The whole recycling scam makes me upset. For decades the message was to recycle for the environment. But it was all just shipped to China and then dumped into the oceans. It actually would've been better if it went to landfills, at least then it's safely contained. Another lie was that we're running out of landfill space, there's so much land out there.
Like most environmental issues, the focus should've been on producers not consumers. Tax plastic usage and producers will use less of it.
Thinking about this more, wasn't there a time, maybe late 90s early 2000s when the message was that plastic is more environmental than paper? Something like at the supermarket checkout you should pick plastic over paper bags to save rain forest trees? Is my memory wrong or was this a widespread message at the time?
> But it was all just shipped to China and then dumped into the oceans.
I've heard this a lot of times, but I've never seen any source that claimed the recycled material sent to China gets dumped in the ocean. As I recall, they had paid a small amount of money for it, so it doesn't make sense why they would just throw it away.
I agree that landfills are underrated. It's much more effective to build landfills in poor countries than it is to try to sweep up plastic in the ocean, which may also hurt the environment.
I think the actions should go on both producers and consumers. Taxes, and also mentality changes, in my case, I produce almost no garbage, because I eat fruit foraged outside, and other local organic food. My only garbage in a year is: 10 rice plastic bag (5kg bags), a toothpaste tube and a toothbrush, a few soap bars plastic wrappings. That's all. That yearly volume you see, that's what most people produce in one day in developed countries
> the focus should've been on producers not consumers
on producers AND consumers. They're not exclusive. Producers have deceived, but consumers have been all too happy to suspend skepticism when buying things once the producer puts the word "recycle" on it somewhere. Consumers overwhelmingly skip the reduce part. Everyone I talk to about it, when they drop their defenses, says somewhere inside they knew they were participating but wanted to believe recycling was more benign than they knew it was. They just wanted their latte without thinking about it too much.
I'm not removing responsibility from producers or government. Consumers have a lot of power. Single-use plastic at least isn't hard to avoid with practice, at least to drop 90 percent of it. Just avoiding packaged food, with a few years practice the last I emptied my garbage was December and I expect my next emptying in 2022.
I think govt subsidy on compostable biodegradable plastics would be good too. Especially if the subsidy was not just on the bags themselves, but the research and process engineering to make them more cost-competitive.
In the US at least, cities can also get creative, such as exempting compostable items from sales taxes.
I can't remember where I read it but there was the view that recycling allows people to think they're environmentally responsible when they aren't. eg the typical family has multiple cars, lives in a big suburban house, has heating/ac buys loads of stuff but recycles their cardboard/glass so thinks their environmental impact is small.
I'm not convinced that it's actually a bad thing to dump plastic and paper into a landfill. You just cover it up with dirt and plants every 20 years and build a new one, pretty low impact as long as you have it properly sealed off. Even gets rid of some CO2. Probably better than putting lots of energy into recycling when it isn't actually efficient to do so.
> Smith allowed people to put two plastic items in their bins: soda bottles and milk jugs. He lost money on them, he says, but the aluminum, paper and steel from his regular business helped offset the costs.
Wait, what?! He should've just said "aluminum paper and steel only" and earned greater profits. It's not like people have a choice of recycling providers.
The plastic recycling catastrophe wasn't caused by advertising. It was caused by entities irrationally subsidizing plastic disposal, for political reasons. Like this guy at a municipal waste facility. And like China.
People get finite-sized trash bins, and they must pay if they want a larger size. Make them put the plastic in the trash bin and they will get annoyed by plastic packaging. I know I do.
This is probably an aside, but due to the lockdown, I've been doing hardware development at my house. It's mostly great, but it means that I receive a lot of packages.
And the packaging, oh the packaging. I'm inundated with packing material. Let's say I order 10 different parts. Each part was made by a manufacturer and packaged in a little plastic bag. (If there are sub-parts such as attachments, screws, etc., they are in a sub-bag).
Each of those bags is placed inside another bag, often a thick zip-loc, with a sticky label indicating the part number and sales order number plus other desiderata.
A short (1 meter) USB cable was coiled up and secured with not one but two twist-ties, sub-bagged, and bagged. There were molded plastic caps on the ends.
