The Delusion of Advanced Plastic Recycling
propublica.org
propublica.org
https://quillette.com/2024/06/17/recycling-plastic-is-a-dang...
Chucking it all in a hole? Not even close.
Also in general, unsafe things are usually best kept concentrated and supervised. Spreading them all around the environment isn't solving the problem - it's just another way to put the issue out of mind, while future generations suffer from a slow-brew, large-scale disaster.
Just because it’s biological and natural doesn’t mean it’s necessarily pleasant, nice smelling, or healthy to be around.
If your only exposure to nature is national parks and the like, it’s easy to over glorify nature.
Not saying landfills are nice or anything, or healthy either. But nature has its equivalents.
[https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria] - kills over half a million people a year.
[https://science.utah.edu/news/toxic-dust-hot-spots/][https:/...
[https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/chagas-diseas...]
[https://www.un-igrac.org/sites/default/files/resources/files...] ground water arsenic levels, nice maps start on page 5.
[https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/new-study-allows-re...]
All are driven by these factors, and there are many many more.
And that isn’t even factoring in things like natural ground water Arsenic and Uranium contamination which poisons millions in many areas.
Near as I can tell, you’re just living in areas that are the equivalent of ‘the good side of the tracks’.
If you think Nature works at smaller scales than man, you’ve never spent time in Nature.
Can we make things worse? Sure! But there are also plenty of real, large scale, natural hazards out there.
First your response to “the non-human environment is an astoundingly efficient circular system” was “nuh uh, nature makes things that smell bad and are ugly too!”
Now your response to “nature doesn’t produce refuse of the same type or scale as humans” (clearly referring to the massive amounts of obscenely stable and probably-toxic-to-most-creatures plastic that we produce) is “MALARIA EXISTS, rich guy!”
Take a breath. Try to find where I said “nature works on smaller scales than humans.” When you find a line that looks similar but says something quite different, get curious about that difference! That’s where you’ll find what I’m actually saying.
Edit: oh, but you had to change your comment completely once you actually read things.
What a ridiculous person.
Swamps naturally breed malaria, among other diseases, similar to how dumps breed Rats. Swamps are where rivers and the like end up washing all the detritus. Malaria (estimated) has killed more humans than any other cause.
Living anywhere near a swamp is the natural equivalent of living near a dump burning tires constantly, but provably more lethal than the dump. Without massive effort to control the vector anyway.
Swamps are as natural as it gets.
How many hundreds of thousands of people are killed by plastic waste in dumps per year again? Zero? Except for maybe some rando who chokes on something?
And again, that is without discussing natural arsenic and uranium water contamination.
Oh, and I forgot about Radon [https://images.app.goo.gl/frMD3KoKXdssTgtM9].
We get worked up about human hazards because humans ‘should know better’, and are at least nominally within our control.
Nature just DGAF, and works at scales we can barely comprehend most of the time. And is often completely outside of our control. So apparently some people seem to think the hazards don’t exist or aren’t clearly far worse in many cases?
After all, how much man made radioactive gas do you need to check if you are breathing in at home?
And yes, all of this is very pertinent to the ‘kumbaya nature is self sustaining and all loving and takes care of everything’ comment.
Nature is, of that there is no question, at least. The rest is up for debate/interpretation. I love nature - but let’s not pretend it can be pretty stabby sometimes.
"you just have no idea what you’re talking about" is just plain rude. No one comes here for that, so you'll have to stop doing that to avoid being ignored.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK220695/#:~:text=Assumi...).]
which we have records of for all of recorded history (and fossil records of from far before that).
I’m not saying plastic is good to be dumping in the ocean. It isn’t! Oil spills are bad! Dumping massive quantities of fertilizer and making oxygen depleted zones worse is bad!
I’m saying claiming that nature is always pretty and naturally balanced without massive die offs and imbalances is just ignorant. That claiming natural hazards don’t exist or aren’t often at least as or more of an hazard is ignorant. And leads to major mistakes on our side, if we think that.
And I wish I could be ignored. Arguing obvious stuff like this is exhausting, but apparently it needs to be done or the BS spreads even further - and causes real problems.
Are they in the thread with us now?
This is the thread in response to the comment “You know what's awesome? The biosphere, which recycles 99.9999% of its own matter in a vast, global cooperative, driven by unending clean source of energy that is literally beamed in from space with no waste products. Chucking it all in a hole? Not even close.”
Which is why mass human (and non human) deaths from natural processes related to the biosphere and it’s wastes/chemicals is pertinent.
Because throwing stuff in a hole is sometimes actually a pretty good thing to do compared to many natural processes.
More than that. Nature balances itself through the massive die-offs. I'm not sure how people imagine this, that animals sit around round tables and negotiate a balanced use of resources? No, everything tries to murder and/or consume everything else, and the equilibrium of death is what we call "natural balance".
Let me know when the mosquitos and radon leaks catch up :)
Sorry to break it to you but you’re not the only person on HN who has heard of malaria or rotting swamps or uranium deposits.
As a side note, it’s telling that the only scoreboard you seem capable of using is which forces have killed more humans. I wonder if there are any other lenses through which one can understand the world ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You know the one about ‘natural processes are all great, and digging a hole and dumping things in it is terrible’?
Which is why I’m pointing out that many natural processes kill a ton of people and animals? And why digging a hole and dumping things in it may not be so bad after all?
I have been tempted to put it on a T-shirt to be worn at gatherings where I might find myself in the company of people who celebrate or promote "natural" as if it were an axiomatic good.
In reality I could never bring myself to wear it in public out of concern for by-catch side effects: griefing random strangers for whom the miseries of cancer may form a very real part of their daily experience is not something I'd want to be associated with even if it was not the intended result.
Give us a million years or two and we'll figure out what to do with plastic as well. Either we are gonna do it or some other species.
Interesting pattern in this thread of anti-alarmists thinking they’re privy to some special knowledge but actually it’s stuff everyone learns in like 5th grade (btw it wasn’t literal dinosaurs, but whatever).
Which is why we have veins of coal.
Near as anyone can tell.
Tannins, when they first were evolved, almost certainly. And they still are used by plants to kill pests, albeit it’s steadily been losing effectiveness and the typical biological arms race has been going on a long time.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tannin]
Again, I’m not saying plastics are awesome or perfect or whatever, and there aren’t problems.
I’m pointing out that if you think ‘putting it in a hole in the ground’ is somehow worse than the ‘natural’ solutions that’s ridiculous.
