University of Alabama Engineer Pioneers New Process for Recycling Plastics
news.ua.edu
news.ua.edu
It seems people forget that _recycling is and should be the last thing_ we do with objects/materials that we don't use anymore, it requires energy to create a new object and at the same time recycling materials doesn't always recover 100% of the original materials.
Also, keep in mind that the article is from his university's PR dept. It's not independent work by a journalist.
Amazon eventually realized that boxed returns were inefficient and implemented unboxed returns via UPS stores.
It seems like unboxed delivery to a store or locker would also be more efficient, but for customers it's less convenient than front-door delivery.
Perhaps delivery workers could also collect reusable Amazon boxes while making deliveries.
Plastic refuse persists for hundreds to thousands of years, and is itself biologically active, often interfering with endocrine or other bodily signalling functions, if not other long-term chronic poisoning, or sheer physical blockage.
Cardboard sourcing of course has environmental impacts through deforestation, monoculture, and land-use impacts. That's another story.
What is needed is not new recycling processes, but a government that is not beholden to plastics industry lobbying. Can we have a new process for good government too, please?
If the plastics industry had to bear the cost of their product, it wouldn't be as cheap.
"For many years, recycling was relatively cheap. North American and European countries were sending millions of tons of recyclables to China, where they were bought at a price that helped offset the cost of local recycling schemes in exporter countries." https://www.rts.com/blog/is-recycling-worth-it/ (randomly picked from search "cost of recycling")
I agree that we should try and reduce our use of plastics. But their environmental impact is very small when they are disposed of properly.
For example, are plastic producers mandated to pay for plastic cleanup efforts? No. Well…why not? All the garbage ends up in the ocean and then destroys the food chain slowly. And then new companies like the “ocean cleanup project” have to scrape by and beg for donations to fund their ocean and river cleanup efforts.
Increased plastic prices would also encourage research into alternatives.
Plastics in the ocean generally come from waste from the fishing industry and from South East Asia.
Undoubtedly you get a lot of it.
Maybe you never heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch
It’s a bit shocking to see first hand. Get out there and look around, and you’ll realize this isn’t a tiny problem caused by boaters.
“An open access study published in 2022 concluded that 75% up to 86% of the plastic pollution is from fishing and agriculture“
And also in that article it mentions you can’t really see or detect the patch yourself without specific tooling for it as the fragments are often quite small and dispersed. You can’t use satellites to see it either as such.
The amount of plastic produced, shipped, and dumped is simply staggering. You can ship 99.9 pct of it to SE Asia and still have enough to pollute all the beaches and snorkelling areas at alarming levels.
> In a 2014 study researchers sampled 1571 locations throughout the world's oceans and determined that discarded fishing gear such as buoys, lines and nets accounted for more than 60% of the mass of plastic marine debris.
Having people in north america pay less for plastic just because we do a better job not throwing it out isn’t fair either. That would basically be north america “outsourcing” our problems to the poorer countries that don’t yet have the infrastructure in place to properly deal with garbage.
Yes, they end up in South East Asia.
https://eastasiaforum.org/2019/06/26/southeast-asias-plastic...
None of this would be an issue if we put our no-longer-usable plastics in landfills where they should be.
They still will. For most things that we use plastics for, they have incredible material properties.
Adding a small cost of disposal to them won't change the equation.
Are there significant health downsides of microplastics?
I’m all for using plastic where it actually makes the product better. Like a silicone spatula for example, or in medical industry where plastics are used to keep needles, etc sterile.
Is society vastly better compared to 50 years ago? No not really, aside from improved vehicle safety and a few other tech improvements. Yet plastics were used SO much less back then. Maybe i’m missing something.
What we are left with is plastic. Cheap yes but also perhaps the least bad of the other things.
As long as we engage in rampant consumerism we will run into similar rampant consumerism issues no matter the materials used.
I'd only worry about the affect of a plastic restriction on food prices. But, again, it might be a blessing in disguise by steering people towards fresh produce and meat.
