I believe plastic recycling is not motivated by oil use primarily. I believe it is motivated by trash accumulation in oceans and the food chain (microplastics). There are a ton of areas of the world where plastic just piles up.
Plastic bags do no harm buried in the landfill, and we’re not running out of land.
I bike along the roads in town, and I see plastic bags in the gutter. I look down the incline beside the road and there are plastic bags in the trees.
Is the USA as bad as Morocco? No. Is plastic waste a problem? Yes.
A plastic bag can be quite sturdy, it can be transparent so you can easily see what's inside, it's light, it folds well, is resistant to humidity, etc.
If you'd give a plastic bag to someone from the 18th century they'd cherish it.
We need to make it so the average person actually cares about buying a bag.
Something like €2 with a return value of €1. Or anything that makes you treat it like you'd treat, say, a good tennis ball. You wouldn't just throw those away willy-nilly.
And we need to ban the low grade ones completely.
Something very similar is happening in north korea.
http://koreabizwire.com/bottled-water-a-symbol-of-wealth-in-...
I would be more amenable to the idea if they made a bag that does not get torn (e.g. armor the paper with cotton or bamboo thread), and is leak-resistant (e.g. waxed), but that somehow takes the back seat.
You do know that we're creating country sized plastic patches in the middle of the Pacific, microplastics are everywhere and we're eating them, they're slowly changing us in ways we don't even understand, etc, etc?
[1] https://qz.com/1299485/antarcticas-waters-now-contain-plasti...
https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...
People used to assume that dumping sewage in the streets was just fine, but it led to cholera outbreaks [1]. There was no push to change that until it became a major problem and something had to be done. Sure, we can assume burying plastic will be a solution forever. But is it not better to avoid risking the event where it suddenly is a problem, and try and mitigate it now?
(Personally, I think so, but it is one of things that will be forever debatable.)
[1] http://www.hubhistory.com/episodes/boston-in-the-time-of-cho...
Yes it is. Just because some decision made in the past is wrong doesn't mean a different decision made in the present is also wrong. There is no harm to landfill, and we know it quite well by now.
Dumping our trash in the ground is lazy and I just don't understand how anyone wants to defend it.
The options are to make a pile of it, bury a pile of it (ocean or land), burn a pile of it, or eject a pile of it into space, while recycling what we can to reduce load on the aforementioned options (often far, far less than people imagine, btw).
So it’s not an issue of people desiring to put their dirty diapers in the ground for its own sake, but it being the better of several shittier options.
Fundamentally we all make too much trash. Each of us. But while that problem is being worked we still need to put it somewhere where it minimizes sanitation and environmental risk.
Far from being lazy, modern landfills are pretty meticulously engineered for surface reclamation in the developed world. You are probably acting more responsible by putting developed-world trash in a developed-world landfill than by shipping it across the ocean in container barges to the developing world, where often as not it just ends up in an unmanaged, seeping pile (assuming it makes it to and stays on land).
There’s a lot of wishful thinking about what to do with garbage (if “we” only..., “people” just need to...), but the best thing any of us as individuals can do is obsessively reuse finished materials without becoming hoarders, donate, and consume less (opt out of gratuitous packaging, don’t buy tchotchkes for decorations or gifts, buy things that will last for decades or generations, not seasons or years).
How’s that?
Or at least, it used to. I think most plastic "recycling" is now going into local landfills.
That isn't true (and was never true). Trash in Asia that ends up in the ocean is local trash.
Even back when Asia bought recycling from us there wasn't much trash in it, and even the trash that was there didn't end up in the ocean.
The stuff in the ocean is what litters the streets, and then goes in rivers during rain storms.
But you are right, the amount of councils sending recycling to landfill is very sad.
https://abcnews.go.com/International/plastic-garbage-flip-fl...
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180426-why-plastics-are...
https://www.surfrider.org/coastal-blog/entry/microplastics-f...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ocean-plastic-liberals-fact...
And it's only going to get worse unless we do something about it. Recycling is far worse than just taxing negative externalities and making the companies upstream use biodegradeable materials.
For aluminum, recycling is incredibly important. It reduces the need for environmentally-destructive aluminum mining and energy intensive smelting.
For paper, recycling high quality paper like clean office paper and some cardboard reduces the demand for virgin wood pulp. Lower quality paper gets thrown away.
Also, shout-out to composting - food and yard scraps breaking down in a well aerated environment produces fewer greenhouse gasses than landfills.
If people are pissed about how much stuff they are throwing into the trash... go look at the incredible amount of packaging material that gets thrown out....
My city actually has this - we were all given bright green compost bins and instructions for composting. The amazing thing about municipal composting is that they can handle way more types of food scraps (e.g. bones and fruit pits) than backyard composting bins. They come pick it up every week just like the trash and recycling.
