Plastic recycling remains a 'myth': Greenpeace study
phys.org
phys.org
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/reports/circular-claims-fall-...
Why can't journalists ever link to their sources?
I've talked to a lot of people in recent years who have seen these headlines and concluded that all recycling, including aluminum and paper products, is actually a lie. We really need more clarity around the recycling situation so people stop drawing their only conclusions from random headlines.
Here's a couple counterarguments I hear a lot:
1) "Personal responsibility - if people choose to do the wrong thing that's on them". I think we've seen that choices are influenced by the environment and not largely within the control of any random individual. People are rational actors relative to their situation but that can often mean choices that aren't rational in a larger context.
2) "Too expensive - some people need the cheaper to produce products". I think this is where markets are useful, we should be able to switch up the landscape and have the gaps filled. I think the big risk here is not having appropriate social safety nets in place to cover people while there are still gaps.
3) "Laws should be about what's 'right', not a way to control people". This seems like ultimately the same thing, someone decides what's 'right' and then makes it a law so other people will do it. We generally agree murder is wrong but it get's a lot more hazy with stuff like taxes and clear that it's a way to incentivize behavior.
Another counter-argument by example: if people choose to smoke and I sit in their second-hand smoke I suffer the consequences of their actions. Similarly, plastic waste is not a problem that stops at the individual.
The whole "personal responsibily" argument has always been a lame excuse by companies to offload responsibility to the customer.
Plastic is cheap and convenient, but its material properties are also advantageous. It's lightweight, allowing more actual product to be transported on trucks. If it breaks, it doesn't make a dangerous mess the way glass does.
We should absolutely work to reduce, reuse, and recycle, in that order of priority, but we need to recognize that other costs exist too, such as more product being damaged and more higher transportation costs (monetary and pollution wise).
All that said, I agree companies respond to incentives, and given sufficient costs, they would lean towards more recyclable products.
No, we shouldn't.
We should primarily work on scaling up our energy production. I was long in favour of nuclear, although apparently there's some exciting development in deep geothermal as well. (inspired by https://elidourado.com/blog/geothermal/ )
We shouldn't even try recycling the plastic, but simply burry it. Oil from the ground, plastic back into the ground.
With enough energy and a viable waste management process in place, we don't need to bother with reducing, reusing or recycling, but can simply enjoy our lives to the fullest.
I'm hopeful, but as far as we know it could take many hundreds of years to solve these problems - they might even be practically unsolvable. So it makes sense to also hedge our bets by making the systems we currently depend on more sustainable, rather than just assume we will transcend them on-schedule.
Small nudge to push innovation in a positive direction is an important tool, but we are getting overboard with control and regulation.
Here in Québec the law forbid plastic bags in stores, but plasticulture, packaging is a far worse problem, the law is virtue signaling instead of pushing for meaningful changes.
There is strong case to be made for progress, more energy, more food, more housing for the whole planet.
In a 100 years we will be so far away in technology that our current problem will seem like a joke.
But I think it important to be careful with things that could never recover: ocean and land diversity, contamination of groundwater/soil.
That said, externalities don't generally get solved without laws. I totally agreed that human progress, technological and otherwise cannot be ignored.
On plastics... It's undeniably true that a large portion of the garbage you might find in the woods, streets, fields, lakes or oceans is plastic. Meanwhile, a lot of landfills and other waste disposal systems suck. They pollute by design, aren't used properly or designed correctly.
It's also true that a lot of that plastic is pretty low value... It doesn't add much to a consumers' wellbeing. If it wasn't available, we'd find alternatives and be fine. Not all the plastic. Some is good value and some is essential. Most though
So... people look at all this mess. Some say "we should just stop making/using it." Others want to stop littering and improve waste disposal. In our inspired age, a common take is "market correcting." Try to internalize externality costs and "let the market work."
None of these are unreasonable. Lame or failed attempts at implementing them are not disproofs of concept. They're just failed attempts... and "politics" is often to blame, making everyone extra upset about the whole thing.
So, yes, I agree. We are progressing technologically, and that is very relevant if we're talking about ecological issues. OTOH, for all our current might, we're pretty impotent when it comes to simple basics like garbage. If plastics did not exist, we'd forgo the convenience of using plastic. We'd gain an end to our plastic waste problems.
So perhaps/probably there are ways of ending our plastic waste problem that are more efficient. If they are higher, than it makes sense to just ban plastic. Where are they? Why haven't they happened? The cost ceiling isn't that high. Low performance.
Why do you believe this? It seems to me that our production of waste and environment destruction has been basically directly tied to our technological progress. Why assume that would change in the next 100 years?
Think about how things have changed in the last 20 years with the internet. How we have improved efficiency all around, started the EV revolution, solar energy, AI, etc.
Same with internet vs before: books, schools, libraries, stores, etc.
Things like facebook marketplace: so much used stuff everywhere. For me it’s very easy to find almost anything I want used cheaply, but when I don’t need it anymore and want to sell it it’s harder (houses are already full to the rafters)
The new generation is not as much interested in stuff, there is too much stuff everywhere.
So I think we are very close to peak stuff and peak humans on the planet.
Furthermore we are being more and more careful about long term thinking our our effects: pollution, ressources, global warming.
I think we are overcorrecting, putting too much emphasis on these things and not enough on humans problems: meaning crisis, depression, suicide, nuclear war.
To me it seems we are very close to a world of abondance and safety, but we still fighting with each others.
We are looking in the rear view mirror to decide what is important, but the future that is coming is very different than the past.
You can look at Tony Seba energy transition just to get an idea of what is coming on the energy front.
We can burn it in an arc reactor or properly filtered incinerator at a lower price than raw oil to produce energy
Simply moving tens of joules of heat to the surface would have the same effect even if doing it affordably weren't scifi.
There's a limited budget of everything on earth's surface from metals to waste heat to space and we're running head first into all of them.
We could spend it on allowing a tiny portion of the world to be wasteful and craven, or we could use it for everyone to thrive.
Current primary energy: 17TW
Total insolation: ~ 180PW
Total GHG forcing: 5W/m^2
Ratio of insolation to total forcing: 40:1
USA domestic and imported primary energy per capita: 14kW
Ratio to world average: 7
Remaining headroom above US averag for 5W/m^2 (catastrophuc climate change): 75kW per person.
