Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

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I agree, there are people working on "molecular barcoding" [0], which would allow for perfect separation of packaging. Combine this with some standards for easy de-lamination or something to get the different components detached (7 layers of different materials in a foil appear to be quite standard) and separated and you should make a dent in the problem.

However I heard "from the system" that manufacturers are not interested in the world knowing exactly what they produce, why, where it ends up and what their contribution to our plastic soup is (surprise surprise). It's a sick system of you ask me. The law (so us citizens) should set the incentives.

Still, people making nice things from waste is always good. But I would be a bit worried about the fumes and dusts coming from these materials though. Where I worked we didn't laser-cut poly-carbonate for example because it would produce airborne endocrine disrupting substances...

[0] https://research.qut.edu.au/cms/projects/macromolecular-barc...

Health concerns are important - which is why the PP knowledgebase and PP workshops include quite a few infos about the safety aspects of different plastics and how to work with them.

The laser cutter is not necessarily a good comparison for safety considerations. By definition, a laser cutter burns the materials it cuts. With equipment that melts plastic - like injection molding machines or FDM 3D printers - burning the material just means that you did it wrong, your temperature was too high - and you will not get a useful product.

What people do on their own is another matter - but hey, that's apparently just human (see all the chainsaw heroes in safety flip flops, the people running SLA printers in their dorm room, all the soldering that goes on without a fan/filtration, ...)

You're fully right of course. I used plastic materials to make rapid prototypes for lab-on-a-chip purposes. We laser-burned channels in PMMA and laminated it to foils. PMMA behaves very poorly with any solvent, so we started exploring other polymers, and then you run into this issue... I remember PP (poly-propylene) being a very good, inert, non-problematic polymer btw.

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