Especially since ‘letting it sit where it was made and have things eat it’, or ‘accumulate in a hole until it gets buried’, or ‘get washed into a swamp or the ocean and accumulate until they get eaten, subducted, or broken down’ is a classic natural way for waste to be handled in nature. And there are plenty of natural things that are super nasty that this literally happens with all the time, and kills lots of stuff.
And nature regularly has huge die offs, poison events like red tides, etc. from purely natural causes. So clearly this isn’t a ‘solved problem’ in nature.
If we even had a single event like that for humans related to plastics (or even an identifiable single event in animals where we could see it), we’d be having a very different discussion.
If you were arguing for literally not producing plastic at all, then it might be a different discussion - but that seems to be clearly impossible at this point, and not what anyone is arguing.
Tell me: how frequently do you think entirely new tannins are introduced to an ecosystem? How global are these new tannins introduced? Are plants suddenly producing a new tannin and spreading it across the entire globe within 50 years? Because we're producing totally new molecules in gigantic amounts and spreading them across the entire globe at a rate that is far too fast for us to even understand what the long term effects are, never mind for organisms to evolve to a new equilibrium in their presence
The lack of co-evolution is the issue. The tendency to invent, mass produce, and disseminate new molecules across the entire globe year after year at a rate much faster than evolution is the problem.
I don't know why you're harping on this "things die in nature" point. No one is disputing that.
Because all the effects you are talking about near as I can tell is because we aren’t burying all the plastics. We dispose of them in other ways, or don’t at all.
Because when they’re buried, they don’t interact with anything anymore.
Literally.
So seriously, WTF?
Those two pieces of information by themselves should dramatically shorten your window of when this stuff will bite us, I.e. there’s good reason to suspect at least that our current obesity and fertility crises are significantly exacerbated by( if not totally caused by) plastic poisoning. It is absolutely not a given that we have time to solve this problem.
I wouldn't go as far as blaming plastic for any of our specific ailments because there are so many better candidates for primary cause in each case but I agree that the potential for some harm is there.
For example with obesity. Japanese don't suffer from it and they use heaps of single use plastics and eat a lot of marine based food that could accumulate microplastics. They just teach their kids to like broccoli instead of stuffing them with industrial grade corn syrup to shut them up.
Plastics' reproductive harm is very well established in marine life and early studies in mammalian life is pretty much in line with it. This stuff is almost certainly very bad, and we're using it for absolutely everything due to its rather fantastic properties and extremely low cost.
Agreed for obesity, there are more significant (and more addressable) causes -- but that's still quite far from "these are inert."
Do you see us going back to Glass and metal reusable syringes?
Or newspaper, for meats and other foods?
Or non-vulcanized rubber for tires? (Aka natural latex)
Or sheep skin condoms?
Or glass bottles for everything?
Or tarpaper and twine wire insulation?
Or unlined tin cans for food? (Anything acidic would be uncannable)
Or any of a million other basic ‘background’ things we use or interact with daily? Like hell, computers?
And thats even ignoring that crude oil is a natural substance that even seeps from the ground on it’s own in many places.
I prefer glass bottles and they are far easier to recycle. (Not that my cities waste collection bothers to do so and I have to go out of to do so).
New material has never been exposed to anything dangerous, so dangerous contamination never needs to be removed.
It’s a big reason why plastic is so rarely recycled anywhere that it touches food or goes into someone’s body.
I don't mean to dismiss the larger truth here about humanity's responsibility to exercise restraint in playing the impossibly strong 5-ace hand it was dealt by natural selection.
But the naturalistic fallacy has a knack for hiding its sharpest razors among the soft folds of words like "cooperative."
The universe appears, as far as we can tell, overwhelmingly hostile toward life with the sole observed exception of our precariously balanced biosphere.
And that biosphere is itself a circulatory system built on exploitation, consumption, and predation - host to endless torrent of unimaginable agonies which are both staggeringly abundant and structurally inalienable from the matrix of this 'cooperative' system.
It's hard, as another HN'er once succinctly put it, to be more cruel than Nature.
But maybe you are not trolling. I'll assume rather that you're merely directing a blunt, honest cynicism toward what you see as the shallow, disingenuous cynicism of humanism (which I don't specifically subscribe but it's close enough for a throwaway internet argument). Someone who may or may not come from a place of disillusioned idealism, but in any case is not at all unhappy but rather perfectly content knowing we live in a morally neutral universe. Perhaps even a little pleased with yourself for having the tough-mindedness /so lacking in others/ that enables you to thrive in a hard objective vacuum intolerable to less robust spirits. Since there is essentially no point to anything, there will be no eschatological reckoning, and naturally no possible harm in optimizing for one's own material satisfaction for there is no such thing as harm at all.
Until we are confronted with conclusive evidence of intelligent life in the universe apart from what has developed in our own gravity well (setting aside the possibility of such entities existing outside a mutually impassible causality horizon); which is to say until we find evidence that the universe either has potential for a purposeful complex homeostasis other than the one we ourselves pursue, or else the apparent universal default fate of reduction to an undifferentiated energetic equilibrium, it is neither cold nor kind to act logically on the actual evidence at hand, which strongly suggests we are indeed the sole custodial inhabitants of this universe, conscious of our leverage over its fate, as we are of this planet (insofar as the notion of "custody" is presently confined to it until we learn otherwise - which, as an aside, would be fascinating even if it might trigger our destruction).
Consciousness (and the awareness, among other things, of suffering that it entails) will have to appear somewhere in the accessible universe first if it is to appear at all. So far, there's no basis for thinking that that somewhere isn't this biosphere right here, and consequently, for our purposeful (even if futile) opposition to the universal tendency toward self-consuming annihilation that would, unchecked, smother consciousness in its cradle.
Let me introduce you to the species named Felis Catus.
To what domain, exactly, are you trying to relegate concepts with your vaguely dismissive take that they are "inside people's heads," as if this doesn't invalidate thought as an origin of material (that is, natural) change and thus pulls the rug out from under your statement itself - since, being just a concept inside your head, it should not have been capable of accumulating the physical mass and energy necessary to get out of your head, onto HN's server, and onto my screen - the letters of which are not randomly generated but an ordered echo of material pointing back to the source informing their order.
The relationship of concept to material is, especially in this kind of case, about as intrinsic as a relationship between entities can be.
