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Comment by jb775 | Hacker News Reader

Not food, but the plastic containers food comes in. Big-plastic essentially created the recycling industry purely as a smokescreen, and everyone is still believing it. Barely any plastics actually get recycled, and it creates tons of pollution during production and disposal. And who knows if any chemicals seep into the food.

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I used to feel bad when I had a plastic container of a type that my town didn't recycle. Then China stopped accepting a lot of our "recyclables", a move that put a lot more scrutiny on the industry and what really happens. Apparently paper is only a little better, especially since 2018. Glass & aluminum though are supposedly well utilized, though notable in that their raw materials already require-- and can sustain-- being molten down to liquids in a process that gets rid of the dirty bits we leave on them.

Aluminum is actually quite profitable to recycle. The aluminum smelting process uses a ton of electricity, re-melting is much cheaper.

Amazing statistics: 75% of all aluminium ever produced is still in use today.

https://aluminiumtoday.com/news/international-aluminium-inst...

That makes me disproportionately happy.

Really? Does this number account for aluminium foil too? In France it's long been said that this should be thrown with the non-recyclable. Is France an outlier in this regard? Does that mean aluminium foil is a negligible amount?

My guess is that aluminium foil is indeed negligible in the big picture. But of course, I don't really know how accurate the original statistic is, either, nor do I know the distribution of aluminium for different uses. I imagine a lot of the metal is to be found in aircraft, which are of course pretty long-lived objects.

Aluminium is one of the best recyclable materials very low losses and initial energy output is multiple times higher for pristine material than one in recycling.

I suppose copper and steel aren't too bad in that regard either.

Glass, at least in the UK, just seems to be broken into aggregate to be used in building roads:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1907207.stm

I believe they’ve given it the catchy name glassphalt

Really we know that chemicals absolutely do seep into the food... but we don’t know if they are harmful yet. All plastics shed & leech.

How could it be that all plastic leach and yet some plastics remain in nature for thousands of years before they decompose?

Plastics absorb and then leach several compounds used to make the plastic itself, e.g. BPA. Plastics in general act as attractors for any number of harmful toxins. So yes, both can be true.

We could also burn the plastic for peaker plant electricity. Good short term solution considering all the factors.

Why we don’t I have no idea. The fuel is basically free. And the co2 impact is much less than building energy storage.

As a petroleum product, wouldn't the co2 impact be very similar to something like coal or gasoline?

Probably closer to coal than gasoline. Plus You have to factor in the fact that coal plants are designed to be most efficient with the kind of coal they are built to burn and with burning plastic waste it's usually some kind of a mix, so there's a good chance the CO2 emissions from burning plastic waste would be even higher per watt than with coal, which is already super bad.

Well.. i mean, it's not as if we'll stop using plastic soon, and since the whole world has issues with it now (since china doesn't but it anymore), investing in such redesigned burners would be a good investment now.

Per lb of fuel? Yes. But the idea is that this would offset other oil consumption. It’s marginally better to turn plastic products into energy than it is to throw plastic away and burn more oil for power.

Ideally, we would think of this as getting a second use for your heating fuel. Between being mined and being burned, it's temporarily used to let you cary milk home from the store.

That's an excellent point, thanks.

I think it’s optics that prevent the US from doing this. Too many people are convinced that plastic is highly recyclable and burning it would be wasteful.

I think people too often Go for the recycle (get it out of my sight) instead of the reuse and reduce angles of the conservation triangle.

Wouldn't it pollute the atmosphere? Is there a "clean" (modulo CO2) way to burn it?

Past thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24714880

I keep reading these comments, but too lazy to research myself. Anyone has any links handy?

This one seems to have some decent info on the situation

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...

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