Comment by zackmorris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zackmorris | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to know who originally put incompatible types of plastic under the same number, which contaminates recycling runs. Like PET/PETE under "1" and injection-molded/blow-molded HDPE under "2":

https://www.warwickri.gov/sanitation-recycling/faq/why-cant-...

Many cities have banned recycling the most commonly used plastics, like plastic water bottles made of 1 (PET). Where I live, 1 and 2 get recycled, 3 (PVC) gets thrown in a landfill and 4-7 get sent to a separate refinery which converts them to diesel fuel.

Not to mention that there seems to be no standard on the legibility of the number.

How many people reading this have thought about automating recycling by having machine learning sort the types? Yet I've never seen "recycling engineer" as a job title. Nor have I seen any grants for improving recycling. Nor any corporations/billionaires making recycling a priority. There have even been TV shows by prominent celebrities pushing propaganda against recycling, like the Penn & Teller: Bullsh*t! episode from the post Dot Bomb luddite era of 2004:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0771119/

We're willing to drink a protein that can degrade plastic before we're willing to hold industry accountable for the waste it produces?

Plastic recycling was a sham, and still is; it's never been economically viable and never will be, because the polymer degrades, permanently, as part of production, use, and aging.

It's window-dressing so the industry can shift attention away from limiting production of something that shouldn't see anywhere near the widespread use it does.

The same is true of the stories you see all the time about some group or person doing a beach cleanup. It casts the problem as the fault of people dumping the stuff, while pretending like it's a solvable problem, if only we had enough people rummaging around cleaning up beaches, parks, ocean bays, fields, hiking trails, abandoned properties, etc.

pete isn't a different kind of plastic from pet, it's just a usa-only abbreviation to avoid the non-plastic-related pet trademark the pet company uses on their disposable drinking vessels made from whatever material

the broader point is valid that recycling even hdpe is difficult because of the diversity of fillers and other additives, not to mention variation in molecular weight even before scission by ultraviolet, hydrolysis, or the heat of the molding process

there are in fact people who make a living by recycling. until recently around here they even bought pet, offering lower prices for the colored pet (because with pet you really can economically separate out the fillers and additives and repolymerize it to a known molecular weight)

mostly they recycle paper (mostly cardboard), copper, bronze, brass, lead, and aluminum. glass, steel, concrete, and plastics can be recycled but it's hard to make it profitable

if you hold industry liable for damage done by people improperly discarding its products, soon you will have no industry

>if you hold industry liable for damage done by people improperly discarding its products, soon you will have no industry

I don't see how this follows. It might make plastics more expensive... but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

liability for people improperly discarding your products is unlimited; there is no limit to how much damage they can do, and there's nothing you can do to stop them except screen your clients very carefully

and that's why, for example, armadillo aerospace went under; vendors of rocket-grade peroxide do screen their clients very carefully, for precisely that reason, and they had to scrap their peroxide engine design and go back to the drawing board

industry is going to happen instead in places like china where it's allowed (at least for chinese people)

> if you hold industry liable for damage done by people improperly discarding its products, soon you will have no industry

If it's predominantly being misused, then they do have a moral obligation. They control the packaging, and they know how much of it will end up improperly discarded. And by moral obligation, I really mean it should be a regulation to capture the damage done. Perhaps the recycling deposit from aluminum cans should be expanded.

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