Can plastic recycling ever work? | Hacker News Reader

Can plastic recycling ever work?

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https://archive.ph/4CFkK

It could work. Just require manufacturers to recycle 1.1lbs of post consumer waste for every 1lb they ship.

Require the recycled waste to be the same composition as the shipped material.

Also, only require this for plastic.

All of a sudden, the vast majority of products would switch to easily recycled plastic or away from plastic entirely.

The problem is what would they switch to? In Japan, they have disposable bamboo forks and spoons, at least I hope it’s bamboo and not wood.

I have heard a Japanese person comment on the large quantity of disposable "wood" stuff in Japan, but I have no idea whether they were including bamboo as "wood".

It is considered wood and used as such.

Bamboo is a bit more environmental than wood (it grows easier and faster). Only 10% of disposable chopsticks in Japan are made of bamboo rather than wood, however. Not sure about forks and knives that were plastic before.

Some bamboos grow a meter a day. It's also a good way to bioremediate nitrogen pollution, they should really do that in places like The Netherlands where excess nitrogen from livestock has become an issue, but I don't know if the weather is compatible with bamboo. Some grasses that can be used for paper-making could also be an option.

Yeah, those are all great benefits. It grows SO fast and with model lamination/bonding it makes a great material.

One company I used to work for went through a saga of finding the best compostable material for disposable cutlery. I think the first attempt was some black plastic thing that melted if you used it to cut an orange. Next was pressed bamboo, which worked but it tasted like wood. Next was a starch based thing that would melt in a cup of tea. I think they finally ended up with some kind of hard brown plastic, but by that time I just had a titanium spork from REI.

So the answer is just bring your own fork and rinse it off when you're done.

Yep, I just have my own utensils at work. Pack my food in a glass container (lid is plastic but reusable).

When I was a kid we used to get ice cream that came with a flat piece of wood to use as a spoon. It was fine.

That's still the standard around here. (Ireland)

Is it plastic in your parts? Plastic spoons always feel way too flimsy to me.

I don't know, they don't give them to me anymore :(

> So the answer is just bring your own fork and rinse it off when you're done.

I mean sure, but this was an international long haul flight. I can actually imagine a 100 people trying to wash their silverware in airport lavatories on a 767 after dinner service.

They supply metal utensils in business class on every long haul flight. There’s nothing stopping them from doing it for coach beyond cost.

As as an added benefit fewer people would waste energy traveling if it were made more expensive by upgrading all seats to business class.

I assume they don’t in economy due to weight, and the reason they provide it in business isn’t related to environmentalism. So we are just exchanging one negative (disposable cutlery)for more of another (more fuel consumption)?

My guess would be speed of service. If everything is disposable you can just chuck it in garbage sack and be done. But having to sort out each customers items when the cutlery can be wherever would take too long.

Ya, that makes sense. But more work would mean more employees which would also have a (monetary and carbon) cost.

I wouldn't have guessed that bamboo has a strong taste. I've used other wooden cutlery before and it doesn't really affect the taste of food at all.

I think it was more of a dry feeling on the tongue and palate than an actual flavor, kind of like a tongue depressor. At any rate, it was a weird experience for someone who grew up using stainless steel.

I suspect there’s some differentiator going on behind the scenes. I remember those wooden paddle “spoons” having a distinctive wooden flavour, and there was some fast food chain that brought wooden spoons a couple years ago: the first ones were obnoxiously “wood tasting” but the current ones seem to have no flavour at all.

Note: none of these were bamboo, they were all some type of lighter tree wood

Edit: if you’re not sure on the taste we’re talking about, chew on a wooden toothpick until it goes a bit soggy: same flavour.

Bamboo is used too, but AFAIK well over half of disposable chopsticks are made from softwood (birch, aspen, etc).

We switch away from disposable things in general

The problem is that our main problem by a mile is that we burn hydrocarbons to do things like shipping.

