Most plastic can’t be recycled into something usable. Plastic degrades quite a bit with each recycling, leaving a bunch of microplastics behind (same thing with “biodegradable” plastic). It would be better to tax it enough (or ban it) to make it not used in certain applications.
That post seems to be missing.
WanderingThoughts 23 points a year ago
Should've made the producers responsible for collecting and processing all plastics they produce. It that makes certain products economically non viable, than that's on them to innovate better processes.
Hamartiogonic 5 points a year ago
I hope that one day drilling oil has been banned, and CCS becomes mandatory. If you want hydrocarbons in order to manufacture chemicals and plastics, you can pull them from the air. There’s enough for everyone.
bingrazer 5 points a year ago
Carbon capture (more specifically direct air capture) is not a viable option due to the energy requirements and the low concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Carbon capture is largely promoted by fossil fuel companies for the same reason that recycling is: “let us keep doing what we’re doing because there’s some magical way to undo the damage, we just need a few more years of research”.
However, plants do the same thing and already exist. Trees in particular have shown some promise for being able to be a precursor for many polymers. This would at least mean that any plant matter used for this did pull CO2 out of the atmosphere in the last few years (so relatively neutral compared to the other options), whereas fossil fuels are releasing carbon that was removed from the atmosphere millions of years ago.
EDIT: TLDR, oil drilling should be banned or severely limited, but DAC is not a viable option and is only relevant because oil companies keep pumping money into it. Biomass is potentially an ok feedstock for plastics (but not for fuel).
Hamartiogonic 1 point a year ago
Well, what if we used renewable energy to run a DAC process? That would require lots of solar and wind power, but we’re going to need a lot of that anyway to get permanently rid of fossil fuels.
As you pointed out, the low concentratiions are a serious issue for any process, but maybe plants will do a better job our current machines can. Either way, once you have that carbon, we would really need put it back where it came from. The way I see it, slowing down global warming is a step in the right direction and becoming carbon neutral is another step. However, what we really need is a complete ban on all fossil fuels and an efficient way to reduce the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere.
Also, I have fairly negative view on CCU, since it doesn’t really solve the problem. CCS on the other hand seems like a better option. If you do it with plants and store the carbon as biochar, I’m all for it. If you want to do it with electricity and chemistry, I’m ok with that too, as long as it gets the job done.
Rentlar 8 points a year ago
Yes... plastic recycling can work, in theory, but the financial incentives are not naturally inclined to be in a way that recycling is feasible, since externalities encompassing the damage that plastic production has to our world are not accounted for in its price. (Caveat: the products that can be made from recycling are physically unable to be perfectly like the previous products they came from)
Like the cost burden of tobacco use being put on both users and producers, plastic must be dealt with the same way in terms of taxation levies so that plastic alternatives and plastic recycling are competitive compared to new plastic from oil by-products.
Not_mikey 3 points a year ago
We have bottle deposit in some states in the u.s. Some do it better than others though, grew up in Michigan and there any place that sold bottles had to be able to return them and a lot of the grocery stores had the machines. Moved to California and it seems like none of the stores are set up for it and the cashier will often turn you to a recycling center.
nickwitha_k 2 points a year ago
The US still has subsidies going to petrochemical companies, despite being insanely profitable. Basically, just extracting the country's wealth in addition to natural resources. Ending those or forcing them to be spent on recycling would help here immensely.
HubertManne 72 points a year ago
Being an old man this really gets me. I love the internet and the way computers today but there is a whole lot that worked fine before plastics were so common. Almost nothing in the grocery store had plastic and everything was pretty much as convenient as nowadays. Sure you had to pay a deposit on the glass bottles but you got it back when you returned them.
EvilCartyen 15 points a year ago
That's still the way it works in Denmark, but with plastic bottles too. Something like 98% of all bottles are recycled.
derpgon 11 points a year ago
If I had to choose glass or plastic, I am always choosing glass. Glass is such a good material. It is infinitely recyclable, the bottles can be reused for several years, and if they are buried they don't release microplastics.
HubertManne 4 points a year ago
I jump for situations where the glass is taken back for wash and reuse. Its the most sensible thing. I swear I had heard about restaurants doing this with containers but I never actually encountered one. So they had perm togo containers they took back and washed.
AnyOldName3 3 points a year ago
It depends on which aspects of the environmental impact you're looking at, as melting glass to recycle it can be much more damaging than landfilling several plastic bottles if the glass furnace is heated by fossil fuels. If glass bottles are washed and reused, they're much better than plastic, but that's rarely what happens.
derpgon 2 points a year ago
Gas is used to heat up glass furnaces most of the time. But it is possible to use elctricity aswell, which is more and more sources from either solar or nuclear.
