It requires a lot of harsh chemicals to remove the inks. The output paper is substandard. The whole process is energy intensive.
And, the messed up part about the whole thing is that throwing away paper is one of the best things you can do for the environment. It is natural carbon sequestration.
We are far better off tree farming for paper.
Which are brown. You don't have to worry about the inks or "substandard" or whatever". And then the pizza boxes aren't re-recycled because of grease.
You suggest we stick to trees instead of recycle, "for paper". But the whole point of recycling is to turn paper into pizza boxes (and presumably also our Amazon shipping boxes, etc.).
It sounds like you're trying to argue against recycling paper... when the reality is it's a huge success, when you realize paper is recycled into cardboard.
It may be better for the environment to sustainably harvest trees to produce cardboard then to recycle other paper products.
A lot of paper is coated in clays, waxes, or plastics, and many inks might make paper unsuitable for use in food grade products like pizza boxes, without heavy processing.
Shipping boxes, maybe. If the structural properties of the resulting board are OK.
But most post-consumer paper is unusable for one reason or another. Recycling of industrial packaging is a slightly different story.
So the paper does, eventually, go to the landfill and become sequestered in the typical fashion.
If you live in an area that collects material for industrial composting you should 100% put the grease coated parts of the cardboard in your compost collection bin.
[0] https://www.portland.gov/bps/garbage-recycling/compost-what-...
I'm not too sure on the details of how that is done, but I imagine it involves driving huge trucks into forests, cutting trees with machines, stripping and cutting the trees, and transporting wood to industrial areas.
It has to be more CO2 efficient to recycle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_liquor
(the first ingredient is hot lye!)
In general, paper recycling is productive enough that paper mills buy recycled paper as an input. Cardboard even more so.
Virgin inputs also requires harsh chemicals, there's no advantage.
Bacteria probably need the right conditions to efficiently break down materials, cellulose is quite tough.
Some landfills capture the released methane and burn it (to avoid atmospheric pollution), which seems like a decent solution (even more with power generation). Some of the material will remain undecomposed (or take a really long time) so it is a net carbon sink. I think this depends on properly sealing landfills and arranging extraction infrastructure.
Seems like a good resource:
https://www.epa.gov/lmop/basic-information-about-landfill-ga...
Another idea would be to curb methane generation or decomposition somehow. Apparently aerobic decomposition reduces or prevents the release of methane:
https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/climate-change/composting-avoid-...
Burning trash directly is also an alternative I guess, though one I'm not very comfortable with due to trace elements contained in everyday items -- surely some mercury and heavy metals will sneak into residues? (and then into the atmosphere and our lungs)
Now, of course, we have LEDs in place of CFLs, and coal burning power generation is on the way out, so it's all moot.
The reality is that the system requires pigovian taxation to internalize their natural externalized costs, capitalism and specifically our modern version of neoclassical neoliberalism loves to socialize loses and privatize profits, we need public action against that
If you wanna hear my angle, I'd go for making Senates and congresses across the world secret, secret ballots, secret voting and secret deliverations and debates
If you wanna know as to why read on James DAngelo's Toxic Transparency Paradox, his congressional investigations on the systemic benefits of secrecy can be found on http://www.congressionalresearch.org/
Unregulated markets don't work, except in the way that cancer works to propagate itself before its host dies. They're not self-balancing ecosystems. After all, they're comprised of people.
Completely managed and controlled markets similarly don't work, and for largely the same reasons. After all, they're comprised of people.
Humanity has a unique knack for at least these two things: 1) constructing games, 2) cheating those games it has created for itself to play.
It's no longer enough to hedge against the risks of idealized perfectly spherical and rational actors bouncing about. We have to begin to take into account our own complexity and how we subvert the rules we lay out for ourselves.
CFCs:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol
Asbestos:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos_and_the_law
Lead paint:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-based_paint_in_the_Unit...
Leaded gasoline:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Phaseout_and_ba...
