Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

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TCE is widely used in industry (and was introduced as a replacement for more toxic and persistent solvents like chloroform, carbon tetrachloride, etc.). Such non-polar solvents remain critically important for a wide variety of manufacturing processes, e.g.

> "TCE the solvent ENTEK uses is essential to ENTEK's separator manufacturing process TCE has a unique combination of chemical properties that , together , facilitate the controlled removal of process oil while allowing ENTEK to efficiently recover and recycle previously used TCE for reuse in both the lead- acid and lithium separator production processes in a manner that minimizes worker exposure while resulting in a product with the characteristics demanded by the battery customers . TCE possesses the following properties critical to ENTEK's use and reuse" (ENTEK TCE rulemaking report to EPA, July 14 2021)

The fundamental issue (that led to widespread contamination in the past) is that capturing and recycling TCE after use is fairly expensive, and since it was cheaper to buy new TCE, manufacturers would just dump their dirty used TCE, creating superfund sites etc.

There are some approaches to replacing organic solvents entirely (supercritical CO2 for example) but they're often quite expensive.

> capturing and recycling TCE after use is fairly expensive, and since it was cheaper to buy new TCE, manufacturers would just dump their dirty used TCE, creating superfund sites etc.

This isn't a problem, us future generations can just engineer our way out of it at a cheaper cost than it would have been to deal with it in the first place.

/s - For sarcasm, and sorry.

Ha. "Let's break all these cups and throw em in a hole! Future people will use something something something tech and put them back together good as new."

People are constantly assuming magical future entropy-undoers to justify their breaking and ruining things today.

I had a family member who used to educate people on recycling. Growing up it was a major fact that styrofoam was a forever material that would never biodegrade and couldn't be recycled. Today there are methods to recycle styrofoam (albeit just like all recycling it takes people and resources to take the effort to do it, which is the real barrier). I don't think being reckless with our future is a good idea. But history is full of past norms being changed by new scientific discoveries.

I've read that McDonald's phase out of its styrofoam containers in 1990 ironically prevented the recycling of a lot of styrofoam. Businesses were in the process of setting up to recycle styrofoam but the removal of such a huge source of used styrofoam eliminated their potential profitability.

Yes, they replaced food packaging that was recyclable with paper-based packaging that is not recyclable. I worked there before the transition, occasionaly we'd get an irate customer complaining about the styrofoam and we'd try to explain that it was more recyclable than using paper but most would refuse to hear it.

That said, at the store I worked at, the only things that actually got recycled were the cardboard boxes from the stockroom, and the oil from the fryers. Everything else went into the dumpster.

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