When you look at, say, a pyramid in Egypt or Mexico etc, you are looking at the material shadow cast by nothing less than a concept that was at some point, only "inside someone's head" and which remains a fundamental and intrinsic characteristic of that structured mass of earth and stone.
--
Stuff like lead (Pb), for instance, isn't useful to the biosphere as far as I know, and is actively harmful to lifeforms in fact. It came from asteroid impacts to my knowledge, and was buried in the ground before humans dug it up and extracted it from ore, yielding the lead pollution we have today.
The pattern I see here is that over time, the biosphere makes everything it finds useful diffuse, present everywhere in low concentrations; everything else, it sequesters and stashes in high concentration in few places. So not unlike what our industry is doing, just with different materials.
Which has nothing to do with whether or not we should work to solve the harm plastic presents to humanity and existing ecosystems (we should)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38994374
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38722984
("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’ll have to go find it again, it seemed like an interesting “local” solution to a genuinely hard problem (plastic waste).
Most recycling is bullshit. "Electronics recycling" ships it off to third world countries where people pull apart PCBs over diesel fires and whatnot, dumping stuff all over the ground.
Each country gets tired of their land being used as a toxic waste dump and their people being poisoned, so the recyclers work to find another country desperate for some sort of industry.
The only solution is to tax the electronics at sale to cover the cost of recycling it in the least hazardous way possible, with extra penalties for devices with a fixed lifetime (ie, non-replaceable batteries.)
What even is the answer here, once an electronic device has reach end of life?
You still have 183 of those boxes after year 1. I don't know about your toolbox situation, but I will have run out of screws, nails, bits, bobs well before then to store.
It's a nice idea, and I do it too occasionally, but the size of the waste stream is just orders of magnitude more than one could reasonably reuse.
Somebody keeps inserting all that crap in between the things I really want, and it is time they are can't quite so cheaply do so.
Not an exhaustive list but a good start for ideas on how to reduce without hampering your lifestyle too much.
Compare with what takeout was like in the 1990s and early 2000s, when it was accepted that only some restaurants and cuisines were appropriate for delivery and takeout. Pizza boxes, deli paper and cardboard clamshell boxes are biodegradeable and industrially compostable. Foiled paper like McDonald's would use has to go to the landfill, but at least there's arguably nothing horrible in it. Oyster pails like Chinese takeout restaurants used to use is probably plastic lined, but plastic lined paper is at least a lot less plastic than the plastic dishes.
Not true for everything but the vast majority are.
Consumer Reports did some testing on this, writeup here: https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-contaminants/dan...
It's from a couple years ago now, so individual results might be out of date.
Even plastic-backed paper (ie, not PFAS) is much better than a fully plastic container, so I support his.
> A third of them, 10 pounds, could be labeled 100% recycled — shifting the value of the full batch onto them — so long as the remaining 20 pounds aren’t labeled as recycled at all.
Amusingly reminiscent of CDO tranches.
ANTONIO
Is your recycled plastic ewes and rams?
SHYLOCK
I cannot tell; I make it breed as fastMaking an outdoor-rated device with a radio, plastic is a hard material to ignore. Given that there’s little else that has the right characteristics at anywhere near the right price, I’ve done a lot of searching for easily recyclable plastics (ABS ain’t one of them). Most of those are not right for the product and would only doom it to the landfill quicker when they failed. So I focused on plastics that would keep the product in use as long as possible. For recycling, we’re going to experiment with doing it ourselves—take used product back, and have our injection molder regrind it for a future batch (this is why I picked a local partner, they’re down for it).
Given that all the real waste is produced by single-use plastics, I think this exercise has been the commercial equivalent of washing and sorting all my food packaging.
The only thing about metal enclosures is you just need either a connector passed through for your antenna or a channel that your antenna can be potted into like on some cellphones with an aluminum body. Since an antenna in a metal box is umm not going to get much if any signal.
--Edit-- Also you can find lots of old radios before plastic was wide spread in metal enclosures. Although those old devices are not exactly water tight no gaskets or sealant between parts. Unless you look at older military grade units.
This is a process that is harmful to communities around the plants, harmful to the environment, and does not benefit users of the process. I do not understand why organizations like Exxon-Mobil and the American Chemistry Council are promoting it.
[1] https://www.lboro.ac.uk/media-centre/press-releases/2019/may...
Because if you start to look at plastics by what has to be done with them after they're consumed, they don't make sense as a common consumer product* anymore. And if they don't make sense as a common consumer product, then there's fewer people lining up to buy Exxon Mobil's plastic stocks, which are made of oil. Since Exxon Mobil is a company that exists to transfer value to shareholders via the extraction and processing of hydrocarbons, this is a problem. The ACC is made up of scientists and engineers that work for companies like Exxon Mobil.
* common consumer product meaning that it's used in places for broad public use where alternatives such as aluminum or wood are viable, like beverage cans.
I'm not sure if you meant it this way, but does wood actually get used in that niche? I'm imagining tiny barrels.
I guess paper cups (or those big coffee things) are sort of that idea.
That's not to say it makes sense. Myself, I'm in favor of a high temperature burn of plastic + scrubbers + insane taxes on halogenated polymers + insane deposits on fluorinated polymers -> to keep the flu stream clean.
[1] pyrolysis itself is endothermic, clearly, since polymerization is extothermic. But the article you linked explicitly says burning pyrolysis by products which must, net, be exothernic
An other way of looking at it is pyrolysis is a necessary first step for plastic combustion hence the cycle is net exo
The halogens are completely recoverable by bubbling them through an alkali mixture, doesn't matter what earth metals are used (some combination of sodium and calcium is cheapest), this will result in salts.
You want to be a bit more careful about some metals, so that you don't have to precipitate them out of the salts to render them nontoxic. There are ways to preferentially bind the metals even in the gas phase, but it's best not to burn them to begin with, which isn't that hard because metals aren't found in high quantities in plastics to begin with, especially not the bad ones like cadmium and lead.
Other than that, plastics are economically useful, but burying them is just delaying their release into the environment, which is not great. So burn them, and stop pretending they're useful for anything but fuel at the end of their service life. Pretty simple.
Which turns the liberated halogens back to salt automatically, in a very favorable reaction which is so strongly favored it is almost irreversible.
Almost.
But not if you carefully apply energy to the brine using an electrochemical process, especially one which has been improved for over a century after the patent expired, and you can't get much more efficient than that. Especially at the scale these operate at. These are not petrochemical plants since they were doing this before petrochemicals actually had plants. Crude oil wasn't even that popular yet.