Regulation can be successful, but at best its slow and incremental, and in the long term corporations will weaken and subvert them. Just having a system which incentivizes good behavior in the first place would be better than trying to regulate bad systems
These are some hot takes, but somewhat surprisingly they check out. Will read more.
D'Angelo goes further and interviews law professors on this issue, and they all not only seem perplexed at first, but agree with him later, and the caveat, is that US Law as it is taught from an orthodox angle, is only really taught after the 1970's or so, and don't really cover how legislation used to be done before it, so law students would naturally assume that "things always were the same way" when it came to how transparency was handled!
Here are some of the talks he has had with Law professors
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVfzvhRhmgI&list=PLzctEq7iZD...
And some other snippets in general
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC88MPXm1jZPNRwdOGyBNqqg/vid...
By now I am convinced that this is the missing piece, that accounts for not only the split between worker-productivity and wages, but everything else since the 1970's, this transparency revolution, with the Toxic Transparency Paradox aftermath is what set the course to where we are today with legislative gridlock, polarization, increases in wealth inequality, oligarchic corporatism etc
The main problem to me is that disposing of plastic is always an externality to the companies who produce and market it. Make them pay the recycling or disposal costs up front, and I’d be happy.
For a bunch of the same reasons you can't "just" make alcohol illegal or outlaw internal combustion engines.
Check your facts [2]:
> Greenpeace says plastic bottle recycling rates are ‘stalled’ at around just 59% in the UK.
> Danone brand evian is introducing 100% rPET bottles to the UK this week; the latest in a series of recycled plastic commitments from PepsiCo’s Naked Smoothies, Nestlé’s Buxton bottled water, and Coca-Cola GB.
> This week Coca-Cola Great Britain announced that all plastic bottles in its core brand portfolio – including Coca-Cola, Fanta, Sprite and Oasis – are made with 50% recycled plastic. This equates to removing more than 21,000 tonnes of virgin plastic, according to Coca-Cola.
> “One of the key challenges the industry currently faces is that there isn’t enough food-grade recycled plastic locally available in the UK to switch to 100% rPET across our entire range,”
I have at least one product
> Frosch packaging is 100% recycled plastic [3]
[1] https://www.plasticsoupfoundation.org/en/2018/02/pet-bottles...
[2] https://www.beveragedaily.com/Article/2020/09/24/The-journey...
Open questions would be: how much use can be replaced with recyclable variants on the application side? (perhaps some use cases are not doable with PET?) How much use can be replaced on the supply side? (can only a fraction of the crude extracted from the ground enter that PET cycle or does a percentage of the extracted mass have to become other kinds of plastics that are inherently unrecyclable?)
And as long as any of those questions stay answered "not all" and we are still burning some of the extracted crude for energy: how much efficiency does that energy conversion lose when the crude takes a detour as un-recyclable plastics application between getting extracted from the ground and ending up in the atmosphere after burning? If that efficiency loss is small, un-recyclable plastics use can be environmentally cheap if it happens within the envelope of unavoidable energy use and vice versa.
(edit: mis-posted before)
There are also ABS, PVC and many others — construction, textiles, shoes, asphalt, consumer goods. But they are not sold as recyclable.
EDIT: can we incinerate trash instead of burning oil? It is a controversial topic.
Would it produce less CO2 than glass? Assuming green energy no, but in such case we could sequence carbon from air. Would it require less energy than recycling? I don't think so.
E.g., I'm adding PVC cable and pipe ducting in various areas of my house, and am using polycarbonate discs as spacers for shelf uprights on an uneven wall. Both will stay in situ at least until I move (which I have no plans to do at present).
In many parts of the world even the question of incinerating trash instead of coal is still meaningful and that one should be far less controversial.
Still questions remain
* Should we mark it as clean energy?
* Should we subsidy it? Or should we subsidy recycling?
[1] https://www.no-burn.org/europewasteburning/
[2] https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/05/03/copenhagen-trash-...
