Just 10% of U.S. plastic gets recycled. A new kind of plastic could change that
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
That industry WANTS us to keep thinking about and talking about recycling. Don't be sucked in - recycling is the distraction that they want you to think about.
Recycling is NOT the answer. The answer is to stop making the endless flow of single use plastic.
If you want to fix this problem, start laying the blame at the feet of the "garbage brands" - the companies and brands that buy the single use plastic. We need to start with the big, obvious targets like Coca Cola, and we need to associate their precious logo and trademarked red swirl with ruined beaches and reefs and oceans. That's when change will happen - when those big brands come to be tightly associated with garbage.
And as for the developing nations who have been increasing their middle class with affordable packaging and plastic products? Eh, screw 'em, right?
/sarcasm
I'm only using this to illustrate how you went right into the "industry bad, four legs good" mantra of the pro-green movement without regard to an alternative that would keep or raise the quality of living for people the world over.
Fact of the matter is if it weren't for plastics, the everyday products that we all consume would either cost way more, or be so expensive that quite a few of us would never get to use them.
Stew on that before you jump to "ban all plastics".
And I simply don't believe that it's not possible to create a highly standardised, reusable washable container system.
These sorts of objections are what the packaging industry will scream till it's lungs fall out because the packaging industries profits and maybe existence depends on spewing out infinite garbage.
That industry needs to say things like "well you're hurting the third world if you stop us spewing infinite garbage".
I don't believe it.
We really should. Plastic packaging is only cheap because the environmental cost is externalised. And reused glass / cardboard is not even that much more expensive. Long-term to medium-term plastic packaging is going to be a lot more costly.
That's fine. When the choice is not having some luxury items vs total biosphere collapse, I'll side with the former. I guess you'd rather keep sipping your Diet Coke while the world burns.
Cardboard, paper, bamboo, corn starch... the list of sustainable, biodegradable materials goes on and on. It's only cheap laziness that makes you believe the choice is either we have single-use plastic for everything or we give up affordable products.
People are working on this problem already, and you'd better believe a lot more would happen if government took appropriate steps to tax and/or ban rubbish plastics.
Also eat less fish - the seas will be healthier and there will be a lot fewer nets, ropes, hooks and floats washing up and fewer birds tangled up in them too.
I'm not one for sharing Facebook videos but if you want to see impact: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1727552737379394
And the manufacturers/retailers need to stop claiming that they are only responding to "market demand" - in numerous decades of buying stuff, no-one has ever asked me what my packaging preferences are. There'll come a time when we can't recycle our way out of our own mess - what will be Big Pollutions smug solution be then?
Possible scenario: People will tell you they prefer low-waste packaging when you ask them in a survey. But when they're at a store trying to pick out an item, they still end up perceiving the item in the small paper box as being lower quality than the one in the giant clear plastic clamshell whose contents are clearly visible. So, regardless of what they said they prefer, in reality they might still tend to go for the high-waste packaging.
People, in general, are bad at long term thinking, and they aren't going to pour hours of research into what type of packaging they are going to use. People also think that their singular actions are not going to have that much effect on the bigger picture. While this may be true, everyone cannot think this way.
That cost is, depending on the market, about $80/tonne. Pricing in the cost of disposal would add about 0.04 cents to the cost of a plastic bag and 0.24 cents to the price of a large bottle of soda.
Plastic is not a problem. It has never been a problem and it never will be a problem. Eliminating plastic packaging is at best a complete waste of time and at worst totally counter-productive.
Climate change is a catastrophe; we have already passed the point of no return, and can now only choose how severe that catastrophe will be.
http://ec.europa.eu/environment/waste/studies/pdf/eucostwast...
https://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/resources/2e935b...
Why is there plastic in every corner of the planet[0]?
Why is there trash covered islands that humans don't live on and should be pristine[1]?
Maybe banning plastics is not the answer and responsible disposal is the correct answer, but there is currently a very large plastics problem that must be addressed.
[0]https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-47947235
[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2017/05/15/henderson-i...
You are right, but I suppose you mean "we", like in "we the people".
The worst packaging I ever saw was a chicken curry and rice meal in 2 compartments, each covered in non-recyclable clear film. In addition, the rice container was non-recyclable while the chicken container was (!) We now hear statements that black plastic containers are not always recyclable, so maybe I should have just thrown the whole lot in the garbage anyway...
In a way it's a shame, in a way it's an annoyance, but realistically it seems possible only a fraction of that black plastic was ever truly being recycled anyway.
Might be better to switch to aluminum. The recycling system appears more advanced.
> At least 90% of today’s food cans have replaced linings that previously contained the controversial chemical bisphenol-A (BPA), according to the Can Manufacturers Institute. This is in reaction to market demands for more options in food safety.