Remaining headroom above US average for 1W/m^2 (still bad): 3kW per person
We should primarily work on preparing for a world with reduced energy.
This is the problem that is destroying the planet. It should not be about capitalism.
My pet theory is that we're basically stripping the planet of all of the good, usable materials for "stuff" and plastic is a nice stop-gap to keep prices low. We don't do a good job of recognizing how inflation is tied to resource depletion.
The thinking was that people reused the thin store bags at least once (i.e. as a small trash liner for a work desk). Without those as an option, people switched to buying plastic bags, which were thicker and used much more material.
Personally, we always opt for plastic bags at the store, and they always get reused once if not many times. Paper bags just don't seem to hold up as well for some reason.
There is no one law, this has occurred independently in municipalities across the globe.
It's all gone pretty smooth except for grocery delivery services. Instead of using one time use thin plastic bags, they now have to use reusable bags. That they never reuse. So places like our company that get office foodstuffs delivered weekly, end up throwing away stacks of thick plastic bags.
Apparently though the legislature is working on a fix for this.
What's worse is that they're harder to reuse. Since they aren't resistant to water, there are fewer other uses that they are good for.
Businesses are far and away the biggest offenders when it comes to waste in general and particularly plastic waste. Getting individuals using reusable bags is fine but really doesn't address the biggest offenders.
When I’ve been in Europe I’ve often seen that there are no bags except for fully re-usable tote bags that you have to pay 1-2€ for. It really only takes one instance of forgetting your own bags to teach the lesson.
In terms of plastic use the reusable bags are much better. It doesn’t take too many reuses before a reusable bag is a net benefit. Compared to other energy uses the plastic bags are a tiny amount so I don’t worry too much about that.
According to this Danish study a cotton bag has to be reused over 7k times.
Most of the reusable bags in grocery stores are polypropylene, and those you only have to reuse 37 times. So that is better.
Now I have to buy my trash bags, which are not used twice and used in the same amount as the earlier bags. Also, I used to get much stuff unpacked, the bag was there to not throw a bunch of loose carrots, chicken legs and tomatoes in my carrying bag. Now, nearly everything comes prepackaged, which is single use obviously.
I don't see how my plastic consumption is down. I guestimate it's up.
I'd be interested in any evidence of the former claim.
The theory (and it may be a shit one, and I have no good claims here besides it's fun to discuss) goes like this, back in the day you could get real hardwood pretty cheap. You could build brick homes. Etc. Now you can't (i.e. it's very expensive) and that is reflected in ongoing inflation of the money supply and partially why we decoupled from gold. New technologies and materials can create substitute products, of course, but for many natural resources I think we're basically stripping or have stripped the planet for the time being. Think lobster and salmon, hardwood furniture, pollution, etc.
In reality the president doesn't control the budget. They influence it through an agenda but it's ultimately up to congress. Congress passed a lot of stimulus in response to the pandemic and much of it was bi-partisan.
> When Trump took office in January 2017, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office was projecting that federal budget deficits would be 2% to 3% of our gross domestic product during Trump’s term. Instead, the deficit reached nearly 4% of gross domestic product in 2018 and 4.6% in 2019.
> There were multiple culprits. Trump’s tax cuts, especially the sharp reduction in the corporate tax rate to 21% from 35%, took a big bite out of federal revenue. The CBO estimated in 2018 that the tax cut would increase deficits by about $1.9 trillion over 11 years.
COVID-19 certainly didn't help, and you are correct that stimulus was largely bipartisan, but in common discussion "blame" for spending is usually assigned to the president and their administration. This can be observed by current members of Congress (Republicans) who have been quick to suggest that Biden has created a huge deficit, inflation, etc. while it's not only untrue but was largely due to actions from the previous administration or Congress before he was president. (In other words for every representative complaining about inflation they should be posting that they were the ones who actually voted for it).
If we were being truthful we wouldn't do this, but if we're going to continue to suggest that the deficit is (whatever insane things people are making up right now to blame Biden on) then it would make no sense to not instead blame any financial problems on the previous administration and keep assigning blame to the President.
W.r.t COVID-19 you can just say the Trump administration did a terrible job and mishandled allocations of money and that's why the deficit increased so much. I personally don't wholly subscribe to that but if Republicans are going to blame inflation on Biden it makes sense to turn around and blame it all on Trump/Republicans instead.
But not only did the COVID stimulus continue once the dems took control, they continued to pass multi-trillion dollar bills (Infrastructure & Inflation Reduction Act) along with a half trillion dollar student loan forgiveness. It's this aggressive spending, while inflation was already rising, that is giving them that reputation.
I'm not taking sides here nor do I want anything to do with Trump. Just laying it out how I see it.
I'm conflicted on student loan forgiveness, but I don't see it as any worse than numerous corporate subsidies and bailouts, and is likely a better use of money than what we normally spend. If this forgiveness bill proceeds forward as it is likely to do, I think coupling it with a measured withdrawal of the federal government from guaranteeing student loans and also allowing student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy would be ideal.
It could still be a major solution. Novelis, an aluminum recycler in Georgia, claims $73m of aluminum are sent to landfills every year. If the southeast boosted aluminum recycling efforts it would drastically increase domestic "raw" materials. (Things like pontoon boats were aluminum limited).
Then do the same for cardboard (hello toilet paper shortage) where recycling paper products reduces energy and water inputs by 50%. Countries like Spain have cardboard thieves while in the US, it goes to the dump.
Plastic bags actually are practically superior to the alternatives in many ways. They are stronger, smaller and more water resistant than paper. They may use less material per trip than reusable bags which take ~50x more resources but are still prone to eventual breakage.
Basically everything about one time use plastics is amazing, except the potential for environmental harm.
It's stronger and easier to handle than plastic; you just need to remember to bring one with you. My partner keeps one in her bag permanently in case she shops on a whim.
But if you can reuse for !years! Are worth the price.
Personally, i reuse a backpack from high school (20 years ago) with a mended zipper. I can carry about 20lbs in it.
However - since the bag ban has been enacted here in Chicago, the amount of plastic bag litter is noticeably less.
Worth banning something? Maybe, maybe not. But I'd take an educated guess that more plastic is reaching landfills vs. waterways due to it - even if the total amount of plastic is more overall.