All of those bags are in a big bag, tied at the top. That goes in a box with packing material filling half the box. I end up knee deep in trash by the time I've unpacked an order. I keep a few of the nicer boxes, but everything else goes into the recycling bin.
Yes, it’s a scam. Only aluminum actually gets recycled. It’s time to tax plastic so companies start using paper products (even if they go to landfill, they will at least sequester carbon there) or aluminum.
Also glass and steel. Rare earth materials like batteries are very productively recycled. Paper recycling isn't awful either, but more of a wash than a win.
Really, it's thermoplastic disposables that are the real problem here. Those don't recycle (except some very specific items), and frankly never really did. The straw bans are just the tip of the iceberg here. We need to be talking about banning all plastic disposables.
That's not true at all. The more valuable something is, the more likely it'll be recycled. Take cars for example. The entire frame is recycled. The motor oil gets recycled. The lead battery gets recycled.
Heck, Tesla's ex-CTO recognized the business potential for EV car batteries and started a company for it. There are plenty of hidden arbitrage opportunities out there for recycling.
They mention decreasing quality when recycling, but I wonder about less-chemical recycling opportunities.
For example, composite decking (Trex et al) combines sawdust and resin. It can be used for picnic tables and such. Road surfaces use ground tires now. Someone makes large nesting blocks for low-stress construction instead of concrete. PET can be made into fleece for garments, how about using it for insulation or other applications?
"It didn't get recycled because the system wasn't up to par," he says. "We hadn't invested in the ability to sort it and there hadn't been market signals that companies were willing to buy it, and both of those things exist today."
Don’t trust this guy, he is supposed to sell oil, recycling is in direct conflict with selling more oil.
I wonder if sorting could be made feasible by mandating color-coding of different types of plastic? Like PET has to be clear, HDPE white, PP green, etc.? Marketers and package designers may not like it, but whatever.
The tiny little recycling symbols seem pretty useless, unless you force consumers to hand-sort their recyclables according to them.
> The tiny little recycling symbols seem pretty useless, unless you force consumers to hand-sort their recyclables according to them.
It gets worse: in King County, WA (Seattle metro area) where WM has most of the contracts we received leaflets from WM telling us to ignore the plastic recycling symbols entirely and to use only WM's "what we can / can't recycle" picture chart - which includes things I didn't think were recyclable (stained pizza boxes) and excludes things that I'd think were recyclable (plastic films).
...and the list varies within the county too: some cities' leaflets say not to put any pizza boxes in recycling (even completely clean ones). Aieeee.
Basically, both the plastics stuff ofthis submission as well as the co2 campaign of BP is shifting responsibility: from big industry/megacorps to individual consumers.
The worst thing is: even if all consumers would religiously follow recycling and co2 saving guidelines, it would barely make a dent in the global view. And that is the reason why humanity is blowing through all environmental targets... and politicians can sit in front of the cameras and straight tell people that "we did all we could".
Seriously fuck this. We need to get megacorps and fraudulent PR under control, and that soon.
I am hopeful that the initiative which uses waste stream plastics as a component of asphalt will allow us to finally get some decent alternative to landfill for plastics. The best part about it was that the plastics didn't need to be sorted or clean; it is just going to be melted, pelletized and then mixed with hot tar to make asphalt. Since asphalt is now nearly infinitely recycled the plastics will be kept in use for a very long time with only minor amounts escaping in to the environment.
What problem was recycling supposed to be solving? Understanding just what the negative of plastic is supposed to be would inform how it is to be dealt with.
> And there are more documents, echoing decades of this knowledge, including one analysis from a top official at the industry's most powerful trade group. "The costs of separating plastics ... are high," he tells colleagues, before noting that the cost of using oil to make plastic is so low that recycling plastic waste "can't yet be justified economically."
I bet if you went back 40 years, there are all sorts of negative documents you can find about all sorts of tech. Think about solar. I bet if we went back, we could find experts talking about how it is is infeasible due to being too expensive or that rare earth minerals to too environmentally damaging to mine, or that it fluctuates too much.
Not saying what Big Plastic did was good, but using archives to find dissenting opinions about feasibility seems more like a gotcha fishing expedition.
> oil and plastics executives began a quiet campaign to lobby almost 40 states to mandate that the symbol appear on all plastic
Yeah, but this was a really good thing (probably the only good thing the oil+plastic lobby has ever done).