But who's going to need to do that, the spent alkali after scrubbing the halogens has no need for additional energy to be added.
Unless you wanted to turn it back into full-strength alkali. Which wouldn't be cost-efective anyway, and nobody should be paying more than it's worth.
Because there's planty of fresh material coming out of the caustic plants already.
But you know how much energy it takes to produce that alkali originally from the virgin brine feedstock those plants use?
More than it's worth. It a plain electrochemical reaction. No other raw materials needed.
It's that "irreversable" reaction that's just a little too strong. So it takes a lot of energy to reverse. Kind of like trying to turn CO2 back into hydrocarbons.
And if you want to try and capture CO2 from the atmosphere using alkali, fuggedaboutit. You're going to need a bigger caustic plant, and a lot more of them.
There's a thing called material balance too, not just electrochemistry and thermodynamics at work.
Or industrial-scale chemical operations.
I don't blame you, this stuff can be confusing.
You mean to say net Exxon?
Thermodynamics is a bitch.
Combustion of the pyrolysis oil, which is the oil the plastic is turned into by the pyrolysis process, is not much different than burning any other oil to release the stored energy.
The problem is that making the pyoil from the plastic as a "recycling" method takes more energy than it is worth.
That's whether money is involved or not, even though the oil itself is worth way more money than the raw waste plastic (whch is about zero to negative as solid waste).
Burning pyoil on its own is a gross positive energy source, but when you figure all the energy wasted actually pyrolyzing the plastic to begin with before it turns into oil, you'd be better off burning the plastic directly.
Since the pyrolysis process on its own is very gross negative, consumes energy not releases it.
It's just thermodynamics, you can't fool Mother Nature.
And I'm talking really gross, more toxic than crude oil too and you really don't want to smell it. A spill has a lingering odor far worse than most crude oils, even though some crudes can be deadly at first if it has high H2S. Since H2S is a gas and dissipates relatively quickly once spilled.
However the final pyoil product comes in the same kind of tank barges and tankcars as crude oil, and some traders can now handle it like this which is not possible for solid waste.
Turns out combustion and pyrolysis are two different animals.
Who knew?
Too bad Google may not help with things like this any more.
>pyrolysis itself is endothermic, clearly, since polymerization is extothermic.
There are also classes in logic for anyone who is seriously interested.
Also, most places already have plenty of taxes that are very insane already, you want to tax people's mental health even more? ;)
The more you understand about thermodynmics, the more of a bitch you realize it is.
If they don't pretend there's a responsible way to dispose of plastic, someone might hold them responsible for the plastic waste they produce.
Recycling technology has not advanced enough that what is promised is credible. If they were honest about the difficulties in recycling, it may be that we still might have carried forward with the plastic revolution - but we probably would have been less cowboy-ish in adopting it for everything.
An interesting analogy but cling wrap is famously thin. Here is another perspective:
Worldwide plastic production is estimated at just over 400,000,000 tons, or 400,000,000,000kg. Not all plastic is the same but its density is roughly equivalent to that of water (once all the air-filled plastics like Styrofoam are crushed down). A cubic kilometer of water weighs in at 1,000,000,000,000kg, roughly double the world plastic problem. (someone please check my math ;)
So yes, you could wrap the entire planet in a layer of cling film. But you also could dispose of all the world's plastic in a single 1km x 1km landfill piled 400m deep, which would be barely a dot on the map and certainly a far better solution than dumping it in the oceans.
But there is no need to give up. As long as we can keep brominated, chlorinated and fluorinated plastics out of the input stream (by taxes and deposits) burning plastic for energy is not that bad.
Fundamentally, as I see it, consumers and regulators love their Gore-Tex jackets and their teflon tape too much to have viable plastic burning.
The expanded version of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle has Waste-to-energy and landfill as next steps.
Chemical recycling could fit in between mechanical recycling and Waste-to-energy.
Though if you just let corporations lie about stuff then it's hard for any kind of logical actions to be taken.
Personally I don't mind the mass balance stuff they mention as long as there is a mandated minimum.
Similar to 'green electricity' that all come through the same wires as the coal generation it's fine if consumer brands want to pay a little extra to market themselves as 100% green energy but if you spread any extra cost across every faceless user by forcing them to buy a minimum 1% green energy and ramp it up over a few years then that's a good way to fund the initial rollout of new cleaner options.
As for the rest? Regulations. Regulate the use of easy to clean and reuse durable containers. Make their sizes standard, interchangeable. Alternately, allow containers that are fully disposable. However the customer fee for a fully disposable container should be zero overhead. Yes this includes paper bags at the grocery store. That tech is super useful and should be encouraged over... heavy plastic BS bags.
I haven't used one since I was a teen - or on the rare occasion I've had a smoothie. I'm pretty sure I would cope without a straw if need be.
The environmental cost is outweighed by the necessity, and we really need to start thinking about the necessity of items, not how convenient they make things.
The primary concern for everyone should be carbon in the atmosphere. Landfills full of plastic might be bad for the environment over time, but they are not going to cause a global mass extinction.
Probably the dumbest thing humanity can do is burn plastic for energy (i.e. convert sequestered carbon to CO2). Followed second by recycling it.
The market for plastic recycling is such that it's often less expensive to just truck it to a landfill. That's what happens in many places, all your efforts to have separate bins for plastic and sorting your trash every week might well be a complete waste of time.
Perception is 9/10s of the law.
... yet.
Do you think that in a wonderful future where we get some technical advancement to be able to deal with plastics effectively, will it be easier to deal with it when it's uniformly spread through the world's landfills, or when it's sorted and dumped in bulk?
<https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/17/climate/ask-nyt-climate-r...>
[I]f the [recycling] plant can find a buyer at a price that makes sense, the bundles will be shipped off to a recycling plant. Sometimes a local one, and sometimes one as far away as Africa or Southeast Asia. If they can’t, everything goes into a landfill or gets incinerated.
And even though my original comment is at zero, the industry specifically pushed recycling because by making people feel like they were helping, they would ignore the real problem.
<https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...>
Yet the industry spent millions telling people to recycle, because, as one former top industry insider told NPR, selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn't true.
"If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment," Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association and one of the industry's most powerful trade groups in Washington, D.C., told NPR."
Burying the plastic is probably the better option.
