Plastic producers have known for more than 30 years that recycling is not an economically or technically feasible plastic waste management solution. That has not stopped them from promoting it, according to a new report.
“The companies lied,” said Richard Wiles, president of fossil-fuel accountability advocacy group the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), which published the report. “It’s time to hold them accountable for the damage they’ve caused.”
I worked in packaging for 20 years. A bottle CAN be recycled indefinitely… if it’s made from GLASS.
Source: I worked 8 years for a glass bottle manufacturer.Too bad most of those bottles got replaced with plastic completely disregarding the impact of the environment they are causing. Not to mention that glass also comes from abundant resources like sand and we don’t risk running out of it anytime soon, the same can’t be said for oil.
Not to mention that glass also comes from abundant resources like sand and we don’t risk running out of it anytime soon
Is now a bad time to point out that not only is sand not as an abundant resource as you think, but we’re actually running short of it?
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a39880899/earth-is-running-out-of-sand/
https://theweek.com/news/science-health/960931/why-is-the-world-running-out-of-sand
Isn’t this specifically about sand for construction which needs to be coarse enough? For glass packaging you melt that stuff anyway, SiO₂ is SiO₂. Also I imagine the amount of sand needed for glass bottles would be way smaller than what construction industry uses, even less so if you recycle.
Specifically sand for construction and glass making. Not saying that glass bottles aren’t a better solution than plastic, just that the main resource needed is rarer than initially implied.
Those glass bottles used to cause an awful lot of horrific deaths and injuries during handling, so from a safety perspective, there is no desire at all to return to glass. Glass bottles are also much heavier than plastic, so have a commensurate environmental impact due to the increased consumption of fossil fuels for shipping as well. Fixing the problems with plastic was a big PR win and saved companies millions in law suits and shipping costs. They won’t go back to glass. The answer is probably re-usable plastic containers purchased by the customer and refilled at stores for the same price (or more) than when sold in disposable plastic packaging. Another PR win in the offing, no doubt.
IT would be awesome if you walked into a convenience store and they just had everything on tap. You bring in your own bottle and lunch container fill em up and walk out.
I want a 100% tariff on virgin plastics
Flexible packaging for 10 years here … we recycle and reuse 100% of the scrap we make in house, even our nylon, PP, and EVOH.
Or aluminum cans! Those are very recyclable as well.
Better but not 100%. Glass is the only item 100%. Paper is next.
The sad thing is that we don’t even need 99.9% of this plastic in the first place. People were making disposable packaging, clothing, building materials etc out of non-toxic and biodegradable materials for most of history and it was fine. I seriously detest plastic and wish it was banned/not made unless for exceptional uses e.g replacement heart valves.
Really. For the vast majority of packaging, what the fuck was wrong with just using cardboard? Even if 99.99999999% of the stuff winds up in a landfill, at least cardboard is theoretically renewable and will biodegrade in less than a thousand lifetimes.
Cardboard and paper bags went out of style because of the “save the rainforest” narrative. Even though most paper products are made from trees specifically grown to be harvested for their wood.
That’s why we started using plastic bags at grocery stores, remember?
That was what they told us. The reason they actually did it was because they were giving us the bags and they cost a nickel. where plastic bags cost them 5 for a penny.
Hemp is very versatile and can be used to make similar paper products while growing at a much faster rate, which potentially makes it a good replacement. The association with marijuana is part of what prevented it from catching on though.
Mostly it was the paper and textile industries lobbying against cannabis so that the superior products that can be made with hemp were illegal and didn’t stand in the way of their infrastructure and market segment.
That alone probably fueled the drug war against it as much as the government using it to crack down on any minority they could illustrate as using it more often.
Their green washing BS lists that it has to be harvested more as a negative.
…like lumber doesnt take far more effort per harvest, as well as take longer to grow?
Besides timber the no.1 reason is agricultural land
Pretty much nothing biodegrades in a landfill though.
Then why do they have to deal with so much methane?
