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Comment by more_corn | Hacker News Reader

Plastic recycling is a myth. It is effectively impossible to do it in an economically feasible way. Recycling itself was invented by plastic companies to divert blame from the company creating the plastic to the consumer. (Just recycle it!) if you don’t believe me look up the origin of the recycling symbol.

Which isn’t to say recycling of meta and glass is useless. Recycling plastic is a myth, other recycling may be of some benefit.

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I know one of the people involved in this: https://sargasso-reclamation.com/

If it's possible for Kenya to do this with the incidental bycatch of local fishermen, I would hope an industrialised nation could manage it with pre-sorted domestic and industrial waste.

Taking a look at their website, 2 things jump out to me:

> A lean operation, leveraging Africa's strength in labour costs

Which is of course a euphemism for "leveraging the low wages of African laborers". And:

> We purchase today from out of work fisherman

So it seems that this operation can exist because their costs are extremely low due to a poor local economy and a surplus of cheap labor. This does not translate to success in an industrialized first-world country.

The second quote is why I made the reference to pre-sorted domestic and industrial waste that isn't going to need anyone to go fishing.

Aren't we at a point where recycling aluminum is a lot more energy efficient than removing it from bauxite and therefore more profitable for the industry to pull it from trash?

Always was, I think?

At least for domestic uses, I know nothing about fancy alloys.

Even when I was a kid, people were big on separating steel and aluminium cans and showing off how recyclable aluminium is.

Some countries do recycling of aluminium well, Japan for example, most don’t. Issues with contamination, sorting, pipeline, storage, just to name a few make it hard to implement well.

Last time I checked modern aluminum alloys made it very hard to recycle aluminum waste efficiently. That's still the case, apparently.

Nearly all industrial ones yes, that’s why some countries that care a lot about recycling use easy to recycle alloys for cans, like Japan. They also religiously keep contaminants and other bits of aluminium out.

> Plastic recycling is a myth.

At least for another "eight to nine months from now"

> But given that its operational timeline expects the processing plant to open eight to nine months from now, it means that the company will likely amass more trash before it can even open its doors

They're basically stockpiling until the plant is operational. I'm not sure how they will achieve this mythical process, but at least they have more than half a year to figure it out.

> ”They're basically stockpiling until the plant is operational.”

Sounds like a variant on the classic tire recycling scam:

1. Lowest bidder wins contract to recycle tires, by offering to do it cheaper than anyone else.

2. Starts storing tires somewhere while they “get up and running”.

3. Discovers it’s cheaper to just keep storing the tires than to actually process them, besides they bid too low to make it viable anyway.

4. Years go by and eventually an enormous tire mountain is discovered (or maybe it catches fire), resulting in big cleanup costs usually paid by taxpayers…

I guess somewhere there is a data to either prove or refute this. Look at all the current active recycling centers and look if they built stockpiles before. And which stockpiles actually disappeared after the center was operational, or which never started operating and the stockpile remained.

If you really could uncover a conspiracy like this, I'm sure big newspapers would be happy to collaborate on releasing these news :)

Paper mills buy cardboard bales, in the $100-200/ton (it varies a lot)

I assume there is a similar market at the aluminum plant for cans, and at the glass factory.

I don't think the plastic is actually an input for anything yet.

I pay extra money for a private recycler who takes plastic film which is used to build plastic decking.

> Recycling plastic is a myth, other recycling may be of some benefit.

Some?! That's just a gross understatement.

For paper, recycling saves 50% of energy and 66% of water compared to pure fresh paper [1].

Glass saves about 33% of energy [2].

Iron scrap is at 72% energy savings [3], copper at 80% [4].

Aluminium is the most insane example - there, recycling saves utterly astonishing 95% (!) of the energy you'd need to create new virgin aluminium from raw ore [5].

Add to all of that: the more you recycle from these groups of valuable materials, the less environmental destruction you have from mining the ores - and the less chance there is for shit to go seriously wrong, e.g. dam breaks like [6].

The case of plastics recycling is still open, but everything else? It's just so much more efficient.

[1] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/umwelttipps-fuer-den-alltag/h...