It’s a systems problem. Sounds like you (like me) grew up in the 1st world where your country has the proper trash infrastructure. Additionally, the government and schools provided the basic education about why littering is harmful, and society at large understands it in your country. That’s great.
Just because we grew up with this knowledge ingrained into us doesn’t make us “better” people, or better than a filipino person.
Some poor countries have poor trash infrastructure, and they do a poor job teaching the ills of littering to their people. That’s unfortunate, but doesn’t make us “better” than them imo. It just means they are poor and uneducated on certain topics.
Now to answer your actual question, why should someone in oklahoma pay more. I don’t think it’s ethical or even fair for someone in oklahoma to pay LESS for plastic simply because they do a better job throwing out their trash. Cheap prices for plastic encourage additional plastic use. And additional plastic use means more and more plastic will be entering rivers and oceans around the world, which affects ALL of us, including the person in oklahoma. Plastics enter the food chain, via fish eating them, and even through rainfall once they become microplastic in size. Basically, i’m arguing that “outsourcing” the issue to poor countries won’t solve the problem and is just pushing a cost burden onto already poor countries.
A proper solution IMO would discourage plastic production globally, or at least enforce cleanup by the producers of plastic (make them pay for efforts similar to the Ocean Cleanup Project).
I will agree that littering is very much cultural.
And following you to circle back to the original point... Raising the price of plastics for everyone does place the majority of the burden on poor people/countries. If everything costs $0.05 more due to more expensive packaging, that is statistical noise for most people in a 1st world country but would make things unaffordable in poorer countries. But I agree that the only way to do it successfully would be to force a higher cost on the manufacturers no matter where they are located, otherwise they'd just shift manufacturing to the lower cost areas. Pretty much anything that raises the cost of goods will disproportionately impact the poor.
Hope that clarifies my perspective.
did you read hacker news before you became a nerd (like myself)? probably not. I didn’t even know it existed! Why? Because nobody told me about it and my social circle growing up was mainly into video games and reading books. I only heard about it after i branched out in college and studied computer science, and eventually got my first job in tech. A colleague recommended it to me.
Nobody is going to randomly search “how to properly dispose of trash” lol. People typically get into an echo chamber so to speak, limited by their social circle. If nobody else around you cares about trash disposal growing up, what are the chances you will randomly show an interest in that? Very slim IMO. ESPECIALLY if the main thing on their mind is putting food on the table for their family.
Worrying about garbage disposal best practices is a LUXURY not every society has and i think you forget that. I’m not criticizing individual people at all here.
If plastic were truly a selling point, it would be prominent in all the advertising: "$5 value plastics!" or "Plastic/Wool jacket!" It's not. Because they know that, in reality, people don't actually like plastic. It's just that in an environment where you have a selection of items varying in price where the highest-price item is just as likely to predominantly contain plastic, consumers will choose the least expensive option. It is exploitation of information asymmetry, not a true preference for cost-effective plastics.
The other thing is that there are a lot of products that are very expensive that are still made with plastic. When looking for products online, I always try sorting by most expensive to least expensive to get the higher quality products. Still there is plastic, but it's Gucci plastic! See, this plastic junk is better because it has a household brand name on it.
The capitalism apologia for this behavior is insulting too: No, you need that plastic, it's better than using the non-plastic materials! You wouldn't like it without the plastic! We're protecting you! (Again, if it really is better, then make its betterness prominent. Be proud of the fact that you chose plastic for its cost-effectiveness or its physical properties!)
The solution I'd like to try is requiring that this sort of information be provided directly under the price at the consumer's request. In brick and mortar stores, they can have pull outs under the price label or just have a bigger label (yes this is feasible - retail stores already redo their labels regularly for price changes and new/seasonal merchandise). Online, there would have to be a prominent flippy switch to toggle on that additional information.
