Amazon packages burn in India, final stop in broken recycling system

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In what is about to become the year 2023, the most effective way of recycling is to limit your purchases altogether. Some day go through your Amazon purchase history for the last decade and see how much absolute garbage purchases you made.<p>Resist buying stuff you don&#x27;t really need. Can you repurpose an item? Then turn to the recycling industry and maybe it will find a way back.<p>Resist &gt; Reuse &gt; Recycle

<i>She was able to quickly identify the envelope as polyethylene, the most common type of plastic.</i><p>PE burns much cleaner than coal, and probably paper too.<p><i>Burning plastic releases a slew of toxins into the air, including dioxins, furans, mercury and other emissions that threaten the health of people, animals and vegetation, according to multiple studies.</i><p>Unless they&#x27;re somehow burning lots of chlorinated&#x2F;fluorinated stuff (which is almost certainly not being used for much in the way of packaging, simply because those plastics are so much more expensive), that&#x27;s just fearmongering. ...and <i>mercury</i>? WTF. That&#x27;s where I stopped reading the article because it stopped making sense. Combustion certainly can&#x27;t transmute elements, and mercury wouldn&#x27;t be present unless they&#x27;re burning something else...<p>...like coal, which does contain mercury as a significant impurity.

&gt; There was no doubt in her mind: Smyla had put that envelope into her recycling bin. “That&#x27;s polyethelene, and I&#x27;d recycle that. If it’s got the recycling symbol on it, into the bin it goes,” she says. “I get a lot of Amazon packages, and they all go into the bin, too.”<p>This thanks to Big Oil.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2020&#x2F;09&#x2F;11&#x2F;897692090&#x2F;how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2020&#x2F;09&#x2F;11&#x2F;897692090&#x2F;how-big-oil-misled-...</a>

This is just sad. I live in an Indian metro, in an upper middle class neighborhood, and recently saw a pile of plastic burning on the side of our street. This happens infrequently (handful of times in a year), but only because of the pressure from the residents here who can afford to apply power to push it out of our neighborhood.<p>The smoke is dense, white and spreads quickly. It has a strong smell to it and quickly seeps into adjacent homes (which are 5 storied apartment buildings, so it reaches a lot of people). It gives me a headache that lasts for at least a couple of hours.<p>I can&#x27;t even imagine what it would be like to live in Muzaffarnagar (city from article) next to one of these plastic burning facilities if one small pile on my street had such a big impact on my family&#x27;s wellbeing.<p>&gt; Around Muzaffarnagar, respiratory problems such as asthma and bronchitis along with eye infections associated with air pollution and the burning of plastic are on the rise, up as much as 30% over the last few years, according to Muzaffarnagar’s chief medical officer.<p>Mainstream narrative over-indexes on long-term impact of global warming vs. the shorter term health impacts of pollution. This makes sense: when developed countries dictate global media narrative, they&#x27;re not going to focus on the pollution aspect much because it doesn&#x27;t impact them in a tangible, day-to-day basis.<p>But the immediate health impact is a stronger narrative: there are people who are impacted by it every day and are dying. It has a face to it. We need a lot more coverage on this front. Grateful for this article.

I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about “plastic roads”.<p>Many countries, desperate to make use of the gargantuan flow of waste plastic, and desperate to avoid it going into landfill, are putting the waste plastic into roads.<p>This is called “recycling”.<p>Sounds like a great idea until you realize that cars and trucks drive on the roads and grind them into dust - dust containing microplastics.<p>The microplastic dust will go into air, waterways, rivers, oceans, food, plants animals and people.<p>All this is because the environmentalists have decided that “keeping plastics out of landfill” is more important than anything.<p>Plastic roads are an environmental disaster in an epic scale being created in the name of “recycling”.<p>The worst thing is that for some reason it’s not obvious that this is a disastrous idea, and all around the world people are breathlessly talking up plastic roads like its a solution to the plastic waste problem.<p>“In 2015, the Indian government made it mandatory for plastic waste to be used in constructing roads near large cities of more than 500,000 people”<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;future&#x2F;article&#x2F;20210302-could-plastic-roads-make-for-a-smoother-ride" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;future&#x2F;article&#x2F;20210302-could-plastic-ro...</a><p>Mandated madness. The safest place for the fire hydrant of waste plastic is in landfill, not “recycled” into microplastic dust.<p>Would you like a plastic road outside your house, or outside your kids school?

I am increasingly coming to wonder if the non-biodegradability of plastic should be regarded as a feature rather than a bug.<p>This stuff is made of oil. The last thing we want to do with oil, from an environmental standpoint, is turn it into greenhouse gases. The best way to accomplish that would be to leave it underground. Since we&#x27;re not doing that, perhaps the second best thing is to convert it into a solid material and then put it back underground. It seems like landfills are our chance at keeping this stuff reasonably contained, and, in that setting, the fact that it lasts forever hopefully means that this carbon we dug up from underground won&#x27;t end up in the atmosphere quite so quickly.<p>All other options seem to ultimately lead toward large-scale greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution and water pollution. Recycling seems to be, <i>at best</i>, a more scenic route to that same destination.

