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lengau ,

Plug for Climate Town’s great video about plastic recycling

Bonus: if you’ve never used Nebula before (or you’re already a subscriber), here it is ad-free from Nebula: nebula.tv/…/climatetown-plastic-recycling-is-an-a…

buddascrayon ,

I was looking for this post. If someone hadn’t already posted his video I was going to. This is information that people really fucking need to know. The plastics industry is full of lies and those lies are stuffing our landfills with toxic waste.

gandalf_der_12te ,
@gandalf_der_12te@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Like, I can’t deal with these videos. They are literal populism. They tell the people what they want to hear, put forward some “bad guy” to blame everything on, and then move on.

Reality is much more complicated, and especially, much less one-sided and much more interesting than that. For example, the common narrative among “climate studies” graduates seems to be that oil = bad, and the oil industry is a bunch of greedy old guys who exploit the planet for profit. Thing is, that is a very narrow-sighted thing to say. There’s so much more truth and beauty in it than just that. Plastics is literally one of the best inventions humans have ever come up with. It’s formable into every imaginable shape and literally has the potential to transform our material world in any way that we can imagine, in any way that we want to. That people put so much blame on plastics today sickens me. It’s wrong to blame plastics, just as it’s one-sided to say “well yeah oil companies are just plainly bad entities who only brought harm onto our society and planet”. Truth is that the oil production has been widely supported by both politics and society for the most part of the 20th century because oil is just an incredible substance with incredible value and brings a lot of improvement, benefits and progress to the society. We should be glad that we had it, and we should be thankful for the oil companies for producing it in mass quantities. It is only now that we start seeing the downsides to it, and it has to stop. Still, I can’t stand videos that just simplify things down to saying “oil is bad, plastics is a scam, …”. It is not, it’s just outdated.

Huckledebuck ,

Reduce, reuse, recycle in that order. Recycling should be the final option to dealing with our trash.

I believe the focus for most people should be reduce (including myself).

JasonDJ ,

Could you tell that to all the companies out there who use plastic?

Remember when Snapple tried to spin moving to plastic bottles like it was a good thing, like 5 years ago?

Huckledebuck ,

Agreed, but there is also far too much consumer push back. Sunchips tried to make a more biodegradable bag, but people complained that they were too loud.

boomzilla ,

They were louder than the aluminium/plastic bags? What material did they use? Also what a lazy argument by the producer for giving up environmental actions. Bet it just cost them more.

turmacar ,

~2010

I remember them being noticeably louder. Unless you were in a library or a movie theater I don’t know why people cared all that much though.

boomzilla ,

Thanks for the source. So yeah “Potato Chip Technology That Destroys Your Hearing” doesn’t sound reassuring. Nonetheless I’d take those packaging everyday over conventional knowing I did my thing while getting fat.

Eating out of conventional chips packaging in cinemas or libraries should be punishable either way. I think in reality those customers problem was the “open the bag at night without waking up everyone” problem which should be preventable with a bit of planning.

Katana314 ,

I’m saddened that Reuse has fallen by the wayside. I brought some cleaned liquor bottles back to my store for deposit, and the clerk admitted to me they’ll just end up in the recycling chain - it’s too much effort to locate transport/handling for the bottles.

Theoretically, there should be a lot of inward transit for cities and civic centers with not much going out. There’s a very efficient mental image of dropping off 80 bottles, and picking up 80 empty bottles to bring back, but it would just take more logistics than people care for to do it that way.

Riven ,
@Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

It’s all propaganda. They do that in japan and for those that are gonna say japan is a first world advanced small country, they do that shit in Mexico too. I’ve lived in a number of states across Mexico for nearly a decade and from big cities to tiny towns you can bring back your glass bottles to the shops and they forward it to the delivery people to be returned to be sanitized and reused. All the big companies do this, you pay a smidge extra on that first bottle and from then it’s cheaper if you return the empty when buying a new one.

If the US based companies don’t do it it’s because they don’t want to, not because they can’t. I know for a fact coke does it in Mexico.

captain_aggravated ,
@captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works avatar

A lot of the issue there is everyone has to have their own unique glass bottle because marketing. A coke bottle has to go back to the coca-cola bottling plant. A Johnny Walker bottle has to go back to Scotland, etc.

gandalf_der_12te ,
@gandalf_der_12te@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

The problem with recycling/reusing plastics has been notoriously difficult in the past. That is why it’s so often incinerated/dumped instead of reused/recycled.

