Breaking free of plastic pollution
worldsensorium.com
worldsensorium.com
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Why are we still not talking about plasma gasification? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification
As far as I can tell, the only real "disadvantages" if you can call them that, are:
1. more expensive than throwing the garbage in a big pile somewhere
2. need to clean it from time to time
3. not necessarily a profitable business
Other than that, it can handle just about anything that's not radioactive, can be designed to produce 0 toxic byproducts, and can run at or at least only slightly below energy neutral. Plasma gasifiers can also consume a huge amount of garbage for their size, so much so that the US Navy is starting to put them on the latest generation of aircraft carriers.
Not building out more gasifiers seems to me a failure of the free market. Because it's hard to make it profitable, no one is doing it - when really we should just be building one or two near every major city and funneling all our garbage there.
In theory, we could build out enough to start working through all the landfills too.
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ADDENDUM:
* This is NOT the same as incineration. Plasma gasification does not produce toxic gases vented to atmo, etc. The main byproducts are "syngas", which is mainly H2 and CO and can be reused to power the facility, and slag.
I think a lot of refuse to energy plants in the US have been shutdown by environmental interest groups and negative sentiment from local residents, etc.
We should first use a lot less plastic in disposable things... but if we can't do that we, should burn it along with a lot of other trash.
Plastics are incredibly useful, fabulously performant, and astoundingly cheap. It is no wonder they are ubiquitous.
If you are poor anywhere in the developed world, you are surely wearing plastic cloths & shoes, eating food packaged in plastic, and drinking water provided via plastic pipes and vessels. What's more, you likely don't have a meaningful choice in the matter. If you are not poor, this probably still holds true.
It is frustrating that there is not a good and clear path forward to resolve this issue... and many other issues of the Anthropocene. We need to do better thinking about how we can help our ecosystems remain viable despite these upheavals.
It really pisses me off
Recycling just increases the chance that it's going to end up as low-quality plastic polluting the environment.
[0] https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2022/gc/d2gc0...
So the solution is to make more plastic? If we're not reducing the amount of plastic we're using, we can at least make less, by reusing the plastic we've already created. Take plastic conduits, they are mostly made from recycled windows, but still last a heck of a long time, that is going to be the better option than making all new plastic for them. We also reuse plastic bottles all the time, 87% of soft drink bottles are reused and made into new bottles (in Denmark), so we'd need to create a lot more plastic overall to compensate if they where not reused.
On a lower level, having to recycle your plastic at home makes you painfully aware how much plastic you drag into your home. Ideally that would mean that you "buy" more, but mostly you don't have any control over that. Everything is packaged in way more layers than strictly needed. The amount of plastic we have to sort on a daily basis is insane. It has made me look for products that are packaged in less plastic, but it's an uphill battle.
Also, recycling can involve wholly reusing plastic containers several times, not breaking the plastic down to make new stuff. This has been done in e.g. the Nordic countries for decades now: soft-drink bottles are returned to the supermarket at a special machine (so you get a deposit back), then they are washed and refilled by the bottler.
Source? I highly doubt they're washing and reusing plastic bottles.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/Finland/comments/w703w4/plastic_and...
Right now I’m making a product that should last 10 years outdoors. I wanted to pick PET or HDPE for their high recyclability, but if it leads to a shorter product lifespan (and all the opportunities to drop out of the recycling stream), what’s the point? Our plan is use a more rugged plastic and take back old product ourselves to recycle, only because we have a willing injection molder.
ABS is one of the most commonly used plastics and very unrecyclable, but it might be more acceptable if the electronics in it were supported for more than 3 years.
First sentence in the article:
>Germany has the world’s largest and highest-performing deposit return system (DRS, also known as a deposit return scheme)
later it says
>In a few years, the market share of refillable containers fell below this quota, and so a DRS for single-use containers was established in January 2003.
A lot of bottlers use reusable bottles, thick walled bottles (15ct deposit) that are sold in crates. For a lot of soft drinks and water they tend to be made from PET (because it’s lighter than Glass).
Don’t get me started on the German habit of buying water in crates rather than using perfectly fine tap water
Then you also have thin-walled PET bottles which are 25 ct deposit and one-use. Return rates are rather high because of the high deposit.
