That said, it is a bit concerning that this could escape into the wild. Plastics are harmful long term but it’s crucial to society that they don’t just start degrading.
Yes plastic ends up in the ocean. But most plastic waste in the ocean comes from recyclables shipped from first world to third world countries with poor refuse control.
With that in mind being able to recycle plastic cheaper than creating it from oil would be an economic and environmental win.
As a small factual change I can not find any evidence for the statement that most plastic waste comes from shipped recyclables. I'd love a source for that.
Almost all plastic recyclables in the US is shipped to Asia and Africa. It’s simply not profitable to process here.
From the article:
> Recently, however, China has made efforts to curb waste.
> For years the country had imported millions of tons of recyclable waste from overseas, but a growing recycling burden at home prompted the government to shift its policy.
>90% of river-borne ocean plastic comes from 10 rivers in Asia and Africa
Sounds like it isn't profitable there either, so why are we shipping it
China’s change in recycling policy was caused by, among other reasons, a documentary on the workers who sift through the countless volumes of plastic waste. It’s quite sad: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6qZwo6U5YFY
Can we stop pretending that whatever bejing decrees becomes reality in the country it claims to rule over? Its a nice play-pretend facade and the socialist inspired reality below is usually quite dystopian..
We pretend to recycle and they pretend to care..
I'd like to see a source for this because I don't believe anything of it. I only found an article saying it's not true https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-waste-trade
> Data for January showed that exports of scrap plastic from the United States edged upward, to 48 million tons from 45 million tons the previous January. Exports to poorer nations were virtually unchanged from a year ago, totaling 25 million tons.
If these larger export numbers are correct, then the estimates in the article you provided should be multiplied by a factor of 10 at least.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/12/climate/plastics-waste-ex...
The principle of harm reduction dictates that society should take a few steps back and figure out what's going on.
Why do we owe it to the future? We can just stick the plastics in a land fill and deal with them later. They don't degrade (much) after all.
Perhaps oil will become expensive enough, and recycling good enough, that it will makes sense to mine landfills in the future.
(I agree that putting plastics in the ocean or so is probably not a good idea. But that doesn't mean recycling is the only alternative, especially when it doesn't make economic sense.
Btw, most plastics also burn well. So waste-to-energy plants might also make sense.)
I guess call it indoctrination since reuse, conservation, recycling is something taught to kindergarteners, but even at face value the lifecycle obviously a cost -- trash management, elegance (due to litter, and bad packaging), the risks of petroleum mining/hydraulic fracturing, presumably greenhouse gas emissions, microplastic contamination, risks of sloppy chemical engineering/benzene contamination... all costs centered on crap that mostly sucks as a product to begin with... an idiotic matryoska doll of nested garbage.
The requirements get tough at those scales, for the full life cycle I suppose, iterating on any component effectively is a lifetime of work. Oh you can melt it, what about nonremovable contaminants? how much energy input did that cost? I don't see any clear-cut solution except to eliminate subsidies at a solution-dependent rate.
Recycling plastic is pointless.
There's some plastic in there, eg for the keyboard. But removing 90% of plastics would solve 90% of the problem they pose. No need for purity.
(I'm just playing devil's advocate here. I don't actually think plastics are necessarily all that harmful.)
Even reducing them doesn't make that much sense. The amount of energy needed to recycle metals is generally much higher.