In all, I find the claim that people prefer plastic to be dubious and think that, if given the information, a lot of consumers would buy less plastic. I think people prefer their time, not wanting to go down a deep research rabbit hole (where one must dodge the companies who infiltrate information sharing spaces like the Buy It For Life subreddit with false sentiment about their products), and are, at best, indifferent to plastic.
And while many products are optimized for cost, they don’t market them as “cheaply sourced ingredients.”
Plastics have a bad rap. They don’t cause big societal problems, relative to the societal attention (Eg plastic straws).
People want simple, binary stories about a fight against evil — but the world is complex and actually pretty good.
People are "against recycling" becuase it's stupid or inconvenient, or others are "pro recycling" for "the earth". But recycling is a fraud, largely, as I mentioned - it's not supposed to supplant the reduction and re-use of materials, yet is has. This is because of plastics industry lobbying and marketing.
No one talks about Reduction or Reuse. Now it's "recyclable". you throw it in a green bin and no one asks about it after that. Plastic bags were made a little thicker and euphemistically labelled "reusable". Study disposable single use trash marketed as reusable.
This thread is so much like the “people don’t want quality” post from a day or two ago, with many of the same observations about information asymmetry, people making weirdly contrived excuses for corporate interests, etc. That thread has one guy ranting about ladles and kitchenware too, like just stamp it once out of steel for the love of god so we can stop rebuying the same junk every year!
Plastic is great where we absolutely need it or ask for it, and the rest of the time it’s just part of the deceptive cost and corner-cutting corporate culture that tends to wreck human health and happiness as well as the rest of the world.
I’m really pissed about this subject lately because I’m breaking a major or minor household appliance like every other day just by trying to gently use it for the intended purpose. I didn’t choose these objects since I’m visiting family, but how much can be blamed on a consumer really before we just call the sale of junk itself shitty and fraudulent? Some people will say “caveat emptor”, but that really only works when choice and information is something that consumers have access to.
There's plenty of plastic on the ISS, where money is no object. If you buy something manufactured with Kevlar or Teflon or Gore-Tex, that will be prominent in the marketing, and it really is better than steel for ballistic protection or oilskins for keeping you dry. If you buy plumbing supplies, the vendor will advertise whether they are plastic, and if so, whether they are PVC or LDPE - neither better nor worse than copper pipes, but with different performance characteristics.
For clothing, polyester is a less premium material than wool - largely because it's cheaper; if wool was free we'd still make plastic clothes - so the seller advertises the wool component.
It's totally unnecessary to have it deliver 12 ounce bottles of coca cola by the metric ton.
That still doesn't solve the problem of recycling plastics or bottles in general, which this research may advance.
People hauling empties all over the place doesn't seem as eco friendly as it once did, especially when so many people have recycling pickup curbside with their trash pickup. In deposit states, you can't crush your cans before returning them but in non-deposit states you can, saving space. Eliminating the deposit probably would result in some amount of plastic going into trash cans instead of recycling bins, but it would be very far from being 100%. The math gets fuzzy when you start deciding on if people make special trips to return empties or are they usually returning them when they already were going to the store to shop. Same the more upstream you go. But that recycling bin at the curb is still there, waiting to be used more.
recycling plastics is not cost effective (another random article) https://greentumble.com/is-recycling-worth-it
the real "solution" is reducing use, not recycling, and re-use, not recycling. Recycling is what should happen with what's left over after the other two "Rs" (remember the 3 R's?).
Instead the plastics industry says "use as much plastic as you want, we'll pretend to recycle it" and everyone pretends that it's actually happening, and it's not. I think that's called "green washing"
Almost all the most pressing problems for the human species seem to be Wicked Problem classes and it's part of why I don't have a lot of expectation that any of them will be solved even _if_ catastrophic events like constant war and mass deaths happen. I also have doubts that whoever survives any of these kinds of events would be more genetically predisposed to solving these problems in the future either.
This is a specious claim with an unjustified goal. Municipal waste management is not expected to be “cost effective”. We don’t need to recycle because it’s profitable, we need to recycle to reduce plastic production and plastic waste.