> Food can linings now are typically made from acrylic and polyester. And all new materials are extensively tested and are cleared by regulatory agencies before being sold in the market. Linings are necessary to prevent the can from corroding, provide a barrier to bacteria and maintain food quality.
I admit I've not researched the topic much, and would love to learn that safer materials are used now.
Available research has left us with a reasonable idea of the bounds on BPA toxicity, and seems to indicate that, in the amounts you get from modern cans, the effect, while non-zero, is probably quite small, possibly to the point of being negligible in the grand scheme of things.
For example, the bacteria and yeast that ferment food also tend to produce all sorts of known carcinogens and toxins. I'd personally expect the fermentation by-products present in my sauerkraut to have a much bigger effect on my health than the BPA that's used to line the can it's packaged in. That seems to be borne out in the science, too, insofar as the health risks associated with eating pickles are readily observable in humans at normal consumption levels, but it seems to take obscenely large megadoses of BPA to make a lab rat sick.
Available research has also left us with a reasonable idea of the health impact of air pollution, including from diesel truck exhaust. And I would guess that the health impact from the extra air pollution produced in shipping heavier glass containers instead of lighter aluminum ones is greater than that of the BPA dose you'd get from cans' linings.
I for one would welcome a switch back to reusable soda and beer bottles that were collected. (see Oregon bottle deposits)
Some music festivals use '10 empty plastic cups = 1 free drink' to reduce the amount of single-use plastic trash laying around. It's simple economics.
Aluminium cans are some of the best items to be recycled, as recycling one takes only 5% of the energy needed for creating one anew. This should be reflected as a higher deposit of course, to get high return rates. I think Finland achieves nowadays over 95% return rate for aluminium cans.
No. It's worse than plastic, even if the bottles are re-used rather than recycled.
http://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/Final%20Report%20Doo...
Maybe go for the aluminum can instead. In the age of single-stream recycling, glass doesn't get recycled all that much more than plastic does. (Some sources suggest it gets recycled even less.) Worse, it tends to render other materials unrecyclable when it shatters and contaminates them with shards.
Also, the can weighs less, which means less pollution incidental to transportation.
I sometimes wonder if i should crush all of my glass bottle before tossing them in the trash; or to "recycle" them more quickly, drop them somewhere in deep water; though I suppose if it were near a continental shelf, it would be even better.
I demand my frozen vegetables are packaged in plastic bags. This is the standard packaging for good reason. There is no other material that combines the flexibility, lightness, and waterproofness of plastic. Plastic bags are not easily recyclable, but very little material is needed to make one. I think it's a worthwhile tradeoff to send a few grams of plastic to landfill (where the carbon stays out of the atmosphere), or burn it for energy recovery, to avoid spending far more fossil fuel on transport and wasted production.
Banning plastic packaging without thinking about the consequences will do more harm than good.
It would not. If I (and frozen vegetable buyers in general) switch to buying fresh vegetables, the market will increase production of fresh vegetables to compensate.
>shop somewhere closer to home
I already shop as close to home as possible.
Every grocery store talks about "shrink" in their Form 10K. They buy extra fruits, vegetables, and meat so that the consumer has a full shelf or display to select from. XX% of that goes unsold, gets processed into prepared food (chopped fruits/vegetables, etc.), and then what's unsold from that gets tossed or donated.
Farmer's Markets have shrink too -- and the lack of climate control means that spoilage happens on the order of days, rather than weeks.
Paper boxes are perfectly suitable for frozen veg. They stack perfectly. Less flexible, I'll give you that. But a compostable box versus plastic seems like a win to me.
I suspect the reason manufacturers and grocers like plastic is that in a paper box, poor handling is dead obvious, because if the produce partially thaws in transit the box gets damp and is a telltale for poor temperature control.
Only if you coat the inside with plastic, thereby making the paper non-recyclable.
Instead of paper boxes, it would be nice if it became the norm to go into stores with our own containers to put our food in instead of using store-provided, single-use packaging. It's ok if they're plastic as long as they're intended and made to be used and reused for years.
How would you prefer Coca Cola get their product to you? I suppose don't drink Coke or anything else you need to ship in a bottle at volume to prevent pollution when people throw things in the ocean.
In general, I think we will find more success in pragmatic alternatives that make sense in the market (which could obviously include applying the cost of externalities like pollution on companies that use single-use plastics) so a recycling option that allows for more efficient re-use to reduce the overall volume created seems like it would only help the cause?
- Extracting aluminum from ore is very expensive
- That makes recycled aluminum cheaper than fresh aluminum
- Aluminum is a metal, you can melt it down to burn off or separate any impurities
None is those is true of plastic.