It's been something of a disaster, because of the way it's changed how individuals "recycle". The bins are frequently full of contaminated and non-recyclable materials that the facility's equipment is incapable of sorting back out. Since it's all commingled in the collection truck, one person who's sloppy about how they recycle can spoil not only their own recycling efforts, but those of their neighbors as well. In my own neighborhood, the recycle bins are frequently full of things like greasy pizza boxes, single-use paper cups, EPS, even yard waste and broken (particleboard) furniture.
Chicago's current program is an illustrative example. After the city introduced it, the percentage of waste Chicagoans placed in the recycle bins roughly doubled, while the percentage of Chicago's waste that actually gets recycled was halved.
To make people want to recycle you need to positively enforce it. If you goto a negative (such as a tax or fine) the incentive to do it falls off quickly. America used to recycle/reuse tons of stuff. Pepsi and Coke figured out a decent cost to their system was the reuse of their bottles. So they funded groups that worked against that. People would put a deposit on the bottles and containers. If you returned it you got the deposit back. If you tossed it someone else usually would find it and return it and get the deposit. It was a positive incentive. Instead now we have this weird thing where companies produce garbage and blame the customers for not 'taking care of it'. We have no real reason to do so other than feeling good about yourself. In some cases the ability and economic reality is not really there.
Most single stream systems are basically 2 trucks. One picks up the garbage. The other picks up the recycling. Garbage goes straight to the dump. The recycling goes to a sort center. They dump it all out on large conveyor belts with a bunch of people standing next to it picking out what they can and slicing open any bags/boxes they see. Pulling anything that is obviously not for the stream (pizza boxes, magazines etc). The magnets pull out anything metal. The plastics and glass are sorted out usually by weight color and symbol if they have the machinery for it. Otherwise it is manual. This all takes time and money. If you are making 50cents for a 2ton bail of plastic the economics is not there. But if you say make 500 dollars for a bail then maybe it is there.
In a neighborhood I once lived in the recycling guy decided he was not going to pick up anything except pop cans and newspaper. Everyone was mostly recycling correctly. Suddenly my neighbors and I had 2x the garbage to deal with. They all dumped it into the other bin and never recycled again for years. It took only one small negative thing to change from 'happy to help' to 'meh not doing it'. The boxes they had it in were obvious. One week everyone was doing it, then almost none. I would drive around the neighborhoods near mine and he had done it there too. They had to change the way they pickup garbage to undo what 1 guy did in 1 day.
At one place I lived, I watched the truck come along and they just dump both bins in the same section of the truck. So you've got me agonizing over which bin to sort things into and then the waste management people just re-combine them. I guess I'm the sucker here!
As usual, the USA's un-coordinated "let the states and local governments figure it out" strategy fails again.
In the town where my parents live, waste collection services , including recycling, are contracted out among several private companies. So the rules can vary among neighborhoods.
In Chicago, the city supplies recycling services for single family homes and apartment buildings with up to (if I recall correctly) 4 units, and anything larger than that must privately contract its own waste management. So the rules have the potential to vary from building to building.
This may provide incentive for either biodegradable or clean burning plastics in the market which could have lower taxes/deposits.
The side issue is plastic is wildly cheap to use and make. You can try to create tax systems that break that. But you just create resentment. A better way is to figure out how to make the other more sturdy reusable and recyclable materials better and cheaper than plastic. Reuse has the issue of re-collection/cleaning and that costs money. If you can crack that the whole market will skip plastic. Anything else tries to bend the market. It usually does not react well to that and creates undesirable side effects. The same thing happened in the coal markets with relation to nat gas. Natural gas became cheaper than coal and easier to use. Huge swaths of the energy market basically ran towards it. If something like that could happen in the plastics markets it would change the world.
The populace is simply too poorly educated, lazy, and propagandized to resist government policy.
> Coca-Cola to switch to 100% rPET
> December 2019 - in Sweden
> October 2020 - in the Netherlands
> first half of 2021 - in Norway [1]
Meanwhile
> Coca-Cola currently has an average of 20% rPET in bottles sold in California.
But
> California will make it mandatory for plastic bottles to contain 50% recycled content by 2030. [2]
[1] https://www.cocacolaep.com/media/news/2020/coca-cola-in-west...
