Think that your plastic is being recycled? Think again
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
What the article is actually about is how recycling programs don't actually end up receiving most of the plastic that is consumed, and how even if they did it wouldn't be enough to solve the problem. We need to actually use less plastic in the first place, not recycle it once only to have it enter a landfill on the second use.
Aluminum would recycle even more perfectly, but it takes a bit more energy to melt.
Aluminum on the other hand takes so much energy to mine that the cost and effort of recycling makes it far more desirable to use the recycled version and is well worth the effort.
It is interesting looking at beer bottling in China. Glass bottles are reused by all the different companies. The "high-end" bottles (tsing-tao) will emboss their logo into their bottles, but you'll find cheaper bottlers reusing those bottles and just slapping their label over the embossing.
But I, of course, don't bring the bottle back. I leave my plastic bottles in a bag near the trash cans, and somebody interested in walking 500 feet and getting back the deposit collects them.
It's physically not possible to recycle plastic and get the same propriety back. About 10% of the plastic is "recycled" worlwide, meaning it's been reused to do something else but can't be used for the same thing (e.g: bottle -> insulation)
In EU 42.1% plastics are recycled, 39.3% are burned as fuel and 18.5% go to landfill. So it's absolutely possible to do better than 10%.
https://circulareconomy.europa.eu/platform/sites/default/fil...
Do people actually think so? I know nothing about recycling and I'd think that AT BEST 25% of materials are actually "got back" from a product.
Burn those, and a whole slew of nasties is produced.
Common plastics like PE, PP & such at least in theory can burn cleanly. If so: make 'm bio-based, maybe a few downcycling steps, followed by burning, maybe isn't too bad overall.
I have a bigger problem with discarded plastic (and related: microplastics) getting everywhere in our environment. That's an overlapping but different problem.
Plastics have their uses & advantages, but we really should be more critical about where they're needed & where not.
If the external costs of our consumption got priced into what we have to pay, it could actually shift behavior. Companies not polluting as much would win, as their products would be cheaper and gain market share etc.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chasing-arrows-plastic-recyclin...
> The EPA agrees. In April, the agency recommended the Federal Trade Commission get rid of the chasing arrows recycling symbol for plastics, calling it "deceptive or misleading."
> But not every plastic with the symbol on it can be easily recycled. Inside the chasing arrows symbol sits a small number, called a resin identification code, or RIC. "The numbers were to communicate to people sorting the plastics, how recyclable they are on a scale from 1 to 7," said O'Neill. "It wasn't ever a signal to consumers to say, hey, all of this is recyclable." O'Neill said the numbers 1 and 2 are for the hard plastics found in things like containers and bottles. But items with the other numbers, 3 through 7, are more difficult to recycle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_producer_responsibili...
Where did you learn this?
I misremembered the story. It wasn't literally coined by the oil industry, but it was heavily pushed by them. BP had an ad campaign talking about "personal carbon footprint" in 2005 which put the phrase into the public consciousness.
Is also the most market friendly way to do it. But at least in the US it seems politically impossible.
Eh no, why would that be? Where I live 87% of all recycled plastic bottles are reused for new bottles.
Most of the time they say they do it, but it's much more expensive and recycled plastic quality degrades quickly, can't be mixed with other PET, so you still need to add a majority of regular plastic to the mix.
Quoting wikipedia "approximately 15% of collected PET bottles were actually recycled into new bottles" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PET_bottle_recycling
From the text: "A full 87% of all collected plastic bottles were therefore recycled into new beverage bottles in 2022."
The used plastic is recycled multiple times: "PET plastic bottles are also good materials for many other products, but it is best when they become new beverage bottles. This preserves the high quality of the plastic so that it can be reused again and again"
Why did you write that they "can't be used for the same thing" when even wikipedia says its happens?
That means your bottle of water will be a bottle of water max 2-3 times until it's not possible to use this plastic again for making bottle.
Wikipedia is not contradicting this, PET is reused in a mix of brand new plastic and old one.
Most of the percentages I see quoted are percent of plastic in the entire use stream that ends up recycled, but then people interpret it as "there's no point in putting plastic in the recycling because it has a 1 in 10 chance of being recycled". But that's not what the number means, the number means that most plastic doesn't even get to a recycling center.
> it’s estimated that in 2015, around 55 percent of global plastic waste was discarded, 25 percent was incinerated, and 20 percent was recycled. Of the plastic waste produced between 1950 and 2015, only 9 percent was recycled.
https://ourworldindata.org/faq-on-plastics#how-much-of-globa...
