The truth is that plastic generally can't be recycled, and we should stop pretending as such. Consequently it would make sense to tax it and generally discourage its use as much as possible.<p>Polluters get away with overusing plastic packaging precisely because consumers stop caring when they think it can be recycled.
Maybe a solution is the same with cigarettes in the UK. Any packaging which is non-recyclable must be a standard color (i.e. red), and may not contain any creative branding on it. If advertisers want to market their products and make them look attractive on the shelves, they'll find creative solutions to using recyclable packaging.
I live in New Haven and saw on our handy recycling flyer [0] that pizza boxes are listed, with no caveat, as being a single stream curbside recyclable item.<p>Which is great, because pizza is a whole <i>thing</i> in this town. We eat a lot of it.<p>So I was surprised to learn, if you go poking around and find the RecycleCT website [1] and hover your mouse over the pizza box, up pops this note. "No food residue. No liner."<p>Never in my life have I had a pizza box without grease soaked through it.<p>Maybe they've just given up, and knowing it won't be recycled anyway, they don't bother to make a fuss about what can go in the bin? Is this flyer just there to make us feel better about our waste? Because otherwise that's a pretty major note to forget to mention. Pizza boxes are recyclable, just as long as there's never been any pizza in it.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.newhavenct.gov/civicax/filebank/blobdload.aspx?blobid=31946" rel="nofollow">https://www.newhavenct.gov/civicax/filebank/blobdload.aspx?b...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.recyclect.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.recyclect.com</a>
This is LUDICROUS. Recycling is harder than doing your taxes. We desperately need uniformity on this.<p>"<i>BEVERAGE BOTTLES
Recyclable. Be sure to remove the plastic film label, which isn’t recyclable.</i>" FFS. Have you ever tried to remove one of those labels? It's impossible.<p>"<i>A bottle with a cap or an opening the same size or smaller than the base of the bottle is probably going to be recyclable.</i>" -- WTF does the size of the opening have to do with it?<p>"<i>The How2Recycle label is showing up on more products at the grocery store ... GreenBlue says that there are more than 2,500 variations of the label in circulation</i>" 2500 different recycling rules?!<p>This is not a consumer-level problem. It's completely ridiculous to expect millions of ordinary people to succeed at this kind of task on a daily or weekly basis. It needs to be solved further up the supply chain, or processors need to be centralized and standardized. Period.
I toured the Recology recycling facility a few months ago. The sorting technology is impressive, but the amount of material that they remove and send to the landfill had me questioning the efficacy of the program.<p>It sucks to push the packaging crimes of businesses onto consumers, but I think improving the public's understanding of what can and cannot be recycled can still have a massive impact on the effectiveness of recycling programs.<p>San Francisco has a great website to help you figure out what goes in which bin: <a href="https://sfrecycles.org/" rel="nofollow">https://sfrecycles.org/</a><p>(Note that you can recycle fabrics -- this isn't possible through most recycling programs!)
Be carefull with this info, much depends on the factory. In the Netherlands we separate plastic and much cannot be recycled but new techniques and factories are being developed as a results of the constant stream of (at the moment!) worthless plastics. [0]<p>[0] <a href="https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2018/06/18/weg-met-plastic-in-laagjes-dat-is-niet-te-recyclen-a1607033" rel="nofollow">https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2018/06/18/weg-met-plastic-in-laag...</a>
The plastics and chemicals industries -- as a chemistry professor used to put it -- are but a pimple on the butt of the petroleum fuels industry.<p>They are a tiny portion of what's getting produced every day. And as long as petroleum keeps getting pumped out of the ground for dirt cheap and getting burned, plastics will be an inevitable byproduct.<p>It just costs pretty much $0 to make new plastic from that stream of petroleum, versus recycling which takes human effort, more equipment, logistics, etc.<p>Until we tax petroleum coming out of the ground for all the later problems it causes us, I too am disappointed but resigned to having recycling being a further waste of resources.
I've sort of wondered if recycling plastics is actually maybe bad from a CO2 angle.<p>It seems that using mined virgin oil for plastics that gets tossed in a landfill means that at least a little more of the oil we are mining ends up not getting burned and emitted as CO2. In this way, we're creating non-global warming demand for oil which competes with the energy demand in the market. I don't know if this is a reasonable way of thinking about it.<p>Of course, the energy required to haul a bottle of water hundreds of miles is huge, so I'm not arguing for buying more plastic waste, just not sure how recycling existing plastic waste affects global warming in particular.