Yes. And I have a silly question to ask. For plastic bags, why cant we make them only last one year and it will start to decompose itself. Making it an issue for Supply Chain management rather than recycling. I specifically use bags here because I am not too sure if the same could be possible for plastic bottles, you don't want your bottles to have 1% chance of self decompose before you drink it.
The problem is, people are lazy, we want convenience. That is why sometimes I still use plastic bags.
Reuse, not decompose, because it's still shit you're dumping into the environment.
Do you really want unlimited paper bags in the ocean, dissolved so they are not visible and therefore not creating outrage but still fucking the environment?
When i visited Germany you bought a bag if you didn't have one and it seemed everyone had them. In the US grocery chains knock a nickel off your total for all the bags you don't use. I don't think saving 20-40 cents is a huge motivator for people. If all grocery chains charged $1 per bag used, behavior may change.
Ideally we should try to motivate people into proper behavior and make it part of the cultural expectation.
It's important to remember the order of operations are listed in order of importance. 1. Reduce 2. Reuse 3. Recycle
Sometimes i forget mine too, we're human but i reuse those when i can and stick them in my car, backpack etc.
Re-usable carrier bags are worse for the environment under any realistic scenario.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
You clearly care about the environment, so do understand that plain paper is as biodegradable as tree leaves. Little bugs of all sizes happily eat it like leaves. It will never accumulate in the oceans.
There are problems with how it can be produced, but it can be one of the most ecologically advantageous and sustainable materials possible.
We have plenty of space (absent NIMBY zoning issues) and the capability to build ever safer landfills.
I don't care about paper bags in the ocean. I don't care about plastic bags in the ocean. Neither has the capacity to seriously affect the functioning of marine ecosystems on any reasonable timescale. If we don't seriously reduce our carbon emissions now, most marine ecosystems will collapse due to acidification and deoxygenation.
Plastic is a useful material that is frequently the least energy-intensive (and by extension carbon-intensive) option, but that's largely besides the point. It simply doesn't matter. If you think it does matter, you have grossly under-estimated the effects of climate change. Our house is on fire and we're too busy arguing about the mess on the lawn to put it out.
What's the question? Because I can tell you right now that plunging us back into a world of expensive commodities won't be accepted by most consumers. Not in the developed world, and not in developing nations.
This seemed the norm in East African in general.
In my opinion, the place where we need to lay blame for single-use plastic are people who eat take-out food, and people who go to a restaurant and ask for a take-home box to avoid wasting food. Wasted food that goes to compost or landfill is benign. But go to any small or medium sized business that serves food, and you will see stacks and stacks of single use plastic containers. Go to stores that market to small business owners (Costco, Smart & Final) and you'll see dozens of pallets of single-use plastic trays, plates, cups, all for the buying. The sheer scale of single-use food packaging is mind-boggling. The movement against plastic straws at fast-casual and upscale restaurants is fine, but those restaurants usually have reusable glass or metal cups, and we need a real solution for restaurants that serve "regular people".
You aren't wrong about all the waste produced by that process, but I think the better answer is to make portions smaller, not to throw away food as if food waste isn't also a huge problem.
No, no, a thousand times no.
Farming is massively carbon-intensive. That handful of leftovers might have resulted in hundreds of grams of CO2 emissions during its production, processing and distribution. Plastic just sits there in landfill, or maybe chokes a sea turtle if someone tosses it in a watercourse. Atmospheric CO2 is causing the greatest crisis in the history of humanity; ocean acidification will likely make the sea turtle extinct within a century.
Using a few grams of plastic to avoid hundreds of grams of CO2 is a huge win.
While we certainly should try to minimize unnecessary packaging, whatever we use should absolutely be recycled as raw material whenever possible. Recycling plastics is difficult because it is such a wide term, but if comparable countries recycle five times as much then surely improvement is possible. Hate on plastic bottles all you want but when 90% is recycled, at comparably low cost, it's not clear what the alternatives are.
The obvious alternative to single use (recyclable) packaging is re-filling containers. That's what everyone did half a century ago. But the food supply chain is rather wasteful as it is and sealed packaging was revolution when it came. Producing food for humans has huge energy costs by the use of fertilizers and diesel. It might seem counter intuitive but burning plastic containers is always better than burning wasted food.
External cost now internalised.
In fact, new companies that are environmentally friendly (refills, product last years, etc) would be on a competitive level with former extremely cheap single use disposable companies.
Downside? Increased consumer costs and decreased shareholder value.
Once a government adopts this or plans to adopt this, expect to see massive and intense lobbying by packaging/consumable industry. In Australia, Coca Cola spent a lot to fight container deposit schemes which I think is a bandaid solution. The above solution could work with anything, not just plastics.