Those symbols are a godsend for DIYers; before we had them you could never know if a piece of plastic could be glued to (and if so, with what glue) or what kind of chemicals it could safely hold (as demonstrated in _Breaking Bad_!)
Though I'm curious if the "reusable" trend is more of the same. Are single-use bags and straws really that bad for the environment, and do reusables get reused enough times to make a difference, or is a reusable straw just another thing to make money on? (Not that I imagine reusable straws is a lucrative enough industry to be worthy of dedicated political lobbying teams, but who knows).
I feel like this is scapegoating "Big Oil" a bit. They made a product, we know it's bad for the environment, as a consumer it is up to you to make the choice not to buy/use it, or limit your use. We've known that recycling was a bad/underutilized solution for a lone time.
When I'm buying most products, I'll look for (and often pay a dollar or so more) for glass with metal lid. Unfortunately there are SO many products that you can't get without plastic. It is everywhere.
But we need to get the message out that step 1 is to not use plastic, which I think was missed in most education. Also note, I believe most of the education came from governments trying to reduce landfill, not from "Big Oil" themselves.
[+] [-] bit_logic|5 years ago|reply
Like most environmental issues, the focus should've been on producers not consumers. Tax plastic usage and producers will use less of it.
[+] [-] bit_logic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aunche|5 years ago|reply
I've heard this a lot of times, but I've never seen any source that claimed the recycled material sent to China gets dumped in the ocean. As I recall, they had paid a small amount of money for it, so it doesn't make sense why they would just throw it away.
I agree that landfills are underrated. It's much more effective to build landfills in poor countries than it is to try to sweep up plastic in the ocean, which may also hurt the environment.
[+] [-] Alex3917|5 years ago|reply
The message is and has been "reduce, reuse, recycle." Recycling has been sold from the very beginning as being the option of last resort.
[+] [-] ummonk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 11235813213455|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spodek|5 years ago|reply
on producers AND consumers. They're not exclusive. Producers have deceived, but consumers have been all too happy to suspend skepticism when buying things once the producer puts the word "recycle" on it somewhere. Consumers overwhelmingly skip the reduce part. Everyone I talk to about it, when they drop their defenses, says somewhere inside they knew they were participating but wanted to believe recycling was more benign than they knew it was. They just wanted their latte without thinking about it too much.
I'm not removing responsibility from producers or government. Consumers have a lot of power. Single-use plastic at least isn't hard to avoid with practice, at least to drop 90 percent of it. Just avoiding packaged food, with a few years practice the last I emptied my garbage was December and I expect my next emptying in 2022.
[+] [-] andrewjl|5 years ago|reply
In the US at least, cities can also get creative, such as exempting compostable items from sales taxes.
[+] [-] zozbot234|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] x87678r|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GhostVII|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] octoberfranklin|5 years ago|reply
Wait, what?! He should've just said "aluminum paper and steel only" and earned greater profits. It's not like people have a choice of recycling providers.
The plastic recycling catastrophe wasn't caused by advertising. It was caused by entities irrationally subsidizing plastic disposal, for political reasons. Like this guy at a municipal waste facility. And like China.
People get finite-sized trash bins, and they must pay if they want a larger size. Make them put the plastic in the trash bin and they will get annoyed by plastic packaging. I know I do.
[+] [-] analog31|5 years ago|reply
And the packaging, oh the packaging. I'm inundated with packing material. Let's say I order 10 different parts. Each part was made by a manufacturer and packaged in a little plastic bag. (If there are sub-parts such as attachments, screws, etc., they are in a sub-bag).
Each of those bags is placed inside another bag, often a thick zip-loc, with a sticky label indicating the part number and sales order number plus other desiderata.
A short (1 meter) USB cable was coiled up and secured with not one but two twist-ties, sub-bagged, and bagged. There were molded plastic caps on the ends.
All of those bags are in a big bag, tied at the top. That goes in a box with packing material filling half the box. I end up knee deep in trash by the time I've unpacked an order. I keep a few of the nicer boxes, but everything else goes into the recycling bin.
