Recycling plastic is a dangerous waste of time
quillette.com
quillette.com
In Europe, we banned single use plastic straws, cotton swabs, cutleries, bags, etc., and industrials found alternatives that are inexpensive and environmental friendly.
Just to add to downsides besides energy spent for transportation and other processing.
Yes, it will add to transportation costs.
https://www.eastman.com/en/sustainability/environmental/circ...
https://www.eastman.com/en/media-center/news-stories/2024/ea...
Eastman is the real deal with going all the way back to useful monomers chemically, at the other end of the spectrum compared to some who are pyrolyzing plastic to turn it into gross poorly characterized oils.
Chemical changes occur in all of these non-physical processes but this is not mere "chemical recycling" with solvents, Eastman is all the way to molecular recycling by using controlled reactions to break down the polymers back into useful monomers. Rather than things like simple pyrolysis which basically turns waste plastic into never-before-seen types of waste oil.
But that's not nearly enough, it may be tough to economically operate unless the recovered building blocks can be combined with an existing stream of like raw materials which are already being turned into fully-value-added newly-molded polymer products which are well-established. And with the final wholesale/retail product having the same properties as when all virgin material was used, that's the highest value you're going to get from the material at hand. They're no dummy, they're there. It doesn't even matter that much if the recovered monomers cost them more or less than virgin raw material would do, they're going to use it all up anyway and turn it into final product. This is no refinery, this is a chemical plant. Eh, they're all huge and all look the same, jk, they don't try to make anything that's cheap enough to burn. As I was alluding to in my other lengthy comment, if the polymer plant making the plastic is big enough to put out miles of railcars, then you would need a recycling plant just as big capable of taking in just as many railcars just as fast or you will never be able to even recycle at an equal rate of production from that one polymer plant.
Now Eastman has got it down and it is circular enough to pay for itself under legitimate accounting and provide what I would call a "significant reduction in carbon increases compared to alternatives". Taking advantage of the specialty plastics market as it stands now.
So maybe as long as more new polymer is being made than the waste they are taking in, will there be enough capability to continue to absorb the intended recycle amount :/
And this is most exemplary and definitely worth building the additional plants they have on the drawing board. As good as it gets so far, they're integrated, technology goals met, these plants are huge, at full scale, pay for themselves impressively, but still might not be economically feasible, if there were not increasing demand for Eastman's highly-value-added polymers in general as a truly positive business outlook.
You have to figure that to really cut back on plastic waste overload, you would have to cut back on the number of new polymer plants being built, but this is a step in the right direction building a combined production/recycling facility rather than a mere production-only plant. And it can generate a positive cash flow which is rare when the default is a financial black hole for recycling alone. Just don't think it will really make present net tonnage in circulation go down at any time. That would require a decline in overall demand for plastic worldwide.
The reflexive answer from environmentalists is “Make less plastic!” That sounds reasonable, but on closer inspection, it lacks widespread feasibility. Vital industries like healthcare and agriculture would grind to a halt without the benefit of single-use plastics, not to mention the ubiquity of reusable plastics in just about every aspect of modern life. Realistically, with the dream of recycling our way out of this problem rapidly fading, the less-than-perfect yet practical solution of waste-to-energy—that is, burning plastic garbage as fuel—needs to be reevaluated.
I think this is overly dismissive of 'reduce'. It ignores 'reuse' and rejects 'recycle' It is true that plastics are uniquely suited to some roles in Ag. and Med. as a vapor barrier guarantee of purity and uncontamination, but there may be alternates, which significantly reduce plastics burdens such as use of kraft paper and wax (yes, I know. this is a less than perfect replacement, but not all "sterile" things actually need to be sterile. They sometimes need to be "clean")
So I would argue that yes, burning and pyrolisis may be the best path out, but 'reduce' is not infeasible, even if at scale in Ag. and Med. it's hard.
