Recycling is a great example of the rule "Privatizing Profits and Socializing Losses". Business is packing their stuff in whatever they want and then citizens, authorities has to deal with the wastes business produced.
Why we can't force to use for bottles/packaging a single type of plastic? Why we can't force easily removable labels on the bottles (the glue that is used to stick half plastic/half paper labels is a deal breaker for simple recycling), I think only in Japan this is mandatory. Why we allow making packages (especially for take-away food from pseudo-paper (which is a paper with plastic coating), which is not recyclable at all and, in fact, is much worst than plastic, but business claims that "now we are eco, see, we use paper for packaging)?
Why we allow to use for packaging whatever business wants? Why the cost and effort of the recycling has to be on people and local governments?
Some plastic needs to be heat resistant, some, it doesn’t matter. Some plastic needs to be easy to tear, some needs to resist tearing. Some plastic needs to be flexible, some needs to be stiff.
Easily removable labels often fall off before they are actively removed.
Restaurants probably tried only paper and their customers complained when the food soaked through and/or the container collapsed.
Far easier said than done, I'm sure. But someone has to say it before it can happen.
Manufacturing works very much like software in this regard - i.e. VHS vs BetaMax
Those clear PET bottles for instance are common and worth recycling, but if a brand makes green PET bottles those need to be separated from the clear ones if you want good-quality clear PET which can be used to make clear PET bottles or blending with a colorant to make green bottles.
Many of the big brands are standardizing on clear PET, both Coke and Pepsi are even using 100% post-consumer bottles in some geographies. In gas stations in upstate NY I frequently see Coke products bottled in 100% post-consumer recycled clear PET bottles.
-- the article
so that's good I guess
I agree that plastic is in most cases a better solution, however you are wrong to say the paper+PE board can't be recycled. Currently here in the UK they are not collected in household waste, but many businesses are recycling them and there is a lot of capacity available.
https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/news/ds-smith-makes-100-uk-coffe...
https://www.thefirstmile.co.uk/online-waste-services/busines...
Some of the issues are the collecting and sorting streams, then there are the commercial aspect of how to sell on the recycled material because it needs to be commercially viable.
> "Privatizing Profits and Socializing Losses"
The UK has recently introduced Extended Producer Responsibility for packaging legislation where the theory is the brand owner pays for the entire recycling and collection process of any packaging they put onto the market. Note this isn't just takeaway & food packaging, it's everything. The system though is an unworkable mess, it's so complicated trying to track every item of packaging and who is responsible for paying the tax down the entire supply chain.
If you also avoid black colour it should be possible to recycle the plastic with automated sorting machines.
because money
If there are less toxic materials that could "do the job" but are more expensive then it really is about money no?
Single meal frozen food containers. You need a seal. Some impregnated cardboard can work, but not as well and is full of chemicals to overcome its disadvantages.
Disposable water bottles. You can use metal vessels, they cost a bit more, but doable.
Packaged frozen meats (they keep longer). Not sure there is a good alternative to plastics other than having people buy meats semi-daily from the butcher.
Some plastics need to be heat resistant, others solvent resistant, others flexible, others stretchy, etc. Different formulations give you what you need at a price point.
Yes we could go back to the 1920s but then life would have to be adjusted to the 1920s. You’d need someone to remain “domestic” at home, etc. as more time is needed to carry out house work without the convenience of modern materials.
I could also go to a bulk goods store instead and fill a container.
But one of these options is much more convenient… and that’s fundamentally why society is having hell of a time getting rid of plastic. These plastics are bad for the environment but they bring a lot of material properties that other materials like metal, wood or glass don’t provide.
Obviously bagged cereal is a drop in the bucket but this materials calculus is applied everywhere and at every stage.
It's not about random pieces of paper with numbers.
Regardless, I'm excited to hear about progress on solving the plastic waste crisis. It seems better than the current alternatives the article presents:
> "The U.S. is the number one plastic polluter per capita, and we only recycle 5% of those plastics," said Northwestern's Yosi Kratish, the study's co-corresponding author. "There is a dire need for better technologies that can process different types of plastic waste. Most of the technologies that we have today melt down plastic bottles and downcycle them into lower-quality products.
"In just four hours, 94% of the possible TPA was recovered."
Modern landfill is highly engineered and extremely stable: what goes in there stays there.
Plastic starts as oil in the ground. Replacing it as solids in the ground isn't a problem.
Source: I did a bunch of research on rocket mass heaters (think rocket stove, not missile engine) when I built one.
Put some filters on top of the power plant exhausts and it's clean enough to build a ski slope on top of it.
They were generally made from PP which is widely recycled as a material.
They are also commonly littered and as they don't break down in the environment led the not only being unsightly but also clogging up waterways and direct damage to wildlife. Paper straws can still be littered, but break down so don't cause the same physical problems in the longer term.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/19/food/coca-cola-new-bottles/in...
and Pepsi is selling 100% post-consumer bottles in some EU countries
https://www.pepsico.com/our-stories/press-release/pepsico-co...
Those clear beverage containers are an ideal case for mechanical recycling. This company
makes polyester fiber from recycled PET. I have a few garmets made from it and my impression is that the fabric feel is nicer than average.
> Catalytic amounts of AC/MoO2 selectively convert waste PET into its monomer, terephthalic acid (TPA), within 4 h at 265 °C with yields as high as 94% under 1 atm air.