Or, if manufactures / retailers / etc adopted other options would consumers simply adapt? The problem here is supply side not demand side - consumers have few choices.
How it making it a profit centre for the government gonna fix anything?
Yeah but if they end up using more energy, which one should we go with?
Why shouldn't they be allowed? There are many non-plastic things that can't be recycled either. Why should plastic be singled out? As long as the proper disposal costs are being paid (ie. burial at an EPA regulated landfill), I don't see any problems.
The real problem is that trashing waste is often the least worst solution for our environment. Expensive “green” packaging and recycling, are too often actually worse for the environment. Feel good movements that kill the planet quicker. Often sold to us via industry propaganda but we childishly are willing recipients for mistruth: we collectively want an anodyne panacea where we can continue to consume without consequences, a convenient lie, a palatable excuse.
To fix the actual problem requires giving up our nice things, giving up on our wants, reducing our spending, or reducing population. We cannot accept those requirements, so we all merrily go along with greenwashing denialism.
The two best indicators for your environmental impact are: (1) your income, and (2) your country. I’m guessing you are a well off US citizen: you are the problem. Not some evil corporation.
I know you read the article, but there is a paragraph where they note that types 3-7 can be recycled, but that facilities to do so are not available to a substantial majority of people. That might be why they have the recycling symbol on them.
They also note, somewhat oddly, that the product of this recycling is not used for anything. Odd, because it seems like being used to create other materials is really the most important aspect of being recyclable. Maybe they should have lead with that?
Of course, eWaste is also a sizable contributor to plastic pollution and most people don't even think about disposable of these items. They either sell them, or they toss them in the garbage... sometimes with lithium batteries still in them which is extremely hazardous.
Strong disagree. There was a recent ourworldindata.org article that discusses this. It concludes:
>I estimate that a few percent of ocean plastics could result from trade from rich countries. A figure as high as 5% would not be unreasonable.
While 5% of ocean plastic waste isn't nothing, there are surely better ways to reduce overall plastic pollution than trying to target 5%. For instance, investing in better waste management systems in developing countries.
what do you expect they'll burn for power if we stop paying them to take stuff to burn?
But if only 2% of plastics worldwide is traded (source: same article I linked in my previous comment), and most of that is traded within the same region, how much waste could possibly end up getting shipped to less developed countries and burned? You'd still be better off trying to reduce domestic garbage production/burning in those countries.
This is ideal, at least in arc and high temperature, scrubbed plants (because plastic recycling takes more energy than burning it cleanly.)
But you likely intended burned less as fuel and more as a disposal method.
I don't know of good figures on how much worse it is to burn plastic rather than wash and reuse it.
How about we stop wasting tax payers’ money to pick up the tab of the externalized costs from all these companies selling single-use packaging?
At the end of the day these companies will gaslight you saying customers love plastic but the reason they do plastic packaging is because it reduces packaging and shipping costs (at a high cost for the environment, water cycle, and humans).
_Ban_single-use_plastic_, except for medical or lab applications.
That was the original proposal in the EC before the lobbyists watered it down to this farce of the ban on q tips and straws.
There is a lot of greenwashing around packing that’s more environmentally harmful to create because they decay when left outside. Except if both products are sent to the landfill then they don’t provide any advantages.
Why do you need a tight seal? You can safely transport meat, fish, seafood from source to home with basic hygiene measures.
You can, but it doesn't last nearly as long, which means more food waste due to spoilage. At my local supermarket meat that has been packaged in airtight bags have best before dates of 2-3 weeks. Meanwhile meat that's wrapped with non-airtight plastic wrap have best before dates of a week at most. The meats I get from the butcher counter do even worse.
These plastic uses are solutions to problems that don't exist.
Freezing ruins the texture of the meat. Buying it in 3 weeks is more expensive because it's no longer on sale. Given the choice between slightly more plastic and saving $1+/lb, I'm choosing latter every time. Also, you focusing on the consumer side entirely misses the retail side. According to the USDA 7% of meat/seafood is lost due to spoilage at the retail level alone. This is with plastic packaging. Going back to wrapping everything with pink butcher paper will certainly be worse.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/44306/10895_ei...
You are introducing an extra industrial step to save the additional cost of maintain sanitary conditions throughout the supply chain.
> Freezing ruins the texture of the meat.
Unless you are grilling some very premium beef cut and eating it without any rub or marination, I strongly doubt the majority of people would even know the 'texture' difference in a blind test.
We think of costs in terms of money but shipping more crap means more fuel and thus more global warming etc.
>You are introducing an extra industrial step to save the additional cost of maintain sanitary conditions throughout the supply chain.
Vacuum packing meat increases shelf life because the lack of air halts aerobic decomposition. That's not something that can be replicated by "sanitary conditions".
Am I missing something?
Sure a glass jar with a rubber gasket works as would a tin can etc, but they require a lot of energy and resources to make which means real environmental costs. Aluminum foil is one of the better options cost wise but it requiers a lot of energy and it’s even less biodegradable than plastic.
>_Ban_single-use_plastic_, except for medical or lab applications.
>That was the original proposal in the EC before the lobbyists watered it down to this farce of the ban on q tips and straws.
And how much of EU plastic waste is mismanaged?
It doesn't matter if 'developing' countries mismanage waste, their total plastic waste is still fractional in comparison to where most of the consumer spending is happening in the world.
Also it adds friction to the business model of these giants like: Coca-Cola, Nestle, Pepsico, P&G, Unilever, etc.
A big part of their savings is in economy of scale. If they now have to keep packaging solutions exclusive for a market but not another it will likely move the needle to single uniform packaging that abides with the strictest standard. This is a well studied effect in many industries.
>It doesn't matter if 'developing' countries mismanage waste, their total plastic waste is still fractional in comparison to where most of the consumer spending is happening in the world.
Why focus on total plastic waste, rather than mismanaged plastic waste? Surely you must agree that a plastic bottle that's tossed into the Ganges river is orders of magnitude worse for the environment than one that's sitting in a properly engineered and monitored landfill?
>Also it adds friction to the business model of theses giants like: Coca-Cola, Nestle, Pepsico, P&G, Unilever, etc.
