Properly designed items should be easier, cheaper and quicker to recycle than to start with a mining step. One of the important bits here is now the various materials are joined, specifically, gluing is a barrier to recycling, as are various surface coatings. This is where I think we could make a very quick step in the right direction by designing not just for manufacturing costs but also for the cost of breaking the produced item up into its constituent elements.

Penalties for the fraction that can not be reliable returned to its pre-manufacture state, as well as an automatic obligation to take back and recycle any product produced.

One of the comments made was that consumers assume recycling works as a kind of magical "Get out of Pollution Free" card. In reality, the system we have only works if there are companies that want to actually use the recycled materials. If there are none, it just gets landfilled.

I bring this up because one of the things mentioned was Pringles cans. Everyone thinks they are recyclable. But the can is two sheets of cardboard glued over a thin sheet of aluminum. The paper companies don't want the cans because they don't want to somehow deglue the cardboard from the aluminum (time and cost expensive to process), and ditto for the aluminum people. So the cans just get thrown out.

In fact some people make arguments that recycling programs do more harm than good, because they allow consumers to alleviate their guilt about waste without actually helping the environment. The cynic may say that's intentional.

Consumers were told that by the local authorities who put these recycling programs in place. They were not told that behind the scenes it all goes to the landfill anyway. If they knew the truth they might actually make more effort to reduce the amount of stuff they throw out and be more aware of wasteful packaging.

Shrinkage. It's to the point where you need a screwdriver to get a kid's toy car out of the box.

This might not be suitable for a Pringles can, but at least suitable for glass containers and bottles.

Coca-Cola bottles had their originating bottling plant stamped into the bottom.

A plastic soft-drink bottle https://www.polisanhellas.com/products-pet-preform.html is about 30 grams of extremely chemically inert material, produced for a tiny energy cost from about 30 grams of crude oil, that goes to a landfill and stays there for, probably, millennia. So a single barrel of oil makes about 5,000 plastic bottles. Each bottle embodies about 1200 kJ of energy from oil that would otherwise have been burned. So whatever the externalized costs of drilling, refining, and shipping a barrel of oil are, it's about a five-thousandth of that. If you incinerate the bottle in the end, you get that saved-up energy back, at the risk of producing pollution from other things in the furnace.

Of course, blow-molding the bottle takes energy; you have to heat those 30 g of plastic up to 125°, but that only takes about another 4.5 kJ per bottle. Another similar amount was spent to injection-mold the preform. The actual work of blowing is even less, under 0.1 kJ. Similarly for shipping, molding machine operation, machine maintenance, catalysts, and so on.

(A potential hole in this analysis is that I don't really know the energy costs of the whole terephthalic acid synthesis and polymerization process. They can't be enormously higher than the cost of molding, but they might be a lot lower or a little higher.)

Contrast that with washing a glass bottle. You can't really wash a 500-mℓ glass bottle with less than about a liter of water, and to sterilize it you need that water to be at least 60°, preferably more like 90°. Heating water from 25° to 60° takes 35 calories per gram; at 4.2 J/cal, that's 150 kJ.

(I think in actual fact the energy to reuse a glass bottle is about an order of magnitude higher than this.)

You also have to take into account the energy to make the glass bottle: you're heating 500 grams of raw materials (or maybe cullet) up past, typically, 1200°, which takes maybe 700 kJ, depending on the materials' specific heats and enthalpies of fusion. This gets amortized over the number of reuses of the bottle.

What about disposal? Proper disposal of a 500-gram glass bottle uses 15 times as much landfill space as a 30-gram plastic bottle (just as it costs 15 times as much to ship) but in any case there is no shortage of landfill space, and neither type of bottle occupies an appreciable percentage of existing landfills. Improper disposal for glass bottles is much worse, as you know if you've ever stepped on a broken glass bottle underwater at the beach. Chemically, both materials are very inert and nontoxic. (Microplastics are almost entirely from washing synthetic fibers, not from plastic bottles.)

So, making a plastic bottle takes on the order of 10 kJ of energy, while washing a glass bottle for reuse takes more like 150 kJ, and similarly shipping glass around externalizes 15× as much of each cost. Neither one has significant disposal externalities, except in the rare case of improper disposal, in which case broken glass is dangerous.

The crucial question, then, is how you weight the raw-material extraction externalities for the plastic bottle, and whether you incinerate it; because if drilling, refining, and shipping oil is the most significant externality (oil spills, bribing Nigerian officials, arresting Native American protestors asserting a sovereign right to block the Keystone pipeline, US invasions of Iraq), then the plastic bottle is about 7× worse. Unless you incinerate it instead of burying it in a landfill, in which case suddenly its oil consumption drops to zero, making it much better again. On the other hand, if the most significant externality is something related to burning oil or other fuels, like global warming, washing the glass bottle is 15× worse than throwing it out and replacing it with a plastic bottle. Unless your hot-water heater is solar or geothermal. Then again, you can run a blow-molding plant on solar energy, too.

