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Comment by nchmy | Hacker News Reader

It's useful for people who don't want to make a bicycle-powered shredder and instead want to source local laser-cut specialized alloys and all sorts of electronics, so they can produce a few kg of shredded plastic per day, and then a few bowls. /s

The value of Precious Plastic has long-since been realized - it inspired some actually-practical people to start making cottage recycling industries in the developing world, which has helped provide some employment and divert some plastic from rivers.

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All of this plastic should be shoveled into a plasma gasifier. This performance art is just a grift. Recycling it results in suboptimal downstream products, landfilling it allows for future mismanagement (methane emissions, groundwater contamination). Gasification is cleaner than incineration, and you can burn the syn gas produced to recover some energy for cogeneration. Resulting slag produced is inert and can be safely landfilled.

Is there any (realistic) concern that plasma gasification causes an adverse incentive to generate additional waste vs waste reduction efforts because now localities are, to some degree, dependent on feeding the machine to generate electricity? Do localities with plasma gasifiers end up purchasing waste from elsewhere to maintain waste input stocks? I am not familiar with the economics here.

> Do localities with plasma gasifiers end up purchasing waste from elsewhere to maintain waste input stocks?

This… sounds like a very good problem to have?

Until the plastic runs out. I was confused by the comment as well but I started thinking about the disposable movement - cheaper to just make and throw away plastic utensils than for McDonald's to have flatware, and remains cheap if there's buyers for the plastic.

A good solution with unfortunately perverse incentives. Probably the solution is government bans on unnecessarily wasteful uses of plastics. The market is provably incapable of tackling environmental issues without regulatory encouragement.

In Australia plastic utensils and bags have been banned for so long you'd almost forget they existed. Was a pretty big shock traveling to other countries and seeing how far behind they are on this stuff. There wasn't even a difficult transition period, it just probably costs an extra cent to use wood over plastic.

I think you’re overstating this somewhat - I took eggs home in a plastic bag from my local butcher this morning and ate with plastic forks and knives at a picnic on the weekend. Yes, in Australia.

I guess depends on the state. I haven't even seen a plastic fork in Australia for a long time. Stores were banned from selling them many years ago. I guess if you went out of your way to direct import them from overseas.

Wood ends up in a landfill anyway or they have proper way to separate it from the rest of the trash?

What's the problem with wood ending up in landfill? It's not going to leach toxins and it's locking away carbon underground.

Ever wonder if wood is really a renewable resource? Once you see a 4th generation forest, you start to realize we might be running pretty short.

This seems to bounce back and forth, for awhile it was save the trees, now it's cut down trees to save the world apparently?

The wood used for disposable utensils comes from farmed, very fast growing trees like bamboo and balsa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ochroma

As I was saying, https://stopthesethings.com/2021/12/18/billions-of-wind-turb...

I didn't read fully because I felt like I was reading something unhinged, but this does not seem to be about farmed wood at all.

Ah yes, brought to you by "Stop These Things: The Truth About the Great Wind Power Fraud":

The great wind and solar scam was founded on lies, built on myth and runs on subsidies. But with Donald J Trump in the White House the scale of the fraud is finally being revealed.

The wood they are using comes from tree farming, not deforestation. It's pretty low density fast growing wood that's about as renewable as it gets. Worlds better than plastic at the least.

Plastics are not the only waste you can gasify. Organics, cardboard, wood, paper, medical waste, household rubbish, etc. The only materials you don’t want in the waste stream are metals, glass, rock, and brick.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/plasma-gasi...

> Is there any (realistic) concern that plasma gasification causes an adverse incentive to generate additional waste vs waste reduction efforts

If waste reduction is a problematic catalyst for more production and pollution, … We have a problem even bigger than I thought.

I would hope that would not be the case, but apparently recycling theater successfully reduced efforts to push back on the supply side.

Our self-created problems are becoming ridiculous. By the time the ultra rich are chocking on plastic in their caviar the rest of us will already be plasticized.

Maybe I am misunderstanding your comment, but I dont see plasma gasification as waste reduction. We are reusing the waste for energy production. We could be making efforts to reduce the overall amount of plastic waste (perhaps through legislation), but if we become reliant on the energy generated, we would be incentivized to avoid waste reduction because we want the energy. FWIW, “recycling theater” is also not waste reduction and is a separate, but related, problem that increases plastic waste.

> Do localities with plasma gasifiers end up purchasing waste from elsewhere to maintain waste input stocks?

This wouldn’t be a problem for a very long time. The reason so much of this waste ends up being landfilled or shipped overseas is due to a lack of capacity in existing waste-to-energy plants. It isn’t quite like the perverse-incentive problem introduced by biomass facilities because the waste is going to be generated regardless.

You can tax plastic also that will more than move the demand you can even use this tax for plasma gasification making more expensive to use and less to reuse.

Waste to energy plants don’t make money. They lessen the waste. So, buying trash to loose less money is postponing bankruptcy. They run on free money. Sounds fun though

It's not really clear to me why it is better to build the required infrastructure, transport things to an incinerator and destroy them than have at least some of them locally recycled into useful stuff and spread some knowledge and experience to more people about materials and techniques involved... It's also not clear why you think the downstream products are suboptimal.

Because the alternative you propose won’t happen.

It is happening all around the world. You can go look at it. You can go participate in it. Just last week I held a workshop where we did it. I also never framed these activities as an "alternative" to other 4R efforts. That is a completely unnecessary dichotomy. Not everything is either-or.

Exactly: plastic is already cheap in the pristine version, the mixed, contaminated is a nonsense product, valid only as a grift, greenwashing prop. Burn it and handle the remains properly.

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