<https://www.ft.com/content/901c78e6-b4d0-467c-ab87-6fc44c8a0...>
“The energy required to do reprocessing is higher than the energy required to make the [plastic] in the first place,” he said. To limit carbon emissions in line with the global warming goals of the Paris climate accord, it would be better to “bury the stuff”, according to Hallett.
I frankly think that an enterprise that can build robots able to sort landfills would make mint.
Buried plastic is largely inert. It is one of the least nasty things that is in a landfill.
Do you think that having all plastics spread through a landfill is better than having them grouped even if residing the in the same landfill? I think sorting your trash is never lost time on a global scale. Anything done to make it easier for future generations to handle garbage should be done, even if it has no immediate benefit.
Is the theory that someone is paying them for the sorted, baled plastic, trucking it elsewhere and then putting it into a landfill?
Are there ways to use less plastic or none at all in packaging?
That 'revolutionary approach' is making one of the other things that we can recycle very easily cheaper. Plastics are wildly cheap and durable enough for their use. But paper (kinda recyclable), glass (very recyclable), metal (very recyclable) are kind of expensive vs plastic. Taxing it would create a weird perverse thing. The real thing that needs to happen is the remaining 3 things we can recycle easily need to be cheaper. When nat gas became cheaper vs coal (which is really cheap) the energy companies very quickly started switching over to NG.
To understand that this book shows what doing that sort of thinking does. https://fee.org/ebooks/economics-in-one-lesson/
Getting tax law and pushing things to work are a delicate balance. Recycling is a good example of it. We are paying people money to 'recycle' plastic. When the reality is only 5-10% of plastics can be recycled. There is no magic fix. The basic problem is economics. Plastics are cheaper to use. Because they are a byproduct of something everyone needs. That is not going to change. If you tax it here they can find some other country willing to crack the oil and do it for the cheap way. You have to make other options cheaper. That usually comes thru volume.
What i do rather is buy a few Fuji waters and reuse them throughout a month. OVerall when i was recycling or whatever i was doing i would drink 6 small bottles of water a day and put them in the recycle bin. Im definitely now using a ton less plastic.
Modern landfills are very good and containing all the bad stuff. There is actually plenty of room for them. And you sequester the carbon in the plastics.
Win win all around.
Now it turns out that it was (mostly) a farce all along. Most recycling ends up in landfills, and the recycling process has terrible pollution side effects of its own. The shocking part of it to me is that it has taken us forty plus years for this to even approach mainstream conversation. The idea that "recycling is a sham" sounded like a conspiracy theory up until recently.
The level of effort that has been put into marketing recycling, just to enable ever-increasing consumerism is staggering.
By the way, the "carbon offsets" industry does this and more. It's a general problem with industries that sell warm-and-fuzzy-feelings with no one particularly interested in looking under the hood. Also extends to some charities, etc.
Anyway, the first claim of the article - that in the pyrolysis process, not all plastic is turned into plastic - seems... kind of nitpicky? So some of it is turned into fuel or paints - so what? A lot of consumer recycling is actually "downcycling". The glossy newspapers you put in the recycling bin probably don't end up as glossy newspapers - more likely, they end up as cardboard.
If we want less plastics pollution, this has to be handled first.
The world desperately needs a tax tied to how polluting things are.
If money's on the line industries and people will quickly adapt. Without it? There's way too much convenience to prompt looking for serious alternatives.
The difference in tire wear between a Corolla and a EV SUV is quite huge, e.g., you're gonna change tires way more often on the second one.
If car tyres cause unrecoverable pollution then we don't need to reduce that by half or something, we need to almost eliminate it.
That means that we need a type of car tyre which does not cause this pollution.
At the end of the day, I disagree with you, you play with the cards you have at hand, and at the moment tire technology isn't gonna change, so at least we should push for using less and smaller cars.
It seems like the solution is to tax the producer.
How much more pullotion is added by that second truck driving around?
Also instead of forcing me to get trash picked up every week why can't it be bi weekly?
I know I know, money. But guh.
Probably not much, or negligible. If everything was going into a single trash truck, it would fill faster. The fact is, trash / recyclable trucks do fill up and need to dump their load. (I'll let you figure out how to run those numbers.)
In my case, my company sends a single truck with one side that handles recycling and the other that handles trash. I prefer it because I only have a single trash day, and everything gets picked up at the same time.
What I don't like is that all trash pickup (in my town) is private. There are 2-4 different trash trucks that visit my street a week, depending on if a company is doing well or mismanaged and going out of business.
It's then about time to stop vending machines of micro-dose ultra-transformed "food", individually package fruits and vegges not to preserve them but to sell them at a higher price, the proliferation of sugar+gas added water to sell more since many in the western world have access to public clean water at home and so on. Let's star selling the as prepared leaves in a significant quantity instead of pre-dosed individually envelop mini-bags, mini-bags of sugar and so on.
This will IMMENSELY reduce the quantity of disposable plastic we drop every day. We can't get rid of anything of course, but we can get rid of many. Even for milk we can start to redistribute it in the classic way instead of in the modern long-range shipping who need plastic to preserve it.
If you follow this idea you'll realize a thing: we need to delete modern dense cities. They are the biggest consumer of such packaging because the fast life in tight space demand them. I'm really serious. Try imaging you as a remote worker or an in person worker in a remote spread are how and what kind of food you buy there. You are at home, no need for packed single-dose bags of sugar, you have you own favorite tea in pots, you have plenty of space to stockpile food and buying in big quantity allow to save some time and money, also you might have time to cook at home and so on.
Oh, yes, it's just a slice of the total plastic we use, but it's a very big one, used for things we can avoid. Surely we have also much plastic for dress, and that's again can be reduced if we live spread because there is far less "need" to dress ourselves in gazillion of different outfit to go downtown, but we can't avoid that completely, let's start what we can start.
There is a common misconception about modern cities than "far past one". Nowadays we do not simply live in dense area walking around with stairs having next to no equipment at home like in the aforementioned past where people live tight but also simply, working in most cases "from home" meaning they just go downstairs and they are in their shops. Modern cities demand a gazillion of things, just a building for:
- clean water
- hot water
- sewers
- fire safety
- elevators
- seismic safety
- HVAC
- ....