The article fails to describe whether this plastic behaves like polyethylene, which can be pliable and flexible, or polypropylene, which is rigid and brittle.
Or any of the other dozens of varieties of plastics, each with their own specific use in this modern world of ours.
Every time I overhear someone at a party or gathering giving their half-baked description of a story like this I have to roll my eyes. There's no "cure-all" sustainable green plastic that can replace the variety we make from natural gas. There just isn't. And even if we were to switch to bioplastics derived from plants, it would still be too energy-intestive to be cost-effective.
A big part of tackling all of these environmental issues is that certain things are going to be more expensive. If it cost 10$ to make certain a disposable water bottle makes it to the right place a bottle of water should cost about 11$. Same with packaging, this will of course change consumer habits, and make people think twice.
And that's just cost. The reason I'm stressing about virgin plastic over recycled is also in consideration of the electricity you use to recycle, the water costs, transportation costs, human labor, ect.
The same applies to glass and cardboard. That sand isn't coming from thin air. The cardboard wasn't made from hopes and dreams. These are physical commodities which are either as finite as natural gas (sand) or require space, water and nutrients to grow (trees for paper for cardboard). Yes, paper is biodegradable and plastic is not, but you're spending a LOT of time and energy to make something that could be better served quickly via plastic.
[0] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/03/great-pacific-ga...
The meal kit industry is particularly insidious for that reason. They invoke environmental concerns heavily in their advertising, but those individually plastic wrapped ingredients obliterate whatever incremental environmental benefits there are from organic ingredients or substituting meat for vegetables.
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/india-plastic-wast...
EDIT: spelling
Food in the cafeteria (I have seen the well hated name Aramak in a few places there) is served in single-use take-out containers, even if you explicitly tell them it is "for here" not "to go", because the cafeteria works have no (clean) plates at their stations. Cutlery is also plastic, since they removed the silverware a few weeks ago after too many complaints that it had been poorly cleaned. The disk washers are now busy taking out mountains of trash, instead of cleaning reusable items.
Once dinner time comes around most of my colleagues eat take out, that is put in plastic lined paper in the best case and styrofoam in the typical case. And even if it is a single item, it will be in a plastic bag or two, along with a large handful of napkins, ten tiny sachets of bbq and hot sauce and three straws, even if no single drink is included.
Today I looked in the fridge at work and saw precooked hardboiled eggs in a plastic bag.
- Sad American
One question is what is the price to create this new plastic, sure the output "recyclable" is more valuable because it's more broken down - so the process of decomposition towards usable components is improved.
You actually hit the nail on the head better than I did. Virgin resin is cheaper than recycled plastic. Which means that manufacturers have an incentive to buy fresh plastic pellets over more-costly recycled material (which is usually of inferior quality anyway).
That's why lots of products you see will say "made from X% recycled parts". A bottle that's 100% recycled just sucks compared to a fresh one.
(edited for punctuation)
There are thousands, maybe millions of different plastics in existance because they all fill a different niche, and price is just one variable in those equations.
Although I guess the point is to replace single use plastics, but that still represents a large variety of things.
It's easy to spend more on "sustainable" alternatives to plastic when you have more disposable income than you know what to do with. But if you're a low-income working class family, commodities like single-use plastics are a godsend.
I'm not saying pollution is not an issue. I'm not saying the plastics industries don't have an agenda to make more plastic. What I'm saying is, you're all blind to the solutions that plastics provide to people who ARE NOT rich white Americans.
This open source project is interesting: http://www.metabolizer.org/
- It uses biodegradable materials to create burnable gas - The has to run a generator - The generator to power a plastic shredder - The shredded plastic pieces are used by a 3D printer - The 3D printer (also powered by generator) can print materials out of recycled plastics
Right now, so much trash is being sent in unclosed containers all around increasing general and specifically ocean pollution. Microplastics are a problem and likely to become bigger over time. Not just the US, but a lot of places really need investment in trash infrastructure in general.
That doesn't even touch on electronic waste. I'd love to see a law requiring unlocking codes for mobile devices that have active security flaws that have been fixed for over a year, without the update released to the device. At least then you could get a longer tail life out of a lot more devices.
Isn't most plastic a byproduct of oil/gas use anyway? All the same, would love to see the disposable snack/beverage companies held more accountable to the litter and waste their packaging brings. The problem is that too many people don't care... and too many others are tired of hearing about it. Divisive conversations and politics doesn't help here.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hannahleung/2018/04/21/five-asi...
Curious to hear what others think / be enlightened. Even if I move to the suburbs, to my knowledge waste management companies rely on you packaging your trash nicely in plastic bags, so I'm not sure what to do...
There are of course the obvious ones, like those flimsy bags for loose produce, and I try to avoid those. Any advice for the non-obvious cases though?