U.S. contributes 5 times more ocean plastic than previous estimates | Hacker News Reader

U.S. contributes 5 times more ocean plastic than previous estimates

nytimes.com

170 pointshochmartinez127 comments

It's a misleading headline, since it's really saying that the US exports plastic and the places where it's exported manage to get it into the ocean.

Yes, apparently some US plastic recycling programs amounted to fraud in that they would simply export waste without due diligence about the overseas sites they were shipping them to. There's a reason why "reduce" and "reuse" come first in the old adage before "recycle".

Fraud is a strong word. This was common knowledge to anyone interested in how recycling works. Wait until you hear about the mountains of glass sitting around never to be recycled.

If by "mountains of glass" you mean "landfilled", then yup.

It's not well-understood that municipal recycling requires private contractors to bid on the waste stream, and if they can't make money on it, it all gets landfilled like the good old days. At least consumers are now trained to separate it.

Those can grifters are likely the real recycling heros of our time. Make it easy for them to find them.

I mean, this is all very disheartening.

First we find out that we haven't been recycling, we've been burying our waste because it's too expensive to reclaim the plastic. Then we find out that 80% of the plastic isn't even ever recyclable, and was a lie from the plastic companies to make us feel better about buying plastics.

Now we're shedding more of it into the oceans.

This is what happens when it's too cheap to pump oil out of the ground and put it in everything you consume.

What do we do about all this?

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/912150085/waste-land https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-... https://www.npr.org/2019/07/12/741283641/episode-926-so-shou...

>What do we do about all this?

There is no solution other than reducing consumption. Which can most easily be accomplished by increasing taxes on the consumption you want reduced.

It's also possible to simply ban some forms of products in the event taxes are not enough to destroy demand. I hear lobbying is cheap and has a great ROI.

That only reduces the problem a bit though, it's not a sustainable solution. We also need to produce plastics that can and will be recycled. Taxation and legislation could be drivers for improvements.

> That only reduces the problem a bit though, it's not a sustainable solution.

Why not? We lived quite happily with a fraction of the plastic usage 60 years ago. It's possible to continue using plastic for critical use-cases like medicine, or engineering uses like aircraft or automobiles where there are no good substitutes, while phasing out consumer usage.

I'd happily take my refillable shampoo bottle, soy sauce bottle, and milk bottle to be filled at the store.

I actually want to do that. I do purchase refills whenever possible, and I hope such mechanisms are more accessible.

It's ridiculous how many things are thought of as "disposable" today.

For instance, any hand wash comes with a pretty good and durable dispenser. But rarely do I see refills being sold, except when you specifically search for it online.

And pens, especially ball pens. The outfit is perfectly reusable, while rarely do I see the refill being sold. Instead, it's just 20 ball pens sold in a giant bundle. It's like they want to encourage you to throw away everything.

Buy expensive pens like Parker. They have refills. Of course the refills cost more than an entire cheap pen, but you want refills, not cheap.

I want cheap and refills. Reuse should be cheaper than buying new everything. Pricing today is backwards because it externalizes the costs of throwaway everything. We collectively pay the price of cheap, unrepairable, unrefillable, un-re-usable goods.

Using a fountain pen, refilled from an ink bottle, is not too expensive. Buy a $20-30 Lamy Safari as a good first pen (the shape of the grip helps to ensure you hold it correctly). Unless you're writing novels by hand, a smaller ink bottle will last a long time. I've not had to buy new pens or new ink for a couple years (I'll need to buy more ink soon). I keep a couple ballpoint pens around for random things where that's easier (what they can write on, not all papers take fountain pen inks very well). I don't buy those, they're usually the freebies given away by car dealerships, doctors, banks, whatever. I use them until they stop writing.

Forget pens. What about the other day-to-day consumer goods? Toiletries, food products?

I've seen pen refills, but they end up having as much packaging as cheap throw away pens.

Target sells refills for many of the brands of hand soap they carry right on the same shelf next to the small dispensers...

Which come in large plastic bottles...

but the volume to surface-area ratio increases as the size of the object increases, bigger is better

I'd like the fresh-ground coffee model for soap, shampoo, detergent, cleaning products, food products. Aisle filled with dispensers that I can fill my own bottle with, have it weighed at checkout. That's way less waste.