Not saying it is greener than plastic when it comes to electricity and shipping.
HubertManne 1 point a year ago
The cleaning was common back then. Every store took back the tall glass bottles of soda and in modern times oberweiss brought that back with milk. The glass melting is nice just as a final option really.
AnyOldName3 1 point a year ago
That's reuse, not recycling. Glass is much more suitable for reuse than plastics as it's longer-lasting and can withstand temperatures hot enough and cleaning agents strong enough to ensure it's food-safe after being collected, but you need quite a bit of infrastructure to get the bottles back to the company whose products they're for. At least for the parts of a bottle's life that the manufacturer's responsible for, it can be much cheaper to make fresh plastic, and if they can externalise the environmental cost of disposing of a plastic bottle (i.e. blame the consumer), it can look better for their carbon footprint etc., too.
Gradually_Adjusting 47 points a year ago
Really annoyed to have believed in plastic recycling even into my thirties. Being an idiot is such a burden sometimes.
metaStatic 23 points a year ago path: 0 16803212 16803719, hotness: undefined, score: 23, children: 1
Gradually_Adjusting 4 points a year ago
It hasn't been my experience tbh... Being this bad at being dumb is basically what I've got instead of smarts
RedSnt 13 points a year ago
I wrote a school report on the plastic garbage patches (pacific, indian, north atlantic, south pacific) when I was still in my twenties. Maybe it was a coincident, but I had a real big depression around that time, so maybe ignorance would've been preferable.
BrokenGlepnir 42 points a year ago
Right now it looks like paper and metal recycling is still good as far as I can read in two minutes. If someone has a correction let me know.
JubilantJaguar 35 points a year ago
Correct. Paper (PS: or at least brown cardboard), glass and alu will always be great candidates for recycling.
faythofdragons 46 points a year ago
Aluminum is the poster child for recycling, really. It takes more energy to extract it from the ore than it is to recycle it.
JustinTheGM 5 points a year ago
I was under the impression that the chemicals involved in recycling paper products, combined with the fact that virgin paper is almost entirely sourced from managed, quick-growing tree farms, make paper recycling also undesirable?
JubilantJaguar 3 points a year ago
Have heard similar things. And it's also true that timber farming is a (very marginal) form of carbon drawdown, assuming the wood products are not burned. But then in theory recycling could allow some of that land to return to nature, which better in all ways. It's a systems problem.
The chemical issue is presumably bleaching for white paper. But thick brown cardboard is basically just degraded wood fiber so that at least must be pretty efficient to downcycle into toilet paper.
Update: there's also another chemical issue in de-inking, maybe that's what you were referring to. Personally I don't bother recycling my tiny amounts of paper waste, for these reasons. Thick cardboard must be a win though.
Anahkiasen 18 points a year ago
Yeah same and I hate when people just say well might as "well not recycle at all then" :/ that kind of defeatism doesn't help either
max_dryzen 1 point a year ago
That is the point at which you remind them they are focusing on the worst R and remind them of the other two which are much more ppwerful
Anahkiasen 1 point a year ago
Maybe i should recommend DDD instead of RRR 🤫 lotta assholes running around still doubling down on dooming everybody
houseofleft 13 points a year ago
Yup! Those things are easy (comparatively) to recycle because they're single material items, so the process is:
- clean
- break down / melt
- rebuild
"Plastic" is thought of as a single material, but even vegetable packaging will be made of around 5-10 different polymers, so for it to be valuable, you need to break it down back to those original polymers.
It's not a issue with recycling as a whole, its specific to plastic as a material.
J_N_F 1 point a year ago
That's just not true. I make flexible packaging and we use thousands of pounds of post industrial resin (made from scrap material produced in house) and post consumer resin (made from used packaging.) They're all coextruded; frequently made up of 10+ different types of polyethylenes, polyamides, and ethylene-vinyl alcohol.
houseofleft 2 points a year ago
I don't think "not true" is fair- I have a soure if you'd like to hear it from someone more authorative than some random internet person (unfortunately I think it might be behind a paywall)[0]
Either way, that's cool! I'm surprised you can build flexible packaging from that, but I'd be really, really surprised if you can use something that crude to fit the other niches of plastic like building technology, clothing, etc.
turbowafflz 6 points a year ago
They also both have the advantage of being things that will naturally degrade over time if left outside instead of just sticking around forever
jagged_circle 15 points a year ago
NPR is definitely mainstream
I think the word you're looking for is "corporate" or "for-profit". Thats what they're not.