Switch to any material that’s even incrementally heavier/more energy intensive to make and you’re creating more CO2 which almost certainly offsets the environmental and quality of life benefits you generate

The may be more expensive to ship but it's unlikely that they will be more expensive to manufacture in the long term. If they can be used 100x times a cardboard box, the cost of manufacturing cardboard would be much more.

Also, as we move to renewables, the CO2 equation will move further in reusable materials' favor.

Yeah, I’d rather we make more reusable stuff instead. For example, I love the minimal packaging on Commander decks for MTG because the boxes they come in are actually really great for a deck box as well unlike the tiny ones they include with their normal packaging. Even if you don’t use them for that, they’re fairly sturdy and a nice size for organizing stuff.

Shipping produces a tiny fraction of greenhouse emissions.

Sure. Considering the US, though, just imagine the backlash.

To be fair, some states have passed legislation regarding single-use plastics, and it's not as though measures in the EU didn't provoke whinging and pushback ... China, and Japan, among others, are somewhere between the US and EU when it comes to regs at least.

But, these are difficult measures to "sell" - the effects of this kind of legislation are immediate, impacting consumers, companies, etc. ... and "hit pocketbooks", in particular. The benefits are nebulous*, relate to some "ill-defined future", and don't seem to have tangible impacts today (except possibly negative) on ability to make a living / continue living.

Unfortunately, these factors in our current system(s) underlie a rigidity (resistance to changes) that bodes extremely poorly, IMO, for adaptations required to face the absolute sh1tstorm of challenges converging on societies like the water from "Lake Conemaugh" after the "South Fork Dam" break (i.e., when what was formerly protective focused problems avoided in former years, delivering decades worth of suffering in an ~hour-sized package).**

This isn't intended to suggest pessimism or apathy, but, rather, how much energy - voting, getting involved in politics, etc. - will be required from the (generally younger) citizens of many countries to break through the momentum of "legacy systems" to create some of the changes necessary.

The current indications aren't great when orange clown*** is still dominating the news many days...

* To the vast majority of sheltered "modern people" - who don't fish, say, or look at rain droplets with magnification, or have other occasions for encountering the really massive problem that's been developing for decades now

** https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnstown_Flood

*** And a whole circus and set of sideshows built around other grifters

Edit: one other point - my current favored "solution" is simply burning the plastic (most can be IIRC) in cement kilns and the like. Unsurprisingly, I think, to anyone with some understanding of "polymer chemistry", plastic isn't so "inert" when exposed to the harsh physical environment over the course of decades. In some sense, worse, one of the properties that makes plastic so useful, also means that most biological systems don't have enzymatic / other machinery for dealing with / processing plastic. There has been more burning of plastic, in recent years - it's not "great", but, it's actually still about the least harmful option for waste streams that can't be (practically) reused, recycled, etc. ... (yet). There have been some reasonably good articles on plastics recycling in some of the more mainstream sources that discuss burning (esp. for cement production / in "cement kilns")... I'd provide but kinda rushed (sorry - I need to stop writing long-ish comments when time is tighter), but, web searches should likely turn those up easily enough.

I don’t think it can work. When I interned at a consumer product manufacturer they used 1/3rd recycled and 2/3rds new plastic. Recycled plastic is too low quality to pass QA. And they could only used recycled bottles.

I wonder if the QA standards are too high for throwaway goods.

Is a soda bottle a high-precision moulding that needs super-precise tolerances? And if so, are there ways to redesign this to reduce the constraints?

Soda bottles are injection-blowmolded, which requires fairly predictable elongation under heat and pressure. I do know using 100% post consumer plastic would affect elongation, but I don’t know how significant the effect is or how hard it would be to compensate for.

Fwiw they do need fairly tight tolerances otherwise the cap won’t seal and the product will leak or spoil.

Would it help to increase thickness? More weight and material, increased cost, to factor in the reduced trail of pollution every piece of single use plastic has?

