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Comment by mytailorisrich | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that glass and plastics recycle much better than waxed paper.

The issue with glass is that it requires a lot of energy to produce and recycle, and is heavy, which means more energy to transport it.

Properly recycled plastics may in fact be the most environmentally friendly option ...

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there is an additional complication. while glass requires more energy to "recycle" than plastic, you actually get the original product back. when you recycle glass bottles, you can keep making new bottles from the same material indefinitely. what we do with plastic might be better described as "downcycling"; every cycle outputs lower quality plastic and eventually you end up with unusable material that needs to be disposed of.

That's absolutely fine depending on what disposal means and how the various cycles look like.

What is not useful is to put a blanket 'bad' label on plastics. This is not a simple issue and it requires comprehensive studies on a case by case basis.

Relatedly this came up in a recent discussion I had with someone about plastic straws. Metal straws are more dangerous (stories of impaling the rough of one's mouth, to worse "accidental lobotomies from underneath"), glass straws are inconvenient to carry without breakage and underperform in drinking situations where flexibility is handy. Plastic straws hit a very sweet spot of performance and function fit, the biggest problem of them is that their "cheap as free" ubiquity has created the mindset that they are disposable single use items. For the most part they are no less cleanable and reusable than what we are seeing of metal and glass straws, it's just the deep old psychological trick that they are cheap and disposable keeping them cheap and disposable.

I think in addition to "plastics are bad" another issue we're having now is that "single use is bad". That's also simplistic and I suspect that quite a few of the alternatives being pushed are in fact worse overall.

A single-use item can be made very cheaply, and that includes amount of material, weight, etc. which can be a very efficient use of material and energy overall on the condition (big one) that recycling/disposal is also efficient.

For example, in supermartkets single-use plastic bag were very thin (not much plastic used). They are gone and now if you need a bag they'll give you one (here in the UK) that uses much more plastic/material. It would have been much better to keep those flimsy bags in case you need one, but to charge you enough for them to encourage you to bring your own as much as possible.

> Properly recycled plastic may in fact be the most environmentally friendly option ...

There is no environmentally friendly way to recycle plastics or glass because the require way more energy to recycle than they take to produce. Only aluminum requires more energy to extract (by electrolyzing bauxite) than to recycle so about 30-50% of aluminum sold in the US is recycled. The rest is virgin aluminum that has to be extracted to meet demand - the entire world would use only recycled aluminum if it could.

Plastics are mostly so cheap to produce because they are currently by-products of our massive petroleum processing industries. There are a lot of interesting questions if plastic recycling will become more prevalent/necessary as we transition out of petroleum-based energy models.

We can still safely use fossil fuels for feedstock without burning them for the energy source. Since plastics aren't usually burned, those hydrocarbons won't make it into the atmosphere and can be neutral with a proper power source (I think the oil used for energy makes up the bulk of the oil used by the plastics industry anyway). We also can't use recycled plastic to produce an output that is higher quality than the input because the polymer chains degrade with every heating cycle during the recycling and manufacturing process, so fossil fuels will be valuable as virgin feedstock for a long time after we stop burning the rest.

Sure, the implication remains however that fossil fuels will never again be as cheap to use as feedstock for plastic. That would add more pressure to better reuse/recycle plastics into secondary/tertiary/etc usage streams than the present where fossil fuels are "sort of" seen as abundant/cheap because their primary revenue stream has been so commercially viable up to this point.

I don't predict new plastics and "virgin" plastics will necessarily disappear, but certainly a change in costs of oil would predicate a reevaluation to the market's love affair with new plastics.

Why does recycling glass take more energy than producing it? That sounds dubious to me.

it sounds like that's not true: https://grist.org/article/pain-in-the-glass/

That article is very wishy washy with the details but this is the key quote:

> And because the theoretical energy savings of glass recycling appear to be relatively slim, it could mean that actual savings depend on lots of devilish details — how far the glass is shipped, how dispersed are the neighborhoods from which glass is collected, whether people make special car trips to recycling centers, etc.

Glass recycling is only efficient when most parameters are just right to make it economical. That includes local supply and demand of the right kind of inputs/outputs to reduce transportation and collection costs, whether a truck collects the recyclables or if homeless people do it, etc.

The margin for glass recycling is razor thin compared to aluminum so the former is rarely as environmentally friendly as the latter (although I'm excited to see what newer furnace tech can do)

Having consulted for a major glass manufacturer I can assure you that recycled glass is a coveted resource. It's easier to work with and it's less energy intensive. I wasn't involved much in that side of the business so I don't know the details but I was given tours and cullet (recycled) glass was a BIG deal.

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