Cornelius_Wangenheim 3 points a year ago path: 0 16806824 16808027 16809978, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0
namingthingsiseasy 5 points a year ago
unfortunately they never make it to mainstream media
Sounds like this "mainstream media" is not doing its job. This might have some kinds of implications for the current state of affairs in the USA. Can't put my finger on exactly what though.
surph_ninja 28 points a year ago
And this is how capitalism eats itself. Nothing can be done without a market incentive, including not suffocating our planet to death.
houseofleft 2 points a year ago
Not to absolve capitalism, but it's pretty easy to add market incentives to at least slightly address climate change. The concept of "externalities" has been around for a while, where something has a net social impact outside of its sale. It's normally solved with taxes and levies.
The real issue seems to be nobody havong the appetite to even attempt the most basic solutions to the problem, mainly thanks to lobbying.
surph_ninja 3 points a year ago
“Slightly” addressing climate change doesn’t cut it. That’s like slightly addressing a raging fire. Incrementalism is climate denial.
houseofleft 1 point a year ago
I definitely get your point. I think it was pretty lousy wording from me to start with, and I should have said that those are pretty big levers to impact climate change rather than underplaying them as "slightly adressing".
I don't think any country has done enough, but countries that have put measures in place climate change are miles ahead of those that haven't. Compare New Zealand, or Sweden, to the USA.
To be clear as well, I'm not advocating incrementalism, I'm advocating that we do everything to adress climate change, and we're specifically talking about just one thing. Saying we shouldn't bother using the levers we have because they don't solve the whole problem is like saying you're not going to call the fire brigade because they won't get there in time to save the whole house.
shalafi -9 points a year ago
It ain't capitalism, it's the stupid fucking consumers. If a product, already plastic wrapped 3 times before they touch it, has a tiny hole, "Oh no, that one has a hole. I want another one." Hell, anything imperfect gets tossed. My dumpster at work is packed full of plastic because assholes won't take anything even slightly unperfect.
It's the idiots buying single, shrink wrapped potatoes. It's the idiots who think a Keurig cup is an ecological disaster, while every other drink they buy wastes 4-5x as much. How about the idiots buying kitchen containers while they toss the, often better, container their food came in?
When I was young, it was the idiot hippies whining about paper bags, like we were chopping down old-growth forests instead of making them from lumber waste (which is sustainable). Congrats assholes, you won, now we're buried in plastic bags and choking turtles to death.
Until people stop buying so much new shit, reject plastic containers (as much as feasible) and start paying a premium for biodegradable packaging, we're sunk. Or, better yet, we could force less waste via legislation.
Jhex 13 points a year ago
Or, better yet, we could force less waste via legislation
it's amazing you recognise the better solution is legislation yet endlessly rant for consumers (dupped by the industry in this very post) to fix the problem
peteypete420 11 points a year ago
It is capitalism tho. Yes, us dummies enable it, but it is capitalism that currently gives the power to misinform the public and suppress the spread of truth/accurate research to a few rich humans.
I also want those Karens to be ok buying a piece of fruit that isnt in 7 layers of plastic, but to pretend that most of the environmental diaster we face isnt caused by corprate need for profit at any cost is wild.
NikkiDimes 6 points a year ago
I just wanted to buy some kiwis at the store yesterday. The only option they had was 4 packs inside of a plastic shell container. They have their own natural container- fucking skin. What the fuck?
tigeruppercut 9 points a year ago
Japan can be really weird about this as well. They have fish markets with fish sitting in the open on ice, where they sometimes put a label directly on the fish. And then you sometimes see stores with single bananas in a plastic bag
NikkiDimes 2 points a year ago
Yeah, Japan is definitely a weird one. For being so conscious about waste processing (they meticulously separate their trash and recyclables), they really don't seem to care about just how many single use plastics they consume, at least on a societal level.
ximtor 3 points a year ago
Well, i think it's definitely the "big evil corpos" fault. But that doesn't make your rant wrong either. Just, consumers never want to be told they are part of the problem. Corpos are shit and all but if consumers wouldn't buy shit while there is an alternative, they wouldn't continue making it. Advertising is a big problem there as well, and people, consciously or not, being influenced at all times..
Spacehooks 21 points a year ago
How to get politicians to change views:
Plastic causes ed and shrinkage
KingPorkChop 6 points a year ago
They'll blame woman for being too slutty and fucking everyone BUT THEM.
ZILtoid1991 4 points a year ago
Unfortunately they'll just claim not praying to god enough and the existence of trans people causes ED and shrinkage...