(There are other questions of pollution; both glassmaking and PET-making can produce pollution, but it's not intrinsic to either process, so which process produces more pollution is largely a matter of how mismanaged it is. However, by virtue of dealing with 15× larger quantities of material, glassmaking is at a disadvantage here.)

A tiny nitpick. I'm quite sure you can use that same liter of hot water to wash multiple bottles. And even then any facility that washes bottles at scale would use the leftover heat from waste water to heat the fresh water.

One quibble: > Proper disposal of a 500-gram glass bottle uses 15 times as much landfill space as a 30-gram plastic bottle (just as it costs 15 times as much to ship)

It only costs 15x as much to ship if weight is the driving factor in shipping. For a lot of surface shipping methods, dimensional measures govern the shipping prices either entirely or substantially. (No one is flying empty bottles as part of their supply chain.) It might be 2x as much, but it’s not going to be 15x if both pallets of bottles take up the same space.

Also glass is denser than PET, so 15 times as much mass is really only like 6 times as much volume in the landfill.

Is it? After a short time the glass is smoothed by the sand/sea/rock and is fairly low impact.

Of course there are natural sharp rocks, too, just like there's natural asbestos and natural hydrogen sulfide.

https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/282173/1-s2.0-S221282711...

So my point stands, we could see significant environmental improvements if we mandated standard glass bottle and container sizes.

Something like: Food, Carbonated Liquid, Beer, Wine.

Sizes: 150ml, 300ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1L, 1.5L, 2L.

It still is in India (at least sometimes). I suspect rising labour costs killed this industry, though. Why take on a logistical challenge you don't have to?

Obviously we should expect energy/material loss when recycling (meaning, each time something is recycled it should require inputs), but perhaps we can get those numbers down more and more as time goes on.

They make you separate plastics because in some areas they burn the plastics separately in ways that attempt to reduce the pollution from burning it.

I also watched that video, it's just so depressing. The amount of externalized costs we incur is simply staggering.

When I see someone throw something away, or when I throw something away myself, I just think: "Everything you've ever thrown away is somewhere."

Coarse shred

(duration???) Submerge within an artificial swamp rich in bacteria to digest the biological components; ideally capture the outputs from this loop for fuel or other bio processes.

When completed a rich 'ore' of mixed metal shavings should be the result, and easier to recycle.

So as nice as this idea sounds it is not really workable in practice.

The way it does work is indeed, shredding, then float tanks to separate the lighter materials from the heavier ones, then some more stepwise improvements (for instance: to separate out the steel from other metals) and finally compaction and what comes out the other end gets passed on to companies willing to pay for it, and if there is no market, which get paid to deal with the resulting sludge/scraps/goo.

Recycling is not nearly as orderly a process as manufacturing is, and there will always be a residue that simply can not be dealt with economically. Properly designed packaging takes that into account at the time of manufacture to ensure that the residue is as small a fraction as possible.

This is a hard problem, and in the longer term, next to climate change one of the hardest ones that we will need to tackle. The good news is that we could start today.

More realistically, there isn't really any risk of running out of landfill space for product packaging at anything similar to current consumption levels. If a person ate a 50-gram can of Pringles and a 30-gram bottle of Coke every day, they'd have 29 kg of packaging at the end of the year, or 29 liters, which compact down to a 40-cm-diameter sphere.

I used to periodically visit an ecovillage that handled their (much smaller than normal) packaging waste in this way: they would tamp it into two-liter Coke bottles with a piece of rebar as a tamper, and when the bottle was full, they would cap it, plaster it over with adobe, and use it as a construction brick. A 6 m × 18 m house with 300-mm-thick walls 3 m tall contains 43 m³ of wall volume which can be mostly filled with this kind of stuff: 150 person-junk-food-years of packaging.

8 billion people doing this would produce 23 million cubic meters of packaging per year, which sounds like a lot, but it's an 800-meter-diameter sphere. Lake Superior is 12000000 million cubic meters, so it would take those 8 billion people half a million years to fill it up with this packaging, if carefully weighted to keep it from floating, of course.

So, I don't think recycling packaging is a particularly bad problem. If by "in the longer term" you mean over the next hundred million years, I do agree that we'll need to solve it. But I don't think it's a particularly difficult problem at that timescale. For the next few million years, we have plenty of space to just store the stuff until recycling it is profitable.

I'd have expected that simply melting down the stuff would burn off all the organic contaminants (paper/plastic/glue and food residue), leaving the aluminium and sludge that can be scooped off.

Of course you need a purification step after dealing with scrap, but aluminum scrap, even when contaminated is quite valuable, basically the price is a function of how pure it already is.

