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Comment by PlunderBunny | Hacker News Reader

It really depends on the type of recycling you do. I recycle (after reducing and reusing) obsessively, while also being painfully aware of the problems with recycling. One of the things I recycle are soft plastics [1], which are made into fence posts (among other things) [2]. I recently bought 58 of these posts, and asked the company that makes them to do the maths on how much plastic was diverted. It surprised me - the 58 posts are the equivalent of "17,694 milk bottles and 79,098 bread bags". (These posts are warrantied for 10 years, and are expected to last for 50 years. I don't know what happens at the end of those 50 years).

1. https://www.recycling.kiwi.nz

2. https://www.futurepost.co.nz

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This is interesting. After the recent collapse of a recycling company in Australia I was under the impression that soft plastic recycling wasn't economical. Are the posts particularly expensive? Or maybe are the definitions of 'soft plastic' in each case different?

https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/retail/redcycle-sof...

I imagine there is a rather limited market for fence posts relative to the amount of soft plastic being recycled.

Depends on how many old wooden posts you have - in a country like New Zealand, there's a lot. Several years ago, they (the soft-plastic recycling company) did get too much plastic at one point, and had to pause collection for several months while they sorted out new suppliers, and found new uses for the product. I think they have now exceeded the original amount being collected, but they roll out new collection areas cautiously to ensure supply matches demand. It helps that we're progressively banning some types of soft plastic too (e.g. shopping bags are already gone).

This is true but hopefully it is just the first product of many.

I think the posts came out about the same price as treated timber - maybe a little bit more. But they're easier to install (because they can often be rammed straight in where wooden posts would have to be dug in, and because you don't need to put concrete around the tip), last longer, and don't leach anything into the soil. The latter is particularly important for organic farms, where treated timber posts are a non-starter.

Most treated lumber sold to consumers is copper based, I think that is generally accepted in the States for organic farming. Is it not where you are?

I think treated pine sleepers in Australia are mostly CCA (copper chrome arsenate). For garden beds, lining with plastic is usually advised. The less common (?) alternative is ACQ - alkaline copper quaternary.

We bought our outdoor furniture from this company in the U.S. (https://lolldesigns.com/pages/sustainability), which states on that page "All Loll outdoor furniture is made with recycled high-density polyethylene (HDPE), one of the most commonly used plastics in the U.S. <snip> Loll’s recycled material is sourced primarily from single-use milk jug containers".

It wasn't cheap, but it looks great and has been very durable (had it about 5 years now out in the sun and still looks like new).

I don't like this type of down-cycling - while this is good because it double-uses a single use thing extending the use of the material to another cycle this is bad because it is sold as recycling to the consumer (on the milk bottle side at least). Those containers are probably easy to identify visually even at larger scales so its probably actually pick them out of the general plastic waste.

The main issue with recycling plastic is that there are several plastics that just look the same until you check the embossed mark and number. This is not always easy to find / visible or even there at all. if you manage that you need to identify and remove the other plastics that make up the bottle.

Many PET bottles have a shrink wrap label on them that uses a different plastic altogether. Generally it don't have a mark and can't be identified so it needs to go into the general garbage.

same goes for the lid and related parts (bottles often have a ring that splits off when you open them) but realistically this does not have a mark showing the plastic type so you have to discard it into normal garbage.

So basically plastic recycling while possible isn't really viable unless you reduce the allowed types of plastic and colors massively, school consumers a lot more and somehow create a cheap way to sort out the mistakes that happen.

even then plastic is only good for a few cycles at best and after that down-cycling is the only thing you can do.

glass, steel and aluminum do not have that issue.

I think it's the same type of soft plastic - I've seen both the RedCycle and NZ Soft Plastic recycling scheme logos on some products sold in both Australia and New Zealand. Reading between the lines of that report, it sounds more like 'mismanagement' was the problem rather than economics.

Yeah I had a deeper look and RedCycle went under because their main processing partner had a fire at their facility and couldn’t take delivery.

Sounds like RedCycle started storing the soft plastic in the hopes of finding a new processor but ran out of money in the interim.

After 50 years, they will disintegrate and leach god knows what into the soi, of course.

Unless you pull them out and recycle them ;-)

Ah but they probably start leaching and breaking down immediately. 50 years is just when they stop being able to do their function as a fence post.

(Aside from that, the serendipity. Two bunnies, passing in the night)

They're specifically sold on the basis that they don't leach into the soil - that's why they're used in organic farms/orchards. (Although, after 50 years, who know what might happen).

It seems to me that with plastics we've been told they're safe and inert and yet have repeatedly been proven not to be (latest stuff about PFAS comes to mind.)

I'm not sure I would trust plastics exposed to the elements for 50 years to not have _something_ occur to them. There's just way too much chemistry that can happen when you're in contact with water and sunlight for such long periods of time.

Of course they claim there is no leeching: there is no way to prove it ex ante so even if the claim is false it will be decades before any downside to making the claim arises.

As the other commenter notes, this is pretty common among new chemical products.

"There is no harm" -> "The harm is marginal" -> "The harm is manageable" -> "Remediation is too expensive for the private sector, the government needs to fund the fix"

I'm sure they do - wear and tear to anything outdoors is inevitable (except maybe if your fence is titanium, in which case the wear and tear probably amounts to individual electrons!) but I would still very much prefer that those plastic bags be put to use rather than decompose - at broadly the same rate - uselessly in a landfill site.

> but I would still very much prefer that those plastic bags be put to use rather than decompose - at broadly the same rate - uselessly in a landfill site.

Well, to be honest, if the landfill is properly managed, protected from leaching into the water table, I would personally prefer those plastic bags to be exactly there -- in the landfill. If they're going to break down, I would rather have everything be concentrated in a single area rather than in thousands of fence posts near farms and ranches. We definitely should find ways to reuse those materials, but not at the cost of diffusely polluting things.

I agree. Landfill has been demonized as a solution to plastic waste but is likely optimal. If stuff is in landfill we can just leave it there until better recycling tech becomes available. Problems like plastic leeching are ignored by recycling proponents because it is a hard problem to measure, so it is more convenient to ignore.

Where I live, most decks are made out of this material too. We have warm humid summers and cold dry winters, so after a few years a wooden deck will be all uneven. These on the other hand don't change at all. Cost wise, it's the same price as, or sometimes even cheaper than, wood.

The only issue is when you cut it you end up with plastic particles everywhere, and it ends up staticly charged so sticks to everything.

> warrantied for 10 years,

That's not great... I think by the end of the whole exercise you'll have wished to gone with proper posts.

How long are wooden fence posts warrantied for? A year? Five? OP says they do have a 50 year expected lifespan.

Many treated wood fence posts have a lifetime warranty, though you might reasonably expect 10-20 years out of them.

In my opinion, mostly just based on seeing a wide variety of plastics in outdoor uses, 50 years seems very ambitious.

I don't know that wooden fence posts get warrantied because its highly dependent on the install.

Depends what you do with them of course - in my case, approximately half of the length of the post is embedded into the ground. That's very different from being entirely above ground.

Recycling is when a bottle gets made into another bottle, or a fence post into another fence post. Plastic can't be recycled.

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