I'm not a chemist so don't know if you can find a way to calculate the cost, but the authors claim that it's cheaper than current methods.
The bigger deal imo is that it recovers PET monomers from mixed plastics, which means avoiding manufacturing more plastic.
The thing is BTX chemicals and other precursors of mass produced plastics cost about 50 cents a pound which makes it hard for any kind of recycling process to be competitive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTX_(chemistry)
We've had almost a century of subsidization of the oil industry. The gov't needs to play a bigger similar role if the recycling industry is ever gonna be able to compete
We need a tax on the full lifecycle cost of plastics so we can stop treating waste as an economic externality
It would be cheaper to just ban stuff like polyester fleece than to try to clean it up after.
This approach closes the loop in a way which encourages manufacturers to re-engineer their products to be less expensive to recycle.
We are subsidizing these materials with our health and our environment. And it affects certain people more than others—usually people who have the least say in it
A 100% linen shirt currently costs around $40 and, when cared for properly, can last a lifetime. Rubber bands made out of natural rubber are much stronger and will last at least 10x as long as plastic ones and are about the same price. I could go on, but the alternatives exist and are already often much cheaper in the long run.
You're just over rationalizing it with 101-level economics ;).
Also no need for the patronizing comment. Economic externalities are a valid criticism of market failures and you haven't provided the more convincing, "advanced economics" jargon-laden analysis you're pretending to harbor
In theory, I agree with you, but trying to internalize these cost is itself extremely costly. That's why the criticism about econ-101 level reasoning: it's a convincing idea in theory that isn't tractable at all in practice and can only end up with a bureaucratic nightmare.
The EU has many such rules that are designed around economics first principle like that, in order to build an “efficient market”, and they are all extremely burdensome and at the same time ineffective (see EU-ETS, the single Electricity market, CBAM, etc.)
In the realm of policies, tractability is always preferable to theoretical elegance.
So just a blanket "Charge everything based on it's cleanup costs" doesn't work.
Maybe in the future you laser-atomize every spec that floats past the actor inside an 8ft cube. Who knows?
I don't think it'd be practical to switch overnight - much of our societal infrastructure needs re-engineering for sustainability which will take time - perhaps a gradually increasing percentage of externalized costs can be integrated over time. It'd be real progress toward a Venus Project style resource based economy.
If some celebrity wants to single-handedly fund the development of a microplastics recovery technology as part of a red carpet fashion item, I'm OK with that.
Vs selectively picking products which have easy alternatives and providing phase out periods which match the difficulty of replacing them. If you tell the public you are going to make car tires cost millions of dollars, you'll be voted out. If you tell them that plastic confetti will be replaced with paper confetti in 12 months you'll make real progress.
This doesn't prevent innovation. Scientists will still do research, develop new recycling tech and processes.
There are definitely reasons to subsidize some products - medical devices, for instance - as you say, things without readily available alternatives. I'm not writing a detailed transition plan here, just pointing out observations.
Mechanical recycling or any flavor of chemical recycling (pyrolysis, hydrolysis, etc.) all suffer from the same hurdle. If the target product of the recycling process is a TPA-derived plastic (be it for clothing or soda bottles), then mechanical recycling is usually cheaper, since it produces a product that only needs to be reshaped and remolded to give shirts or jugs. Chemical recycling converts PET into its constitutive monomers, and to (re)produce a TPA-derived plastic from the monomers requires a not inexpensive (re)polymerization step, in addition to reshaping and remolding.
Chemists, even highly regarded ones like Tobin Marks, are less interested in "solving" the PET recycling issue and more interested in the fundamental chemistry involved in chemical recycling. Issues of Green Chemistry (or blurbs in phys.org) are not the appropriate reading materials to get insight into costs, scale-up, etc.. Very few, if any, academic journals are focused on such matters, and rightly so, in my opinion.
I think most recycling methods for PET require melting anyway.
Finding it also odd that biodegradable plastics and safer alternatives are going quiet. As if the new scheme is to keep fossil fuel companies rolling, with the promise that one day a solution to get rid of incalculable mountains of plastic will be found. Don't worry, feel free to plastic pollute, because one day there will be a solution.
They tend not to be a good solution to anything.
There are a couple of ways of making degradable plastic. One is to add something to their manufacture so they break down into shorter chains which their supporters tell you will then further break down. These are generally referred to as OXO degradable.
Another is to use bio based plastics such as PLA or cellulose. These both have poor performance compares to oil based plastics.
All of these also require industrial composting where they add no nutrition to the compost, effectively just bulking it out. They [generally] do not break down when littered or even placed in a domestic compost heap.
There is also a problem because these plastics are virtually impossible to sort from recyclable plastics so if they get in each other waste stream the whole batch can be rendered contaminated and useless.
[1] https://www.unep.org/plastic-pollution
[2] https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/ocean_plastics...
[3] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/microplas...
[4] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/microplas...
[5] https://scitechdaily.com/startling-discovery-scientists-find...
Kind of like fresh air exchange into a heated house where new air in gets heated exchanging with old air out
All industrial processes recycle heat extensively. Heck even distillation based desalination isn't that inefficient because you do in fact recover the heat.
Actually, the tap water is optional.
And instead of monomers, the end product is carbon - which is even more recyclable!
Pulo ng suso ng dalaga
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Triple point: Myanmar Memento mori 天命靡常
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A exchange game to placeholder..