Don't waste your time recycling plastic
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
New York City Administrative Code: "Any person who violates this chapter... shall be liable for a civil penalty.. in an amount of twenty-five dollars for the first violation, fifty dollars for the second violation and one hundred dollars for the third and each subsequent violation... A person committing a fourth and any subsequent violation within a period of six months shall be classified as a persistent violator and shall be liable for a civil penalty of five hundred dollars for each violation" https://law.justia.com/codes/new-york/2006/new-york-city-adm... (Title 16 sanitation, chapter 3 solid waste recycling, subchapter 6 REGULATIONS SUBMITTED TO COUNCIL AND ENFORCEMENT)
Not an idle threat, either, my apartment building has been fined in the past.
It's... not concise.
Even if recycling plastic doesn't do much (a claim I'm not certain about), it makes you think about the planet every time you throw something away. This can carry over into other behaviors, i.e. making people more adherent to recycling metal (or anything at all!), composting, reusing items, or whatever. It's important to be right about these things and not just correct.
Also, I’d suggest you aren’t the median person. Even if it had zero effect on your behavior, that likely isn’t true for others.
We don’t know which is the more powerful effect, so you can’t really say if recycling plastic is meaningfully good or bad on the whole.
If people think they are already doing something, they might see less need to make the hard choices.
Whereas the blood drives and even World War II were much shorter and acute problems. They didn’t require actual permanent lifestyle changes from the doing your part perspective. I.e. something like never flying again or never buying plastic water bottles.
But at least you’re only fooling yourself when it comes to personal learning. Doing “social good” which isn’t deludes both yourself and everyone else you influence. That’s a game for chumps.
And there's probably a lesson in there about how long it takes to effectively shift consumer behavior with the right campaign. I feel like it took about 2 decades to get everyone on board with recycle bins and general eco-friendliness, both using carrot and stick methods.
[0] https://gruppe.schwarz/en/press/archive/2021/lidl-and-kaufla...
Plastic bottles
Some kinds of food containers
Everything else
Plastic bottles are the only profitable-ish plastic to recycle. Often the only possible.
The "food containers" are profitable to recycle only where the labor is VERY cheap.
Everything else is better off burned than doing anything else with it.
Personally i say burn it all, everything else is too carbon intensive and the filtration systems on good burner plants provide better air than the environment surrounding them
And the amount of trash we produce is mind blowingly big, no mines are big enough for 1 day of trash collecting.
> Trying to recycle plastic makes the microplastics problem even worse. A study of just one plastics recycling facility discovered that it might be washing 3 million pounds of microplastics into its wastewater every year — all of which ends up being deposited in our city water systems or dumped into the environment.
> At this very moment, we all have microplastics coursing through our bodies. This is not the fault of not enough recycling. This is the fault of too much plastic. So I say: Let’s treat plastic like the toxic waste it is and send it where it can hurt people the least. Right now, that place is the landfill.
Because of EU vide law. https://www.surfrider.eu/learn/news/the-deposit-return-schem...
>valuable
Its not valuable, its the thread of fines for not fulfilling EU regulation on accepting plastic bottle returns.
https://www.france24.com/en/environment/20240318-activists-s...
https://wielun.naszemiasto.pl/kolejny-pozar-skladowiska-w-na...
https://portalkomunalny.pl/gospodarka-odpadami/pozary-sklado...
https://zielona.interia.pl/wiadomosci/polska/news-pozary-odp...
https://zielona.interia.pl/smieci-plastik/news-odpady-jak-ku...
EU "recycling" turned to Poland after China banned plastic garbage imports. There have been illegal garbage dumps (plastic and other hazardous substances from the west of EU) burning in Poland for over 10 years now, usually couple a month up to one a week.
Its run by organized crime, how it works:
Goon rents a warehouse/piece of land in Poland claiming to be a transportation/construction/recycling company usually using forged documents or homeless person fronting whole thing.
Gets paid to remove hazardous waste from UK/Scandinavia/Germany, stockpiles until place is full.
Finally either sets the place on fire to cover tracks, or the owner stops receiving payments, discovers whats stored on his property and decides to take insurance hit instead of having his assets blocked for several years while courts try to figure out if/what/who is going to pay for lawful disposal.
Recycling plastic is a HUGE LIE.
Wonder why the author favors this option over incineration, which to me seems as being the better approach to get rid of it.