There are several people here who have actually said that they would rather send plastic to the landfill than to the recycling center because they read numbers like that and interpret them wrong.
(I don't know whether or not the number is correct, but OP isn't wrong to warn against exaggerating.)
I’ve been fascinated by how much the cynics, contrarians, and people with certain political leanings latch on to this story and exaggerate it. I worked on a large campus where rumors began to spread after they installed recycling bins. The rumors, fueled by stories like this one, escalated to the point that some people insisted that the maintenance crew was secretly collecting recycling bins and dumping them into the trash at night when nobody was watching. They all had variations of the myth claiming they knew a guy who saw it happen one night or they talked to a friend who knows the maintenance people who admitted it was all fake. I endured some painful lectures from older people who explained that recycling was actually a psyop conducted to train us to be obedient because that’s how the elites wanted us to be. People in this camp stopped recycling aluminum and glass on principal, defiantly throwing it in the garbage and making a big deal about it in the process.
Eventually we got an email newsletter explaining where the recycling goes, what the recycling pickup company does with it, and including photos of where it ends up. This didn’t stop the hardcore conspiracy theorists, but it did stop the recycling wars from being a constant topic of debate.
Where I live we are back to paper grocery bags, which I like better. But I can drive a few miles in state to get plastic bags for groceries.
I am old enough to have seen paper and glass replaced by plastic, time to go back and charge at least 1 USD per bottle to encourage recycling instead of 5 Cents. For people out side of the US, we are almost at the point were nothing costs less than 1 USD.
The Nordic countries have a deposit system by which the population is highly incentivized to return the bottle to the supermarket, the deposit is so high and one can get cash back, not just store credit. Even if a consumer feels well-off enough to just throw the bottle in a normal bin (or, as often the case with people boozing in parks, is too drunk to dispose of the bottle), hungry students or migrants will seize on the chance to return the bottle themselves and get the deposit back. This system seems so effective that no one even talks about a ban.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Turns out the amount of energy recovered pays for the whole process.
https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution#plastic-waste-b...
It's also what most people think of when they hear "plastic recycling", not plastic lawn chairs or deep sea fishing equipment or textiles (though there's programs to reduce impacts of those things too)
Over time as more, cheaper renewable energy enters the grid this tilts the balance towards recycling and away from incineration, but it's unlikely that incineration with energy recovery will ever get worse than landfill, which is generally considered lower on the waste hierarchy, and cheap energy lets you invest more in treating the emissions.
The article does not argue that we should not bother recycling, it argues that in addition to recycling we need to stop plastic at the source. It just has a bad title that sparked an unrelated conversation on HN.
1. Go to McDonalds and read the recycle notice on their drink cups. 2. Ask an employee if they recycle those drink cups. 3. Then go out into McDonalds parking lot and notice that their garbage containers do not separate out drink cups for recycling.
And this is the same whether the city that the McDonalds is in recycles plastic or not.
Plastic bottles were basically unheard of. Glass or metal containers it was and they were also recycled. Bags were mostly cloth. Again, no plastic. So it's definitely possible to live in a much-less plastic polluted world.
Unfortunately we live in the society of "It's pretty amazing that our society has reached a point where the effort necessary to extract oil from the ground, ship it to a refinery, turn it into plastic, shape it appropriately, truck it to a store, but it, and bring it home is considered to be less effort that what it takes to just wash the spoon when you're done with it..."
Perhaps we should consider taxing plastic on the producer side until renewable, durable, and recyclable materials are substituted.
I think storing waste plastic in a dry place, some desert, covered from wind, might be a pretty good solution, until we find a way to recycle this huge pile of simple organic molecules.
It seems fair enough, maybe not ideal, but it generates some extra use from the waste.
I also find it sad that some companies like Snapple are regressing, changing from glass to plastic bottles.
It's a shame that this stuff is happening. Lots of feel good measures that aren't helping anything.
What the article is actually about is how not enough plastic ends up at the recycling center in the first place, and how even if it did it couldn't be recycled a second time, so we still need to stop plastic at the source.
It seems common to falsely believe that burying plastic in landfills has less greenhouse gas emissions than recycling it, so I'll assume that's what you are referring to.
> The existing literature on LCA of plastic waste management is vast and the results reported are generally consistent, showing that recycling generates the lowest GWP and TEU environmental impacts.
LCA: lifecycle analysis
GWP: global warming potential
TEU: Total Energy Use