>A big part of their savings is in economy of scale. If they now have to keep packaging solutions exclusive for a market but not another it will likely move the needle to single uniform packaging that abides with the strictest standard. This is a well studied effect in many industries.
I'll need numbers for this. The factors working against your argument are:
1. while economy of scale is a thing, the gains you get decrease as you scale up. If you only have bottle factory and it only produces glass bottles, it would be tremendously expensive for you to start producing plastic bottles, because you have to build a whole new factory from scratch. However, if you have dozens of bottle factories around the world, then having separate plastic/glass bottle factories effectively cost you nothing. Yes, there is small efficiency gains to be had, but I doubt that they're significant enough to drive plastic bottles out of business.
2. as developing countries get richer, their plastic consumption will go up as more people can afford consumer products. The same isn't true for rich countries. After all, you being 10x richer won't cause you to use 10x more shampoo.
Yeah but what's the point of your activism? Is it to tick off a box and say that you did "something"? Or is it to improve the world by some metric (ie. microplastic pollution)? If it's the latter, then it's pretty obvious that you should devote your effort into the highest impact projects regardless of whether it's righteous or not (ie. even if it means picking up "the tab of the externalized costs from all these companies selling single-use packaging").
>Why should any other country mandate a switch if even wealthy countries don't bother?
They shouldn't because I never made such a proposal. My original comment mentioned "investing in better waste management systems in developing countries".
But that’s what customers love: undamaged, well packed goods at low prices.
I don’t think there’s anyone claiming that people just “love plastic” in the abstract.
I don’t disagree with you that regulation is likely the only way to enforce more responsible plastic use. The only other way is to find more responsible alternatives that do the things plastic does at similar or ideally lower cost.
I can pick some other sentences from that article and give another picture: "Most of the plastic that enters the oceans from land comes from rivers in Asia.1 More than 80% of it.
Only a small amount comes from rivers across Europe and North America. Together, these regions contribute just 5% of the global total. This would suggest that the world’s richest countries don’t contribute much to the problem of plastic pollution.
But, these numbers only look at the plastic that is emitted domestically. They don’t consider the fact that many countries export plastic waste overseas."
Overall I would say that article contradicts itself and makes no sense.
The article is pointing out that:
1. Most ocean plastic enters the ocean from East Asia (80%)
2. Only about 5% of its enters the ocean from North America or Europe
3. But some plastic waste is exported form North America or Europe to Asia.
4. So is it plausible that the true waste share of NA and Europe is higher?
5. It concludes, yes, North America and Europe contribute as much as 5% of ocean plastic directly and then up to a further 5% via waste export.
It doesn't contradict itself, your parent poster didn't "just pick a random sentence from the article," and you should maybe read more carefully.
It's literally the bolded conclusion to the section named "How much do rich countries contribute to plastic pollution through their exported waste?". Given that the parent comment was talking about banning plastic exports, I think that's very relevant to this discussion. Saying that it was a "random" sentence is an extremely unfair characterization.
>I can pick some other sentences from that article and give another picture: "Most of the plastic that enters the oceans from land comes from rivers in Asia.1 More than 80% of it.
>Only a small amount comes from rivers across Europe and North America. Together, these regions contribute just 5% of the global total. This would suggest that the world’s richest countries don’t contribute much to the problem of plastic pollution.
>But, these numbers only look at the plastic that is emitted domestically. They don’t consider the fact that many countries export plastic waste overseas."
>Overall I would say that article contradicts itself and makes no sense.
What exactly is contradictory here?
Plastic would just wind up in domestic landfills. It's not like countries are running out of landfill space.
Placing them in landfills is the right thing to do.
The idea that nature is over there, not here and that the landfill site is somehow ok to ruin has strong vibes of the (fantastic) comedy segment where the oil spill happens outside the environment.
Why is it not the right word?
Precisely. That's where they should end up.
In this case, if you want to do your part, stop recycling plastic and start putting it in the trash where it belongs.
In parallel, we should look to invent / promote full cycle plastics that can fill the gap and see about the economics of trying to replace low value plastics with glass and metals where we can. I would be all for a tin metal box revival!
Unless it's sequestering something inside. Like water. It terrifies me to think about how much water is locked away for centuries in bottles underground.
- ed : are you thinking that microbes and germs and whatnot might lie there dormant until they're dug up again, unleashing some plague on unsuspecting descendants? If so, I imagine the chemicals leeching from the plastic will kill or retard their essential survival/replicative mechanisms...
To the extent that net water in the water cycle is relevent, we would have the opposite problem where we are introducing far more water that had been sequestered (mostly in the form of glaciers), causing sea levels to rise. It would be great if we could find a way to sequester all of that extra water; but even putting a dent in that would nake carbon sequestration look trivial.
No, this is silly. The amount of water that human beings package for drinking is a tiny fraction of the amount we use for agriculture, which is itself an absolutely miniscule fraction of the amount of fresh water that cycles through the environment constantly (itself, of course, a tiny fraction of the water available in oceans).
Amounts of water aren't the problem. There will always be water. When people complain about water, it's not about how much there is in any one place, it's about flows: how much of this or that river basin or aquifer is being diverted for human use, potentially causing side effects like lake drying or desertification downstream. Those are important effects that need to be managed.
But Dasani bottles in land fills aren't hurting anyone.
Water is plentiful in many areas of the earth. Where I live, it was common just 20 years ago for sinks to just have continually flowing pipes with no faucets, since the water was diverted from streams or springs that just flow into the sea anyway. This rainy season we've had well over 200" of rain.
Also in the long run that water will be squeezed out of those bottles by pressure and degradation, so I don't think that's too much to worry about.
When you realize that a little bit of water in each bottle adds up to significant leakage from trash bags, what doesn't leak increases transport weight, and then what isn't lost landfill will live for ages (if not ruin the landfill liner over time)
One ocean-inch of water is 2200 cubic miles. It will never happen.
I'm all for eliminating single use plastics where sensible to do so, and arguably the possible biological effects of plastic should make us consider reducing overall plastic usage, sustainable or otherwise.
Burning the plastic in a properly fitted plant largely "cleans" the toxic additives by burning them too.
Plastic in nature will eventually turn into CO2, just slower and with a lot of bad side-effects.