Demand MUCH more energy than modern wood based single-family homes (if well built ad without exaggeration of course) both to be build, operated, maintained and evolved. We are not anymore in the era of rock+wood homes passing from a generation to another for centuries with little to no changes. With "new deal" tech we simply can't live in cities. Just take a look at a mean apartment in your country, in Italy a mean apartment need 20-30kW thermal power to heat in the winter simply because even if it's less and less cold most of them was built in an era where no one care about insulation. Modern homes with 1kW electrical can heat and cool themselves in the mean for the same country. In single family homes there is typically room to recharge from p.v. cars if you WFH or working in a spread area to recharge them from p.v. at work, the same model. In cities it's simply not possible. How much energy this alone means?
Now try seeing "future personal air mobility" sold as urban https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... but definitively NOT urban, cities can't simply adapt, you need to rebuild them to adapt more than few evolutionary steps. In a spread (not too much of course) area you have plenty of space to adapt and buildings are small, they can be made in recyclable materials for most of their structure and the same is valid for local infra. Cities demand big harbors, airports, highways who consume enormous resources and can't change much, a spread are use maybe even LESS resources and being spread can slowly adapt. Try just seen the nightmare of Jakarta and their "solution" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-01/indonesia... can you measure how big waste of resources such move represent?
In a dense city most people don't even have a car.
I live in an apartment building from the 50's. With just 2 walls of our building retrofitted with insulation I now barely need any heating in winter, try that with a single family home.
>Cities demand big harbors, airports, highways
You still need them with spread, only more roads to spread everything around.
Yes, but the city need a far more expensive metro network, surface buses and so on, witch in term of raw materials demand much more than cars and in term of energy demand the same or even more because metros have also stations and even with metros and buses we still need cars and van for a variety of activities, vehicles used for work (like a small Transit for a plumber or an electrician) but also usable for private stuff. The TCO is still not in favor of such model, despite many (from the interested ruling class) claim the inverse...
> I live in an apartment building from the 50's. With just 2 walls of our building retrofitted with insulation I now barely need any heating in winter, try that with a single family home.
This means that you live in a nice climate, where summers are not too hot and winters are mild. Such areas exists and are typically densely populated also because of the climate but they are a very little part of the inhabited earth, or you are in a less nice climate but being "in the middle" you get "free heat" from some apartments underneath and "insulation" from apartments over yours. Again that's true for some, but in TCO terms it's still not favorable for the humanity at a whole, only for some humans.
If you are in mild climate a single family home would barely need heat as well, not if you get free heat from neighbors of course BUT a new single family home in the same climate can thanks to insulation and mere design (compact form, large windows on the southern side, roof/other element shielding the Sun in summer while allowing it pass in the winter etc) and while you might profit from your neighbors they still have to heat/cool anyway, it's good for you but it does not reduce the overall consumption.
Just for a personal counter argument: I was living in an apartment from the '60s in a mild climate, it's heated with 24kW methane. I live now in a home twice the size/a bit more than twice the heated volume, in a much colder place and I heat with 1KW most of the time, climbing to 3-4kW few late night and early morning between January and February, the maximum absorption recorded for heating was at the end of January 2017 a single night with a minima of -24.8℃ (-12.64℉) with 6.3kW. In raw material terms electricity here means nuclear (I have p.v. with small storage, but not to heat the home at night) and the grid, gas means a much more raw material and energy hungry distribution network. So again building new home demand energy, but in their useful life we amortize it and we evolve. Remain in old buildings demand still more, many times more in many cases, just to keep them operational and we do not evolve. Can we change them now? A 40 apartment building build today respect of one 40 apartments from the '50s cost at least twice... You need to relocate 40 families for an year instead of putting a small container-home in the garden for two-thee month...
Source? This says otherwise, especially if you take into account you'll have to do less km in a dense city. If you go by bike it's even less.
https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint
>in the middle" you get "free heat" from some apartments underneath and "insulation" from apartments over yours. Again that's true for some, but in TCO terms it's still not favorable for the humanity at a whole, only for some humans.
In an apartment everyone has at least 1, most people 2-3 neighbors and many even 4.
>Just for a personal counter argument: I was living in an apartment from the '60s in a mild climate
You're comparing with a new build house, compare with a new/renovated apartment.
>You need to relocate 40 families for an year instead of putting a small container-home in the garden for two-thee month...
For the most renovations you don't need to move, insulation is added on the outside.
> Source? This says otherwise, especially if you take into account you'll have to do less km in a dense city. If you go by bike it's even less.
Personal considerations and experience, I think no such real study exists mostly because it should be really large. Taking into account all the variable in a real life case ALONE demand much effort. For first you should find data for a significant timeframe, let's say 10 years, measuring the raw materials needed to build a metro in some city, and I think no such data exists, you can get some projects but not a trustable bill of material. Secondly you have to track all buses and trains and their average consumption. Done this you have a generic measure of "how much it cost in capex and opex the public transport system of YouNameIt city", what you miss is a "YouNameIt city" spread equivalent with only private vehicles. In this case you can only measure a large number of people consumption in a spread area, count the cost of the original road network witch likely exists since so much time no one can count and their operational costs. Even if you reach such goal you have just a "first degree measure", you need to take into account resources needed to produce the resources you used to build the city and the spread area transport network, some are easy, let's say cement and sand, some others are far harder, like steel. And so on. You probably need an decade to craft a working model for a state like North Korea (a good one because due to it's politics (Juche) anything there is mostly "domestic", they do commerce of course but much less than other countries and they still have cities and spread are, though get real data on NK might be a bit hard).
To cut it short the "carbon footprint" is a nonsense, sometimes useful but not an answer: a train travel it's far less energy intensive on a modern rail than a truck travel, the material travel, but thing change if you have to count resources needed to build and keep rails vs roads, including exchange nodes, because we do not have rails on the home front door or aside of a cultivated field. If you just count how many tons of steel you can start imaging what cost more and what less. At this scale we have no simulation, non real scientific study, only "I like it let's try" without possible comparisons.
> You're comparing with a new build house, compare with a new/renovated apartment.
I do on purpose because my new home was built in around two months, rebuild the building of my ancient apartment is practically impossible because not only you have to relocate ~53 families for an year or more but also because it's in the middle of a dense EU city where such large demolition than construction size would destroy the traffic of a significant part of the city for an year or more, such EU buildings was simply built considering an eternal useful life, and that's a bubble waiting to explode with damage not much different than those of a nuclear war. In USA something similar have happened with certain big condos collapsed or at least damaged enough to be beyond repair but USA cities tend to be far less dense and younger than EU one so MAYBE some might be rebuilt.
The point is essentially that small buildings with enough ground around can be practically rebuilt, dense area can only be rebuilt in batch like relocating all the people from NY to another place and rebuilt the whole NY, witch I bet no one think it's doable or at least reasonable to do...
