Vaporizing plastics recycles them into nothing but gas
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
The current sense of a plastic waste crisis is that a certain fraction of plastic gets chucked outside and will find its way to the ocean where it will be mechanically broken down in harmful ‘microplastic’ and ‘nanoplastic’ particles. No form of recycling will work if people don’t use the bin.
If, in the other hand, people throw the plastic in the trash bin it will be buried and spend a long time (100-10,000 years?) underground and will at least somewhat decompose. Any environmental threat is kicked far into the future.
The trouble with chemical recycling is that it produces the kind of chemicals that come out of an oil refinery/petrochemical complex (which are used to make plastics) and those are all worth about 50 cents a pound.
OTOH, there's a lot of plastic that is discarded at larger scales (vs. Chris & Pat drop their empty bottles into bins), and a really good chemistry might make recycling a far better choice in those scenarios. And much of the world does not have well-run (especially long-term) landfills to put trash in. And there's a morale effect, too - if we quite reasonably can recycle some common types of plastics, that injects a bit of hopeful news into the generally miserable plastics recycling situation.
blaming consumers for the industry waste that's being released from their factories into the public environment is diluting responsibility. If the governments were not subjects of the big multinational petrochemical corporations, they should charge a deposit for every gram of plastic that customers acquire, similar to the German Pfand for plastic bottles and cans (0,25 euro cent).
If a plastic contains 33 grams of plastic as described in their QR code or instruction manual, charge the customer a deposit of 3,3 dollars for each product and pay the customer 3,3 dollars for bringing back that amount of plastic. The environment would be pristine
Plastic is cheap because the future generations are paying the price of pollution
The oil industries will complain The single use plastic purveyers will complain and the lazy consumers will complain, yet exactly like Germany, it must be done.
Some people think it's cool to burn money, while others purchase unneeded AI farms.
We, companies who make, companies who sell, and consumers who use as well as permissive governments all dilute responsibility, and a vast majority of plastics I pickup are simply the tops of plastic food containers.
How many are sealing reusable containers? Zero. how many straws? Thousands.
Make plastic straws the gold standard for recycling. worst offenders? The top fast food venders in food deserts. Cheap companies serving cheap lazy customers.
The poster is absolutely right.
Which I suspect is why it's not better known or distributed.
I don't know enough to distinguish that this isn't just a graphic of population x flow rate.
It uses some averages and rates to backfill totals, but isn't just pop x flow.
It has a coefficient for 'waste mismanagement' which seems to dominate the eqn of how much ends up in the rivers vs landfills or otherwise secured.
I was under the impression that ocean plastic was comprised largely from discarded/lost material from ocean going industries followed by tyre dust.
A quick google didn't reveal much more than organizations think science is done by SEO.
Found a lot of incomparable data being compared. Measurements by mass, measurements by particle. Varying definitions of what constitutes a microplastic. from >2cm to >0.1mm
I found claims for top 10 rivers ranging from 95% to 18% of the river plastic. In general a lot of percentages, and few absolute numbers. In general it makes me despair for finding actual data. I'd like to be able to at least check that they calculated the percentage correctly mathematically. Preferably I could also know what as a proportion of what was being calculated so I could have some confidence that they were at least the same class of thing.
Keep America Beautiful, a packaging industry greenwashing group, developed the industry's modern response to policy. They're against bottle bills too, despite the fact that they're an extremely cost-effective anti-litter policy.
Back when the 5¢ deposit was introduced it was equivalent to more than 25¢ today, so today's policy is limited by a failure to update with the times. In Michigan (which has a still-pretty-measly 10¢ deposit) they see recycling rates of 97%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_deposit_legislation_...
I find the doubt that prices work a bit surprising, since generally HN audiences tend to be above average in market literacy otherwise.
https://www.bottlebill.org/index.php/benefits-of-bottle-bill...
Why not blame consumers which would dispose their garbage wherever they want instead of a bin? I would rather criminalize this. It's so easy to put an empty plastic bottle in a bin yet they insist on throwing it on the ground.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050401181834/http://www.altern...
Blaming consumers for this is like blaming them for lead in gasoline.
Is this ever enforced anywhere outside Singapore? I don't think anybody cares.
>It's so easy to put an empty plastic bottle in a bin
you're not solving the plastic pollution problem, you are only sending your waste to pollute Thailand.
The solution to the mass-death that a plasticised environment is causing is not to blame the victims, but to analyse the root of the problem: entrepreneurs and factory owners who abuse plastic because it's cheap
Every time I walk a road in Thailand, also anywhere else, I pick up every piece of trash I stumble upon to throw it into the first bin I encounter. Thanks G-d I haven't been to the places where there is too much garbage and no bins.
> Modern landfills are completely sealed to reduce contamination of the nearby groundwater. First, the ground is lined with clay. A thin layer of flexible plastic is placed on top of the clay layer. That allows the collection of leachate, the liquid that passes through the landfill and may draw out toxins from the trash. The leachate is collected though a drainage system that passes this contaminated water through pipes to a pool where it can be treated to remove the toxins before being released back into the environment.
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/landfills/...
https://www.urologytimes.com/view/testosterone-levels-show-s...