"Recycling" the plastic has been shown to instead be sold to whatever-place-du-jour which ignores laws. Often it's burned in open pits, creating both immediate CO2 release, as well as new toxins created in the imperfect burning, and leaching of the old toxins, as well as large chunks of unburnt plastic floating in the wind.
And burning plastic is a waste, but a lesser waste, because it's turned into some electricity.
Upholding recycling structures for plastic also creates a false sense of "this is fine". Instead, it should be treated as low-level-dangerous refuse which should be burnt and only used for applications where this trade-off is acceptable.
Whether we recycle, landfill or incinerate, I'm not sure what difference that makes to plastic pollution. To deal with plastic pollution, we need to reduce overall plastic usage and improve collection and waste management.
From the wiki article: "The trade in plastic waste has been identified as "a main culprit" of marine litter."
Only 2% of plastic waste is traded between countries. Further, most of that is traded within the same region, so the amount of waste that's shipped across "long distances" is probably under 1%.
That's just because the clown world we developed only cares about money, as long as the numbers fit in the excel tables we'll do all kind of dumb shit like sending trash to Africa to have it burned in open dumps
There is a very easy solution which seemingly isn't even conceived, recycle it locally... really mind blowing I know...
If you're still using the plastic, then it's not currently degrading in the ocean.
I'm curious why the ocean appears to be the terminal destination for plastics. After I throw it in the rubbish bin, which mechanism transports it to the pacific?
I've said for decades, that each bit of plastic made, is less plastic used as fuel. Create the plastic, then after, bury it deep in a plastic landfill. It came from deep in the Earth, back it can go.
Meanwhile, people have wild schemes to put CO2 deep in the Earth, and that's OK? When not used plastic?
A lot of it starts in the ocean; fishing gear and stuff falling off ships are big sources. https://marinedebris.noaa.gov/where-does-marine-debris-come/...
Of the stuff that starts on land, it's often carried there by wind and river: https://marinedebris.noaa.gov/where-does-marine-debris-come/...
Ocean microplastic is overwhelmingly caused by countries that actually just throw their plastic in rivers. The US contributes a very small percentage of all environmental microplastic (like somewhere under 2%, maybe much under that).
Specific to washing machines, I wonder if there is an option for a micro plastic filter?
Moving and handling waste plastic less is a form of improving waste management.
Which can be trapped/filtered to avoid pollution.
> if plastics ever become sufficiently valuable - or recycling sufficiently viable.
If that was remotely probable, you'd have banks offering plastic-storage related ETFs already.
Yes, it's better than burning it outright in open fire pits (as it's done in an awful lot of "third world" countries to concentrate metals out of the waste), but it's way worse than a dump yard. And most of the places that have a lot of plastics waste don't have the resources to install decent scrubbers, much less perfect scrubbers.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/06/recycling-global-stat...
Yes and no. If the energy is recycled (for heating buildings and/or water) you'll reduce carbon emissions from coal/gas/oil. Waste incineration (instead of landfills) is a thing in various European countries and the heat can (and will) be used to heat buildings or the steam drives turbines to generate electricity.
We need good incentives with a system that self-corrects; we need to stop playing whack-a-mole with easily-known-ahead-of-time problems and implement good systems.
Then we have all this discussion of plastic in our food and water.
Genuine question: why are we even having this discussion?
In the third decade of the 21st century, common sense ain’t so common
Companies would do cost-cutting on product wrapping way before the emissions become a problem.
A turtle occasionally eating a plastic bag for breakfast is a bad thing, but the turtles wouldn't be happy if they knew they're about to die off because we're distracting ourselves with bans on single-use bags and plastic straws.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries
Plastic pollution is affecting the "novel entities (chemical pollution)" boundary
The mainstream scientists, European governments, China etc all think that recycling plastic is better than burning or landfill for reasons they've documented in depth in multiple Lifecycle Analysis papers and meta reviews of LCAs.
But, there is a very loud minority, funded by the same network of think-tanks representing fossil fuel interests that fund climate change deniers who say this is all nonsense and really everything you've been told by the "consensus" actually either does nothing, or actively makes things worse, so you might as well keep using and burning fossil fuels.
But I used to work in a industry that would bundle its used plastic and burn it to get rid of it... (I know, I know... terrible)
Let me tell you. That stuff doesn't burn easily unless there is already a damn good fire going, or some helper combustibles. Sure, it will burn just fine when you put a few in a fire, etc. But once you get to the kinds of loads that occur with bails of plastic...
It's going to mostly smolder and offgas from my experience. It got so bad they stopped burning it, and started selling it to some company that found a way to recycle it. Ironically enough.
I'd say, bite the bullet and add the recycling costs to the production costs. Pay it upfront. If unsure, make it even more expensive.
Right now it's too cheap to outsource our production to some other country to do all the pollution. If that was priced in making those things more expensive, local and sustainable production might actually have a shot.
"It's simply not economical to build a sustainable system right now"
Well too bad then, I guess humanity has to commit suicide because it's the path that consumes the less amount of paper bills with made up numbers on them
A total ban outside certain medical use-cases would probably also work. Do you think that would be cheaper?
> Can you give an example of where someone has prioritised their own profit over their own survival?
Clearly they weren't saying, given the mugger's choice between "your money or your life!", capitalism would have you choose your money. This is about causing environmental destruction for the sake of profit, something that businesses have done and continue to do, endangering our long-term survival as a species. Saying that you don't know what the original poster meant is baffling.
Here was the original quote, specifically not talking about the environmnet, but rather as a principle to apply to the environment, for reference:
> If profit and self-preservation are at odds, profit wins.
Capitalism is a system that optimises for a single variable. It is self-evident how this means that any time another variable is inversely proportional to profit, it will minimise this variable. There is also many trivial examples of such cases: Preserving the environment costs money. Therefore, capitalism will do its job and optimise economies to maximise environment pollution.
If you had any worthwhile counter-argument, you would have stated it by now, instead of pretending not to understand my point.
I'm asking for a previous example of this principle that you're stating will apply to the environment.
This isn't what I understand capitalism to be. As I understand it, capitalism is the free exchange of goods and services centered around personal property. There is no single variable. Individuals engage in trade freely, and each individual evaluates the value of that trade individually. Each individual uses their own set of values in evaluating the net value they get out of the trade. Under capitalism there is a near infinite set of variables as each market participant is carrying their own set of values into every trade.
