And to me one of the worst, also recently covered by NPR: the big lies we were told about plastic being recyclable[1].
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
> Recycling plastic is "costly," it says, and sorting it, the report concludes, is "infeasible."
1. no infrastructure for sorting, there is no 100% method as of today (basically no research is done on this topic) 2. even if it is feasible, nobody does it becasue it is expensive. 3. there are countries where plastic recycling works, but these are outliners and countries who heavily invest in sorting, recycling on the consumer side.
- what infrastructure is needed for sorting? - what countries are successfully doing that? Taiwan? - can "expensive" be quantified?
So I have a PhD in mtls science, and I studied a bit of plastics thermo. However I never worked on the recycling problem.
Plastics, or polymers that aren’t cross linked, are in a sense easy to recycle - Just melt them and recast the part. 3D printing hobbyists even recycle their filament.
The problem is that any melted plastic doesn’t mix with any plastic other than itself. So if you have 99% polyethylene and 1% polypropylene and melt them together they won’t mix. But they won’t separate perfectly either (so you can’t skim the PP put).
Instead you get inter-penetrating phases (a spinodal). These phases have surfaces that don’t stick well together so the end result is that any parts made of this are exceptionally weak.
So this is the dilemma: if you have even 1% of different polymer in your mix, the plastic will suck. But we use at least 4 or 5 different plastics in everyday life all chucked into the same bins, all looking more less the same.
Solutions?
1. One solution is to heat all the plastics so that they break apart and therefore use them for feedstock. But this is very expensive, and the feedstocks aren’t very pure.
2 Make cat fuel. Cheaper then above, since the purity requirements aren’t as strong, but it’s basically the same as number 1. This doesnt increase CO2 emissions since the plastic is displacing oil
3. Burn it for energy. This needs far less strict requirements than 2 and lower CO2 emissions (since you don’t have to waste energy getting oil out). However, you’d have to basically ban public use of perfluorinated polymers or make them very expensive, or make them easy to identify (Teflon, gore-Tex.)
Frankly I’d ban perfluorinates except for use in critical industries. That chemistry is ecologically nasty.
4. Force companies to color their containers according to plastic type. I.e no more clear Pepsi or Coke bottles - all PE products are color, say green. All PP colors are red, etc.
But some observations on your comment.
Is plastic, that was never in the atmosphere (for millions of years anyway), really a carbon sink? It seems that trough its entire lifecycle it never goes into the atmosphere.
Also, if you burn plastic you’re displacing oil that wouldn’t otherwise be burned. Oil that is never extracted. And don’t forget that it takes a lot of energy to extract oil, so burning plastic reduces CO2 emissions globally somewhat.
Also, I’m skeptical about the practicality of using landfills to create geological treasures for mankind 100k years from now. The problem with it is that I feel that it is wishful thinking that placates our conscience. It’s easy to imagine yourself living “sustainably” in geological time scales. It’s hard to live sustainably in 1000 year timescales.
Burning is the only thing that makes sense, and that's OK if thebtotalt amount is "not too much", where current fossil fuel usage is "too much".
It turns out that a lot of the plastic in the ocean is there because there are countries where people are just dumping trash in the ocean. It can be less expensive than transporting it to a dump and dealing with it there.
The answer has to include making waste plastic have enough value so that people find it advantageous to recycle it or at least to bury it.
> 4. Force companies to color their containers according to plastic type. I.e no more clear Pepsi or Coke bottles - all PE products are color, say green. All PP colors are red, etc.
Humans don't have to sort the plastics, machines could. Is there a machine-readable but human-invisible marking we could give them? Like coloring them in a way that would be distinctive under a UV camera or UV light?
But ya, the UV dyes are probably not very stable
> Hitachi holds the record for the smallest RFID chip, at 0.05 mm × 0.05 mm......These dust-sized chips can store 38-digit numbers using 128-bit Read Only Memory (ROM). A major challenge is the attachment of antennas, thus limiting read range to only millimeters.
Sounds to me like RFID chips can be small enough to not worry about. Even at 1mm^3, you can likely just let it fall out while melting down plastic, and collect it later. Not that I'm advocating for doing so, I think enforcing a visible symbol indicating the contents is a far better idea.
well I'm no expert in this topic, just a little bit more engaged with the topic. the biggest problem is that companies save tons of money not from different colors, but from different components. most cheese products for example have different types of plastic (MA/MH packaging, compound structure plastics are just cheap and easy to do), and most people do not know that if you don't separate them that it is way harder to recycle (some also just don't care). it's a hard topic and I've seen countries like sweden who tackle that problem by teaching everybody how to recycle plastics (they have multiple containers), but I do not thing that this is feasible worldwide. I mean I live in germany and my governement does not tackle the problem, they do not invenst, they do not regulate, all they do is calling itself "world champion of recycling", but what do they do? they declare burning waste as recycling (called thermetic recycling, point 3. but it's not recycling and we do not care about the emission when it comes to burning) or better, we declare it as recycled but ship it to africa / asia and don't look what they do with the waste at all. waste management is something that most countries don't feel pressured to change something. mostly because you would need to change multiple industries, the packaging industry and the waste management industry.