Does anyone have a article that clearly shows the energy costs for different container options? Let's use a 12 oz / 330 mL container of soda as the example. What I'd like to see would be something like this:<p><pre><code> New Recycle
Glass: GN Kwh GR Kwh
Plastic: PN Kwh PR Kwh
Aluminum: AN Kwh AR Kwh
</code></pre>
That is, rather than seeing statistics that say a recycled aluminum can uses only 5% of the energy needed to create a new can (AN vs AR), I'd like to see how that 5% compares to the energy to create a new plastic bottle (AR vs PN), or to recycle a plastic bottle (AR vs PR). And I'd love for it to be units that make sense. My searching hasn't turned up much.
You can recycle polyethylene pretty easily on its own, and a lot of those plastic wraps that the article says aren't recycled are made out of LDPE. HDPE and LDPE are great materials for a lot of things that you might otherwise make out of wood or 3D-print. It's easy to machine, and it can be very strong and rigid for its weight.<p>Basically, you just shred the donor plastic, heat it to 300-350F, press the air out, and let it cool. With LDPE plastic wrap, you can fold and stack it instead of shredding it. You can also get cool tie-dye effects by using multiple colors in the same batch.<p>You can use plywood for the walls of your molds, and a toaster oven that you don't plan on cooking with ever again can be a reasonable furnace. To compress the hot plastic, try making a loose-fitting lid and tamping or clamping it down while the plastic heats.<p>But make sure that it is polyethylene - some plastics, like PVC, release highly toxic fumes. And others, like polypropylene, are often mixed with plasticizers which evaporate into nasty fumes and reduce the quality of the recycled plastic.
The US actually sends a lot of its unrecyclable plastic trash in boats across the world to Asia (in return ships that delivered goods), but it's coming back more and more.<p>Here is a cool video that explains this - Asian Nations Reject Western Trash - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-htnUTN4mH0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-htnUTN4mH0</a><p>For example, for recycling plastic bottles, we are supposed to take the plastic lid off, and even remove the attachment of the lid and separate it from the main plastic body.<p>Otherwise, the bottle can't actually be recycled. Single use plastics are everywhere where I live and more prevalent than ever: you want to buy 4 peaches at the supermarket? They come in a small plastic box wrapped in a plastic sheet.<p>The only way is going to be to make it illegal and force people to use paper bags or reusable bags, not only for carrying the groceries but also to separate fruit, use reusable containers for grains, etc.<p>But it has to be mandatory for everyone in order to make any significant difference.
Worth noting for anyone who thinks "why bother recycling", this is specifically about plastics.<p>If you have metal, aluminum <i>especially</i> is a very valuable recyclable, so definitely keep recycling that.
I like the "wishcycle" term - have never heard that before. Where I life in Southern California we have "single stream recycling" -- you throw all of your recyclables into one bin. I used to have a roommate who I had to continually remind <i>"leftover burritos and hair extensions are not recyclable"</i>. Her attitude was <i>"I just throw everything in there... they'll pick out what they don't want."</i> Some days I really wonder how effective such a recycling system is at <i>recycling</i> vs. how much it only serves to make us feel good about ourselves.
Someone has run the numbers and figure out energy cost and total tonnage and figure out what makes sense to streamline.<p>Plastics is a term which applies to thousands of different polymers. Some it makes sense to recycle, some don’t.<p>We can then begin to whittle down on the plastics we allow on the items which make most sense. For example we don’t needs tends of different plastics just because one vendor prefers the aesthetics of one over the other. Give them a select choice rather than an infinite choice.<p>Then label the packaging simply with simple easy to understand labels which are clearly visible. Avoid mixing incompatible plastics.
I was wondering if we should put "seller unique rfids" on everything so the trash can be sorted and returned to the seller. Then we just add the cost of recycling to the cost of the product. Alternatively, add a "recycler unique rfid" and every seller has to partner with a recycler in order to sell a product.