I want a 100% tariff on virgin plastics, and a shift of corn and oil subsidies to hemp.
Penn and Teller did an episode of Bullshit on this in 2004. They also concluded that paper and glass recycling were similarly worse that throwing it away. Glass because the energy required to grind, melt, and separate the raw material, and paper because the process uses toxic solvents and produces just as much waste as throwing it away.
Also don’t be fooled by people claiming plastics can be burnt cleanly. That’s another myth that plastic producers push to prevent people reducing their plastic use.
I worked for a glass bottle manufacturer and using cullet (broken glass) lowers the melting point and saves a significant percentage of costs to heat the furnace. Before the lightweight single use bottles became the standard in the 80-90’s, bottles were thicker and heavier, made to be returned, washed and reused.
Yep. I’ve told people about that Bullshit episode so many times. I’ve even shown it to people. They don’t believe anyone would lie about it and since the episode is so old new tech has to have fixed the issue!
If we use more nuclear to create electricity recycling becomes cleaner and cleaner
Also don’t be fooled by people claiming plastics can be burnt cleanly.
Not seeing why not. I did help work on a place that did that. Could you explain what you mean?
best case, you’re releasing extra CO2 into the atmosphere that would have at least been locked up in the landfills/seas of microplastics. worst case, you’re also releasing unstudied and most likely carcinogenic incomplete combustion products.
Yeah but that CO2 is already up here. Why is it better to pull up more oil instead?
As for the incomplete combustion products we had scrubbers.
I’m in favor of not using plastics at all (or at least only used in medical and scientific applications in which it is absolutely necessary). My point was that burning it is trading one set of problems for another.
I’m definitely game for this I have been looking for hemp based clothing, but it is always so pricey.
I’d totally be willing to spend twice as much if it was gonna last twice as long, and i’d spend three times as much if additionally no exploitative practices were involved in the making of the clothing. I’m still over here wearing 10 year old clothes, partially because they have outlasted a lot of my newer clothes, partially because i don’t care about fashion trends, and partially because i get paralyzed thinking about all the injustice that must have occured for this shirt to only cost $20 or whatever. Oh, and plastic-blend fabrics make me itchy and/or sweaty.
I started just buying stuff from Goodwill. At least that way i know sweatshop owners aren’t getting any of my money, and if it ends up being cheaply made i only spent a couple of bucks on it (though that seems to be a decently rare problem, cheaply made items tend not to last long enough to make it to Goodwill in the first place). It takes some digging, but i can almost always find something good. Some of my better finds even had the original tag still on!
I should check out the hemp socks/undies situation, though: can’t get that at Goodwill!
I just want hemp to become commonplace once more and not some expensive niche item
Ok well that isn’t happening.
I have been in waste of all sorts for the bulk of my career. Deal with the world as it is not as I want it to be. So given that we do use plastic the question is what do we do with it. Recycling or burning it for fuel are possible answers. If/when it is pretty much banned then it won’t be a big deal.
Got to say I felt really good working on that project. I built the scrubber system, keeping all the nasty stuff out of the exhaust.
I certainly wasn’t intending to imply your work is not worthwhile, and I apologize if i came off as combative or dismissive. Plastic recycling is such a scam, I do think burning it makes sense in the short term (especially with the scrubbers you talked about, those sound cool and will at least help with the microplastic problem). I guess it’s just that the marketing push to conflate “clean” with “green” has been bothering me recently, and, while perfect should not be the enemy of the good, we’re running out of time (or possible have already run out of time, depending on how depressed i am when you ask me) for incremental change to be sufficient. But, you are right. We can only do what we can to make the world we’re currently in better, not simply will it into perfection overnight (despite how much I hate not being able to do that…).
No worries. I would like to point out that plastic broken down still has uses. Example we have been using it in sewage plants for the past few years with polishing ponds. Basically increases the surface area and gives the bacteria a place to hide out when there is a die off. The rough texture of shredded plastic pieces has a high surface to volume ratio. Decreasing the time it takes to process more poop. Part of the many reasons why modern wastewater treatment plants don’t smell as bad as they used to.