Unfortunately, it seems like I'm one of two or three people on my street who compost my food scraps every week. I think composting should really be easier for people to figure out than recycling - it's so simple to know what you should and should not compost (as it says on the front of every green bin, "If it grows, it goes").
I must admit I am surprised that anyone needs to justify the merits of recycling, so I'm curious what your outlook is. What makes you question the need for recycling?
> What makes you question the need for recycling?
The environment makes me question it. Everything I've seen shows recycling anything except metal is bad for the environment. We only do it because it makes people "feel good".
The right thing to do with:
Metal: recycle it
Glass: bury it
Paper: bury it
Plastic: burn it
Everything else: bury it
Additionally glass is harmless in the environment, and it's not something we can ever run out of.
So why do it?
Additionally, if you actually do want to recycle things, glass shards contaminate everything, making it much more difficult and expensive (i.e. consumes more resources) to do it.
Making new glass can be an issue, as it typically uses sand, which is not very renewable and sand mining in many countries causes massive issues with flooding, droughts, sinking, black markets, even sand mafia!
No we should not landfill everything after a single use, or we will soon run out of reasonably accessible raw materials in suitable forms.
And no, we will never run out of it - the planet is made of it.
The work towards truly biodegrade plastic is generally from the other end; identifying or making organisms that can break down the polymers themselves. Those don’t seem to be commercially viable, and in themselves won’t address environmental plastic pollution.
Granted the biodegradability of many formulations is still far too long and requires unrealistic circumstances to happen in the wild (hot composting for example).
Apart from that, what problem are you trying to solve with this innovation?
In fact bio-derived plastic buried in the landfill is carbon-negative and should be encourged!
But then how are we not at the same solution? Burn the plastic garbage (in place of coal or natural gas) to generate electricity.
Even better if they were plant-based plastics to begin with, because then it's renewable energy.
Edit: Just to be clear, I’m not trying to say that this is a viable solution to anything, or that it’s a good use of resources based on our current methodologies. I’m more just trying to say that there’s so much raw material out there and that it’s better if it comes out of the ocean. Like, if suddenly we found a non-polluting method to perfectly separate out all the components, then a health-safe chemical mixture with those components that was solid and fireproof (and UV proof), there’s probably enough out there to do something significant with.
If microplastic turns out to be as serious a problem as has been suggested, with bioaccumulation and various sorts of damage, then the only solution is that all plastic without exception has to be thoroughly destroyed chemically or by burning as soon as it it isn't in use. And not put into use in ways that emit microplastic (as fibers, dust, or otherwise).
Plus, since asphalt’s petroleum-tar binder is liquified during the working process, it would actually act as a solvent perfect for dissolving (certain) microplastics into. The microplastics wouldn’t merely be in mechanical mixture with the asphalt; they wouldn’t exist as distinct entities any more! They’d revert to being a petroleum fraction, in complex with the heavier petroleum fractions of the tar.
We need to catch the plastics before they go into the environment, disintegrate, release their plasticizers and other toxins.
As has been said, best way to deal with all the plastic garbage that contains who-knows-what would probably be fuel, feedstock in refineries or similar.
https://www.sciencealert.com/that-ocean-garbage-collector-is...
... slowly leaching endocrine disruptors in the environment for generations to come.
No, it can't.
Then you should welcome pandemic, genocide and war.
Over my cold dead body [and I won't go without a fight.].
What are they gonna do, line me up and execute me and my family ? Kill my children ? Fortunately, Rights are still a thing, including the 2nd.
The birth rate everywhere outside Africa has already collapsed, anyway. It's probably too low.
Funny thing is that Malthus already recognized the effects that artificial birth control can have on the reproductive rate and was worried about that - I don't the the citation at hand though.
I agree that the birth rate outside Sub-Saharan Africa is probably too low and I think that this will become an issue, probably first in China, then the EU and finally in the USA.
I think we are seeing people having fewer children because they're depressed about the world/future expectations, of course, but that's not quite the same thing.
Plastic in the ocean isn't an easy problem to solve with anything other than wait for it to degrade. Which isn't as bad as it sounds because plastic doesn't do well in the sun, and we can easily make plastics that do worse and thus degrade faster.
You should probably stop assuming that.
Since you sound so excited, are you going to live in the first plastic house with your family?
I think suggestions like this are super demeaning. I often see them coming from privileged knowledge workers, who are eager to share ‘free ideas‘/psuedo-solutions as a sort of ‘charity’ for poor people (and people in the global south). They are also often strategies which somehow don’t seem to fit for their own life - and instead are for ‘others’ who are less well off.
In other words: tech solutionism.
As knowledge workers, let’s try to cut through our false consciousness and come up with some awesome systemic changes that kick butt.
I’ve edited my comment to clarify the subtext, but to answer your question: if we could find a health-safe fire and UV-resistant plastic formula that made solid building materials out of the pollution in the ocean, I would definitely live in the first plastic house with my family. It could survive hundreds of years and have a lot of benefits.