Not that landfills are inherently bad - like the article implies, it's really the creation of the waste in the first place which is the problem.
It benefits me to have sorted waste anyway, since the non-recyclable garbage is more prone to attracting pests and a separate recycling stream helps to make the quantity of garbage more manageable. But what's even better for that is municipal organics/food waste collection.
San Francisco Environment Department will fine your condo building up to $30,000 a month if a Waste Management pickup truck deems you didn't recycling enough plastic. https://www.sfenvironment.org/zerowastefacilitator-faq My HOA has been fined and now threatens to search our trashbags to identify us.
Stale regulations failing to keep up with reality.
Where is the contradiction in believing both that we use too much plastic and should act on individual and governmental levels to reduce it, and that sending a PET bottle to the landfill is a child's tantrum and not some heroic defiance of the plastic industry?
This may be technically correct, but is it significant? The difference in weight from glass bottles vs plastic bottles is surely nonzero but how does it compare to the weight of the truck moving it?
> energy intensive hot water
You can recover a lot of that heat with a heat exchanger
Glass bottles are more than an order of magnitude heavier than plastic bottles. This does seem pretty significant.
It would be interesting to see a full lifecycle analysis of both options.
While this would be a great start in the right direction, there are still many other uses of plastic where the answer is not so obvious. Still worth pursuing though.
Maybe (commercial?) recycling tech has improved to be able to do something with less dense plastic sections but seems diminishing returns. To be fair I’ve seen some cool maker videos of people cutting a bottle into “wire” for 3d printing etc. - but that’s not a commercial/global solution.
1 bottle has 15-30g of plastic in it and hardly half is usable for that possible use...
In Sweden we consider ourselves as very advanced in recycling but there was just a story in the news today where they said that old snow toys were just NOW, sometimes, being recycled. Even though it costs more to recycle them than to burn them, some companies are making the effort to recycle them just to be more environmental.
But I've been recycling plastics in my home for a decade. So wtf...
Last year, they introduced a plastic packaging surcharge - which turned out to be a fee directly given to companies, not a tax nor earmarked for green activities.
This resulted in widespread outrage since companies started wrapping every single item in plastic just to charge consumers that fee. There was no mandate to provide plastic-free alternatives either. Absolutely bonkers!
The discussion of what is the best way to deal with plastics should be done with data, formulas and graphs not with opinions.
And on top of that, there is not even one material "plastic" it's a class of materials, and for which probably the solution is different, like some should be forbidden, others recycled, etc.
The article addresses that.
We as a species aren't going to solve the macro issue unfortunately. The best thing you can do is think local and minimise the direct impact on yourself. I'd suggest starting by buying a house on a hill.
I find this type of attitude baffling. Of course the actions of an individual wouldn't be able to offset the emissions of a private jet or whatever, but that's not a reason to not take individual action. Your individual actions can't solve global warming because global warming isn't caused by one person driving their car to work, or even one jet taken to an eco-awareness conference. It's caused because there's hundreds of million of people driving their car to work. "You can [insert some sort of lifestyle change to reduce carbon emissions] but it still wont offset the carbon cost of one jet taken to an eco-awareness conference" is a great way to ensure hundreds of Americans continue to drive SUVs to work, buy meat at the grocery store, and take their annual trans-US/atlantic flight, all of which adds up to 5 billion tons of co2 produced per year.
I agree, this isn't a problem that can be solved by a single person's actions. We need large scale solutions, but I'd still caution against the kind of thinking that lets you fool yourself into thinking that your own actions don't have any impact. I hear that sort of argument from people who say "who cares if I throw my trash directly into the ocean or dump my motor oil down the drain! Sure, it's bad but it's nothing compared to the carbon footprint of blah blah blah" yet we've seen how a large number of people acting selfishly in small ways leads to large problems too.
I'm not saying you're doing this personally, but it's one thing to call out the unnecessary waste of others, and another to use the actions of others to justify being a smaller part of the problem.
In that order
https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4932
tl;dr - PET and LDPE are worth recycling in the US, those have 1 and 2 in the recycle symbol
Other countries check your local area. Different local government can recycle different things.
What does "worth recycling" mean? I see a lot of people make the claim that if it's ever more expensive to recycle something than it would to make something new it's not "worth it". Recycling rarely makes sense from a purely economic sense.