Yeah if you want to know about wet scrubbers just ask. Basically imagine a smokestack with nozzles. A liquid rains down as the gas goes up. The liquid picks up stuff from the gas. Then the liquid is processed. Devil is with the details with this stuff but the concept is over a century old.
For that plant I worked on the plastic was heated up with waste heat from another plant (cogeneration) in a low oxygen environment producing syngas. The syngas is scrubbed and then burned for fuel. Long term the plan for places like that is to convert the gas into liquid fuel.
Now I agree we use way too much plastic I would however like to point out that the same process we used to burn it could be used for pretty much all C-H stuff. Paper, wood, food waste, etc. the vast majority of household waste. According to the EPA IF garbage plants are run well they have the least environmental impact. It is is a big if granted.
Basically give me a trillion dollars and garbage will be solved. You do have a trillion dollars right?
I was thinking about the plastic problem the other day and how humans could go about simply banning plastics cold turkey. I was curious what that would look like.
As a “fun” experiment, go through your place of residence and identify every item made with plastic. Now imagine each item eradicated or reinvented to eliminate plastic.
I think the takeaway is: everything is hopeless so our species should either go back to hunting and gathering or go extinct.
Nah, hunting and gathering is how we got ourselves into this mess. It’s a mentality that leads to fascism and hoarding of resources.
We need to try some things we haven’t before, like meeting the basic needs of every human, and being OK with being OK. Nobody needs a billionaire, and anyone seeking to consolidate that much wealth and power should be stripped of their lands and titles.
What is plastic made of? Oh yeah. Oil.
Throwing it away puts the oil back in the ground.
We have known that less than 2% of plastic has been recycled for years. This isn’t new news.
I remember them talking about how little actually gets recycled in the late 90s. My guess is everybody assumed things had gotten better.
We don’t even have the capacity to recycle paper products appropriately.
We don’t even have the capacity to recycle paper products appropriately.
You burn them or put them in a landfill where they decompose, which turns them into CO2, then elsewhere you grow a tree, which turns it back into wood, to turn into pulp, etc. Paper recycling is pretty much always done. Nobody hermetically seals their paper so it doesn’t even decompose.
The bar is so low that that’s almost not tautological.
Not to excuse the inefficiency, but it’s still better than not recycling at all. I’m curious to know why recycling hasn’t been effective. One of my guesses is that the general public probably don’t care at all to segregate. I mean, how many times have we seen people throw compostable stuff into the recycling bin and vice versa? And not to mention we treat every recyclables as if they’re all the same and put them into one bin. Plastics could not be recycled with paper or cardboard! That being said, countries have different system so there is mismatch with recycling programs across the world. Where I live, we treat every recyclables the same, but in Portugal they properly segregate paper, cans and plastics into separate bins. I think the different systems only makes recycling overall inefficient.
Why couldn’t we switch back to glass as our primary container material? Wasn’t that always fully recyclable?
Apparently we’re running out of sand. That’s going to make the transition to glass harder. I’m not saying I don’t agree because I would definitely prefer glass than plastic.
Good luck shipping stuff in glass packaging. Very heavy, extremely fragile, big, expensive. Glass is only worth it on reusable stuff. We need to find a good material for “throwaway” stuff. Eco plastic made from stuff like bamboo are great starting points. They feel like plastic even mcdonalds is using this material for their throwaway spoons. And it can’t be that expensive or they wouldnt be using it for free spoons
Yet another instance of companies pushing the responsibility and onus onto private citizens. We pay for all the recycling infrastructure via taxes and waste fees. Yet more money thrown down the memory hole of greenwashing.
I really want the packaging industry to fuck all the way off with the use of nonbiodegradable materials. We need a 100% tariff on virgin plastics for the health and safety of everyone
Can’t we just force heavy taxation for the amount of plastics in products? That would force producers to look at alternatives to plastic for packaging.