The role of pyrolisis in general should be better known. Char, carbon, and liquid byproducts are useful. Since the liquid product isn't that far off the feedstock in petrochemicals and ultimately drugs and related, it's a bit of a virtuous circle.
[https://cen.acs.org/materials/coatings/PFAS-paper-food-packa...]
Most plastic is not safe to reuse for the same uses, as the plastic is a little porous and is nearly impossible to properly clean to a sanitary level once exposed to certain types of chemicals or other contaminants. And it is exceptionally difficult and expensive to effectively test for them.
Think of the stains Tupperware would get if you left something with tomato sauce in it too long.
Now think of the equivalent of ‘community Tupperware’ - except someone stored pesticide in one of them before turning it in.
Glass generally doesn’t have this issue.
For plastics, reuse has limits, sure. My dad's tool room was packed full of pipe tobacco tins, for screws, bolts, thread-cutting die. I think when we banned smoking we did two harms: we allowed people to grow old and become a burden on the state instead of dying young, and we stopped providing almost limitless tins for things to be put in.
Glass is god level re-use. Second time round is a bare minimum for many economies use of glass, but the steps down the chain from clear through coloured to aggregates for construction are still an amazing chain. Hopefully with improved renewable energy the whole heat-cost to re-form glass (and aluminium and steel) can be worked through.
Per Wikipedia, Generic wax paper (since 1897) has used parafin wax, and per that other link since 1967 has used PFAS compounds.
So unless it explicitly says it’s using natural waxes, I’d assume some variety of synthetic is being used - probably PFAS based for anything modern.
And glass is indeed great for that! Also old coffee tins!
Got milk? Got glass splinters and shards in your milk? In my childhood, we did, from commercially re-used glass milk bottles.
Any idea what happened?
"Proper rinsing" is not adequate for commercial operations. High temperature (near boiling) water at fairly high pressure, tens of thousands of bottles in a batch. Metal baskets, mechanical conveyors. I'll let you imagine the failure modes.
I lol'ed at the thought of milk bottles being rinsed by hand in a commercial operation. How much do you want your milk to cost?
Glass shards aren’t going to be able to stay inside or on any bottle subjected to that.
But if a neighbor shattered at some point when later filled, it could happen I guess.
Though that would apply to anything bottled in glass, new or old glass yeah?
Glass is often dirt cheap to make, and recycling it usually only makes sense if you can match colors and compositions - as if you can’t, the coefficients of expansion will be different and colors weird, making it difficult to make sellable or high quality product with it.
Reusing containers commercially is also usually impossible with the way the consumer market is now structured, as there isn’t any single dominant player, standardized container, etc. in any one market.
At the consumer level though, it’s usually a lot easier - pasta jars are free to reuse for whatever, etc.
Plastics are so much safer and cheaper and more reliable and easier to use that it's unreal.
The collective action problem is mind-boggling. Get all countries to change their import laws and manufacturing, use, and disposal laws simultaneously. Anyone who goes first will simply destroy their industries.
"Hard" is major understatement.
> "Making hydrogen from waste plastic could pay for itself" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37886955 ; flash heating plastic yields Graphene and Hydrogen
> "Synthesis of Clean Hydrogen Gas from Waste Plastic at Zero Net Cost" (2023) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202306763
"Fungus breaks down ocean plastic" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40676239
What does "Zero Net Cost" mean and how does that relate to margin?
Most of us wouldn't be here if lots if consecutive things weren't successfully solved for millennia before now.
With plastics recycling one of the challenges is the ridiculously low value of the recycled product, hovering at zero to quite negative net dollars without subsidies.
This leads to an even more ridiculous state of affairs where the more of the human race that's involved with marginal plastic "recycling", the fewer that will be available to carry out activities that are orders of magnitude more effective for the same effort and energy expended.
I don't know how many miles of railcars you have walked on top of that were filled with virgin plastic pellets, but these things are so cheap because they are made by polymer plants big enough to produce them by the mile.
