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Comment by jdmoreira | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm crazy but I hate packaging. Packaging should be standardised and regulated. You should only be able to buy soft drinks in aluminium cans or glass bottles for example. Why is plastic even an alternative?

Just regulate packaging. Make standards for packaging and the world will be a better place I believe.

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> Packaging should be standardised and regulated

And reusable/with a deposit, like water bottle in Germany, that would be perfect.

Aluminium cans aren't any better

why not? I know in the USA the vast majority of aluminum is recycled. I would much rather see drinks in aluminum/glass containers. Personally I like my soda but I always use a tumbler and get fountain drinks. I don't keep it around the house because I know I'd drink too much of it, but an occasional one is nice.

And it's fairly easy to separate in a recycling center, just hover a magnet over the conveyer belt.

You're thinking of steel, not aluminium. It is possible to build a machine that detects aluminium but it's not just "a magnet" because aluminium isn't magnetic

Actually, I didn't know that, thank you. I always assumed the big magnet over the coveyer belt was for cans but it is for steel indeed. Apparently they use a similar process using eddy current to separate cans.

Aluminium is 100% recyclable.

Aluminium may be, but interior of the can is coated in plastic (some quite unpleasant), and painted/coated/labelled externally too.

That’s like 1% as much plastic as a bottle.

Can any of it be recycled/reused, or is it destined to be incinerated or chemically stripped?

I agree, to a point. My initial comment was related to the "100% recyclable" bit. The aluminium certainly is, the can itself isn't just aluminium though. This wasn't to say that cans aren't better, merely to draw attention to the fact that it's never as simple as we might like (and bisphenol-A, one of the common ingredients in the epoxy lining, is pretty awful stuff).

Aren't the periphery products just seperated away during the molting process of aluminum recycling? I'm not a chemist, but I have a friend who works in a metal recycling plant and he described the process to me once. It seems like aluminum can recycling is a pretty well built out process. Getting rid of the impurities from an aluminum can (paint and plastic liner) don't seem like an issue, especially compared to refining ne aluminum.

it will be burnt and smoked during the melting stage

As is PET, the plastic drinks bottles are made from.

From wikipedia: > Most recycled PET is used as apparel fiber. > However rPET has also been sold in the form of carpet fiber. Mohawk Industries released everSTRAND in 1999, a 100% post-consumer recycled content PET fiber. Since that time, more than 17 billion bottles have been recycled into carpet fiber.

Aluminum is 100% recyclable into whatever it was before. I guess just don't have the same standards for what recyclable means or should mean.

IMHO plastics just go into a stupid microplastic generation pipeline grinding cycle.

That can be one use for it, however certainly in the UK most of the clear food packaging is made from rPET.

PP, usually ready meal and microwave trays, at the moment can't use recycled material and still be certified for food contact. I think much of that goes into things like traffic cones and building materials.

I'm not informed on PET specifically, but my understanding was that most plastics can only be recycled once, and that the recycling process generally can't produce the same grade of plastic as the input material.

The issue is primarily with sorting and contamination, such as different coloured bottles going on to the same batch meaning that resultant material won't be as clear. 10 years ago rPET containers were slightly foggy, but now it's virtually impossible to tell the difference by just looking - that's how far the infrastructure has come in a short period of time.

Have a look at https://egreen.co.uk/brochure/index.html#p=32 for an example of clear drinks cups made from 100% post consumer waste.

Polymers can degrade, but if it's well managed then generally not a problem and I think it can be recycled more times than paper. Each time that is processes the fibres are broken so it the strength is affected. The lowest grade is toilet tissue which has almost no strength compared to something like virgin Kraft with very long fibres.

One thing to consider is recycling is advancing at a phenomenal rate, what was the case five years ago may no longer be an issue.

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