> Frankly I’d ban perfluorinates except for use in critical industries. That chemistry is ecologically nasty.
well a lot of things are nasty, but as long as they print money. it won't be banned/changed that fast.
About Germany’s “recycling” I despise it when “experts” talk down at ppl saying “white lies” because we’re too stupid to understand (Dr. Fauci, I’m looking at you buddy).
Burning plastic isn’t recycling and Germany’s neologism is sophistry.
But it is a decent solution short of significantly increasing the price of plastic. That’s assuming you burn it correctly. And correctly burning it requires very high temperatures to get rid of dioxins. It means making sure to reduce as much as possible Chlorine sulphuric and Fluorine in the feedstock. It means having excellent NOx filters. It means having super tough monitoring of the emissions
What lie id Fauci say, that you're annoyed at?
All of the ills in policy and lack of transparency flowed down from that malignity of leadership.
Edit: He has also admitted to providing different numbers over time in order to get people more comfortable with the idea. He needs to cut that paternalistic bullshit and just be straight with us.
Hell, what in the last 4 years has made you believe that half of the country ISN'T worth talking down to...
Maybe they think that because people in power keep lying to them.
Getting rid of waste plastic in the environment is not impossible. The big problem is that manufactures only pay for the creation of the product. We need to have them pay for the disposal too. In time they will find the least expensive way to recycle it.
Of course, one should never be one's own editor as one always misses something - that is until one reads it the next day and sees one's glaring typos! But that's impractical.
It seems to me that a partial solution would be to allow small/limited edits after the normal timeout and or highlight the changes in some way. This would negate the problem of a subsequent poster's reply comment sounding ridiculous if the original post was altered too much.
Which actually works, because that's exactly what you'd have to do!
Where heavy petroleum fractions and other applicable refinery streams are broken down into lower molecular weight hydrocarbons
The cat feedstock is some nasty material that looks worse than most crude oil.
It would seem feasible to introduce a small percentage of waste hydrocarbon plastics to the cat feed as it was being processed, in order to at least recover a bit of the fuel value from the plastic.
I can only imagine it is simply cheaper to continue to purchase the equal number of barrels of regular cat feed than it is to attempt to displace some of it using waste polyethylene & polypropylene which may even be possible to deliver at no material cost.
OTOH, for all I know people may be doing this already.
Or use a better material, eg aluminium. I’ve seen aluminium bottles with aluminium caps. I realise the lining is plastic, but that little bit of plastic has to be better than a plastic bottle.
The way to do big changes is one small step at a time, and the reasonable way is to start with the low hanging fruit. So the the interesting question isn't why we're being lied to by Big Recycling, but why the easiest steps aren't being taken.
It's almost fruitless to discuss these issues on online forums because otherwise intelligent people insists on explaining how hard the problem of universal polymer recycling really is, as if that would make all recycling of plastics (sometimes even all recycling, full stop) impossible.
Meanwhile countries such as Norway recycles 95% av all PET bottles while the US is stuck on 30%.
Yet every discussion that remotely touches on recycling has to iterate that it's all a big lie.
I really think progress with plastics has to be before the materials ever reach consumers. And if we are to recycle it by throwing it in a bin, I think there needs to be an incentive for people to play along and not mess everything up.
1. tax it to discourage its use
2. bury it in landfills
GMOs can be great. Really I do believe that. But we’ve got these companies that don’t care about much beyond their bottom line pushing out GMOs that encourage extreme levels of biocide use and I and many others have a real problem with that.
So it is not a choice between “this chemical” or “that chemical” and many view that kind of thinking as the real problem. In this way the GMOs that you describe support that problematic kind of thinking.
That said, I am not familiar with what you describe. Which chemicals did not break down and how did GMOs allow us to use chemicals that do break down? I’d like to learn about that. Thank you!
https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2020/07/new-stud...
https://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12302-0...
> Growing reliance on the broad-spectrum herbicide glyphosate has triggered the spread of tolerant and resistant weeds in the U.S. and globally [5–10]. To combat weeds less sensitive to glyphosate, farmers typically increase glyphosate application rates and spray more often [11–13]. In addition, next-generation herbicide-tolerant crops are, or will soon be on the market genetically engineered to withstand the application of additional herbicides (up to over a dozen), including herbicides posing greater ecological, crop damage, and human health risks (e.g., 2,4-D and dicamba) [6].
The opportunities for genetic modification are boundless: more nutrition! Higher yields! Reduced allergens! Not to mention complete green-field things like bacteria designed to clean up industrial waste. These are things that could make ordinary people say "we're moving forward as a species."
So what's the face of this brilliant new industry? A mediocre tomato whose primary selling point was a few days longer shelf life in the store, and some staple crops sold with the explicit feature of "you can pour MORE herbicides on them!" GMO didn't hit the market as a way to make good things better, it was a way to make lousy things viable. We blew the launch, and the entire product category has to spend decades building the goodwill it should already have.
Yes, it's oversimplifying to the level of malpractice to put it that way, but marketing and presentation matters.
Higher yields means we can produce the same amount of food while converting less natural environments into farmland. So it's not all bad here.
I don't know where to look for information.
What books should I read? what websites have good information and explanations? whom should I trust?
Even if under current technology we are not able to profitably recycle goods, having an obviously detrimental to the environment material more heavily concentrated seems like a positive to me.