[2] https://www.beveragedaily.com/Article/2020/10/02/California-...
When I was growing up in NYC recycling was even part of the curriculum, but there were definitely contexts in which recycling was difficult (for example, sidewalks usually had street garbage cans, but not street recycling cans)
(St Louis. Kansas City has pretty decent service in this respect)
I am a tea and coffee drinker with a preferred mug and a travel mug which has a lid on it. If I go out for a stroll I fill the travel mug with coffee and take that.
Never do I wake up in the morning and think I need some drink in an aluminium can or plastic bottle. Nor do I wake up and wish my beverages were laced with corn syrup. Or advertised on TV.
If they stopped selling fizzy drinks tomorrow then I would not notice for a long time.
I am also out of the habit of drinking alcohol, however, when I do drink beer I prefer it to be in a pub where the glass is not just recycled but is re-used.
My additions to the recycling bins are small compared to those of a normal person that drinks beer, wine or other alcoholic beverages every day. I am also quite partial to citrus fruits so I have no aspiration to buy 'orange juice'.
For whatever reason I have not adopted the habits of buying these tin cans and plastic bottles in the first place. I am set in my ways and no amount of TV advertising will suddenly make me start the day with an energy drink or have a moment with Coca Cola mid afternoon. I just am not interested.
In the USA there is this culture of drinking fizzy drinks that the advertisers have been working on for decades. The default drink comes in a can or other single use container, not a preferred mug.
Separating waste might be a habit that needs to be worked on by some people, however, there is this deeper habit of using single use containers all the time.
The single use drinks are sold at massive profit.
I joke that restaurants are almost universally places that break even on food, if they are lucky, and make all their profit on hard/soft drinks.
Of course, who knows what happened to the recycling before that -- but right now, almost all of my recyclables go into the trash.
Also, most of the plastic the city takes, the rural location services won't.
Still, the stuff is still basically hydrocarbons either way - you should be able to break it down to it's constituents and refine it to something indistinguishable from the normal feed stock. Woukd it be horrendously energy intensive ? Most likely! But definitely doable.
BTW, this is why I'm skeptical to efforts to fix the environment just by saving energy. Sure, it should not be wasted but if we want to fix all damage that has veen done while still providing adequate standards of living for everyone, we beed to produce much much moore energy than we do now & do it in a clean way - most likely mega massive solar on enything, lots of nuclear fission and possibly massed off shore wind as well. Ideally backed by storage if/where possible.
Together with megaproject scale waste processing it should be possible to cleanup (and reuse!) all the old stuff while also handling all the new stuff comming in.
And the end result would be a nice clean plabet yet again, but this time with very robust energy and industrial infrastructure ready to face future challenges - or disasters!
Sounds like something one can aspire for rather than all the doom and gloom one sees some days.
And their about page, they use a form of pyrolysis: https://bravenenvironmental.com/braven-advantage/#advantage
Or ... just burn it for energy, and thereby pump less oil.
Sure you'll need more oil for more plastic, but you come out ahead because by burning the plastic you save some oil.
This whole plastic recycling stuff makes zero sense.
Did you use hot water to wash them?
Probably yes. Last time I did the math making them out of plastic saved energy vs heating water to wash glass (it was a close call, it depended on if you used a dishwasher vs sink washing).
So it might seem environmental friendly, but if you run the numbers it's not necessarily so.
Did your calculations include things like the extraction and distillation of the petroleum?
Beyond the environmental impact, there's also just the stupid, wasted effort that goes into pointlessly recreating the same thing over and over when you don't have to. In this case, the bottle goes back on the return trip from delivering new milk, which had to happen anyway. The milk ends up being the only thing delivered, on net. It's just strikingly elegant in its lack of wasted effort and material. It's not clear if it's a net win, though, given the delivery part, unless there are others on the same street signed up for the same day.