/rant
[+] [-] fmajid|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newacct583|5 years ago|reply
Really, it's thermoplastic disposables that are the real problem here. Those don't recycle (except some very specific items), and frankly never really did. The straw bans are just the tip of the iceberg here. We need to be talking about banning all plastic disposables.
[+] [-] esturk|5 years ago|reply
Heck, Tesla's ex-CTO recognized the business potential for EV car batteries and started a company for it. There are plenty of hidden arbitrage opportunities out there for recycling.
[+] [-] gumby|5 years ago|reply
(Only trivially more effectively in practice as paper in an anaerobic environment won’tbreak down to any material degree)
[+] [-] imglorp|5 years ago|reply
For example, composite decking (Trex et al) combines sawdust and resin. It can be used for picnic tables and such. Road surfaces use ground tires now. Someone makes large nesting blocks for low-stress construction instead of concrete. PET can be made into fleece for garments, how about using it for insulation or other applications?
We should be embracing this stuff in new ways.
https://www.alternativesjournal.ca/science-and-solutions/pop...
[+] [-] hangonhn|5 years ago|reply
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/09/739893511/episode-925-a-mob-b...
[+] [-] bamboozled|5 years ago|reply
Don’t trust this guy, he is supposed to sell oil, recycling is in direct conflict with selling more oil.
There’s no reason we should fall for this twice.
[+] [-] m463|5 years ago|reply
They worked on recycling plastic, but the problem was:
- it was very expensive to clean the plastic
- even when the plastic was cleaned, it could only be mixed with virgin plastic at a very small ratio - single digit percentages
- even the small ratio would weaken the plastic considerably. Think laundry baskets which are flexible but break easily.
in the end I think they made giant logs for playgrounds out of the plastic.
He told me really the best idea was probably to burn the plastic cleanly.
[+] [-] ardy42|5 years ago|reply
The tiny little recycling symbols seem pretty useless, unless you force consumers to hand-sort their recyclables according to them.
[+] [-] DaiPlusPlus|5 years ago|reply
It gets worse: in King County, WA (Seattle metro area) where WM has most of the contracts we received leaflets from WM telling us to ignore the plastic recycling symbols entirely and to use only WM's "what we can / can't recycle" picture chart - which includes things I didn't think were recyclable (stained pizza boxes) and excludes things that I'd think were recyclable (plastic films).
...and the list varies within the county too: some cities' leaflets say not to put any pizza boxes in recycling (even completely clean ones). Aieeee.
[+] [-] mschuster91|5 years ago|reply
Basically, both the plastics stuff ofthis submission as well as the co2 campaign of BP is shifting responsibility: from big industry/megacorps to individual consumers.
The worst thing is: even if all consumers would religiously follow recycling and co2 saving guidelines, it would barely make a dent in the global view. And that is the reason why humanity is blowing through all environmental targets... and politicians can sit in front of the cameras and straight tell people that "we did all we could".
Seriously fuck this. We need to get megacorps and fraudulent PR under control, and that soon.
[+] [-] bondolo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfdietz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|5 years ago|reply
I bet if you went back 40 years, there are all sorts of negative documents you can find about all sorts of tech. Think about solar. I bet if we went back, we could find experts talking about how it is is infeasible due to being too expensive or that rare earth minerals to too environmentally damaging to mine, or that it fluctuates too much.
Not saying what Big Plastic did was good, but using archives to find dissenting opinions about feasibility seems more like a gotcha fishing expedition.
[+] [-] andrewjl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] octoberfranklin|5 years ago|reply
Yeah, but this was a really good thing (probably the only good thing the oil+plastic lobby has ever done).
Those symbols are a godsend for DIYers; before we had them you could never know if a piece of plastic could be glued to (and if so, with what glue) or what kind of chemicals it could safely hold (as demonstrated in _Breaking Bad_!)
Everything else they did was evil. But not this.
[+] [-] BlueTemplar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daxfohl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pedalpete|5 years ago|reply
When I'm buying most products, I'll look for (and often pay a dollar or so more) for glass with metal lid. Unfortunately there are SO many products that you can't get without plastic. It is everywhere.
But we need to get the message out that step 1 is to not use plastic, which I think was missed in most education. Also note, I believe most of the education came from governments trying to reduce landfill, not from "Big Oil" themselves.
[+] [-] bagacrap|5 years ago|reply