This probably leads you to reusable bottles, which are just cleaned and refilled again.

Would be the next logical step. But without strong incentives, either intentional rationing of row materials or the equivalent sharp increase of their cost, I don’t see any indication producers and retailers would adopt it.

The problem is the plastic we see as a uniform material is a chemical cocktail of the polymer, plasticizers, chain extenders, curing agents, lubricators and process aids, stabilizers, colorants and more.

Size tolerance, the way plastic flows through the molding equipment, temperature at which its blown, how much shit leeches into the beverage, how strong the resulting container is, all that factors in.

Plastics are a complex technology and people are optimizing what we can do with them as across every dimension much as possible

That’s because it degrades each time you use it. There’s a reason the cheapest stuff comes in black, thick, low quality plastic containers. It’s because it’s just short of being processed into either astroturf or roads.

Some stuff gets re-manufactured 5 or 6 times. The majority gets manufactured once and ends up in landfill.

Glass, metal and standardised sizes is really the only way forward.

That’s fine. The input to the recycling facility has to match the grade that was shipped.

Capitalism can find a use for the low grade plastic, or a way to avoid producing stuff that needs high quality plastic.

Just an idea I thought about before... If wood chips are used to make particle boards then I wonder if plastic chips can be used in the mix say in a 50:50 ratio (or 70:30). The idea that perhaps hard plastic can be shredded to make particle boards which are a useful building material. Not sure how such a board would perform and what issues does it create.

Many plastic items are single use items with a low lifetime. Recycling all these short lived single use items is absurd. An Amazon box lasts 1 day and then needs to be turned into pulp again and made into a new box if everything is recycled correctly?

Theoretically, it seems like turning a box back into pulp could be easier than waiting 25 years to grow another tree.

Cardboard (not plastic) is highly recyclable. By starting with pulp, roughly 50% of the water and energy are saved. Keep in mind Amazon boxes almost always consist of ~100% recycled material.

And the portion that can't be recycled into boxes is likely made into paper towels.

It's extremely profitable to recycle cardboard in most jurisdictions.

There's simply no reason to do it. WTE (Waste to Energy) is superior in every single possible way except the emotional one.

The problems with recycling plastic are well established. Multi generational heats even under the most beneficial boundary conditions will increase the moduli (brittle), slightly increase tensile, but in general the stress strain curve becomes less predictable with each heat (generation). Under practicable circumstances, waste plastic is full of many variations of additives (colorant, UV inhibitors, glass fiber etc...). All of the real-world circumstances make recycling on a large scale less feasible. There is a SPAC called "purecycle Technologies, PCT" if one is interested in following some of the latest research. Plastics are wonderful to design and mfg in the consumer product world but IMHO, the true cost of this material is not put on the front end and it should be due to the recycling problems

I really do think the Japan approach is the only practical one: just burn it all up. Maybe we just need to impose a plastic tax and use that to offset the carbon release. In the end this might be more inefficient but sometimes simplicity is far more important.

Why is burning it better than putting it in a landfill?

Japan is quite famously a fairly small mountainous island nation and therefore does not have much land where it is easy to pile up garbage.

We are in a climate crisis. It literally never is.

For some reason, people equate plastic waste with the other problem that literally changes the weather (maybe as a coping mechanism?). Under that framework, it makes sense to burn carbon.

But realistically, dead oceans filled with plastic in an atmosphere under 400ppm is a dream outcome compared to what’s actually ahead.

If we are burning something to create energy anyway then perhaps it makes more sense to burn waste rather than fuel we dig out of the ground.

Why?

Are you implying that it’s less intensive to collect used plastics from consumers and ship that to burning stations to generate energy vs. pumping natural gas and shipping it in pipelines?

The problem with any plastic recycling/burning plan is always the energy needed to collect, sort and divert it.

