that must privately contract its own waste management. So the rules have the potential to vary from building to building.

A deposit/tax system on plastic containers would likely end most plastic packaging. Consumers tend to prefer the metallic/glass/paper packages when given the choice. to enforce reasonable economics on the recycling side the deposit would likely need to be an order of magnitude higher than the cost of the plastic.

This may provide incentive for either biodegradable or clean burning plastics in the market which could have lower taxes/deposits.

Deposit systems are usually better when the object is reused in some way. Just to put a deposit on something that will be immediately thrown away/recycled I think creates a negative tax issue.

The side issue is plastic is wildly cheap to use and make. You can try to create tax systems that break that. But you just create resentment. A better way is to figure out how to make the other more sturdy reusable and recyclable materials better and cheaper than plastic. Reuse has the issue of re-collection/cleaning and that costs money. If you can crack that the whole market will skip plastic. Anything else tries to bend the market. It usually does not react well to that and creates undesirable side effects. The same thing happened in the coal markets with relation to nat gas. Natural gas became cheaper than coal and easier to use. Huge swaths of the energy market basically ran towards it. If something like that could happen in the plastics markets it would change the world.

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