News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Tips from Poland on Old-School Zero Waste (2019). Parent comment

Re:Tips from Poland on Old-School Zero Waste (2019) by m463 on Sunday February 02, 2020 @08:57PM (#22220830)
A friend of mine employed at a chemical company worked on a plastics recycling projects.

Even mixing single-digit percentages of recycled plastics with virgin plastics made the resulting product substandard. Think laundry baskets that break after a couple of uses.

The recovery, washing and attempt to recycle the plastic was extremely expensive, labor and resource intensive.

In the end he truthfully thought the plastic should be burned.

I personally think we should industrialize the waste management, reducing the waste to components that can be easily reused, or inert.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste-to-energy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Tips from Poland on Old-School Zero Waste (2019) by paulryanrogers on Sunday February 02, 2020 @11:45PM (#22221474)
Maybe a fountain system where people being their own reusable bottles would be better still.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Tips from Poland on Old-School Zero Waste (2019) by Symbiote on Monday February 03, 2020 @02:46AM (#22222227)
> Even mixing single-digit percentages of recycled plastics with virgin plastics made the resulting product substandard.

That is why bottle return systems work: they collect only known plastic/metal/glass.

[ Parent | on HN ]