I want to explain my view of this:

Reusing plastics is difficult because the bottles are often produced in a way that makes them as thin (and lightweight) as possible. That has the advantage of saving oil, but has the disadvantage that they are in turn so brittle that if you tried to reuse them, chances are high that the bottles would either break, or - more dangerously - abrasive effects would cause the bottle to get tiny cracks, which would set free microplastics and potentially additives, which could be really toxic; and nobody wants to be responsible for this, so they are dumped.

Then there is the problem with washing the bottles. A lot of the plastics is not made to be brought into contact with soap, as I understand it, because the soap severely impacts the plastics. So washing them thoroughly is difficult.

Recycling has a different problem. Recycling consumes more energy than simply producing new ones. In the past, that was the reason to dump them. With cheap solar energy, the game could change. Recycling still takes a lot of energy, but as energy is getting cheaper, industry could reuse the carbon atoms in the bottle; in other words: reuse the material that’s in the bottle, not the energy that’s in the bottle. This will require even cheaper energy prices though to be economical.

rekabis ,

Unfortunately, most plastics are useless to recycle - they either get incinerated or dumped straight into the landfill by the companies who collect and filter them.

Which is why my wife and I only bother with plastic bags, styrofoam, and the hard plastics marked types 1 & 2. These are the plastics which are easily recyclable, and therefore, have a non-trivial chance of actually being recycled.

We put types 3 through 7 straight into the trash, as they have about a 97% chance of not actually getting recycled.

buzz86us ,

Except when you reuse you’re subjecting yourself to micro plastics

thejoker954 ,

Reduce needs to be the focus of manufacturers.

Even if we - the end user, reduce our usage enough that manufacturers ‘take note’ and provide us non plastic versions they will still use so much plastic behind the scenes that it wouldn’t make much of a difference.

aniki ,

Refuse, reuse, riot.

brb ,

The situation looks better in EU according to this article

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/2750e910-6497-4a58-b21d-d341840ac069.png

roofuskit ,

That’s just waste.

rekabis ,

The upper line has a steeper slope than the lower line, making that spread grow. So unrecycled plastic waste is increasing.

vga , (edited )

NGL that’s more than I thought, but nevertheless: don’t use plastic if you can avoid it. It’s not easy to recycle.

For instance, for beverages, prefer cans or your own glass / metal water bottles.

That said, 9% is a huge lot better than 0%. edit or considering the amount of plastics we use, a huge lot better than 8% too.

BruceTwarzen ,

The older i get the more disgusting i find plastic. I would never buy plastic tupperware ever again, drinking out of plastic bottles just feels wrong.

TheObviousSolution ,
@TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee avatar

How is it difficult to recycle? The temperatures requires to do so are less than metal, the 3D printing communities has people that recycle them into filaments all the time. I don’t think the problem is the plastic so much as it is how it is still treated as a disposable container and that neither companies nor governments pay for or provide reclamation means like recycling machines that pay for each bottle collected. In other words, the problem is more cultural than material.

HereIAm ,

And how many times do they recycle the filament until it’s too degraded to use?

TheObviousSolution ,
@TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee avatar

Depends on what you consider degraded, the only reason it would stop being recyclable is if it became too contaminated with foreign substances or exposure, which applies to anything.

cynar ,

Repeating plastics tends to damage them on a chemical level. The polymer chains break and shorten. This ends with the plastic being more brittle. Since 3d printed parts have already been remelted once, they have even more degradation than injection moulded parts.

I believe the recommended amount of recycled plastic is around 30% for PLA. Any more and the parts lose significant strength.

I personally would prefer us to accept that plastics aren’t really recyclable. It’s better to move towards renewable plastics like PLA, and treat the waste as biomass (either composted or burnt for energy.

TheObviousSolution ,
@TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee avatar

I personally would prefer us to accept that plastics aren’t really recyclable. It’s better to move towards renewable plastics

Err … getting mixed signals …

What you are describing is exposure. There are plenty of build with 100% recycled plastic, so not sure where you are getting that 30%. I think you are perhaps thinking of the marketing material of PLA filaments that sell themselves as particularly ecofriendly because they include recycled materials, while I’m talking about builds made entirely out of things like recycled water bottles, which are made out of PET. PLA is more susceptible to exposure to sunlight, heat, and moisture, so rather than using it to hold beverages at that point you might want to skip plastic entirely. PLA itself is not recycled that much, but it is more biodegradable.

cynar ,

Exposure can cause similar effects. However, the act of heating the plastic to the temperatures needed to melt it and defirming it also damages the structure. It’s particularly obvious with pla, but all plastics suffer from it, to an extent.