I am always in shock when I buy some product and it has layers and layers of thick plastic to give the impression of some premium product. And sometimes I don’t even have an alternative product to buy to avoid it since I only have 2 supermarkets in my area.
Yup, Climate Town did a great video on it
I was going to link this if nobody else did. Glad to see it was already posted. It’s a great video
And nothing happened…
And nothing happened…
Have you called your house representative to speak with them about this?
Lol
Lol
Have more of a chance of affecting change than just bitching and moaning about it on Lemmy. /shrug
Edit:
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism. Source
So don’t even try?
You know how ridiculous it looks to try to justify inaction, since nothing will ever affect change (per that stupid link of yours), so why bother?
You’re so busy to try to win an Internet argument, and save face for being called out on something, that you post some kind of really dumb link on something so abstract that no one gives a crap about, instead of just taking a moment and thinking about “hey maybe if I made that phone call my local rep will see that their constituents are interested in the subject and will actually bring it up when they’re in Washington”.
You are part of the problem that you’re bitching and moaning about here on Lemmy.
No. You’re part of the problem. Liberals think they can create radical change in the capitalist system through voting and reforms, when that is empirically not the case.
All of Marx’s economic works, mainly The Capital, seek to show that it is not possible to solve the problems of capitalism through reforms, as Proudhon wanted. Source.
We are under threat from fascism because of liberalism.
The immediate point: those looking for salvation in electoral politics are unlikely to find it. Source.
I do not advocate inaction. I want people to educate themselves and organize. I don’t care about losing internet arguments.
Fine. You win. Now, read and learn of things that might help you better create change.
Organizing can sometimes be as simple as “hey lets all call a senator to pressure them and lock up the phone lines and staff”. The idea that strikes or revolutions are the only things that effect change is silly. Those just hurt the most but they are the hardest to organize as well.
Liberals think they can create radical change in the capitalist system through voting and reforms,
You know, talking to your local house representative isn’t a “liberal” thing to do, it’s an American citizenry thing to do.
And I guarantee you, if enough of us did that, on a regular basis, so that those Representatives are fearful for their positions if they go against the will of their constituents, you would see actual change happen.
You won’t see change if we just complain about things on an Internet forum.
By the way, that Cambridge paper you quoted, is from 2014. Politics has changed since then. And, that paper doesn’t discuss at all about the issue of the citizenry being inactive and not forcing their will onto those they elect. It also mentions where citizenry through special interest groups like labor unions can affect change.
We are not responsible beings when money can be made. It repeats itself over and over again. We cheat the systems we make ourselves, but we’re too dumb, greedy and selfish to think about consequences. We basically don’t give s shit about the planet and life, someone else can take care of that down the line, right?
maybe we can evolve past this selfishness.
John Oliver had a good bit on this too…
Obviously NSFW for anyone unfamiliar with John Oliver:
There’s still thousands if not millions of products out there marketed as microwave safe plastic. There’s no such thing. Get this toxic shit out of contact with your food. Feel free to mark my words for later when the science finally catches up and shows that it’s a major carcinogen.
The thing is, chemists knew it. Nobody wanted to hear it. There are only three things worth recycling: Aluminum, glass, and electronics.
That’s extremely reductionist and inaccurate. Most metals can be recycled easily, not only aluminium.
Aluminium is typically used as is though, while many other metals are used as alloys. I suspect that it makes things much easier when you don’t have to worry about composition.
Note that I don’t really know anything much about metals or recycling, so I might be completely wrong.
Waste metal is basically always going to be purer and easier to deal with than metal ore, so it’s worth recycling nearly anything that it’s worth mining the ore for. Aluminium’s particularly recyclable because it’s expensive to make it from ore, and much less expensive to melt existing aluminium.
Glass is marginal at best for recycling. It’s good for reuse. Cardboard is almost as good as aluminum for recycling
