Comment by ch0wn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ch0wn | Hacker News Reader

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> Plastics aren't a problem if people actually put them in the bin, and they are buried / recycled / burned.

Only 9% of all plastics ever produced has been recycled. 100% is impossible due to the various composite materials that exist.

Landfills don't work in many places in the world due to lack of space and are expensive, hard to manage and come with methane emissions. Burning is obviously the same as burning fossil fuels and cannot happen if we want to keep our planet habitable. It also happens almost always in poor communities that suffer health consequences because of it.

Even if the disposal was somehow magically solved, we still have the problem with production. Plastics are a lifeline to the fossil fuel industry and are expected to account for more than a third of the growth in world oil demand to 2030. Cracker plants for plastics production are also usually placed near communities of colour or in developing countries and create toxic conditions for life around them.

Plastics are a problem. Regardless of the disposal.

Burning is a lot better than dumping it in a river, as happens in many places in Asia. It reliably gets rid of the plastic, produces energy (ideally offsetting fossil fuels that would otherwise have been burned), and regulations for exhaust filtration keep the toxins at bay.

Not producing plastic would be preferable, and sequestering it in a landfill is the second best option, but burning it is a great alternative where the first two don't work

that is a misleading number. In my country it is almost 100%.

Most gets recycled, the rest used as fuel in energyplants. The real problem is the 10 countries in the world that are responsible for 90% of dumping stuff in the rivers (all in south asia and africa).

> In my country it is almost 100%.

> Most gets recycled, the rest used as fuel in energyplants.

Do want to share how much work your "almost" is doing here?

> the 10 countries in the world that are responsible for 90% of dumping stuff in the rivers (all in south asia and africa).

How much of it is their own waste? How much was produced for Western consumers and then off-loaded onto them?

> How much of it is their own waste? How much was produced for Western consumers and then off-loaded onto them?

From following ocean cleanup project, for plastic ending up in the ocean it's usually own waste. The issue is countries that don't have working waste collection systems, any rainpour will often wash out the trash into river/oceans.

(littering is also an issue in countries with waste management though, but to a smaller degree, I kinda hate when people don't realize that stuff they throw in the street will often end up in rain collectors and directly flow into rivers)

Thanks for the reply! I was able to find the source you mentioned. Is there room in the conversation to talk about how much of their "own use" plastic is sold to them by Western companies who control the local markets?

> In my country it is almost 100%.

Do you have a link? I think OP meant actual recycling, not waste collection.

I don't think 100% plastic recycling is close to achievable at the moment (even if recycled, it's often downcycled).

Recycling here implies reworking existing plastics into new ones, not just collecting them.

Plastic can't be recycled at all, that is a complete myth. The only thing one can practically do is down cycle it, and even that costs more than virgin plastic so is uneconomical.

Of course theoretically perfectly clean and pure singly type plastic can be recycled, but that is something very different from post-consumer waste

"PET bottles on the Dutch market averaging 44% recycled PET content in 2023". Also, many other products: Fleece jackets are made out of bottles. That's up-cycling, afaik. And lots of packaging materials (bags, shampoo bottles, etc). If it is economical depends on many factors, and can be different in each country. Landfill may be cheap in the US, but extremely expensive in European countries, because there's no un-used land.

but yes, what can't be recycled is epoxy (also a plastic).

But nearly all plastic recycling companies in the Netherlands have gone bankrupt recently. Unfortunately it is usually best to just burn the plastic for energy.

For the case of PET bottles, recycling is possible if:

- products are made from a single sort of plastic with the intent of recycling - can be collected as a dedicated waste stream - are not contaminated in a way that is not easily cleaned - there are rules and regulations to offset the added costs

As all these conditions have to be met, one might as well use reusable bottles instead of recycling altogether, like we do with glass beer bottles. But then why were plastics used in the first place, as there is then hardly any advantage?

Can’t it be compressed back into a fuel?

Misleading. It depends on your jurisdiction, many are doing a great job recovering material.

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