We should focus on the lowest-energy way to keep it out of the ocean, which for the most part (outside of island nations) is burying it somewhere in modern well maintained landfills.

>Are you implying that it’s less intensive to collect used plastics from consumers and ship that to burning stations to generate energy vs. pumping natural gas and shipping it in pipelines?

We have to collect it whatever we do, whether it's driven to a waste incineration plant or a landfill site makes little difference.

Plastics in the soil reduce its biological productivity by various understudied mechanisms, and so reduce amount of carbon captured by vegetation and other soil live.

It could work if one directly captures all the released carbon instead of releasing it into the atmosphere?

If only we already had a solid material that contained that carbon in a way the kept it out of the atmosphere.

Maybe a polymer of some sort.

Oh wait that’s just “never burnt plastic”.

Sorry for the snark. I just am always amazed at how badly otherwise smart people want to burn trash when we have the space to just bury it. Like the phrase “garbage in garbage out” applies to fire too…

Thanks for this reply! I never thought of it this way before.

I guess I had imagined the captured carbon would be used to make something else, like fuel, and remove the need for extracting more oil.

If you’re growing the bamboo used in production, you’re starting by capturing the carbon that is eventually released on burning at end of life. So it’s likely carbon neutral already (though may produce other harmful pollutants).

Well, just wait a decade or two until we decarbonize most of our chemical industry until you burn it, ok? Right now all that plastic is much better down in a hole. We can always dig it up and bur it later.

Anyway, if you are going to tax anything, an actual carbon tax is guaranteed not to backfire on your face. A tax specific for plastic will almost certainly make everything worse.

The fumes are incredibly toxic though and it’s not just carbon.

Yay for scrubbers with catalysts.

that depends on the temperature.. Burn it hot enough and the result is water + co2, perfectly clean energy

Japan recycles PET at a > 90% rate. Everything else gets burned though.

https://www.petbottle-rec.gr.jp/english/actual.html

Plastics which can't be reprocessed back into the same food-grade product can sometimes still be recycled into lower-grade plastic products! Mixing all the different colours and contaminants together isn't always a problem, [edit: if the goal is to reduce waste to landfill rather than reduce production of plastic]. For example, turning soft plastics (the worst of them all?) into fenceposts (which last forever unlike wooden ones). Plenty of other examples: https://www.recycling.kiwi.nz/partners

Do these fence posts shed micro plastics into the environment…?

I've seen loads of plant based packing and cold beverage items. One thing these companies couldn't compete on was price. Mostly cause they couldn't get volume. I wish I had my notes at hand. Plant based for some plastic uses work. Current buyers have the switching cost. I'm sure, but can't prove it, that plants could replace a lot of this. And a small forcing function such as single use plastic tax could flip many of these volume buyers.

If plastic simply weren't an option it might work?

The idea of recycling works by making the victims feel guilty of their suffering (“the polle pollution because we don’t recycle enough”) so people don’t organise and the entrepreneurs can continue plasticising the planet’s organisms

I have always felt that the problem with the plastic recycling is that there is a lack of an economy. If you sell a yogurt for $1.99 I don’t care about what happens to the container, I t’s hardly surprising that most of it ends up overseas, in the ocean or a landfill. If the state levied a tax on the container, manufacturers would be motivated to gain a competitive advantage and use something exempt from the tax. Recyclers, who might want to taste of that tax money, could invest in better technologies for handling the material. In fact, you enable capitalistic forces to solve a problem. It’s only cheap to use virgin plastic because the manufacturer is absolved of cost of dealing with the waste.

For my own part, I have started to throw all my plastic in the garbage. It feels better to know it goes in the landfill versus the great Pacific garbage patch.

Pyrolysis can be used to turn waste plastic into a ~50/50 mix of diesel and syngas, that can in turn be converted back into propylene through a FT and hydroformylation process.

But cracking waste naphtha is about a tenth the cost and externalities are paid by those schmucks in the future.

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