It's a pain but we could switch to glass containers or wax-lined cardboard for a large portion of things that come in plastic containers almost overnight.

That's ignoring things as basic as: if I need a plastic shampoo bottle... let me refill it? Why am I throwing that away after one use? For that matter why is it plastic instead of stainless steel?

Convenience. It's easier for people to throw away the plastic bottle, green wash it because it gets "recycled", then buy another one.

On an individual level, one can reduce their plastic consumption by using things that are not packaged in plastic (eg. powdered laundry detergent, bar soap, powdered shampoo, and so on). It's a bit trickier for many perishable foods in the US (eg. milk, yogurt, frozen foods), since many things are not available in non-plastic containers, but this could be solved by regulation.

Isn't synthetic wax petroleum based?

> We also need to produce plastics that can and will be recycled.

We need to use recyclable and biodegradable materials or at a minimum, just biodegradable materials (Or relatively bio harmless materials like glass). Even in the best cases, some percentage of material won't get recycled. In many cases, plastic should be replaced by something other than more plastic.

I prefer to think of plastics that break down easily. Some plastics can be composted. Landfills already capture methane emissions, so a plastic that breaks down to methane and other simple (safe) things in a landfill is ideal: we get energy out of waste. (Breaking down in a landfill is a tricky problem)

Or perhaps we figure out how to make recycling more valuable to be done.

That would just increase consumption. Plastic is really cheap to make relative to how expensive it is to recycle, energy wise.

> Which can most easily be accomplished by increasing taxes on the consumption you want reduced.

Or you could make monetary changes to prevent constant inflation. Hyper-consumerist culture with cheap disposable plastic garbage is largely caused by constant inflationary monetary pressure.

Or maybe hold companies accountable for the damage their products do to the environment and stop allowing the blame to be shifted to individual consumers?

>hold companies accountable for the damage their products do to the environment

What does this mean? The environment is damaged because so much plastic is consumed. It then follows that to reduce damage to the environment, less plastic must be consumed.

So we have come to the conclusion that we need less plastic to be consumed, the question is how. Obviously no one wants to consume plastic, since plastic is nice and convenient and most importantly, cheap.

Therefore, if you make plastic more expensive, people will consume less of it (since they have limited amounts of money). Also known as a tax.

Nearly everything in American grocery stores is packaged in plastic. How do we ensure that the companies producing consumer staples find better solutions for packaging and distribution, rather than just continuing to use plastic and passing the tax on to the consumer?

If the tax is high enough, at least one company figure out better packaging solutions to avoid the tax and offer cheaper products. Customers will prefer the cheaper product. Other companies will be forced to follow suit or lose market share.

Make the tax so high that the only feasible use of plastic is medical supplies and (very) durable goods.

Also, plastic is not one material. Taxes can be based on the re-usability of the plastic in question. So very durable goods could still be made of plastic and not have restrictive taxes. This could make it easier to achieve because we can re-purpose the existing plastic manufacturing industry without having to build up entirely new production techniques.

>rather than just continuing to use plastic and passing the tax on to the consumer?

Keep increasing the tax until the alternative becomes a more affordable option.

If wrapping something in plastic makes it so expensive (through taxes) that it causes the end product to lose competitiveness with something not wrapped in plastic, companies will be incentivized to not wrap their product in plastic.

Why not both? There's also a big difference between one time usage of plastic and reusable/reused plastic. For example, used in packaging, its almost all one time usage. However in say a laptop or smartphone, the product gets used for years.

Well you kinda are. Let's say a $4 item that normally is packaged in plastic now is required to cost $4 + $25. I think a lot of companies would quickly migrate packaging.

That would be silly - most of the products we create can harm the environment.

Probably 95% of what I have at home (plastics, electronics, furniture's paint and glue, chunks of relatively special metal like aluminium, chemicals used to clean anything, etc...) would harm the environment if I would just dump it anywhere without control => if you would want to hold companies acountable for all that stuff then we would be back to the stone age => in my opinion a combined organized disposal by endusers + more taxes on products which are "difficult" to dispose of (difficult to implement? most taxes target "consumption" and not "production") + a general "push" (by media & social) to be aware of problems related to such products are the only option.