I still think there might be value in other things like not using up/wasting new raw materials when we could recover them from old products, or most importantly limiting the amount of brand new plastics we're feeding into the environment knowing that it will never go away just break down into micro/nano plastics that will end up in our soil/air/blood/organs/newborns/food or that it's better to recycle as much as we can to keep plastics out of incinerators where they poison our air and out of landfills where they take up space without breaking down efficiently like other trash and can still leach chemicals into our ground/water. Even if recycling or reducing plastics could result in a larger carbon cost it might still be worth doing it if those negative costs could be more easily mitigated or controlled for than the harms caused by the increase in new plastics.
If the plastic made it into a recycling plant, chances are it's going into a landfill or an incinerator. In that case the amount of microplastics being generated is likely negligible. All the microplastics in the environment today is either generated from plastic in use experiencing wear (eg. tires on cars or synthetic fibers being washed), or from mismanaged plastic in the environment decomposing. Properly managed plastic is a negligible source of microplastics, and recycling it or not doesn't make a difference.
>incinerators where they poison our air
this is a non-issue in modern incinerators because they burn hot enough to avoid generating toxic emissions and/or have pollution abatement technologies.
>landfills where they take up space without breaking down efficiently like other trash and can still leach chemicals into our ground/water
Can't speak for other countries but at least in the US we're not going to run out of land any time soon, so "take up space" is a moot point. Landfills are also lined so it's unlikely to affect the water supply.
Incineration isn't perfect either (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...) but it seems like burning wins over landfills as long as there are very strict requirements for emissions and the ash/filters are properly collected and disposed of. It seems like the best thing we can do is reduce the amount of plastic being made and introduced into our environment, but since we don't want to go without it we should try to get as much use out of what plastic we've made as we can. The break down of plastics into microplastics is inevitable one way or another.
That's almost true by definition, but how worried should we be about groundwater microplastics vs other sources?
You also might want to look into the existential threat of putting high-recycle-cost plastics into landfill where it doesn't do anything (low/zero) vs doing literally anything else with it including recycling (high).
The result is that everyone knows what the problems are (see: scientists). But you’re stuck spinning your wheels on the BS busywork created by the marketing/spin departments of those corporations.
And then there’s you. You’re just one gal. Okay, so maybe you’re cynical to a practical degree so you’re by-default skeptical of whatever “organic trend” that comes up on this topic. But so what? The regular people that are vocal on this issue are gonna come off as naive do-gooders. How could it hurt? Don’t you care about the environment? And what’s your retort to that? You can give them a three-paragraph lecture like this one here and feel like a mid-20th socialist intellectual giving a speech on Ideology. But you’re gonna come off as a crank. Old man/woman yelling at sky. Just some random person with an anti-social pet peeve. So you just go along with it even though it’s gonna end up in the same dump somewhere, you presume.
Is that supposed to be surprising? Just because you know the problem doesn't mean we as a society can agree on what the solution is. During the covid pandemic we could barely agree whether we should do lockdowns or not, whether to shut down schools or not, or whether to force people to vaccinate or not. And this is arguably without "corporations still have millions or billions of dollars to frame the narrative". Going back to plastics and fossil fuels, they're used because they're cheap. Getting people to voluntarily pay more now for supposed benefits decades down the line was always going to be a tough sell. The fact solving global warming has prisoner's dilemma dynamics built into it (ie. you stand to gain economically if you don't cut emissions while everyone else tries to do so) makes it even worse. It's not as simple as just "just stop burning oil".
The whole point of that comment is that the dynamics are not surprising.
We're just going to throw the bottles in the trash like the plastic and fossil fuel companies always wanted us to do.
That'll show them!
many plastics are good fuel; but it's been difficult to say so for years because the "science was settled" that recycling was The Way.
And when it comes to recycling, marketing, and consumer behavior - for the 99%, feel-good is by far the most important metric.
If so, then yeah, multi stream is generally considered more efficient. Obviously some central sorting/filtering is still needed, but much less.
As for recycling in general, it’s considered a decent win for plenty of materials. Making cans from recycled aluminum takes only a tiny fraction of the energy of producing new aluminum cans, paper recycling does reduce the need for forestry, most recycling reduces the need for landfills, etc. It’s mostly plastic recycling that is useless, and just there to make ppl feel better about their plastic consumption.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/15/recycling-pl...