Spacehooks 3 points a year ago
Thats crazy we all know trans people do the opposite for that lot.
ZILtoid1991 18 points a year ago
I wonder how much the oil industry subsidies are responsible for making recycled plastic more expensive than the new one...
notabot 14 points a year ago
The biggest issue seems to be around a lake of thinking. Recycling used plastics into more plastic is certainly energetically infeasible, and letting plastics escape to contaminate the environment is also unacceptable. However plastic can be recycled, or perhaps reused, into other things, notably as a partial replacement for aggregate in concrete. This process is low energy, doesn't require sorting the plastic, and actually enhances the thermal and noise insulation properties of the concrete, whilst also reducing it's overall weight. There are undoubtedly other things a stable, non-biodegradable, waterproof and hardwearing substance could be used for given some though.
jol 21 points a year ago
The more I see plastic being integrated into construction, the more I worry we're just postponing the inevitable. Concrete, stone and steel and basically reusable or recyclable and low impact on the environment when dumped. Plastic on the other hand slowly degrades into microplastics and seeps into waterways. Sometimes we forget that buildings don't last forever.
notabot 4 points a year ago
That's a fair concern, but, as you say, concrete is recyclable, and I would expect (though I admit I haven't looked for studies) that it still would be when it has some amount of plastic aggregate. If the plastic breaks down in the concrete, the microplastics should be trapped, and will be reincorporated when the concrete is reused.
Nothing is going to be a perfect solution to plastic, we need to find alternatives to its use, but in the interim it seems sensible to find effective ways to reuse it rather than just dumping it and hoping for the best.
MonkderVierte 1 point a year ago
Putting it in concrete just delays the inevitable.
notabot 2 points a year ago
It does, but it will also bind a lot of the micro plastic pieces into the concrete matrix, which, I think (and, again, as I said, I haven't actually gone looking for any research on this), would keep them from entering the environment. If the concrete is then recycled, typically by crushing and using as aggregate, it would further trap the particles. It's not a perfect solution, but I don't think there is a perfect solution to plastics in general, we just have to find less harmful alternatives.
MonkderVierte 1 point a year ago
Best solution imo is burning it with a filter after use. Gasification will happen anyway but this way at least it doesn't damage ecosystems.
jagged_circle 1 point a year ago
Probably designed by a nuclear engineer
underscores 14 points a year ago
Recycling rates are low, but I wouldn't quite call it a myth. There's a lot of materials that get lumped together as 'plastic', that each have to be handled differently.
Some are relatively non-toxic and easily recycled. More can be, but aren't profitable without incentives. Some are very toxic, and recycling those are difficult. Then there's a lot of rarer types that make it hard to collect and sort. There's also mixed materials, where it's hard to separate the plastic to recycle.
Generally everyone should be minimizing plastics, but check how they're handled locally so you know what's recylable.
Clent 19 points a year ago
It seems there's been a flip. The myth is now that plastic is not recycled and it's all been a lie which is the actual lie.
The information around what types of plastics are easily recycled has never been a secret.
There is this weird mindset where people, often children are given a simplified explanation of things and then feel they were lied to when they find out their is nuance.
The entire world of information works this way. If the nuance was included from the start no one would learn anything because they would be bogged down in details. Every topic is a Wikipedia like rabbit hole with no bottom. It's what we have specialization in society.
The issues with plastic are not in its recycling. It's that is breaks down into what are essentially forever chemicals. This is the dilemma.
Producing less plastic because it's not recyclable is bad messaging.
Producing less plastic because it creates a substance that will last for eons is the problem. We've known about this property for decades but the repercussions of it have become more pronounced.
We need to stop making more plastic and work out how to chemically dissessemble the plastics already created without creating a worse output.
jol 7 points a year ago
In some places there's really no recycling. For example, islands where recycling would mean shipping plastics to the mainland. They just burn it instead - if you're lucky, for producing heating or electricity.
Clent 4 points a year ago
Sure but there is danger is telling people to not bother recycling. Even a location as you described since it could become possible in the future and it's actually better for it to be shipped off than buried. Keeping plastic out of the environment is not a waste of fuel.
The focus should be a return to glass bottles that are reused. This was still a thing into the 90's in my area.
rekabis 13 points a year ago
The sad thing is, only types 1 & 2 plastics are recyclable in any real fashion, and sometimes not even then.
That means types 3 through 7 are better disposed of in the trash, where at least they’ll be sealed into a landfill instead of being shipped overseas to end up somewhere far less environmentally secure.
