Friendly reminder that modern, well regulated landfills are actually fine and there is plenty of space for them.<p>Also, most of the ocean plastic comes from a small number of rivers in the less developed world. [1] Rich countries aren't really the problem.<p>While we should try to reduce waste as much as possible. This is far more effective at the front end of the process when they're designed and produced, the vast amount of carbon is from direct carbon from production and follow on carbon from the carbon intensity of the products under use.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic-tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans/" rel="nofollow">https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plas...</a>
"Operation National Sword" or "Green Sword"[1] from China in 2017 killed most recycling in North America and Europe. But no municipalities or governments wanted to acknowledge it because they spent decades training the population that recycling is important and they didn't want to undo those years of hard work.<p>It's only been in the last year that things are sort of coming back, but landfilling happens for almost all plastics and paper products, unless your muni does multi-bin sorting and not single-stream.<p>Now that petroleum is more expensive, maybe plastic recycling will make a resurgence, but I'm not holding my breath.<p>Recycling boils down to a really really really big and messy sorting problem, and hopefully someone clever can come up with 0-marginal effort waste bins that handle the sorting so Americans can remain lazy and provide a pre-sorted pickup for recyclers.<p>Multi-stream recycling at the source yields the lowest contamination and best recapture rates for material. [2]. The single-stream wave worked when china bought everything, but now that material quality matters, the volume benefits from single-stream are now a liability.<p>1 - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_National_Sword" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_National_Sword</a>
2 - <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-era-of-easy-recycling-may-be-coming-to-an-end/" rel="nofollow">https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-era-of-easy-recycli...</a>
Just fucking throw it away. Why do we pay extra for the privilege of recycling something that is barely recyclable to begin with?<p>Putting plastic in a landfill sequesters carbon, has less emissions in transportation, and doesn’t require paying people to sort it (ultimately born by us chumps paying extra to recycle it - if recycling were truly worth it, they’d be paying us to take it away, or at least discount our garbage service for separating out plastics). Landfills already have mitigations in place for groundwater contamination since landfills can have much more harmful things than micro plastics seep out of them.<p>Not to mention all the micro labor involved in cleaning plastic, and in sorting it for people who aren’t lucky enough to have single stream recycling. Maybe it makes some people feel good but it seems like a distraction and waste of time just to make an unviable activity slightly more viable (if plastic recycling were actually viable this would be centralized since it’s more efficient).<p>I completely support recycling for materials like aluminum and glass that make sense to recycle, but recycling plastic has never made sense economically, and putting it in a landfill isn’t that bad.
Just to be clear, it wasn't being recycled when we were shipping it to China either. It was just going into their landfills instead of our landfills.<p>Recycling plastic is a non-solution to a much bigger problem: over-consumption of plastics.<p>The only way I see forward is for governments to implement policies that discourage use of plastics by consumers and manufacturers. Some places have done this with plastic bags, but need to do it for plastic single-use bottles, etc.
Placing blame and responsibility on consumers to not purchase single-use plastic is not the right approach. Discouraging the use of single-use plastics should be done at government policy level to heavily tax the sale of single-use plastics, and subsidize sustainable alternatives.
In the UK too there's been a lot of news on this:<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/17/uk-plastics-sent-for-recycling-in-turkey-dumped-and-burned-greenpeace-finds" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/17/uk-plast...</a><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/may/16/uk-ewaste-dumped-ghana" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/may/16/uk-ewast...</a><p><a href="https://www.greenpeace.org/africa/en/blogs/11125/africas-exploding-plastic-nightmare/" rel="nofollow">https://www.greenpeace.org/africa/en/blogs/11125/africas-exp...</a><p>Basically recycling companies pay to export the waste to poor countries who simply dump or burn it instead of recycling it.<p>For this reason I avoid plastic and stick to cardboard, glass and aluminium. Fortunately plastic is extremely unfashionable in the UK right now and products are increasingly switching to card or aluminium instead.
Frontline did a documentary about this a while back. Your plastic fruit container may have "3" on it with the recycle symbol, which means it can go to a facility that can recycle that grade of plastic, but that doesn't mean your city / state has a facility that can process that, or will spend the money to build such a facility.<p>It was a move from the plastics industry to push a feel-good policy, but is likely not doing as much good as many of us think.<p><a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/plastic-wars/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/plastic-wars/</a>
This is supposed to be a surprise?<p>It's very simple: If you have to pay to recycle things, it's a failure. If they pay you, it works.<p>China used to <i>buy</i> plastic recycling from the US (it was never just shipped for disposal, China actually paid for it). For a while they actually wanted it because they could use it to make new stuff. But it become uneconomical (too labor intensive), and they stopped.<p>Metal: You have people hunting for metal, and going through bins for it. i.e. it's good to recycle.<p>Cardboard: Same thing.<p>Everything else? Don't recycle it. Burn the plastic for energy, and bury everything else. Sweden actually buys garbage from other countries to burn for energy. Since they are paying for the item, this works just fine.
If only!<p>Western landfills are amazing technology that affordably and safely lock away garbage. Most of the land can be reclaimed for parks or golf courses or other public spaces.<p>Recycling programs often end in plastics being sent to Asian landfills which are little more than open dumps susceptible to rain, flooding, and contributing to the Pacific garbage patch.
This is so disheartening. I subscribed to and helped perpetuate The Lie. Damn.<p>While we're on this topic, does anyone have info regarding what happens to the plastic bags I return to my local (CA, US) grocery store collection bin? Are they part of a separate stream?<p>I add all sorts of used plastic bags to that bin (thin produce bags, the more heavy-duty grocery bags, Amazon padded shipping envelopes, deflated shipping air bags, clean zip lock bags, etc.). I also wonder if I'm gumming up the works by putting different types of plastic bags in the bin because most bags don't have recycle markings/numbers.