You can ban or tax (heavily) single plastic use production, simple as that.

>> What do we do about all this?

> There is no solution other than reducing consumption. Which can most easily be accomplished by increasing taxes on the consumption you want reduced.

The ocean pollution in the article is due to shipping plastic waste to other countries, who subsequently let it shed into the ocean.

Couldn't this problem be eliminated in a near instant by disallowing export of that low value plastic waste, and landfilling it in the US? It doesn't solve the oil / carbon problem, but neither does exporting it. It does solve the ocean pollution aspect pretty completely though.

I'm not saying it's the best solution, but it does seem like a stepping stone.

That step cannot realistically be taken apart from the previous suggestion of taxation though, since someone has to pay for landfilling...

My understanding is that in the past decade or so costs to recycle have exceeded costs to landfill for most cities, since the value of the plastic has dropped and China became unwilling to accept it.

It's quite clear we need to make it illegal.

Canada has just banned single use plastics [1], which is a start but doesn't go nearly far enough.

If we were actually serious we would make single-use plastic bottles and many, many other things illegal too.

It will come, I just fear it will be too late.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48477087

There's no reason to ban single-use plastic or even multi-use plastic as long as your electricity infrastructure contains oil plants or gas burner plants.

Simply burn the plastic waste.

You can reclaim more than 90% of the energy, and you're simply offsetting the use of power plants that burn the oil directly. If you instead use the oil to produce plastic, use the plastic for something good, and then burn it, you've gained more use out of it than you normally would, and you're co2-neutral.

... except for the toxic gasses that are released when burning plastic. Dioxins are no joke.

Isn't that a non-issue with high temperature incinerators?

Modern trash incinerators don't have that problem. A friend of mine works in the industry, and they're starting to build co2-traps as well, which makes it an even better choice.

I know the US is severely behind on trash incineration compared to for example Sweden, but the knowledge and technology exists, it's just a matter of building the plants at this point.

Why not just make the export of plastic waste illegal? That's how it gets into the sea.

So what are you doing?

Force your local community to build clean waste burning power plants instead of commissioning new landfills and recycle what can be reprocessed locally. Additionally put a tax on each bag of trash to encourage recycling and ban private burning of trash.

Pass a law that requires all vendors of electronics to take back any e waste which then goes to recycling.

Also pass a law that food plastic packaging can be disposed of at the supermaket for free.

I was not asking what could be done, I was asking what he was doing besides commenting on HN.

A landfill sequesters the carbon. Burning the plastic puts it into the atmosphere. That's a bad idea.

If the problem is that "recycling" programs don't always recycle, then just landfill it all. Problem solved.

Modern trash burning plants capture emissions and turn them I to solids which get buried.

I think you're still caught up in the lie about recycling. Part of that lie included indoctrinating people with the belief that landfills were bad. They're not. The US has unlimited space to create landfills and they can now be made so they don't leach chemicals into the water table or erode into the sea. The problem with plastic is it getting into the ocean. It gets into the ocean (from the US) because of failed attempts to recycle it. So put it in landfills where it's harmless.

I agree, but with the caveats that indescriminate use of landfills (as we have today) is not good, and they are not maintenance-free in future although considering them 'dump and forget' is very attractive. I expect historical landfills being compromised, especially due to increased sea levels and extreme weather events, to become an increasingly common topic in the next few decades.

Sequestration of plastic in landfills seems to be the best option we have right now for plastic waste disposal. Even then, more focus on proper encapsulation before it goes in is needed. Even simple initiatives like EcoBricks (https://www.ecobricks.org/) helps ensure more permanent sequestration in ways that look likely to reduce the risk of eventual environmental damage.

We also need more focus on diversion of materials before landfill. Right now an enourmous amount of compostible organic waste, e-waste, and metals are sent to landfill because nobody is willing to bear the cost of diversion. IMO material disposal cost should be borne by the original producer (see the EU WEEE regulations for a good starter on how this can work). This incentivises sustainable choices from the very start of a goods life cycle, rather than how it currently sits as an afterthought.

Rising sea levels should not be a concern for nearly any landfill, except perhaps those of island nations. Building a few meters above the present sea level will keep you out of the ocean even if everything melts.