Now of course an average 3rd world country doesn't have any of that, but if you would actually travel there you would see plastics everywhere, in the sea, on random land, in the mountains, in the rivers etc. While still leaking what you wrote but way more directly.
But acting like plastic isn't 100% bad goes against the narrative, and happens to align with those who don't think carbon needs capture. Just throw it away.
Making it into a boogeyman has ironically caused the remaining chemicals to be more leechable, as the substituted hardeners don't work as well, yet likely have similar negatives as the BPA replaced.
It's the unlearned lessons from asbestos all over again.
The farmers have to fight off the same pests and weeds, just with “natural” compounds instead of strong, tailor-made artificial ones.
But surely the natural spray and the artificial spray has to have either the same active ingredient, or ingredients that are chemically very similar? And if it doesn’t work as well, the farmer will surely end up using even more of “natural” compounds than he would’ve if he just went with RoundUp?
That was the original definition of "organic" farming. It's not the food that's organic; it's the farmer.
That has since become captured by agribusiness, who wrote the rules to exclude the kinds of small farms that practiced organic farming before it became a buzzword.
It's unreasonable to expect 100% of our food supply to come that way. But we can do a lot better than we do, and actually looking at the numbers instead of guessing makes that clear.
https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2021/07/09/organic-vs-con...
The most important advantage traditional agriculture has is that it uses less land and frees up space for nature.
It’s much more efficient than other materials in many ways.
If every single-use plastic container/wrapper had to be replaced by some kind of paper or waxed paper doing the same job, we’d need dramatically more of that material than plastic (barring clever inventions).
That comes with its own side-effects. More dead trees if it’s paper vs plastic, more metal mining if it’s metal vs plastic, more weight being shipped around, in many cases more energy being used to produce the alternative packaging in the first place. And all that to have packaging that’s functionally worse than plastic.
That does not matter if it's poisoning us. And if we end up in a situation where energy is cheap (thanks to PV or whatever), it might be much better to use less efficient less poisonous materials, like glass or ceramics (and so on).
But I think that's a tiny % of plastic waste and the vast majority comes from the production processes.
Factories wrap things up heavily before sending their items along to the next step in the value chain.
Farmers sometimes lay down plastic sheets on the ground.
I hate it as much as anyone but removing any of it will have knock-on effects.
It's better to wrap that pallet in an extra pound of plastic rather than it getting damaged and having to re-produce the whole 1000-2000lb amount of goods.
It might be better to lay down the sheet and use less pesticide & water, or be able to grow crops closer to the point of use.
Now if I want organic apples or something, I may be forced to choose a pre-bagged selection of far too many; take it or leave it.
No it will not, stop pushing junk science. Vinyl Chloride is a chlorinated double-bond. PVC is made by opening the double bond to form connected monomer units (i.e. polymers).
PVC doesn't "degrade" back into a higher energy state compound.
Even if you left it you in the sun where UV might re-double bond it, the molecule itself is incredibly reactive - it's environmental lifetime is basically zero under those conditions since it'll oxidize and break down in air in a few days at most, and photochemical reactions are amongst the slowest and most inefficient.
Buried PVC doesn't even have the energy to do that.
Let's flip that around -- the benefit of chemical recycling is that no new petro resources need to be fed into refineries etc to produce these -lenes (which themselves are major industrial feeds).
If this process were to be scaled up, certain plastic trash would become valuable, which would divert them from waste streams (similar to how eg. aluminum cans are treated).
I can see major objections coming from those who sell petro resources, but otherwise, how is this not a good thing?
Out of curiosity, how often are new plastics invented, and how often are those plastics difficult to recycle?
For example I'm finding that modern computer cables are sheathed in a much more durable (less brittle) form of plastic than those from 10+ years ago. Or is that just the addition of pthalates?
Edit: plasma gasification does still produce tar, as per [1], but much less than standard gasification. There isn't much review on the effects of applying plasma gasification to plastics.
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09560...
By way of contrast: Vaporizing lead or mercury compounds, not such a good idea.
But the GPs point seems to be that only those two specific kinds of plastic vaporize into those tractable gases. Most of them become all kinds of things, from wild poisons to chemical nightmares that will destroy your equipment.
In one particular video they were shredding all kinds of waste plastic (again, not even a dust mask) and melting it to extrude into thin strings that were then cooled and chopped up yielding bags of source material for new products.
They were then taking these pellets and making "PVC water pipes" using a home-made looking propane powered extrusion machine. God only knows what kinds of plastic they were using but the pipes looked exactly like the ones you'd find at a Home Depot or similar store. Kudos to the ingenuity of the workers, but wow, I worry about the health implications not just for the workers inhaling the particles and fumes, but the end-users who are now drinking water through pipes made from who knows what plastics.
But the article doesn't address the biggest issues:
1) Do you need to separate types of plastics or clean them before using this process?
2) What are the challenges to scaling this? (They mentioned that this is an issue but didn't answer the question)
The whole second section of the article discusses this process on mixed plastics, including:
> Another test involved introducing different plastics, such as PET and PVC, to polypropylene and polyethylene to see if that would make a difference. These did lower the yield significantly. If this approach is going to be successful, then all but the slightest traces of contaminants will have to be removed from polypropylene and polyethylene products before they are recycled.