Eranziel ,

Others have pointed out the degradation issue, but you’re also assuming that all plastics are thermoplastics. They are not. There’s huge variation in chemical composition and material properties between different plastics, and most of them can’t be melted and reformed.

TheObviousSolution ,
@TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee avatar

But then the problem isn’t with all plastics, it’s with certain plastics, and around 70% of global plastic production are concentrated around commodity plastics, all of which are thermoplastic. The greatest degradation issue occurs with biodegradable plastics, which is perceived as a good thing for them, though even biodegradable PLA has toxicity concerns.

rekabis ,

don’t use plastic if you can avoid it. It’s not easy to recycle.

Plastic bags, styrofoam, and those hard plastics marked types 1 & 2 are the ones most likely to be recycled into new products. They are easy to break down and recycle into new containers.

Hard plastics marked types 3 through 7 are most likely to be filtered out and either incinerated or dumped straight into the landfill, as it costs more to recycle them than to just create new straight from oil.

Carighan ,
@Carighan@lemmy.world avatar

I’ll be honest, that’s actually more than I would have guessed (ballpark would have been 5% or under), sad as that is.

Badeendje ,
@Badeendje@lemmy.world avatar

I’ll bet the term recycled is actually open for interpretation, and the official use differs from our (pleb) expectations.

b161 ,

I read somewhere that because recycling plastic isn’t profitable, under the capitalist system there’s no incentive to do so.

Most plastics due for recycling just gets shipped off to poor countries for “reclycing” but isn’t at all, and a lot of it just ends up in the ocean.

So you’re better off just throwing plastics in the garbage where it will at least end up in landfill and not in the ocean.

Thorny_Insight , (edited )

That’s a bit cynical take. In many countries, including mine, there are dedicate bins for plastic waste which is the majority of waste from your typical household. It’s all being recycled into new products, not being shipped anywhere. Also, when it comes to plastic bottles for example, close to 100% of them are returned and recycled into new bottles. I’ve got a tiny-ass bin for the stuff that ends up in landfill because I separate and recycle it all as does most other people.

EDIT: Nevermind then. It’s all apparently dumped into the ocean. Sorry about the attempt in some positivity.

Tiptopit ,

plasticexpert.co.uk/what-country-recycles-the-mos….

Germany has the highest recycling rate for plastics with 65 %. Not everything you put in the recycling bin is being recycled.

Thorny_Insight ,

Seems far more likely that the recycling rate is low because not every piece of plastic waste is put into recycling. Not that they simply don’t recycle it.

Tiptopit ,

The problem is that there are quite some different sorts of plastics and that plastic containers are not standardized. If you mix different kinds of plastics or plastics with other materials you can’t use it anymore in an automated processing and it usually gets burned. Also mostly recycling is a downgrade, so usually if you recycle some packaging, it is not made into packaging again but into things like pallets or construction fence bases.

Deceptichum ,
@Deceptichum@quokk.au avatar

In my country (Aus), last I heard our recycling was mostly shipped off to Indo or somewhere else in SEA (previously China before China banned it).

I suspect very little ever sees recycling, but the neoliberal model means privatised companies paid by government, so they’re out to cut expenses to maximise profits and shipping it off to someone else to do the illegal thing where it’s not illegal isn’t illegal.

Badeendje ,
@Badeendje@lemmy.world avatar

Haha… yeah I live in the Netherlands. And my city started separately collecting plastics.

Here’s the kicker: because there is no more plastic in our waste, the energy value of the waste went down. The city sold these waste “rights” to an incineration plant that reclaims heat and energy who now cannot use the waste. So to avoid contractual fines, our city now imports plastic waste from elsewhere in Europe to be mixed in with the waste and then incinerated.

Well fuck me!

  • This is more expensive for the city (separate bins, separate collection, separate processing, buying plastics from elsewhere and getting it here)
  • All the extra transport and shipping movements is worse for the environment.
  • I’m stuck with an extra fucking bin, and with both a greens bin and the rest bin that are collected once every 3 weeks instead of 2… stinking up the place even worse.

But I’m sure they meant well.

frazorth ,

It’s all being recycled into new products

I’m afraid its not. There are many plastics that don’t have any method of recycling, and plently more that require specific machinery for their “one time” recycling that just isn’t being used.commercially.

when it comes to plastic bottles for example, close to 100% of them are returned and recycled into new bottles

Even the PET bottles can only go through the process once or twice before becoming too degraded. That’s not even taking into account that most manufacturers want white or clear plastic, and recycled does not work that way.