If you are not more than a few meters above sea level, then you are probably on valuable coastal lands and should move inland anyway.

But there are many such island nations and the consequences are global - In England and Wales, for example, there are at least 1700 coastal landfills in the coastal flood plain and at least 60 threatened by erosion ( Coastal Landfills, Rising Sea Levels and Shoreline Management: A Challenge for the 21st Century - Nicholls, 2019). Last year a landfill on the south west coast of NZ busted open due to unprecedented high rainfall, sending hundreds of tonnes of waste matter down the Fox river and out to sea. Inthat region alone another 12 historic landfill sites are at risk, and remediation for the already-busted one to ensure no further spillage is a multi-million-dollar project that the region can't afford.

It's not just island nations either - A great portion of humanity lives close to a coastline and waste is generally interred in proximity to where consumption occurs. Physical damage is not the only consideration - Any situation that prompts power interruption, water damage, or reduced access to the site puts a landfill site at risk of incident. In the US the EPA considers there to be significant risk of these events and has had it in their sights for at least a decade: https://semspub.epa.gov/work/11/175853.pdf

Assuming that sea level rise is just a matter of adjusting the shoreline in accordance with topography is also a huge mistake - Erosion increases rate and begins occurring in places it didn't previously. Storm surges and king tides bring surge water to higher points that ever before, and intrusion of saltwater into landfills poses far higher risk of leaching than rain, river, or aquifer.

The underlying problem is a changing risk management landscape - A decision to site a landfill on a once-in-300-years flood site may be taken, but when that assessment is later revised to once-in-100 years, you're faced with either rolling the dice each year or pulling funding out of your ass to relocate. Repeat the gamble at a global scale at many thousands of sites, the overall odds look very bleak.

This is a problem for some extant landfills, but not the premise of landfills themselves. Most nations do not have a shortage of land a long way away from and above the ocean.

Agreed. Off the coast of LA, I just learned that companies were dumping thousands of DDT barrels for decades.

"Landfills could hold only so much, and people were concerned about burning toxics into the air — but the Pacific Ocean seemed a good alternative. Explosives, oil refinery waste, trash and rotting meats all went into the ocean, along with beryllium, various acid sludges, even cyanide." [1]

Companies were dumping and putting out of site. Much harder to burn it and avoid getting caught.

Third world countries are also taking first world trash and then dumping massive amounts into rivers and the ocean.

Cleaning up the ocean is a hell of a lot harder than cleaning up the air or the ground.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-coast-ddt-dumping-ground...

> we've been burying our waste because it's too expensive to reclaim the plastic.

Good. That's literally the most correct thing that can possibly be done with this waste. It's _never_ going to be recycled, at least not with current technology, because it takes more energy to get usable plastic out the other side than does sourcing new plastic. It's simply not worth it.

Bury it.

You think we're going to run out of space? You think we can't handle preventing runoff into the ocean? These are solved problems - all we have to do is to admit to ourselves that we're going to be burying a ton of plastic waste, and then ensure that every single unrecyclable scrap of it actually does get buried. We need to export our best practices for waste management to help other countries bury their plastic, and sell some of our gargantuan amounts of land space to bury plastic for smaller countries that don't have the space. It simply is what it is.

We don't have to give up plastic in order to prevent it from going into the ocean. What we do have to do is to understand that plastic, as an artifact of an advanced civilization, rests on the fundamental requirement of having implemented of all the waste management infrastructure also. If you don't have that, you're not ready for plastic!

Yet, we've exported tons of it to the third world where waste management is simply not a thing - sewers aren't even a thing - and then we act surprised when they throw useless plastic into the river, until you end up with this:

https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=garbage+river

We do not see this in the first world! Nobody is doing that here, which is why I vehemently reject the guilt trip people want to put us on with regards to plastic. We have this amazing technological invention, the "garbageman", who with his truck is able to keep our civilization pretty damned clean. Remember to thank yours.

How do we export this incredible innovation to Africa, India, etc. so that their garbage rivers become livable homes for aquatic life once more? Seems to be a lot more difficult than it should be, but I am really lacking in any kind of understanding of why that would be.

having garbage trucks that come reliably costs money and infrastructure that often isn't there.

