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Comment by akiselev | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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)

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