There is some possibility that any plastic recycling operation that is actually scaled to handle one whole railcar of prime waste at a time, would still not be financially sustainable as a standalone business if they started with a railcar that was virgin pellets instead of prime waste anyway.
How would they compete on price, selling one railcar at a time when that doesn't provide enough profit to pay for labor to even move the railcar? And ideally-fully-processed recycled plastic, for instance all-PE, clean & ready for blending with virgin on industrial scale, still needs to sell for less than virgin since it is physically less useful on its own for so many applications.
Now chemical recycling, where the prime waste is basically dissolved in toxic and/or flammable solvents, has been up for consideration. There is really no miraculous solvent that does a recognizable good job of dissolving plastic well, only usually adequate if more pounds of solvent are used than pounds of plastic. Virgin solvents are petrochemicals that may not be as expensive as they could be, but cost can be about 10x as much as designated fuel hydrocarbons (like diesel or gasoline which are optimized to be cheap enough to burn rather than for further use as industrial material). Once a hydrocarbon plastic (PE PP PS) without significant non-hydrocarbon content (no PET, ABS, PVC, etc) has been successfully dissolved into a compatible hydrocarbon solvent, it can then be sold for further hydrocarbon processing such as blending with fuels to a limited extent if the specifications can be maintained, or with crude oil for complete re-refining. This may not be fully legitimate in every jurisdiction, and any expensive solvent involved ends up being sold at prevailing fuel prices or below, along with the pounds of plastic dissolved in it. Less solvent can be used to dissolve the plastic, or solvent-recovery schemes are possible but that ends up relying on heat.
If you are going to use heat, might as well consider pyrolysis. You're just going to need a bigger heater. You really can't afford to do this unless you get the heat energy for close to free though, because it takes about the same energy or more than it did to make the virgin plastic. Now some people are good at this and do seem to be able to wrangle up some apparently free energy without any unbelievable shenanigans, so I would expect them to take it forward more than most. Definitely easier to come up with raw plastic waste for free, these are the two major inputs to the process, what could go wrong? Solvents may not be needed in the production of the pyrolysis oil, however something equally effective will be needed on an ongoing basis for routine cleanup. Should not be a major item like energy though.
But if you ever saw (or smelled) pyrolysis oil you might find yourself in the majority who would probably rather not have it exist at all. Too late. Some people think the toxic solvent vapors are worse, but not most. My findings are inconclusive so far but right now it looks like some toxic components of these type of plastic pyrolysis oils are so different from the ones found in "conventional" pyoil, that will be the first time those exact not-fully-characterized constituents have found their way into tankcars in any significant quantity or concentration.
Anyway some of these intended recycled plastic outcomes under ideal conditions are blendable as hydrocarbons, as long as the quality is there and the price is cheaper than what they are being blended with. Certainly then the carbon formerly sequestered in the native plastic, basically in the form of "solid waste" from the moment the virgin plastic leaves the polymer plant[0], then meets the same fate as the bulk hydrocarbons it was blended with; being largely burned for fuel and releasing more CO2 into the atmosphere than if it were landfilled. For the most part these type of liquid recycling processes require traditional oil & refining companies to be thriving well enough to already have a suitable hydrocarbon stream for blending, sizable enough to overwhelm the full amount of recycle liquid so there is not disagreeable amounts of degradation to the receiving stock when they accept it.
Depends on how you do the math but might as well just burn waste plastic directly for energy without all the recycling hassle beforehand, or even more environmentally sound, landfill solid plastic as soon as discarded. You think in some places real estate is too expensive for that? Maybe not after you bury enough toxic waste under the property :/
And for affordability, that's not counting the testing fees which can be pretty expensive by the tankcar. Unless you've got a lot of tankcars to make up a bulk parcel, but we're still going to get you on sampling fees.
[0] Only awaiting official Solid Waste designation upon discard.