[2] https://www.bvse.de/glasrecycling/themen/glasrecycling-schon...

[3] https://www.bvse.de/dateien2020/2-PDF/06-Publikationen/04-Br...

[4] https://www.gdb-online.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Factsh...

[5] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/35...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brumadinho_dam_disaster

And energy savings might be the secondary benefit -- the primary benefit IMO is not having to dig the ore from the ground.

I'd hope thats included in the energy calculations.

Perhaps the digging energy is included, but not the "lack of a hole in the ground" benefit.

And this is why we really could use government intervention - to create standardized markets for recyclable products.

Basically - the CME for recycleable material, leading the way to gradations and cleanliness standards.

Right now this is an industry that could benefit from creating more scalable markets within the food chain.

Thanks for these stats, it changes how I think about aluminum packaging/cans.

Do keep in mind that it is relative to new aluminium. It might still be far better for the environment to use other materials.

For example, a plastic container might result in X emissions, a recycled aluminium one in 2X emissions, and a virgin aluminium one in 150X emissions. It just means we should absolutely recycle aluminium when used, but it doesn't by definition mean we should be using aluminium in the first place.

If Evian sells its water in bottles made of 100% recycled plastic, that means 100% less plastic is entering the environment from Evian bottles than would otherwise.

Do you disagree?

Not op nor do I disagree but if recycling plastic involves lots of energy and toxic chemicals, one should compare both of these two evils.

I do disagree. I don’t believe a food giant such as Evian to tell the truth. I don’t believe McDonalds or Starbucks either. It’s only told for advertising purpose, at least since the 80s if not more.

That depends on the definition of "100% percent recycled plastic". What most people understandably think this means is "Made 100% from plastic that was used in some product and then thrown into a recycling bin". What the FTC defines as "recycled", for the purposes of advertising that your product is made of recycled content, can be found in section 260.13 of the FTC's "Green Guides": https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/press-re...

"Recycled content" is defined as:

> materials that have been recovered or otherwise diverted from the waste stream, either during the manufacturing process (pre-consumer), or after consumer use (post-consumer)

And they do not have to inform consumers of this distinction:

> Recycled content claims may – but do not have to – distinguish between pre-consumer and post-consumer materials.

> Recycled content includes recycled raw material, as well as used, reconditioned, and re-manufactured components ... The term “used” refers to parts that are not new and that have not undergone any re-manufacturing or reconditioning.

Well, taking what was previously waste in the plastic manufacturing process and turning it into more plastic is better(?) than nothing. But I think most people would think of this more as "making plastic manufacturing more efficient" than "recycling plastic". It makes plastic manufacturing margins more profitable, as now what was waste has value. It means that "100% recycled plastic" still relies heavily on the production of virgin plastic.

If people who would have not bought plastic bottled water DO buy it because it is "100% recycled", then the satisfaction of that additional demand requires the production of virgin plastic. Even if the number of people buying Evian bottles doesn't change, Evian is still buying the results of plastic production from plastic factories, which is likely to increase the amount of plastic in the world.

Again, it's better than nothing. But it certainly isn't a silver bullet, and many would argue that it is still not sustainable.

I might agree if it was actually zero sum, but as far as I know we still make new plastic from oil pumped out of the ground. Demand for recycled plastic is simply indirect demand for new plastic.

Even if all plastic was recycled, there is still the issue of microplastics polluting our water and food supply.

If a consumer is conscientious enough to recycle something, the counterfactual is that they put it in the trash rather than that they throw it into the nearest river. In a landfill, a plastic bottle will lock up its constituent carbon for hundreds of years. In that long we should either have learned to manage the amount of carbon in our biosphere. To the extent that the amount of carbon we pump out of the ground is inelastic, better it get locked up in landfills than that it get burned. Now actually it is fairly elastic but given how much worse carbon burned is than carbon stored for hundreds of years I think disposal is probably better for the climate than recycling.

I seem to recall that something 10% of the oil that's extracted is used to make plastics, while the rest is used for energy. Framed that way, it could be argued that it doesn't make much of a difference if it gets burned (especially if it's burned in lieu of burning some other fuel), but if it's burned there's no chance it will pollute a river or ocean.

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