The crates are often a PITA to deal with because you need to return them to a shop that sells the same bottles (there are some standards, but some bottlers think a non-standard bottle is a USP). Whereas the 25ct bottles must be taken back from any store that sells 25ct bottles themselves.
I don't follow your logic. Say you consume 10 units of plastic per year; if 5 of them are still good to be recycled, and 5 end up in the landfill as degraded "low-quality plastic" (whatever that means), you net landfill contribution is 5/yr.
Why would be sending 10 units/yr of "high-quality plastic" be any better?
In practice, the issue is economic; it's cheaper to produce new plastic than to fix the entire recycling supply-chain.
Until we have a carbon tax over plastic manufacturers that equalizes the recycling costs, it'll be hard to create systemic change just based on consumers' consciousness.
That's when plastic is sent to "recycling" centers overseas, which not only burns fossil fuel getting it there, but may end up in nature instead of being recycled when no one is looking. And by overseas, I mean countries like Indonesia, China used to be one of them but they are now taking the environment a bit more seriously and are starting to refuse to greenwash western trash.
Plastic recycling can make sense in a limited way, but it shouldn't hamper other efforts. The most important being avoiding dumping in in nature.
And remember that plastic is carbon. Burying it where it doesn't degrade is carbon neutral (for oil based plastics) or carbon negative (for bioplastics).
> Recycling just increases the chance that it's going to end up as low-quality plastic polluting the environment.
Recycling was/is a scam
https://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/the-passionate-eye/recyclin...
(The fish died from lawn runoff causing algae blooms as well - please be aware that if you live somewhere where it rains, then over fertilizing pollutes.)
* Burn it hot.
* Take the exhaust from the burnt waste and fractionally distill it to extract the Nitrogen, CO2, water and other safe gasses.
* Take the ash and extract things that are worth money (metals), then vitrify the rest (turn it into glass)
* Take everything else and stick it back into the input, letting it go round again and becoming something safe this time.
1 ton of household waste probably only makes 5kg of vitrified glass - turns out nearly everything in your house is carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.
I suspect the energy in all the waste makes this process "free" from an energy standpoint. But obviously the capital cost of a plant big enough for the worlds waste is huge, and unless laws are written to ban landfills and regular incineration, it would never make financial sense.
!!!
Because of the nets?
We don't really know how much damage plastic/chemical pollution is doing. It could easily be more than climate change.
We eat more fish than land mammals. If the plankton go, the fish go and we follow not long after.
Oh yeah, edit to add, if the plankton go, the oxygen goes too, so we might see the whole planet shift back to anaerobic conditions. Not fun.
> It is estimated that about 50% of the world's oxygen is produced via phytoplankton photosynthesis.
> Avoid bringing in all new plastics and single-use plastics into your home and recycle what you have.
He either lives in a buble or didn't do any research. There is no recycling of plastic. Almost everything is single-use plastic: clothes, bottles, shopping bags. A lot of things are made from plastic which cannot be recycled: TVs, phones, furniture, shoes, clothes, housing insulation, a big part of cars, buses, trains.
Instead, we should aim to not put contaminated stuff into the landfill in the first place. Which in turn means don't sell toxic stuff to consumers.
Such an important issue, yet no world summit, no word about the topic when we talk about environmental issues.
Change is due !
Because it's the largest existential threat human civilization has ever faced.
But perhaps two things can be bad at the same time, and we should stop flooding earth with microplastics without taking away any attention from climate change. There's plenty of attention to go around. It's not like humanity is wholly committed to fighting climate change. Quite the contrary.
There are yearly events and summits with huge press coverage.
I don’t know if my company can afford to spend 3 more days per employee talking about microplastics and chemicals pollution.
I can perfectly imagine employees of a bank having to do that for the SRI rating. Then head back to their cubicle for the 280 other days and give loans for mining, road constructions, malls, etc. 99% of the time spent on business as usual isn't exactly being too much concerned about an existential threat...
That said, 3 days is better than nothing at all, and your company is likely an exception.
Regarding plastics and soil pollution there are very actionable daily and local measures we can take the reduce it. Yet nothing is done.