Sure, sure. So how was garbage dealt with here before we had trucks? I suspect horse-drawn wagons wouldn't be the worst idea in the world....

not sure how common horses are in africa, even before colonialization. garbage wasnt as plentiful back then either.

That's exactly the point.

Pains me to do it, as I'm not a gamer, but it's like in a video game when you get a weapon or item your character is not skilled enough to wield. Try using it and it won't work as well as something simpler. You need to level up, ostensibly building your fundamental skills up to the point where you can make use of it.

Same is true here: plastic is an artifact of an advanced civilization and it's being dropped into a developing one that simply doesn't have the infra or the cultural values of proper waste management needed to handle the problem.

Solution: we keep using plastic, they stop and focus on things that work better in their situation, using local materials that fit their lifecycle well into the mindset of the people.

I agree. The only thing that gives me hope is this:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2016/01...

> This is what happens when it's too cheap to pump oil out of the ground and put it in everything you consume.

Sort of. Why is oil cheap now?

Oil is cheap now, fewer people will extract it. Exxon is reporting historic losses. Occidental went bankrupt. Shale extraction and deep sea exploration both are suddenly uneconomical. Isn’t this a positive?

Was there a reduction in demand? Sure. There was a huge reduction in speculation! People are still buying plastic, but dumb money (like USO and Chinese hedge funds) actually sent oil prices negative. Something inconceivable from a reduction in demand alone.

Do you have to burn the oil you buy? It is toxic waste that belongs in the ground. You could buy oil resources (extraction) relatively cheap right now and simply leave the oil in the ground.

People hate this line of argument, they hate it a lot more than recycling, like who’s going to go and buy oil futures, take delivery and not burn the oil?

People already do this with e.g. rainforests and land conservation and it’s basically the only 100% market-based, bulletproof land conservation process - buying land and like, not chopping the trees down or mining it. Maybe the same people who hate buying oil and not burning it also hate land conservation. Maybe they hate that forest protections make natural resources more valuable, thereby enriching the bad guys. It certainly feels shitty, giving these oil bastards free money. No simple answers here.

Besides what would happen to prices if people bought more oil than they need? Prices would rise, encouraging people to extract. Or prices would not rise, simply because speculators are terrified. Who knows! Lumber prices rise and fall all the time, despite forest under legal conservation having increased over time.

Anyway, if you know where prices will go, trade oil futures and become a billionaire. Also it’s only cheap for Saudis and Russians to extract oil. What do you want to do, invade?

I’m just trying to litigate the #1 misunderstanding: the relationship between oil prices and pollution. It is impossible to predict how oil prices alone will affect pollution. Prices are both cause and effect.

>People hate this line of argument, they hate it a lot more than recycling, like who’s going to go and buy oil futures, take delivery and not burn the oil?

wouldn't it be more efficient to just buy the mineral rights to those oil, and leave it in the ground?

>What do we do about all this?

Don't recycle for the sake of recycling. Tax any externalities associated with virgin plastic manufacturing and plastic recycling. Let the market figure out what's the most efficient. This weird obsession of recycling-for-the-sake-of-recycling is what led to this problem in the first place.

This right here. Taxes can have a huge impact on behavior. However, corporation's ability to lobby can delay or stall any efforts to make meaningful changes quickly. I think we'll get there, but it'll take far longer than it needs to.

> Let the market figure out what's the most efficient.

The idea of using the market, which has only ever been good at figuring out how to rape mother earth as thoroughly as possible, to solve environmental issues gives me calling-upon-Hannibal-Lecter-to-solve-your-serial-killer-case vibes.

Markets respond to incentives. If the incentive is towards raping mother earth (eg. if polluting is more productive than not polluting, and pollution isn't punished), then that's the behavior you're going to get.

From TFA:

> This figure is almost double the higher end of the estimates from 2015 and five times more than the lowest estimates in the earlier predictions.

> The data included American waste exports that were not accounted for in their previous studies.

> Recent developments have shown that much of the plastic waste that is exported does not go through recycling systems and ends up in the oceans.

It's sad because even if US Democrats have the momentum to make a clean sweep of government, it's unclear if they have the political currency to pursue a green agenda, especially when economy/Covid are the top two issues. A large-scale plan will likely dampen the US economy in the short term at time when voters want short term wins.