If anyone's in the Bay Area and is interested in delivery sort of like this, which also tries to set up regular delivery routes to minimize the marginal impact of a customer, I recommend checking out Farmstead (https://www.farmsteadapp.com/). They provide a similar milk delivery service by picking up Straus milk bottles and refunding the deposit. They also solved my biggest issue with most of the delivery services by picking up their reusable bags and having minimal packaging inside, but COVID put a stop to the bag pickup, at least temporarily.
Power markets are very liquid, so I tend to favour calculating your personal footprint based on the average co2 output of the grid, not the particular energy production method you've chosen. This makes it clear that even if you're paying for wind power, it's still better not to waste electricity.
The issue isn't getting bottles hot enough to kill germs. It's doing so in a way that doesn't aerosolize the bacteria and preventing all the other ways cross contaimination can occur.
And not only can they be reused, broken glass bottles can still be recycled.
And in the real world it's virtually never recycled, instead its crushed and used as landfill cover (they cover the trash each night to keep down vermin).
shudders
Not too hard to get that heat by burning fuel, but through wind power? Not sure how it'll be done.
Not dismissing it. I just really don't know.
The above is why aluminum is smelted in low energy cost areas. the above is why my company runs the foundry only for the night shift - the power company gives us a discount for using power at night when they need to keep the base load power plants running even though nobody is using power, which more than makes up for the extra pay we give to for working the night shift. (Now that wind is >50% of the electric mix in my state I wonder if the shifts are changing)
In fact most high temperature is generated from electric not fuel. If you burn something to get high temperatures the process is inefficient, turning the fuel into electricity and then the electricity into heat is more efficient (look up carnot efficiency)
In India, they do use them often for delivering milk and it's very sturdy.
If they choose to use steel or glass, and it doesn't get cleaned properly, and it ends up causing damage, then they might be liable for damages. Their liability insurance will deny coverage for damages because they knowingly used a method that had a higher probability of harm than using new plastic.
I'm sure there might be some way to ensure cleanliness of steel and glass, but it's probably cost prohibitive versus just using plastic, so it might cause the cost of the product to be too high to compete in the market.
It's probably a combination of all of these things, but the fact that no glass alternatives exist in the market in a similar price range as plastic options indicates there's an overall cost advantage for plastic.
Through there are limits for white glass this is much less the case for brown and green glass.
BUT, that 30%, it’s not post-consumer recycled plastic.
It’s the manufacture grinding up the runners, sprues, and bad parts. In the industry it’s called “regrind”. [0]
So if they were trying to tell you it was post-consumer, that was probably misleading.
(Products that use post-consumer recycled plastic will almost always say so, as it is a marketing angle)
[0] https://knowledge.ulprospector.com/1468/pe-regrinding-plasti...
An interesting point to consider here is that if oil production ever goes down for whatever reason and virgin plastic prices go up as a result, post-consumer plastic recycling becomes a more attractive business prospect.
Hopefully people can find good stuff to do with the heaps of shite we've already created.
Theres a guy in the UK that got started making skateboards out of this plastic, and showing people how to do it. Looks like they branched out. https://preciousplastic.com/
Some other companies jumping on the wagon train too. https://wasteboards.com/about/
This could just be more greenwashing, but it's inspiring.
The detergents, water and heat needed for cleaning alone have a higher environmental impact than the few drops of oil needed to make a plastic bottle.
Plastic waste is a big problem for sure, but switching to glass is not the solution.
Why would you want it to? Being inert is a good thing if you put it underground: no water contamination, no gas being released. But why put it in a landfill when you could reuse or recycle it?
> and has limits on how often it can be re-used as well.
What are these limits?
I wonder if there is a country where the laws are so structured that you could class action sue for the value of the time lost.
What I don't understand is why governments and councils continued to go along with this, to collect it all separately and then just send most of it to be burnt or landfill, the cost surely wasn't worth it. My Freedom of information act request to my council about plastic recycling was eye opening, just 3.2% of the plastic put into recycling correctly was actually recycled. They know full well this is pointless and yet it continues.
Just a small fraction - way less that 1/3 - can be used in recycling and it makes the resulting plastic a lot weaker and limited in uses.