The separation and recycling that you do is mostly gaslighting and green washing.

frazorth ,

Even if you look the Scandinavian countries which generally does better than the rest of the world, you are looking at only a 25% recycle rate.

finland.fi/…/finnish-innovations-for-overcoming-p…

Maalus ,

It’s because you can’t recycle plastic really. Each time you heat it up to melt it it loses its properties. A recyclable material is for instance aluminium, which keeps on being awesome. I tried various recycled plastics for a business I run, none of it was strong enough. Recycled lego, recycled car bumpers, nada. And then the question is - why would I buy the recycled plastic that doesn’t work when it’s like 30 cents cheaper. Pellets are so cheap in fact, that I could buy a tonne, use up 100kgs, throw the rest away and still be fine.

PrimeMinisterKeyes , (edited )

Once they touch the factory floor’s floor, plastics become filthy and cannot be used for high-quality applications - food wrappers, anything with body contact. Oils and heavy metals are the biggest contaminants, a plastics-producing company I used to work for concluded. They either sent it all to a recycling factory or used it for very low-quality stuff like trash bags.
Now with post-consumer plastics, not only are they extremely heterogeneous, they will also have even worse contaminants like mold which proved to be very resistant to cleaning, a EU study concluded. So you might want to pyrolyze them like you do with crude oil, but there’s just too much O, N, S and halogens, so the output will be too corrosive, but also too heterogeneous for it to make economic sense.

Classy ,

What was it like working in plastics production? I imagine you were breathing in vapors all the time?

MonkderVierte ,

Maybe with some additives? Or removing them, in the first place? But expensive i guess.

Maalus ,

Maybe there is something, but tbh why bother when virgin pellets are better. The best plastic recycling strategy is to not make it in the first place. Or just use other types of packaging - alu cans, glass bottles, paper containers, whatever.

Also additives soak water like crazy. Moisture is a huge problem when making parts - you need to dry some types of plastic pellets in industrial dryers, which eats up a ton of electricity - since they are often running off of compressed air out of a compressor. Most plastic comes in natural colors to which you add additives to change to the color you want. Simply doing that (2% by weight) is a difference between not having to dry at all (since some plastics just don’t absorb water - i.e. polyolefins - which high density variant is what bottles for shower gel, shampoos are made of) and having to dry it for like 6 hours before use.

MonkderVierte ,

Gets burned here, same result like with oil it is made of.

Blackmist ,

It’s just a bad material that’s cheap to make things out of.

Once used, to my knowledge, it can’t be reused as the same thing, so they “recycle” it into road surfacing etc, which I’m sure doesn’t end up fragmenting into tiny bits over the years and ending up in water sources…

And I’m not sure there’s a good way to get away from it completely. Even drink cans have a small layer of plastic inside to stop it reacting with the metal. Glass is probably the most environmentally friendly (if you just wash and reuse), but a bitch to get it back in one piece.

Time to tax the ever loving shit out of plastic tbh. And yes, prices will go up, but you know what? They go up anyway. They can only take as much as we have, and they’re already taking it.

roofuskit ,

Most glass is recycled into asphalt. Until fairly recently that was the only way to recycle glass.

vga ,

I read somewhere that because recycling plastic isn’t profitable, under the capitalist system there’s no incentive to do so.

Not just unprofitable in a capitalist sense, but inefficient. A typical plastic beverage container can be recycled two or three times before the plastic degrades too much to be usable.

Socialism won’t save you here. Unless said socialism bans plastic products.

roofuskit ,

Those countries stopped accepting it.

Chessmasterrex , (edited )

Probably a terrible idea, but melting the plastic and extruding the plastic in underground abandoned mines, filling up the empty spaces like icing on a cake from floor to ceiling. There are abandoned lead mines in Oklahoma, where the town was vacated because of the toxicity and the ground collapsing underneath. A place like that seems ideal.

lauha ,

In Finland one mine had broken the law and dumped all their waste in the back of the mine and they were ordered to clean it up and they raised their hands up and said they couldn’t because it was too dangerous to work there. Govenment’s mining superviser dude turned out to be paid by the mining company, surprise!

Thorny_Insight ,

That assumes the plastic is already being collected, so why not just make new products from it instead of dumping it into the ground and then using even more oil to make new plastic?

Ensign_Crab ,

9 percent seems high.

cashmaggot ,

I worked at a university at one point in my life, and they were quite proud about their recycling plan. The janitors though, would just take the trash and the recycling and put the two bags together and throw them both away. I never really lived anywhere that recycled outside of the West Coast. But is it actually being recycled here? Is this the 9%?