It will fall on the rest of the world lead on ecological responsibility & technology, while the US becomes an increasingly odious neighbor.

In many states voters can put initiatives directly on the Ballot.

For example the state of Washington had a carbon tax on the ballot in 2016, however voters rejected it.

Until these issues actually resonate with voters, it is unlikely change will come.

- Plastic pollution has little to do with climate change.

- "5 times more" says nothing about the absolute amount. According to https://www.plasticethics.com/home/2019/3/17/the-countries-p..., 5x more means moving up to be tied with Sri Lanka on the global list. It would take another 5x to match the worst offender.

- Other posts in this thread are pointing out that the headline is misleading in several ways.

This is the logic that I love to see.

Why are you confusing plastic in the ocean with climate change? To some extent, solutions to each of the two issues exacerbate the other. There's no single right way to manage the environment. That's why nobody is doing it the way you want, because it's not "right" by all measures.

Check out the Ocean Cleanup Project, it definitely cannot be the only solution, but it is one solution towards reducing ocean plastic. I know it seems crazy daunting, and even impossible, but they are excited and entrepreneurial so I support their efforts to help the problem.

I'm especially excited about their Rivers[1] project, and their recent sunglasses[2] made from plastic they removed from the Pacific ocean (worth noting, only 95% of the product is recycled from the ocean).

Disclaimer: No affiliation, but I like what they do, have donated in the past, and just bought 2 pairs of their sunglasses.

[1] https://theoceancleanup.com/rivers/

[2] https://products.theoceancleanup.com/

I don’t disagree that there’s a problem, and removing plastic from the environment is definitely a good thing to do, but if reclaiming plastic when it’s all in one place (the transfer stations, landfills, or even the cargo containers) and easy to collect, how can it possibly be sustainable to skim it out of the ocean?

(Not a convincing answer, but it’s my answer) Because this group is motivated to accomplish it. lol, sadly we were lied to, and apparently no group has really cared about cleaning up land based plastic.

And I kinda fall into this bucket too. If you told me someone hurried the plastic, I’d be a bit sad “but ok”. Meanwhile, I love the idea of the ocean being clean, and am happy to pay the X% extra to buy sunglasses or whatever to help fund cleaning the ocean up.

Plastic should be taxed.

Plastic manufacturers could be made to buy back plastic goods at a rate that would bankrupt them if they're unable/unwilling to reuse or recycle that plastic. This would incentivize the use of less plastic overall, recycleable plastics in general, and the creation of products that remain useful to consumers for longer (to drive down the return of plastic products.)

In California at least, there's already the "C.R.V" - California Redemption Value. This is effectively a tax, added to every bottle sold, available to be redeemed upon being turned into a recycling center.

Even with this, not enough people bother.

The real solution is to make our garbage collection far more efficient. Why do we still separate recyclables and garbage into separate bins? As-if regular people can be trusted to do this without fail? Make it automatic, and a lot of this concern will go away.

Seems like CRV could be increased to get the target recycling rate desired by legislators pretty easily.

If each bottle was $0.50, many more people would separate and sort their recycling to take advantage of this.

Would probably have some free beneficial side effects, like less soda consumption and more use of re-usable water bottles.

Or, we can focus on automated garbage sorting. It shouldn't matter which bin you toss something into, it should all be automatically handled the best way for whatever material it's made from.

Increasing CRV disproportionately impacts people with less economic stability than others. Many of us here on HN probably wouldn't miss $0.50, at least enough to be compelled to take the time to properly sort our garbage 100% of the time.

Plastic floats, glass and metal sinks. Shred everything and separate it. Machines already exist like this - but everyone wants to focus on compelling human behavior to be a certain way instead of just removing that hurdle completely, which would be better for everyone involved.

The advantage of garbage sorting is it can change. If I don't get the memo that X can be recycled I won't put it into the right bin, but if it is sorted automatically the garbage company just installed the equipment and we are done.

Not to mention all the lazy people who don't bother to sort anything still get the right thing done.

