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Comment by gmuslera | Hacker News Reader

Great, now instead of turning the 95% of all extracted oil into greenhouse gases, we now can turn the 99+%. That is efficiency.

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we always could - burning the plastic always was an option, and effectively happens in a lot of places (incinerator). Recycling into oil would give us the option to use it as input to either new plastic or other hydrocarbon based products.

Now, whether this works as advertised is an open question.

This is a very mature industry. I'm skeptical it's economical at all.

It's also an area where the economics are changing - renewable energy is cheap during peak hours. So if you can build a process that can essentially soak up that energy you could try and do arbitrage. Whether that's enough to make that economically viable depends on the capital investment required, but it's at least possible in the near future.

Well one hopes this is an enabler of a more-closed loop process for plastics. But… yeah.

The alternative is polluting the entire planet with micro-plastics for a 5% savings in greenhouse gasses.

This does nothing to prevent micro plastics.

Micro plastics are plastics that have escaped into the environment, which by definitions means we are no longer collecting them for disposal or recycling.

All this does is keep some recycling programs from shutting down, and most of those are collecting bulk #1 and #2 which as far as I’m aware are not the major source of micro plastic pollution.

Patagonia has a fucked up plan of using recycled polyester in everything lately and I don’t see how nobody is noticing that a major source of urban micro plastics is going to be coming from dryer lint. Which means synthetics and dryers are a bad combo.

I line dry all my exercise clothes, but most people don’t.

if you're worried about microplastics from drying your patagonia fleece in the dryer, worry about other things first. Car tires get ground up into microplastic and estimates range between 10 and 28% of the total microplastic pollution in the oceans [1]. And that's not surprising - the weight loss of a single tire over its lifetime likely exceeds the entire weight of your fleece jacket. Drive less car miles before worrying about patagonia clothes.

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/tires...

For tires, is anyone working on biodegradable or otherwise eco-friendly tire materials? Something that is biocompatible. Although you don't want tires breaking down and causing accidents... Tires have a lot of conflicting design requirements.

Bio tires would be great, but the more immediate, easy and efficient solution is public transport investment to reduce car use.

Tires made with natural rubber are nothing new, that's the way all tires used to be made. And I doubt it's any better for the environment, from either a microplastics perspective or a deforestation perspective.

Michelin had a tire formula a few years ago that was augmented with natural hydrocarbons. They claimed that it gave the tire better performance at 50% tread wear as well. But I found out recently they don’t sell the model I bought anymore so I’m not sure if the expectations matched the projections or what happened.

I'm wondering - how much microplastics come from _bicycle_ tires? I mean, surely it's a lot less, but how much less? Say, per bike km ridden?

I can tell you that my pair of bike tires is now 13 000km old, still going strong, and weighs about 790g each. It may loose maybe 100 or 200g over it's lifetime, but unlikely that it's even that much. Worst case estimate so far would be 790g/13 000km, or 0.061g/km per wheel - under the assumption that the whole tire is consumed.

For cars and bikes alike, it all comes down to how much work the tires are doing, which is to say, how much hard acceleration and hard braking occurs, especially to the point of losing traction despite grippy conditions (burnout/skid), in conjunction with how much mass is being moved.

E-bikes and e-scooters are going to be way worse than human power, per distance, because of the quicker acceleration/braking. My FWD scooter is always slipping on uphill climbs, but my RWD bike doesn't because the weight is shifted appropriately.

Lots of considerations.

We should worry about the global phenomenon of microplastics for sure, but most of what’s in my yard came from litter or from the dryer vent.

Also they used to use more natural fibers and now it’s almost all blends, except some of the work clothes.

How exactly do materials go from dryer lint to trash bag and then somehow end up in the ocean?

I can see a washing machine sending micro plastics down the drain resulting in some small percentage of those ending up in the ocean. Assuming some failure where raw sewage was dumped into a river or ocean.

Most, if not all dryers vent to the outdoors.

Some particles make it through the lint trap into the hot/humid air stream into the environment.

Normal wear of the garments will shed micro particles from just rubbing up against them.

So using a dryer is better for the ocean than air drying, good to know.

I would think air (line) drying would be better in terms of microplastics, since there is no tumbling.

Would it be safe to say that (mostly) frictionless line drying would shed fewer particles than tumble drying?

The dryer collects already loose or broken fibers in the lint trap for disposal. Air drying doesn’t which means those large broken fibers containing several orders of more magnitude more plastic than might escape from a dryer end up in the environment.

This is why new clothes result in dramatically more lint than old clothes by weight.

Isn't it possible that tumbling is the only significant source of breakage?

If that was the case old clothes would produces far more lint in a dryer because the dryer would keep damaging them. Instead the reverse happens with new clothes produces vastly more and it tappers off.

They do cause damage, but it isn’t the overwhelming source of damage.

Old clothes have a lot less fiber in them. Whether your math checks out would depend on the % of fibers lost per week rather than just the total number.

Washing machines also have lint traps, and the water treatment plant has to deal with a lot of solids from washing machines. I don't have numbers on what percent comes out in that case.

I am doing this comparison based on weight not individual items.

It’s really obvious is you’ve ever washed a full load of new clothes vs old clothes.

The dryer abrades the fabric. If you have a delicate or dear piece of clothing they always advise that you air dry it as the fabric will last longer. Those delicate bags for the washing machine are substantially about limiting abrasion from rougher clothing, and also about not accidentally running them through the dryer by tucking inside or clinging to something else.

Normal use also abrades fabrics, the point is normal use doesn’t collect these damaged fibers so they all just end up in the environment.

They end up in the environment regardless. Where do you put your lint trap material? where does the dryer vent to?

If you want to be that pedantic the clothes you’re using right now are already part of the environment as are clothes sitting in stores etc.

However, using the common terminology a sealed garbage dump isn’t part of the environment in question because sea life isn’t coming into contact with it.

Technically yes, if dryers can improve their filtration, and dryer owners can be trusted to maintain their filters ...

You don't need much of a failure. Many cities all you need is a really rainy day and it overflows into general ocean run off[0]. I'm pretty sure parts of Vancouver still just send sewage directly into the ocean. All of Victoria did for over a hundred and fifty years until during Covid they finished a treatment plant finally[1].

[0] - example - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/sewage-overf...

[1] -https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/victoria-crd...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34441324

Only if it increases demand for oil.

Realistically, this oil would replace oil that would otherwise have to be pumped from the ground.

Ah yes, just like how fracking reduced the other methods of drilling oil from the ground.

So when there's unrest in the middle east, does the price of this converted oil suddenly spike as well? /s

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