> You still need them with spread, only more roads to spread everything around.
Not exactly the same thing, yes, maritime commerce need harbors and having many little harbors and many little ships it's not much sustainable, so you need some "hubs" in the logistic network but having much more room for local production you can do them, and the rest of the logistic network is spread anyway so MUCH simpler and cheaper to be build and evolve. A simple example around me there are enough potential farm to have cows for meat, milk and cheese for the nearby residents, it's definitively not enough for modern living but in a hypothetical spread society it would be normal and actually it was normal in a not so far past where at least milk was generally local instead of import in from 1000-2000km away simply because there it's cheaper than here even with the needed logistic. Do so on scale and it's easy to view you need much less resources. We would anyway import shrimps from South America and India, but the volumes changes much.
This is completely wrong. They renovate buildings here in Tokyo all the time (normally every 20 years), and it doesn't affect traffic at all. They just cover the entire building in a mesh netting and go to work.
The rest of your anti-cities screeds read like someone who thinks that everyone can be a remote worker.
Living spread is permitted by remote work, but thanks to remote workers those who are not can WFH in many other cases, like a dentist who can work in the basement while living at the first floor in a small village of single family homes. Thinking this is for remote workers only is a common misconception typical in cities where people often have issues imaging a life outside the city. I was in one dense city, I know the feeling, than I go outside and I understand was false.
1. No, "renovation" means making major changes inside the building. In a condo, this usually means ripping out the kitchen and bathroom fixtures and replacing them all, redoing the walls, etc. This doesn't mean replacing the building; that's called "rebuilding".
2. Yes, buildings here in Tokyo are demolished and rebuilt all the time. It's extremely common. There's apartment blocks near me being demolished and replaced right now. Obviously you've never been here, or any place where they know how to demolish and replace buildings regularly. Buildings here generally don't last more than 40 years because of earthquake standards.
The lifestyle you're suggesting is utterly crazy. You can't have tens of millions of people spread out and driving to various rural destinations all day long; the traffic would be non-stop.
2. I was in Tokyo for a project and before as a tourist, I've not seen large buildings totally erased and rebuilt but it doesn't matter I was there for a too little timeframe for that, but enough to see how many issues of high density Tokyo have, even the the Japanese have put an immense effort to handle many of them.
About the lifestyle I suggest, here in EU:
- Nederland, 425.4 humans/km², 81.3% live in single family homes
- Belgium, 381.79 h//km², 77.6% in single family homes
- France, far less dense, 62% in single family homes
- Ireland even less dense, 89.4% in single family homes
While some others like Italy or Spain do the opposite. Accidentally I'm Italian and I'm living in France switched from a dense city to the mountains and have no intention to came back, as many, many others, essentially all that have tried this way, so well, working it does work, it's not crazy, and local services are spread as well offering local jobs to many people in far better living condition than dense cities in the same country. It's a matter of choice, and I bet the late night Tokyo metro show the effect of density on humans.
If anything there would be less space for local farming and manufacturing in a spread society, since housing takes now a lot more area.
Do they? Because so far I still have to find a complete analysis witch show to be something different than interested PRs...
Also I observe that some countries, like the Nederland, with a very high population density are among the biggest producer of meat and co in EU, while 81.3% of the population live in single-family homes...
This is more of an argument for remote work than an argument against dense cities. Living in a "remote spread" is not great otherwise: long distance travel, limited public transport because it is not worth it due to the low population, cars are pretty much the only option. You don't have more time, again because of long travel time because of long distances. You can stockpile, but you have to take conservation into account, and plastic packaging is, maybe unfortunately, a great solution for conservation.
Dense cities are quite efficient, and not particularly reliant on small plastic packaging. Many cities have markets at walkable distances that sell products in bulk. And from my experience in living in tight spaces, I think it is actually a good thing against plastic use. For the simple reason that you have less space for plastic. You have to think twice before buying something, because where you are going to put it is always something to consider, and packaging takes space too. A tea ball and tea in bulk takes less space than individual tea bags for the same amount of tea for instance.
> long distance travel
Travel for what? Take a look at some EU Rivieras, there is little "commuting" since a slice of people work (or could work) from remote, others work locally/nearby, people normally do not travel back and forth countless of time like in a dense city. I state that for personal experience having left a dense EU city for the Alps, yes, I do travel, but not more than the number of km/miles I've traveling in the city. Simply because many "regular trip" are far less needed here. For instance I do not buy grocery every days but every 15 days or so. Also I have room for p.v. to recharge my car, so I consume even less from the grid, travels are cheaper both in pure monetary terms than in pollution terms.
> limited public transport
Witch again it's a GOOD thing despite common (interested) narrative. Collective transport was effective back then when it was just to bring workers back and forth to the factory from their homes, so every working day only with nearly always at nearly complete capacity. It was then extended in an era where cars was very expensive and only very few can own one NOT BECAUSE it was efficient for that but to allow people who can't afford a car to travel anyway at a price they can pay, and it was heavily subsidized because of that. Then it became a business munging money both from their customer and the public, wasting enormous resources to allow the city to exists but being horribly inefficient. We need to move 24h a day, anyone with their own schedules, as a result collective transports can't completely satisfy the demand, so we have a mix of personal and collective transport means both typically under-utilized wasting even more resources.
Try to really think as an alien observing curious aliens from the orbit, you'll see how many resources a modern city eat just to exists, how many to get regularly updated and regularly at certain point in time get rebuild because at a certain point in time you can't evolve without big rebuilds. You need ENTIRE COUNTRIES just to build few cities. Modi in India think they can build 100 smart cities on the entire country resources. In central Asia most State can only have ONE city and so on, we do not see that because cities for us was ancient ad slowly changed, but an external observer see it very well, cities are a sink hole of resources for giving an utter life to most people. Their purpose in the modern era with modern logistic and IT? Just the service economy or keeping people owning less and less till nothing, salves of the services operated by few, modern Fordlandia equally distopic and equally untenable, a more broad description: https://kfx.fr/articles/2024-04-26-onnewdealexp-contrapolis/
> You don't have more time, again because of long travel time because of long distances.
Oh I have it. Because in a reasonably spread (meaning not too little dense nor too much) living the 15' city is already there, but not on feet, instead by cars. Most people living spread can do nearly anything in 15' car trips. And they are in nature, so they can have plenty of natural activities instead of consuming paid services for anything because in a modern city anything is a service on sail...