There isn't much cost to the above: I'm not perfect so they need to re-sort my recyclables anyway (this is why I only have two bins, one for non-recyclables, one for recyclables instead of a dozen for each type). The real trick is to make the machines cheap and reliable enough to handle any input. I think the main reason they don't do this already is the machines jam if you feed them plastic bags.

I haven't heard of the plastic bag issue. I'd think industrial equipment would be able to rip them up, which is what would need to be done to recycle them anyway.

Only having a single bin to worry about - all garbage goes into it - would be a huge win for the environment. It's one of the few areas I'd actually be OK with significant government subsidies to help companies/municipalities acquire the equipment.

Plastic bags tend to not shred into pieces, but into strings that wrap around the shredding blades until they are jammed full and don't shred. (this isn't a stop the moters jam, just the machine stops shredding)

But what happens to the bottle when it is returned? Does it actually get recycled or does it end up in the ocean anyway?

To be clear, nobody in the US is dumping plastic into the ocean.

The article states clearly it's other nations dumping or losing US garbage, that they purchased with intent to do something with, that is the main culprit. That and fishing and shipping equipment that is thrown or lost overboard.

I'm actually unsure what these recycling centers do with the collected bottles. Maybe they sell the material to companies that will recycle it into new objects, or at least dispose of it in designated areas where it will not impact the environment. Either way, it's the "designated, government sanctioned" way to recycle these bottles. Tossing them into your recycle bin doesn't redeem the CRV for the individual.

PET bottles get recycled into more bottles, or other things like textiles. PET is a very recyclable plastic.

There is also hdpe, ldpe, PP - those are the ones I see the most of in my house, PET is rare (you just learned something about my personal distaste for soda)

Yeah soda is foul, though there's quite a bit of it around. PET is also used for plain seltzer water (which accounts for the majority of bottles I go through.) I guess PET is favored for pressurized drinks?

fwiw finding a recycling center in California is a pain. It's not like in the northeast where many supermarkets have can/bottle recycling machines. Homeless can collectors often sell the cans for 50% of the value or less to some guy with a pickup truck who can actually get to wherever the far-off recycling center is.

That is still a much better deal for the homeless than the deal they get where this is no redemption value. Homeless often do walk into recycling centers in cities where there is no redemption value, but they are lucky to get $.01/can when selling by weight.

Recycling centers are common if you know where to look - the ugly side of town is an ideal place for them (both because they are by nature messy, and because competition means they can't afford are more expensive area). Many small towns have a place to recycle (most small town industry has enough metal waste to make it worth recycling, so there is demand)

Though in Iowa the way the redemption works is any store that sells it must take it back. I don't know how redemption centers work, because we don't have them, instead every supermarket takes their cans back. This ends up being a war on generic soda: coke/pepsi you can take anywhere, but stores will reject the other-store brand cans making them a hassle to sort.

All of my plastic bottles go in my recycling bin that the city collects every week. I'm guessing they must make some money off of it. Also, the homeless seem to do a really good job of getting plastic and aluminum cans off the street. I rarely see any of those items littering the area. It's tough and hard work for them...

The real solution is prevent the production of single use plastics and packaging at the source.

Why?

If we can automatically recycle most/all of them, single-use becomes a non-issue. You get to have your plastic straws and bags without producing waste material.

Taxing plastic will take care of most single use cases, as they'll become uneconomic.

In this thread, we've already discussed how California, basically, taxes all bottles - plastic bottles too - and how it's had nearly zero impact on people's behavior.

Which is why it's better to not rely on people's behavior for recycling programs. It should be automatic. Place whatever in a bin, and the garbage company sorts and recycles.

1. this was a tax in an attempt to get recycling, not a tax to discourage use of something

2. a tax on all bottles doesn't incentivize using a different material for bottles

3. if the tax is ineffective, it isn't large enough

4. recycling plastic is expensive - better to just not use plastic in the first place

A tax on plastic (not glass or tin) would incentivize making bottles out of glass or tin instead.

Plastic waste won't be an issue if plastic products intended to be waste aren't produced.

That isn't really feasible due to the way plastic degrades as it is recycled. When you chop up and melt a plastic bottle the resulting material is no longer suitable for making bottles for example.

We could figure out some plastic waste scheme that works like carbon credits, and that might lead to better outcomes. You could get credits for turning waste PET into insulation or fabric, and have to buy said credits to produce bottles. Though this is sort of off the top of my head and half baked.