I think taxing packaging along with a country-wide standard for recycling AND for standardised containers (as per other posts here) would be the best option - win-win for governments. Non-homogeneous packaging eg. Cardboard food containers with plastic windows would be taxed heavily.<p>Taxing packaging by weight and type would theoretically work to minimise packaging and encourage eg. Bringing a tupperware container to the shops. The standardised (countrywide) container types would mean you could eg. Put your standard coffebean container under the supermarket dispenser and do away with packaging.<p>The taxation would apply to manufacturers (import) not consumers, thus incentivising them to advertise green credentials as a feature, and to cut down packaging or pass the cost on (at which point most customers would move to the cheaper product).<p>As far as non-homogeneous packaging goes, if it takes longer than 5sec to separate each bit into homogeneous parts, then I'd class it as non-homogeneous.
Something I've wondered about but never been able to find a clear answer: what is the cost of putting a non recyclable item in the recycling?<p>I'm sure there's a lot of "it depends" in this answer, just as there is for most parts of this article. Still, even a ballpark answer would really help with the applied question of how much confidence in an item's recyclability one should have before putting it in the bin.<p>If I'm 95% sure then I'll do it. If I think the odds are 10% I won't. But where is the line? This depends on the cost of being wrong in terms of processing effort/energy, potential to ruin surrounding goods items, etc
Lately I've been playing around with melting down and reforming plastics that aren't recyclable in my area. It has been enjoyable and I've made a few usable things already.<p>The <a href="https://preciousplastic.com/" rel="nofollow">https://preciousplastic.com/</a> project takes this much further.
Coffee cups are a no too - <a href="https://envirobank.com.au/coffee-cups-recyclable-or-not/" rel="nofollow">https://envirobank.com.au/coffee-cups-recyclable-or-not/</a>. You can't just split into lid and cup and chuck one in the paper bin and the other in the plastic bin.
Recently I got some 9V batteries from Amazon (for the smoke detector). They all came individualy shrink wrapped in plastic - all 8 of them - despite coming in a box that was surely strong enough to protect them from damage on the short trip from the fulfillment center. Why? Protect from corrosion?<p>This is probably a poor example, as I'm sure there must be <i>some</i> reason to do this with batteries, but so many things we buy online now come with mountains of non-recyclable plastics that just create more waste. I'm with other commenters here: tax the hell out of this stuff and force retailers, especially ones with clout like Amazon, to develop different packaging technologies that don't overuse plastics for literally everything.
Considering the success of neural network image classifiers, it seems garbage sorting would be a slam dunk application for these reasons:<p>(1) the training data is readily available. there are human sorters who already are classifying everything in real-time as they pick stuff off the conveyor and move the item to the right bin. train cameras on the conveyor belt and the analyze which items are picked out and which bin they get tossed in.<p>(2) the NN doesn't have to be anywhere near as accurate as, say, a self-driving car. tune the classifier to minimize false positives. If the resulting NN can classify only 70% of the items, but accurately, that means 70% of the garbage stream can be automated and run 24/7. Humans can still go through the remaining 30% if it economically makes sense.
Why can't we just package more food items in aluminum? Every time I read about the mess that is recycling, I am reassured that aluminum is the absolute best case material. Why are we only using it for soda cans?
We have an all-generation family vacation each year in TN (lots of food and drink). Coming from MA, we are used to recycling and so would collect recyclables and take them to the grocery store collection point (curbside was garbage only).<p>This year, we did the same and noticed the recycling collection bins were gone. Went inside to inquire and were <i>proudly</i> told, “Oh, we got a big new landfill opened up with <i>plenty of space</i>; we don’t have to recycle anymore!”<p>Ugh.
Just stop buying things in plastic . There <i>are</i> alternatives - stores that sell products in bulk, growing your own food, reusing containers. The solutions are there.
What I don't see anywhere is chemical-based recycling. Many plastics can be dissolved in acetone, for example. Shred it all to flakes, put it in a vat of acetone, burn the stuff that isn't dissolvable and then take the raw materials out of the acetone?<p>Or is the dissolving-into-acetone part a non-reversible operation and one ends up with a boatload of contaminated acetone?
Before reading this, I thought that non-reusable plastics should be banned, and that only reusable packaging should be allowed, should it be high quality plastics, glass, stainless steel...<p>Some plastic types should be banned, it would make recycling more viable...<p>I'm really curious how much plastic China was importing, and what they were doing with it.
I always joke that we'll have robots that take care of this problem before we have self-driving cars.<p>On a more serious note: This is far too confusing, and most of this burden belongs to the recycling processor, not the consumer.
nearly everything we acquire ends up in a landfill eventually, plastic or not. Plastic unlike metals can never be restored as good as new. The recycled plastic will always be inferior. Metals do not have that problem.