I used to think that failing to recycle plastic was fine, because plastic in landfills is carbon sequestered. If not made into plastic, that same carbon would be burned and enter the atmosphere.<p><i>Then</i> I found out that, for each carbon bound up in a piece of plastic, a half-dozen are released to the atmosphere in doing that. Thus, for each bit of plastic not recycled, so much more is made from scratch, and that much more CO2 enters the atmosphere. (Presumably, recycling involves energetic processing, but less.) In the future, when the energy used in processing comes more from renewables, will balances shift?<p>Shale oil, by the way, is equally evil. For each carbon extracted and delivered, four or five are burnt in extracting it.
The Chinese used practically slave labour to sift through US garbage before they ended the imports. 'Recycling' was a euphemism for offshoring garbage whether plastic bottles or solar panels, but now the Chinese have tightened their standards.<p>2017 film 'Plastic China' trailer<p><a href="https://youtu.be/jnNNnHTLjmg" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/jnNNnHTLjmg</a>
The article is specifically about plastic waste. A considerably higher proportion of glass, metal, and paper is successfully recycled, not all of it, but value is extracted and reused.
Throw your plastics directly in the trash. This way you will be honest with yourself about where your plastic is going and maybe use marginally less.<p>The truth is though that if you aren't growing your own food and making your own household items, you are pretty much signed up to create large volumes of plastic waste in a way that is mostly out of your control.
I always suspected this, because given what I know of the average American, there's no chance that the recycling bins aren't full of all kinds of nonrecyclable items. The only things that I expect are reliably recycled are those which are profitable enough to pick out of the mess.
> In large part, that's due to the fact that China stopped importing plastic waste back in 2018, causing a massive pile up in western countries.<p>I don't think so, I've seen reports that most plastic waste sent to China wound up in landfills or incinerators too. So it's actually probably a net improvement to not spend all that energy sending it 7000 miles to China to put it in a landfill.<p>It's been a fiction all along, we just paid China to make it easier for us to pull the wool over our own eyes. Or, even more cycnically, to get it into <i>their</i> landfills or incinerated air pollution instead of ours.
It's not shocking if you understand some of what's involved.<p>For glass, there are lots of different chemical compositions related to color, hardness and other physical and chemical properties, plus all the contamination with other materials like labels. You can't just throw it all into a big furnace and get anything except low quality glass with inclusions - and there's no market for that. Heck, ask glass blowers what COE they use and if you can bring your own colors in.<p>Paper has a lot of the same issue, cleaning it isn't worth what you can get from it. I would guess that we might see an increase in some sort of biological breakdown of it in the future, BUT that might end up releasing a lot more carbon than simply sequestering it in landfills.<p>I suspect that we'll see big improvement in plastics in the coming decades with better breakdown and separation options, but even there contamination will be a big problem.<p>Metals are about the only thing really practical to recycle, at least given current prices for them.
We've recently had another bin added for compost. Now it's Recycle, Compost, Garbage.<p>This upset me so much as it is very clear that there is no mature recycling industry and it's getting worse.<p>A mature recycling industry could just take "rubbish" as a single output, sort it efficiently and get on with things. Get money for taking your rubbish. Get money for selling recycled output.<p><i>Everyone</i> has experienced the "outsource it to the masses so we don't have to cover the expense of doing it".<p>What happened to "efficiency of expertise" and "economies of scale" ?
Moat of plastic recycling is focused on heating up and melting down thermoplastics. I've been wondering if there is another way. Like dissolving the plastics into solvents, then distilling and separating the different compounds in the solution, then pull out thr solvents in a recoverable way, then one would be left with pure compounds. It seems like the science and tech for this exists now, we just need to industrialized it and make it profitable to do so. Not unlike distilling organic compounds like we do today on a commercial scale.
I wonder how long it will be until landfills become valuable mines. A lot of materials in them may certainly be reused again in the future. After all, everything is "recycling" on a long-enough timescale... and the fact that the stuff in landfills has already been processed once may be advantageous from the perspective of needing less processing when it's mined again, compared to something like crude oil.
Perhaps we should require all manufacturers of physical products to have cradle-to-grave lifecycle planning for their products. The supermarket should accept discarded containers from consumers, the tomato soup company should accept discarded cans from supermarkets and the can manufacturers should accept discarded cans from them. Pretty soon you will have reusable containers for almost everything.
In 2020 only 10% of plastic was recycled in Sweden. [0]<p>The rest was burnt to produce heating and electricity - which releases an enormous amount of CO2 gases and other pollutants.<p>Not just a US problem.<p>[0] in Swedish:
<a href="https://www.ivl.se/press/nyheter/2020-02-21-lattlast-rapport-ger-fakta-och-tips-om-plast.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.ivl.se/press/nyheter/2020-02-21-lattlast-rapport...</a>
When we get off of fossil fuels, the economy will have a shortage of cheap reduced carbon. At that point, plastic can be recycled not as plastic, but as a carbon source. It'll be vigorously thermally processed to get small molecules out that can be dealt with like fossil fuels currently are.
Keeping it isolated to its own landfill might prove better than mixing it if plastic eating bacteria tech continues to innovate: <a href="https://www.livescience.com/plastic-eating-bacteria" rel="nofollow">https://www.livescience.com/plastic-eating-bacteria</a>
Fun fact. The recycling plant I worked at would buy and mix in new cardboard with our recycled cardboard because we couldn't get the contamination rate to an acceptable level without blending.
Lots of talk about blaming recycling programs. But the OP as I understand it, shows that people are not even bothering to put but 5% of their plastic in the recycle bin to begin with!