These types are the numbers inside the recycling symbol. Many things are mixed and matched - a plastic bottle might be a type 1 (recyclable), yet its screw-on cap is typically a type 5 (largely non-recyclable). Always try to find the recycling symbol and dispose of anything not a type 1 or 2 in the trash.
ILikeBoobies 4 points a year ago
I noticed a bottle was recyclable but the label wasn’t, was annoyed that they would do that because I doubt there are many who would read the label to know that
But even recycled plastic just gets shipped to SEA for them to deal with instead of actually being recycled so I guess it doesn’t matter
rekabis 1 point a year ago
I can absolutely guarantee that it is either
- Burned for power generation
- Disposed of in a landfill
- Exported to a foreign country
Only about 0.5-2% of all “recycled” polypropylene is actually recycled in North America, in places where it is accepted for recycling.
ChickenLadyLovesLife 13 points a year ago
The good news is that global warming (I prefer to call it Anthropogenic Runaway Global Heating because of the acronym) is going to completely fuck us all anyway, to the extent that plastic in the environment isn't going to matter by comparison. At least oil turned into plastic and buried isn't oil turned into CO2.
AnarchistArtificer 11 points a year ago
The two problems have a decent amount of overlap though. For example, I recently learned that car tyres are a huge contributor to microplastic pollution. This means that improving public transport infrastructure will reduce CO2 emissions and microplastic pollution.
SaharaMaleikuhm 7 points a year ago
But we still have microplastics in our brains, which does warrant some concern I think.
peteypete420 4 points a year ago
Sadly that is the problem. YOU did not think, the microplastics in your brain did.
toastmeister 2 points a year ago
Thats just the microplastics talking, go back to sleep.
NikkiDimes 4 points a year ago
Hey, maybe all the plastic will lead to such significant fertility issues, populations will crater, and ARGH won't even matter anymore!
JubilantJaguar 12 points a year ago
Convincing detail here.
The priority is to keep used plastic out of the environment, which generally means out of waterways.
RumorsOfLove 9 points a year ago
Dont forget the goal of disrupting actual leftist movements into confusion
jhonmu648 8 points a year ago
Honestly, the whole concept of "recycling" plastic feels more like a PR strategy than an environmental solution. If it were genuinely effective, we’d see investment, innovation, and accountability—like we do with metals. Instead, we’re handed the guilt while corporations keep pumping out garbage.
starman2112 5 points a year ago
Much like the concept of a carbon footprint, it exists solely to make consumers think they can make an individual difference so they won't push for regulations
amateurcrastinator 4 points a year ago
Yeah I especially love that one everytime I fly. I get to choose the environmentally friendly option with lower carbon footprint for more money. Who the fuck they think they are kidding? We are all in the same plane burning fuel at 10000 m.
starman2112 1 point a year ago
Would you say that those things are actually really important and NEED to be made of plastic? I wonder if Aeri would account for that possibility
Aeri 2 points a year ago
I'm not the ultimate authority on all things, but I'd question if these things need to be made of plastic.
Syringes are made out of things like Borosilicate glass, Stainless steel, autoclaves and cases exist.
It would also be way less big a deal if we just didn't have as much plastic in general.
warrenson 6 points a year ago
These guys are recycling, but I'm not sure it's the recycling most of us have in mind. Toxic tofu (YouTube)
EtherWhack 5 points a year ago
I really can't wrap my head around this... (https://www.cbsnews.com/...)
The idea has absolutely no foresight. They want to "lower the carbon footprint" by putting less carbon in the atmosphere and polluting the future's soil and water even more.
max_dryzen 5 points a year ago
Interesting to compare aluminium recycling with plastic recycling
When the true aim is to recycle material, industry comes to the party and you get a refund scheme, even purpose built deposit facilities that can be set up locally
When the aim is to misdirect public attention toward a non solution you get government mandated plastics recycling bins and penalties for "contamination" plus never ending messaging (gotta keep the lie alive with constant repetition lmaooo). Coercion is just a lowkey admission that the material isn't worth recycling
The real question isn't how to get the plastics industry to change, it's how to make the ruse no longer a tenable position for governments
MNByChoice 4 points a year ago
If only some government somewhere on Earth had sponsored research on this. We could have known.
Or we did and no one cared.
Remember, if one depends on the media for information, you only get information dumb people can understand.
jagged_circle 4 points a year ago
That's not safe either. The best is to ban it.
thanks for using Leebra!
go to feed...
The price stuff can change through taxation that makes new plastic more expensive than recycled plastic.
As we all know, taxation is super popular and has never been controversial, ever.
At the very least flaskepant has worked great for like a century here in Norway. Always kind of surprising when other countries don't have it.
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