> You can stockpile, but you have to take conservation into account, and plastic packaging is, maybe unfortunately, a great solution for conservation.
That's right, but at what rates? For instance I buy some times per year significant batch of pig meat, I grind and salt and flavor it at home making my own sausages and freeze them in dedicate plastic, but not single-use, containers. I buy olive and sunflower oil but not in small bottles, instead in metallic containers around 10l some, 5l others. They got recycled as well. I tend to buy wine in demijohns from "nearby" producer one or two time per year, and bottle it at home, again it's glass and cork recyclable and normally reused. So yes, there is still plastic, but far less and generally not single use.
> Dense cities are quite efficient
Is efficient for you living in tall buildings than moving to others tall buildings typically with immense machines named metros, using such buildings for less than 12h/24? I call it ALL but inefficient...
> and not particularly reliant on small plastic packaging
So you do not eat ready made food, typically sold in some single use packaging while working downtown? Just for instance. You do not frequently buy grocery with plenty of plastic bags, mostly too thin to reuse?
> Many cities have markets at walkable distances that sell products in bulk.
You can also buy in bulk from a supermarket, but you need space to stockpile and in apartments, specially in modern ones, there is not much space. Not talking about the fact that's impossible have p.v. and heat pumps for anyone anyway... So essentially the full-electric new deal is nearly impossible in cities.
> You have to think twice before buying something
If I see my grocery records I've bought MUCH more back then in a dense city than now on mountains, really. Simply because I buy frequently ready made stuff than dropping their relative packages to the bin. Try a simple experiment: hold somewhere your packaging for a month (if you have enough space), you'll might be shocked by their volume.
Just for tea bags: I like green or white tea and I tend to buy metallic 1kg pot, they last for long. Yes, I need a bit more to clean anything but WFH it's not much an issue, in the end my waste is ZERO. Simply because having nature around I made compost, so the used tea leaves got dropped in nature, where they do not pollute. While with bags they need to be dropped to the bin, creating a certain amount of waste per day. Really, try experimenting collecting the waste you can without odors etc for a month or at least a week, then try measure it and project the same for 1000 of you per year try playing about changing habit in this model.
Cities of the past, where people just live in "wall homes, little equipment" and tend to work "just downstairs" do not exists anymore, there are the theoretical "strong towns" who are not there and they are not compatible with today economy anyway. Modern buildings just for piped water, electricity, sewers, elevators, fire safety, seismic safety, HVAC consume MUCH MORE raw resources than small homes and makes people consume more. They are really only needed for financial capitalism, against nature and humanity.
For example in a centralized model the initial investment in resources is pretty high (like building a large apartment building) but the idea that over time you can manage and operate that building with common resources among the inhabitants. Hopefully over time it uses less resources than a distributed model.
Since the '80s thanks to modern logistic assembly a chair in India, with Russian wood, Brazilian caning, Chinese felt and Indonesian nails to sell it in Amsterdam became cheaper than built it nearby. Cities was still needed, most things happen on paper and we can't duplicate archives around employee homes, receiving customer there, conferences was only in person, trade fairs/expo was needed and so on, so again there was no distributed modern model possible. After internet start to spread, TLCs evolve, we do not need the office, we do not need in person conferences or trade fairs and so on. So now we can choose between centralized and distributed models.
Stated that: the centralized model is not anymore the one from the past, a big residential building in the past, let's say just from the '80s was typically a big concrete structure, with a concrete or metallic roof, some windows and doors, a simple clean water distribution, hot sanitary and heating water and a common sewers, very simple electricity (since there is not much power needs), phones and TV. That was already significantly more than the '50s where phones was not really a thing and TV was a new thing only few have, no central system. Now? Well, roof need to be an insulated and ventilated one, nothing exceptional, but complex on a large structure. For seismic safety we might need or much more steel or a seismic insulation, witch again it's nothing so exceptional but still means 15-20% more raw materials, of course we need general insulation, ventilated facades, stuff to allow winter Sun penetrate the building for free heating, but not the high summer Sun, VMCs, HAVAC, f.o. maybe security cameras, elevators, .... a modern building of comparable size/number of apartments than the '80s one is more the double it's cost AND you can't count for generations in the future to amortize it, tech change. We have had classic copper phone, than FTTH, and in many cases we was not able to reuse copper ducts, TV now in large part of the western world is distributed on IP, so we need at least home networks because relaying on wifi is horrific and you are not allowed anyway in new buildings, a new cat6a/cat8 LAN per apartment instead of some chained coax, electricity is used for cars and much more powerful appliances so again we need much more stuff for it and I do not take into account how many things are now mandatory for cars, including mere garage space, not demanded in the '50s
Long story short in the past, a near past, the cost of building a 40 apartment building was LOWER than building 40 single family homes and the useful life of such building was estimated certainly for 50 years but probably for 100 years. Now the useful life is perhaps 30 years and potentially 50 years and the cost of 40 apartment is greater than 40 single family homes, beside that a 40s apartments building can't evolve much. A single family home can do only a bit better but being a single family home with a bit of ground around in 50 years when the elderly parents having build if for them die their children sell/rebuild it, it's doable at a reasonable price (let's say the price of 4-6 mid-range cars, in a hypothetical spread society) so single family homes remain "up to date" to current tech, needs, human desires and climate change. Large buildings and cities can't.
Long story short in the past there was no other options than cities, now cities are too costly and we evolve at a speed we can't amortize such cost, we do not need them also, so it's not much reasonable keeping them and pushing for smart cities which are even more costly and hard to evolve.
It's not differently than cars: can we have BEVs? Yes. Can we have BEV-trucks, well, there are some, but honestly they are not realistic, so what? It's better taking the cars, since so far we can for them, trying something else for the trucks or simply giving up?
For something we can change, and it's a good thing to do, for something else there is no option.
Even BEVs are sold as "green", well, they pollute much anyway, but instead of polluting the atmosphere we all breathe in, they pollute around mining sites, witch tend to exists where little to no humans live a life. It's not good anyway the pollution, but it's a choice: damaging certain area or the whole planet. For nuclear it's the same, a nuclear accident it's a disaster but normal operations are "clean", yes we have waste witch are an issue but in the end we put them in deserts and they can pollute at maximum there except in case of extreme climate disasters where we have anyway little chance to survive.
Apparently 21% is already recycled in the US, 30% in the EU.
It can also be made from recycled plastic.