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

The difference is whether the state will be allowed to profit from its own resources, or is the nation under the thumb of a more militarily powerful nation and there exploited by foreign capital. We let Norway exploit its resources its own way, in other nations we have interfered mightily to better our own interests at the expense of the populations of the nation that owns the oil resource.

So the default assumption is that if you do your job, the tax is more of a deposit. If you don't do your job, you, or rather your customers are still paying, and your customers can drive down the cost of your competitors by helping increase their tax offset if you make it a hassle to return things at yours.

By creating the presumption that you ought to be able to collect and recycle most of the recyclable products you sell (return rate for cans and bottles is well over 90%), the tax/deposit can be set fairly high. High enough and you create secondary businesses taking the hassle of returns for those who can't be bothered (don't want to return your bottle in Norway? odds are someone who needs the money will fish it out of the trash to collect the deposit), and there's a strong incentive for businesses to take back anything they sell subject to such taxes/deposits and deliver them to whichever scheme is approved to offset against their tax bill.

This sounds relatively close in principle to an implementation of what you're suggesting. with penalties etc. implemented basically by tallying up the tax per unit sold and then reducing the liability per unit recycled, so the penalty is simply the default if you fail to recycle.

The cost needs to be high enough to either get really high return rates and/or to cover the costs to society of undoing whatever damage is done by what is left.

Note that a key part is also that the most convenient option offered to comply needs to be to participate in recycling.

In Norway you hand bottles or cans in pretty much anywhere that sells them. Which means most people just bring them in next time they go to the grocery store.

If you require people to bring them to special recycling locations you should expect return rates to plummet.

I feel like so much could be fixed by just making things cost their true price.

I'm not trying to shit on the idea because I think we genuinely need to do something but I can't come up with any rational way to calculate the true cost of limited resources.

At the same, I don't think doing nothing at all a good alternative. If anything I don't even think this is the biggest obstacle. That's probably the fact that literally no country in the world wants to volunteer to put themselves at a competitive disadvantage.

I think that it has been established that the cost of packaging is smaller than the marginal increase in profits from greater sales (from the perspective of the manufacturers and retailers).

In theory, an AR-heavy economy could displace packaging costs with AR facsimiles overlaid on generic (even standardized) packaging, but I don't think that would be a win, energy-wise.

Like if you buy natural gas from a responsibly run source that does a good job and has low emissions and I buy it from some terrible company that does a shite job, do we pay the same tax per unit of gas consumed?

For example, with carbon taxes on gasoline, we can calculate what the average person consumes in terms of gasoline per year, and then calculate the outliers (people with super-efficient cars and people with gas guzzlers). Then, we establish some reasonable maximum that we think we can get away with surcharging the guzzlers, and establish a gradient. The average person is given back a tax break that corresponds to the surcharge they'll pay at the pump, so it's a wash for them; the guzzler gets the tax break too but ends up paying more, incentivizing everyone to be the efficient driver who basically gets a bonus.

I think you could do the same for any kind of tax; establish the baseline for resource consumption efficiency for a particular recyclable commodity (and it will have to be per-commodity to make any sense at all); set up the incentive gradient so that companies producing more-recyclable-than-average goods end up getting free cash for doing so, hopefully offsetting the other costs associated with this, and companies producing things that are harder or impossible to recycle end up paying more.

The end result is that the product for the consumer that is more recyclable should end up making more financial sense. Instead of pinning the gradient the way you do for gas (literally, 'what they can get away with and still get elected'), you'd pin it at a level where it incentivizes companies themselves to be purchasing recycled materials instead of new ones.

All of the above is predicated on the material in question being able to be recycled without requiring more energy input / producing a higher carbon footprint to recycle than acquiring the original raw product is. There are some materials that it's just not worth to recycle, most of the time; plastic is definitely on that side for now, like it or not.

Right-to-repair friendly products would thus get an immediate advantage owing to their ease of disassembly.

In economics we talk about externalities, or costs tht are burdened by society but not the producer, making prices artificially low.

I would love to see some mechanism in place to make sure that firms bare the cost of externalities. In this case, maybe firms are required to fund the cost of recycling their products which would incentive them to reduce the cost of recycling.

Yes the cost of products will go up, but in a direct relationship to removing the cost to society and making sure products are properly priced.

I'm purposefully simplifying this because the actual methodology to make this happen is incredibly complicated.

If someone told me all this $3T extra spending in the US was to offset the costs of producing a more Circular Economy then I'd agree it would be a future generation's money well spent for good reasons.

Plastic recycling has pretty much been a multi-decade lie. Let's not bone ourselves with Lithium.

Who am I kidding, humans are great at boning themselves.

We really ought to be incinerating things at 3000C, but so far we haven't been able to engineer machines to do this without melting themselves...

A typical Lithium-Ion cell contains Aluminum, steel, possibly a protection circuit (fibreglass, electronics components), carbon, copper, an electrolyte with lithium in solution and quite probably other elements besides.

This is BS. Modern separators are microns thin.