"Another drawback of capitalism is that it often leads to a host of negative externalities, such as air and noise pollution. Negative externalities are costs paid for by society and not the producer of the externality. A factory dumping waste into a river or emitting smoke into the air is a problem shouldered by the communities that the factory is in, and not the business itself."
I'm not suggesting that negative externalities aren't a thing under capitalism. I'm suggesting parent's definition of capitalism is incorrect. When you define capitalism as a free exchange of goods and services centered around private property, you can see how that quote is misleading at best.
Current humans, on average, place disproportionate value on the things that directly impact them. When they enter into trade under capitalism, they carry that bias with them. This leads to outcomes where individuals (the business in that example) make a decision to improve their standing by dumping waste into a river. But this isn't a shortcoming in capitalism, it's a shortcoming in human nature.
In order for your counter to be complete, you'd need to provide an example of another economic/governing system that humans organize under successfully avoiding those negative externalities. Without that, I don't understand how humans would avoid falling into the same traps under different structures. For example, your quote tells me nothing about how a central planning board under communism responsible for agriculture wouldn't decide to let pesticide run off into a water source in order to deliver the crop yield expected of them. That board is still comprised of humans who are carrying their biases into their interactions.
Right now, at best, my understanding from this conversation is "humans do this under capitalism, therefor humans do this because of capitalism" which isn't a compelling argument.
That's a text-book whataboutism. You can't just dismiss the inherent problems with capitalism by just pointing out that other systems have the same or even different problems. That's not the point here. So no, nobody needs to point out a better system.
> For example, your quote tells me nothing about how a central planning board under communism [...]
Tell me you don't know what communism is without telling me you don't know what communism is.
> Right now, at best, my understanding from this conversation is
Yes, you're entirely missing the point because you're trying to defend your world view. Somebody points out a problem with capitalism and your first reflex is "well communism is bad too", which tells me all I need to know about your motivation: 0% intellectual honesty and 100% crony belief.
So here's what the actual point of the conversation is: "Capitalism encourages people doing this, that is a problem"
There is no "because", there is no "as opposed to" and there is no "therefore", simply the statement of a problem. One person might see the solution in replacing capitalism with communism, another might suggest imposing additional restrictions on it. But right now, we're just talking about acknowledging a problem instead of completely shutting down and crying about how it's not capitalism's fault it's not capitalism's fault it's not capitalism's fault it's not capitalism's fault...
No one is doing this. It seems impossible for you to avoid mischaracterise what's being said, so I think it's best to leave this.
Except me, in my first comment, which started this conversation in the first place. Stop trying to convince me of what I'm arguing about, it only makes you look even more like you have no clue about the topic.
I'm saying no one is doing the above.
As I've already said, I don't think you're able to do this. Let's stop.
I’m not sure it’s whataboutism. You’ll need to help me get there.
My stance is that this happens under capitalism. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a problem to solve at the capitalism layer of society. And I’m trying to tease that apart.
I’ll try to restate to help. Let’s start with the argument “capitalism incentivizes this.” I don’t disagree with that. My definition of capitalism was incorrect, as a sibling comment pointed out. My definition is closer to free market capitalism. So I’ll use the siblings definition: “Private ownership of the means of production operated for profit.”
If the single variable is maximizing profit, as you argue, we have to understand why anyone would be incentivized by profit. What value does profit offer an individual? I’d submit that, for most operating under capitalism, it’s what you can do with that profit. I’m sure there are exceptions where folks are racking up points like a video game, but I’d hazard a guess most view profit as a medium of exchange. So they aren’t motivated by profit, they have their own set of incentives for accumulating that capital. I’d also argue most market participants also have non-profit motives (I.e. operating in line with their personal values or directly exchanging goods/services without going through currency as a intermediary, like travel being a perk of the job).
Incentives exist in every system. The things people want to use capital for under capitalism exist when you remove capitalism. Humans still want good food, shelter, and shiny bobbles. If you substitute capitalism for another form of self-organizing, and the problem doesn’t go away, I have a hard time understanding why we’d call out capitalism by name.
I don’t see this as a condemnation of capitalism, but as a problem with how individual humans make decisions. My current mental model for this problem, that I’m asking for your help in updating is: “this is a thing humans do, we’ve (mostly) always done this across time and cultures when societies get big, how do we get ourselves to stop?”
Given my understanding that this is a problem intrinsic to humans on average, the problem is with incentives and how to address individuals making decisions in their own self interest on a small scale (under any form of self organization) not being in line with keeping our ecosystems from collapsing and our societies healthy.
If you can't get wealthy dumping waste into a river under a different economic system the incentive is gone and it shouldn't happen.
"I'm suggesting parent's definition of capitalism is incorrect."
Maybe, but you made up a definition of capitalism.
Capitalism is not defined as a free exchange of gods. Definitions vary but most of the definitions talk about profit as a motive. Your folksy definition leaves out things like ownership of the means of production, capital and labor.
At any rate, your argument amounts to "I declare discussion of capitalism to be limited to this definition I made up." Encouraging people to argue what words mean in the dictionary just seems like derailment.
Not really; that's just a free market, which is linked to but not the same as capitalism.
The core principle of capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. It's just that most of the capitalist societies we know do free-market capitalism specifically.
And there absolutely is a single variable: Profit. It's the one and only variable capitalism optimises for, and anything else requires some form of intervention by tying profit to some other variable (e.g. a carbon tax to make greenhouse emissions more expensive, thereby making it more profitable to avoid these emissions); but that's always just an external force steering the market (thereby making it less of a free market), so it's not capitalism itself optimising for environmental preservation over profit.
> Each individual uses their own set of values in evaluating the net value they get out of the trade
On a small scale, this might be true; but we don't live in a world where most capital gets moved around by small businesses with owners that act based on their moral convictions; we live in a world of massive mega-corporations that shouldn't be expected to follow any moral principles, and that's exactly what we observe: they will do literally whatever they can get away with as long as it increases profit.
At the end of the day, CEOs answer to shareholders, and the only thing they care about is how much money they're making and whether they could be getting into legal trouble for it (to some extent, at least).