Of course we need to reduce demand, you’re right. We need to avoid plastics in the first place, and that should be higher priority than recycling.
But there’s nothing wrong with the idea of recycling. Yes, today’s recycling is not happening as advertised. But that’s not because recycling doesn’t work, it’s because people aren’t doing it. It’s a social problem we have, not a process problem.
It looks like the best solution the municipality has managed to come up with so far is to attach metal cupholder-like thingies to new trash cans, and people are expected to put statiegeld bottles and cans there, so that others can take them later and get a refund. Though I don't know how a regular uninformed person is supposed to figure out what these cupholders are for -- it's not intuitive at all.
Around here they're polite and don't make a mess. But on the flip side you could only go around making a mess so long before you got beat up or something and good luck getting a police response for that so it's probably not in their interest to be obnoxious.
Still, beats landfilling.
So many billions of hours and dollars lost to this nonsense.
(one article picked at random from a search for "recycling fraud")
https://eia-international.org/news/exposed-the-plastics-wast...
I honestly don’t understand what this statement even means.
Are you saying that recycling technology is so cheap, efficient and easily deployed that government is the only obstacle to better waste management?
If that’s the claim, it’s audacious to say the least. Where’s your evidence to back it up?
Recycled plastic are used heavily in things that people touch and need a lot of chonk to them relative to their strength to feel substantial and high quality or stuff that'll almost purely be loaded in compression (like bolt on plastic pads that prevent metal to metal contact or allow nice sliding).
See also: all the people completely certain that Semaglutide will definitely cause HyperCancer or something "soon".
What do you think oil and coal come from...?
The sad thing is, if you pretend to recycle instead of actually recycling, you're just a landfill operator. And landfills can be run profitably.
"We'll let some magic future AI figure this out. Meanwhile, we'll put dirt on it"
//TODO: Collisions are too common here. Implement a custom hashing function to improve the performance of this algorithm
//TODO: This class is 60k lines and has no tests. Replace it
Turns out they were just burning the glass.
https://www.al.com/breaking/2010/05/huntsville_residents_you...
https://energyjustice.net/usplants/
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/florida-popul...
This article about PET recycling probably won't do much to improve the 6-8% recycling rate for plastic waste primarily because there is no economic incentive to do so.
In fact, market economies are actively avoiding PET plastics for health reasons, so this effort is double dubious IMO.
I don't mean to inject cynicism to downplay their achievements, but I think it's as crucial for ecology that we be honest about the limitations of our existing efforts within the market capitalist/individual materialist paradigm.
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2009/gc/b9068...
How do you justify the leap from you not caring to "no one cares"?
Plenty of examples where that generalization isn't true.
OP also edited the title (which is frowned upon at HN). The article abbreviated UA.
https://afr.ua.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/UA-AFR-FY23.pd...
I’d imagine the taxpayers are happy with the recognition via the university.
I don't follow the logic that taxpayers would be happy with the university getting credit. I'm a tax payer, and I'd much rather the researcher get credit.
This is such a strange statement. He leads a team at The University of Alabama which has been given a grant by the National Science Foundation. He is not a sole inventor working by his own funding in his private time. The University of Alabama has also filed a patent application - so why wouldn't any news article mention the university ?
I keep seeing these sort of statements but have yet to see one backed up by a link to some reputable evidence.
My local supermarket accepts clean soft plastics for recycling and when I investigated I found membership of schemes to ensure full transparency. Looking further I found the companies accepting the waste and financial statements indicating heavy investment in machinery to deal with it.
Plastic recycling, because of what plastics are, is basically impossible at cost. PET recycling might make you think "see, we can recycle plastics" but first and foremost, PET recycling isn't recycling, it's reuse (using the PET as a base material to make something else, like fleece, which cannot be recycled), and second: the majority of plastics aren't PET and literally have no recycling path.
I was hoping for something academic rather than a YouTube video.
And the final message is definitely a little more nuanced than that =D