I would imagine for something like plastic for food or water bottles might need to be new.
and then there are prions:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/prions-ar...
Plastic just isn't good for reuse, it is not robust.
The Just Salad restaurant chain in NYC will sell you a reusable plastic salad container that you can wash and bring to them to prepare your meal in and there doesn't seem to be any issue with food safety regarding those bowls. It's heavier duty than the clear disposable ones they give you otherwise.
There's certainly a usable life to anything, plastic will degrade over multiple washes and being battered with utensils. I'd expect well used ones would need to be retired but it should still be better than the current situation where they are primarily single use.
I doubt that many people sit down and weigh the pros and cons dispassionately. Most of the time it is politicians making political capital and shrill activists wanting us to "think of the children"; basically, ill-conceived and costly theatre.
In other words, isn’t the use of plastics replaces potential carbon emission via burning of oil?
Unless you mean turning co2 into oil to make plastic or something? Which is itself weird for the energy requirement.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/How-Much-Crude-Oi...
You could make it carbon negative if you converted CO2 gas into plastic, but the energy requirements to do so are enormous. It is the same problem with fertilizer production. We could make synthetic fertilizer from the air, but it requires so much more energy to the already immensely energy intensive production process that you don't actually gain anything.
If the energy needed was all clean energy, and we had enough of it, we could make carbon negative plastics. But that is like ridiculously cheap electricity to the point where residential power costs would be measured in like 50 cents per year, minus power line upkeep.
I was dragged to a recycling plant with a bunch of curious engineers from Google a long time ago. The takeaway was that is was a giant scam- we can't recycle glass, paper is iffy, msot of the stuff is meh, but aluminum is ok. Trash trucks literally pulled up to the plant and removed the "unrecycleable" waste.
We were all so pissed we went into software, when one could literally just put trash into a different container with a green/blue color, and thus purify and bless it, and then send it to a dump.
The part we missed was the ships just taking all this trash to China and Bangladesh.
Just because plastic is a scam doesn't necessarily mean everything else recycled is. Scrap metal is big business. Old rubber tires get shredded and vulcanized into new products.
It’s also not really saving any energy or valuable resources, and glass is heavy and fragile.
(Which of course uses fossil fuels for the bitumen; possibly even more than the equivalent mass of Portland cement concrete.)
I'm not aware of any other significant uses for recycled glass.
The only caveat is colored glass can only really be used to make the same color glass (at least economically).
Metals, Glass and paper are profitable to be recycled, plastic a bit less so, but still doable.
But in EU there are a lot of programs to cut taxes or subsidize recycling so maybe that’s actually working?
If this one was 'safe' until it wasn't, why do you think a newer kind of plastic is going to be safe? Plus now you have bought twice as many containers.
Narrator: they weren't
They had to do a big mea culpa and then scramble to change their product line later in the game than they could have.
And then there was an organic food company (Muir) that dragged their feet on switching the liners for their canned tomatoes and sauces (you may recall that acids make the leaching worse) and pissed a lot of people right off.
Whitney Webb is arguably the premier investigative journalists of our age. Any publication that doesn't source her work is simply not credible.
https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/category/whitney-web...
I get it, plastic can't be recycled profitably and we should be using way less. But one of the reasons its so terrible to recycle is because of how poorly it's sorted.
How much time or money does it cost to not put plastic bottles in the paper bin? How much are you going to earn in that time to donate?
Given that plastic at best gets 1.3 uses, the initial one and then a third of that material can go into a recycled container. That is it. When you compare that to the thousands of reuses of glass bottles we used to do for milk it is really apparent how awful the plastic process is, its barely better than just throw away. This also ignores the fact that huge amounts of the plastic used isn't actually recyclable at all.
The triple whammy to all this is that all over the planet people have been cleaning their plastics with hot water, drying and then separating it into different rubbish bags with separate collections and additional bins etc. All for a giant lie about recycling that was never true. We have wasted substantial energy and time on something that never worked and helped destroy the environment even more because of it.