A simple example would be companies maximizing short term profits to their own demise. Like the online ad business, managers are happily ignoring the fact that bot armies are inflating their numbers. I'm really curious how Google is going to handle that in the future.
Can you give a counterexample? Why are you talking about capitalism, and not, say, people?
Curiously, they never use the same logic when referring to positive effects of capitalism like a boom in life expectancy and reduction in poverty. That's simply an inevitable consequence of technology. It doesn't matter that the only reason people have the economic means to acquire such technology is due to capitalism.
Bullshit. I am perfectly happy to give capitalism credit where it works well, and so do most people other than extreme leftists.
Meanwhile, people defending capitalism seem to do this much more often: Capitalism does something good -> all hail capitalism, for it can do no wrong; something bad happens under capitalism? Literally anything else is to blame, specially communists.
Even the people who came up with capitalist's principles would be absolutely outraged by what it became
The rhetoric on this gets dialed up to 11 immediately, and I don't think it benefits anyone but a very small group of people to do so. This report suggests that views on plastic recycling should be reconsidered, it does not suggest that humanity is going to come to an end unless we _immediately_ solve this problem.
> because it's the path that consumes the less amount of paper bills with made up numbers on them
I don't think people who work for an hourly wage are likely to agree that the numbers are made up. They may have a certain arbitrary quality to them when you consider them at scale, but they aren't made up for the majority of people alive.. and the difference between them means a lot to many people on this planet.
This is what this rhetoric ignores. Single use plastics are an issue. We should reduce them; however, acting as if they are only in use for profit motivations is insane. The next time you go to a hospital, or a dentist, or open up a pack of dental floss consider what else you might use to protect that equipment, those instruments, or your own hygiene products and foods.
We could go back to using waxed paper, but it's inferior for shelf stability, it's not compostable or recyclable, and it's made from paraffin wax which is a petroleum product.
We of course need plastic to some extent but we're so far from any kind of reasonable usage
My grandparents didn't have nearly as much plastic and their food was just fine, if anything they ate much less plastic wrapped processed junk, most of what we use it for really isn't necessary or even desirable
Did they grow up in the western world? Have you asked them about food borne illnesses and safety and how that's evolved over time? More importantly, have you asked them their opinion on this particular matter?
> the other day I even saw pre-sliced apples in plastic bowls with a plastic lid, wrapped in a plastic packaging with a smiley feel good vegan mascot printed on it
I can't account for where you shop but you should be willing to consider the use of plastic outside of this narrow environment. I assume these foods were brought to your store? How do you suppose they were conveyed there? How far did they come to get there?
Another thing to ask your grandparents.. how do they feel about their grocery options today?
Southern France
> how do they feel about their grocery options today?
They can barely afford them with their pension
> How do you suppose they were conveyed there? How far did they come to get there?
Yeah it's shipped from overseas, but that's no argument for using plastic, if anything it's an argument for both stopping shipping basic food from 5000km away AND stop plastic all at once. The status quo being fucked up can't be used as an argument to let it rot further
It's a real mystery.
Sure, tech workers can afford a few more cents per plastic item. But inflation this year has shown just how precarious the world's economy really is when it comes to handling even small percent increases in cost of living.
I think we just need to do a better job of disposing of plastic, but it's not clear how to accomplish that.
Also every solution is destined for failure because it would have to be adopted by the entire world, but that will never happen.
After recycling, the plastic still needs to be sorted by its chemical variety. This is done fully automatically using an optical sensor and compressed air. The success rate of the sorting phase has been optimized in co-operation with plastic packaging manufacturers (plastics that are dyed black are more problematic for the sorting process.)
And there is certainly consumer demand for recycled plastics even if it's more expensive than pristine plastic. Using recycled source material allows companies to brand the end product as more ecofriendly. The recycling plant that processes the plastics for my city is already operating at fully capacity, able to sell 100% of their output and looking to expand.
The end product of the recycling process are small plastic granules that can be used just like pristine plastic to make new plastic products. Only limitation is the granules are not food-grade, but then again there are tons of non-food plastic products. Also, if there is ever lack of demand for the recycled plastic it is possible to ban the use of pristine plastic for certain products to increase demand. But as said, currently the organic consumer demand for recycled plastic products already surpasses production capacity.
Commercial link: https://www.fortum.com/products-and-services/recycling-waste...
So should you recycle single use plastics? Only if you can't avoid needing them in the first place and you can't re-use them.
Basically it's a sign of progress that they're putting more emphasis on the earlier two steps as public opinion starts to shift in their direction.
I admit I'm probably not as knowledgeable as I should be, but I have read many pieces on this issue and I'm only left more confused than I was before. I do think single-use plastic is far too common, but there are reasons why is is used, and in many cases moving to other materials (glass or metal, for example) would create additional problems that are never addressed by pieces like this.
Here's my questions; I'm genuinely curious about them and not trying to be antagonistic to the idea of reducing traditional plastic use, which I am supportive of in general.
1. If mixed single-stream recycling is a problem, why not return to sorted recycling, like we did for years? Yes, getting people to recycle correctly is a problem but it seems like part of that was an educational/system issue (not educating people about what can actually be recycled, making it truly easy for them to do so by supplying the right things, etc.), and if it solves the problem at least by a substantial percentage points, isn't that better?
2. Why not focus on improvements in recycling engineering and plastic production than plastic recycling per se? I can forsee some situation where someone makes it very efficient to recycle plastic, and then we'll be in a position of "undoing" all the "plastic recycling is a myth" pieces like this. Also, what happens when we produce plastic in some kind of sustainable way and end up with compostable plastic? Won't this be confusing to people? Why not focus on specifics?
3. I get the idea that new plastic is cheaper and more efficient to produce than recycling old plastic. But then there's often a leap to something like "we should use aluminum instead because recycling old aluminum is very efficient and cheap compared to producing new aluminum". However, this is not the same as saying "recycling old aluminum is more energy efficient than producing new plastic" or even "recycling old aluminum is more energy efficient than recycling old plastic". When I've read articles about this, it's confusing because they generally have said that producing the same item in either new or old aluminum is more costly environmentally/energy-wise than anything with plastic old or new. This seems like a common error in sustainability campaigns, not fully accounting for the energy costs involved in switching materials due a focus on end-of-life considerations alone.