SSJMarx ,

I feel like the bulk of the plastic that gets recycled is done in other developed countries that spend significant money on doing it. Like when I lived in Japan they were very stringent about separating your trash, same thing in Germany, and not for nothing those economies that do recycling at scale generally prefer glass over plastic because recycling glass is more efficient.

cheers_queers ,

custodian checking in: if your university is anything like the school i work in, custodians are dumping it in the trash because nobody seems to know what can be recycled and the staff fill their recycle cans with trash. it’s not worth the time picking through it to salvage what you can.

most of the stuff in the recycle bins in the rooms i clean cannot be recycled. food wrappers, Kleenex, etc. it’s a sham meant to make people feel better about themselves

cashmaggot ,

I always figured it was just because it was a sham as a whole and they didn't really give a puck and nobody ever seemingly was watching them. Thank you for your input though, this is good stuff =)

cheers_queers ,

it’s possible they also didn’t care, but we do recycle the best we can in our district :)

cashmaggot ,

Oh yeah, I feel that too. Also feel your nickname ;D!

I think a lot of people who are just trying to survive never really cared that much about a lot of things - recycling included.

*Mind you, I know you can also get paid some solid $$$ for being a custodian cause I dated one and she made bank ass bucks.

cheers_queers ,

more people should consider being a school district custodian imo. i get health benefits, all federal holidays and weekends off, a union and a pension (yes, a pension. not 401k)… it’s hard work if you do it right, but can’t beat it for the benefits as an entry level job

cashmaggot ,

Y, I had an adopted papi (rip) by the by (as in found family) and he was a custodian too before he retired. And he worked at a hospital and did very well for himself. I guess one more is that I knew a guy who once was attending university, dropped out and now sweeps floors for a living and he's WAY happier doing that than keeping up with the joneses like you have to do at a private university. I myself have worked all sorts of gigs, and enjoy a solid sweeping or three =)!

One last one, little sneak in here - in that I have always been good at flitting too and fro and some of my favorite people to talk to growing up were custodians, because they were like the invisible folks of the school but depending on if I was "in hiding" or "visible" I could always find comfort and fun stories with the custodians =)!

My buddy is a TA, and does well for themselves even though they struggled for years to find a place to fit in. People always talk about what a nightmare it is to be in the school system but I know a handful of people who really love it. I think you've got to just be a realist in this department. Either way, high-five =)!

doingthestuff ,

In my area you have to pay a lot extra for a recycling bin, and they only accept two kinds of plastic.

Then it came out they were just shipping it overseas to be recycled but sometimes it was ending up in landfills anyway. There are only a few houses on our street with a recycling bin out each week.

wafflez ,

Can’t find for total glass but just current rates for glass: “US’s roughly 33% glass-recycling rate” “90% recycling rate in Switzerland, Germany, and other European countries”

cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/…/i6

paraphrand ,

In my area they don’t recycle glass. I was so surprised when I moved here and learned that. Glass and aluminum are the two most worth it/possible afaik.

Telodzrum ,

That’s a lot of plastic.

TehBamski ,
@TehBamski@lemmy.world avatar

For anyone interested in increasing that number in any way they can, check out earth911.com for hundreds of ideas and ways to help recycle, reduce, and reuse things in your everyday life.

Here’s a link to learn about how to properly recycle or dispose of things. Categorized into nine kinds of materials.

And here’s a link to their Recycling Solution Search, where you can select the thing you desire to recycle and then enter a zip code.

apfelwoiSchoppen ,
@apfelwoiSchoppen@lemmy.world avatar

Almost like plastics recycling has been a scam all along perpetrated by the corporations to greenwash their business.

Reduce, then reuse, and if the other two cannot occur; recycle.

Repelle ,

This is absolutely correct but still not the whole story. Recycling for glass and aluminum and steel can be done essentially infinitely creating a largely closed loop (though for glass in particular we really need to return to our old reuse practices). By using the same language for plastic as we do for better recycling methods we still make plastic recycling sound better than it is, even when reduction and reuse are emphasized.

grue ,

I imagine that goes the other way, too: by conflating the scam of plastics recycling with recycling in general, some people are probably discouraged from recycling anything at all, including aluminum.

EldritchFeminity ,

Plus the whole system was created with the idea of getting people used to recycling so when better, more efficient forms of recycling came into use, people would already be recycling.

Too bad that whole “better, more efficient” part never really happened.

_sideffect ,

Recycling was the last in the list of what to do.

The problem is we forgot about Reduce and Reuse… The two most important things.

We use way too much instead.

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