This is kind of a side show though in my opinion the overwhelming majority of plastic in the ocean is fishing relater (e.g. abandoned nets) and shipping material that blows off of cargo vessels.

Better monitoring and policing of fishing in international waters could kill a lot of birds with 1 stone.

What you say is generally true of plastics, but not in the example you give. PET is in fact properly recyclable; bottle-to-bottle recycling is done with PET.

(And the intent of my proposal is to render the use of plastics unlike PET uneconomical. That's the point of the proposal, not the problem with it.)

Yeah PET was a bad specific example.

I think the issue is that plastic is useful for reasons other that just the material cost. Shipping glass is both dangerous and VERY energy intensive. Treated paper doesn't hold pressure, and is easily damaged. There are a lot of other reasons why plastic is suitable for packaging that I won't enumerate at length here, but I think it's reasonable to say that there are legitimate uses.

I will wholeheartedly agree that plastic packaging is over used. That said, fishing and marine waste are still the single largest source of ocean plastic.

I think you're getting emotionally caught up on the idea of having less plastic. If it was safely and permanently buried, it would be no worse for the environment but cheaper than recycling or using less.

Single-use/disposable plastics are just one prong of a larger culture of waste and consumption that has many limiting downsides like how we've been trained to buy tech gadgets that we can't even upgrade nor repair. Or how we are more likely to trash our pants than learn a simple life skill like how to mend a small hole. Or how less and less self-reliant we become.

That it's cheap to bury our trash in the perfect, well-maintained landfill is a tiny consolation.

I constantly get items in the mail that come in very excessive plastic packaging. Taxing plastic would take care of most of that.

It's far simpler and more effective to just tax the plastic. It also provides a revenue stream for the government that can be used to fund green initiatives.

In Texas, they 'lobbied' (bribed, imo) the state government to overturn Austin's plastic bag ban. It occurs to me that the most workable tax policy that can be passed in the US today consists of politicians raising their 'prices'.

Our supply chain needs to be improved.

There are so many things that we can buy in bulk. Something like bringing your own container for hand soap that then gets filled up at a dispenser.

Even better, we could start regularly circulating certain deliveries at scheduled intervals. So every two months, a truck with all the soaps comes around to neighborhoods delivering to people that registered for a delivery on their app.

Or you could not use liquid soap altogether ;-) it has no benefits over bars of soap that last far longer and don’t require plastic packaging.

Reduce, reuse, recycle - in that order

It doesn't exist (at any real scale) because there's no impetus for it to exist. As long as there's no real premium to go to the store and buy single-use products, people are going to continue defaulting to that.

I hope there's a bit more detail than that. I have seen numbers in the past that the US and Europe together represent only a relatively small amount of plastic, but perhaps not if you account for transfers of recycled material. I thought the major contributor was abandoned nets, though.

I'm assuming this means we export 80% of our waste?

Wondering how the anti-globalist populace feels about this.

Further down it says 9% of our waste is recycled, and our exports should come out of that.

It makes me feel like shipping it overseas was a way to keep from having to deal with it. If we have to deal with our own garbage, then maybe we'll care about reducing the amount we produce.

I understand it to mean that OF the waste the US exports, 88% of that (unquantified) amount ends up somewhere with inadequate capabilities to handle it.

The actual tonnage/proportion of domestically-generated waste being exported I don’t think is referenced anywhere - haven’t gone beyond the article itself yet though.

Url changed from https://inhabitat.com/u-s-contributes-5-times-more-ocean-pla..., which points to this.

The author of this article is "Bonface Landi". His bio describes himself as a mentor to up-and-coming writers. I can find no evidence of his existence online outside of his bio on the linked site, another site that describes him instead as "her", and a LinkedIn page with no profile photo and 1 connection.

Who is this person? "Bonface" is also not a plausible first name.

Does it matter? The original source [0] is the first link in the article and is much more detailed than the short summary article.

Bonface seems to be a first name used in some parts of Africa.

That is correct but the spelling of that name would be "Boniface".

I think that's what the name is ''supposed'' to be, but a web search revealed a number of people seemingly named 'Bonface', spelled that way.

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