4. What about all the supply-chain problems introduced by eliminating plastics? I'm thinking weight, damage, etc. It seems just as arbitrary to say "plastic recycling isn't economical" versus "everyone everywhere just get your deodorant and yogurt in reusable containers". Sure, it can be done, but realistically in the modern age? If it's so appealing why don't you see yogurt container deposits taking off?
5. Along those lines, aren't the economics of this somewhat arbitrary and malleable? I don't mean this in a naive way, I mean: taxes and government incentives shift this stuff around. There are also successful companies who base their entire business model on recycled plastic -- aren't they supplying a demand?
6. Also along those lines, much of this seems kind of overgeneralized. I know of locales that, through these sorts of government policies and so forth, push the economics of this all around to create these kinds of opportunities. Putting aside of "scaling this up", it seems a little overstated to say "plastic recycling is a myth" when there are places doing it. Maybe it doesn't usually work, but fighting against it in general seems kind of like the wrong place to put effort.
7. Let's say you successfully recycle 5% of your plastic. "Successfully" in all senses. Isn't that still 5% less plastic, which is a lot?
Again, I'm not trying to be hostile to the idea of reusing and reducing, as opposed to recycling, and I make an effort to avoid plastic when feasible. I'm very much in favor of those things, to the point of probably annoying many people around me. But this anti-plastic-recycling campaign has left me scratching my head when I've looked into it.
They're just trying to simplify their message.
They have no hope or even intention of banning all plastics, they just want the "reduce" message to be heard clearly, because the audience isn't nerds, it's the American public.
And they'd love all the stuff that wasn't reduced or re-used to be recycled, but it's hard to convey that to a lay audience. "If recycling is so great, why do we need to reduce and reuse?"
If the outcome of recycling isn’t doing a good job of achieving that goal — which it arguably is not - then we should not be overly attached to that. Recycling shouldn’t be be a quasi-religion, accepted on faith as a solution with no regard to its actual outcome.
Right now, putting out recycling to be collected every week makes people feel better about themselves and their consumption. The numbers indicate it isn’t working to reduce waste though, despite how happy we are to pat ourselves on the back.
Is it gloomy to point out the emperor has no clothes? I’d argue someone needs to say it.
It is of course always preferable to try to reduce waste than need to invest in recycling - that is a given. We can always dream big about everyone switching to reusable containers and other ways to reduce plastic waste on a grand scale. But to claim that plastic recycling does not work and can not be made to work (and by logical extension is therefore not worthwhile) is akin to ignoring the present problem while proposing a pie-in-the-sky solution.
Lots of places mark things recyclable when they are not. Governments refuse to require proper labelling or better yet tax or ban non-recyclable plastics. Companies routinely lie about the recycled content of their plastic. Municipalities insist waste is sorted, then just throw it all in the same landfill.
You've heard of security theatre? We have recycling theatre and emissions agreement theatre and 101 other similar stitch-ups
Without the plastic containers, many sources of revenue disappear. People are conditioned to pay for plastic water bottles, but often expect water fountains to be free.
As a wealthy consumer, it's much more convenient to buy a bottle of water when I need it, rather than carry a metal bottle with me everywhere for when I need it (and then refill at water fountains). The $1 cost of the bottle is negligible to me, so the only thing holding me back is the guilt of knowing that I am contributing to unsustainable economic practices.
In truth however, the same could be said for the meat I eat, the car I drive every day, my luxurious single family home with grass lawn, the luxurious levels of heating / AC I use every year, and so on. Very little of what I consume is 'sustainable' so even if we didn't have recycling theatre it's easy to get sustainability fatigue and buy the plastic bottle of water anyways.
Since China banned imports of waste, Japan has been working on improving recycling capabilities at home. They collect something like 86% of their plastics properly sorted and are developing new more readily recyclable plastics. We should follow their lead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_producer_responsibili...
Similar to renewable power, we basically already know the answer but we like arguing about problems more than solving them so progress is slow.
One can't really suspect swiss to be lazy or cheap on anything, in contrary. I don't know details about general waste lifecycle here but it seems other places could take some inspiration and focus energy and resources on more sane parts of waste processing.
Still, if we're looking at comparative effort for GHG reduction, I agree in principle that landfilled plastic might as well be considered nearly carbon neutral: extracting oil, creating plastic, then landfilling the plastic is a "closed loop" in the sense that the carbon starts in the ground and ends in the ground (minus waste in the intermediate processes, of course). It's not "sustainable" because we don't have infinite oil, but it's not going to be the primary cause for climate change.
This is in contrast to using fossil fuels for energy and transportation, wherein we extract oil/gas from the earth and then burn it to transform into heat, electricity, or kinetic energy for your car. In all of these, the carbon's end state is in the atmosphere, which is worse than a landfill.
To that end, I would much rather spend effort tackling petrol cars, oil and gas heated homes, and fossil fuel power plants. Plastic is an ugly problem, but not the worst problem.
The best place for plastic that has been used is buried in a giant pit, and the second best place is burned to CO2 in a high oxygen furnace.
Plastic bags require pure refined plastic so they don't have random holes and thick spots in.
But then you can melt down 1000 bags into a big lump and use that as a chair...
For example it might look like this: https://www.recycledfurniture.co.uk/Benches-and-Seating/Park...
And obviously a heavier product has itself a larger environmental impact when it finally comes to be disposed of - weight is a rough proxy for environmental impact.
We can only really do cost effective recycling if we transition to aluminum only packaging.
There's always someone desperate enough.
I always ponder what I’d do if we ever stopped recycling plastic.
It would take up so much space in my trash can I’d be emptying three times a day. I’m pretty sure I’d still separate the plastic and cardboard into a separate bin just for sanity?
If someone is running a small business from their house the amount of trash produced per day can be staggering.
Not sure where you live, but everywhere I lived does not accept these into recycling - so I assume these don't account for what the commenter was saying.
Secondly, if you’re personally generating that much plastic per day, I think the first step in your personal journey should be to re-evaluate how that’s happening and change your habits to reduce it. Making that much waste isn’t normal or healthy.
People could vote for their money.
Only the political system can deliver systemic change. It has managed to use money to insulate itself from the will of the people, though.