&gt; Laurie Smyla, a 73-year-old retiree from Sloatsburg, New York [...] Smyla has a degree in environmental science and even served as coordinator for the local recycling program in the late 1980s, as she explains when reached by phone. She was able to quickly identify the envelope as polyethylene, the most common type of plastic.<p>I gotta wonder, how many people did the reporters have to contact before finding the perfect subject to put a human angle on this part of the story. Kudos to them for doing the legwork

So, in my city, there&#x27;s a warehouse, they buy Amazon returns and surplus in bulk, every week on the same day, they fill shallow elevated bins ideal for picking through with the items. Day 1 everything is $25 an item, the price reduces each day until everything is $1 on day 7. It is a great low cost (it&#x27;s actually profitable), probably profitable enough that if Amazon ran these themselves they could pay to process all the waste in an eco friendly way and not lose money.

Plastic doesn&#x27;t recycle, at a practical scale. I like the idea of developing garbage burning plants with superb emission control, and burning it all locally.<p>As well as reducing plastic usage in low value applications. It is sad, all the plastic litter in the world.

I think it&#x27;s become apparent that the whole recycling concept is misguided. There&#x27;s just not enough economic value in these materials to justify the socialized cost. It&#x27;s better to dump the waste into proper landfills.<p>Ultimately environmental impact is mostly about CO2 release these days. We&#x27;re not running out of most of these raw materials. And for the one big one we are (oil) having it end up buried in a landfill is about the best realistic option we have today.

A Dutch newspaper wrote a depressing article¹ two years ago in a similar vain about plastic from the Netherlands ending up in Türkiye for &#x27;recycling&#x27;. The same story, just different countries.<p>There are a lot of actors pushing for municipalities to collect plastic separately (like paper and glass), but stories like these make you wonder if that even makes sense at this point.<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nrc.nl&#x2F;nieuws&#x2F;2020&#x2F;10&#x2F;16&#x2F;plastic-afval-hoe-een-nederlands-dropzakje-kon-eindigen-in-een-turkse-berm-a4016112" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nrc.nl&#x2F;nieuws&#x2F;2020&#x2F;10&#x2F;16&#x2F;plastic-afval-hoe-een-n...</a>

I am trying to start a local 3D printing business, where a lot of basic parts or things people need can be made locally with Amazon style 2-day delivery. The order just goes to someone in your area who is certified to make stuff. I think this could massively help our global logistics and waste problems, and be a boon to local economies. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;HeyRobot.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;HeyRobot.org</a> Please get in touch if anyone is interested in joining in this project. I work on it nights and weekends… No VCs, just me and some friends coding.

Does Amazon declare the financial and legal risks of externalizing the disposal costs of their plastic- and styrofoam-based (and cardboard!) packaging onto municipal recycling and waste processing?<p>For example: what would it cost Amazon if they were charged a recycling fee for all single-use packaging by the state California?

It&#x27;s past time for state and local government to require large online retailers such as Amazon to provide a means of collecting shipping materials for recycling and reuse... This segment of our economy badly needs some gov regulation... For the sake of the planet

Interesting that plastic bottles that get accidentally shipped to India are still worth extracting and recycling.<p>&gt; unmasked waste pickers sifted for metal cans or intact plastic bottles that could be sold<p>The plastic they burn is envelopes made of soft plastic that have been incorrectly sorted by the recycling process and bundled with paper that they do actually want.

The idea that we&#x27;ll get Americans to properly dispose of plastic is not credible to me, without some kind of cultural shift that I don&#x27;t expect (I&#x27;m aware that some other countries, perhaps Germany and Japan, are much more diligent about how you dispose of household waste).<p>I&#x27;ve observed a number of people who haven&#x27;t seemed to internalize the current rules about what can be recycled. People especially want to think that thin plastic bags can go in the recycling with everything else. I don&#x27;t think people are going to move away from single-stream recycling, which appears to be a big part of the problem.

A friend of mine had this boyfriend once who ran a business that used recycled glass. Something to do with producing high quality sand for filtration systems and some other interesting processes (can&#x27;t remember exactly what it was anymore bummer). The sand was made out of ground glass from wine bottles. As he told me, his process required just the right kind of glass and it had to be very, very clean. There was substantial investment into washing and label removal, to produce the right inputs. He said it was barely worthwhile, and he said that most plastic and even glass recyclables are just too dirty and too mixed up for it to be worthwhile. Al and Fe cans and Cu wire on other hand are absolutely a go.

I ordered a small item from Amazon about a few months ago and it came in a paper envelope which was light weight but padded with a corrugated paper mesh which was not rigid like cardboard. At the time I thought, “This is the perfect replacement for those plastic blue and white envelopes!” But every small item since then has been shipped in the standard plastic envelopes. I don’t know what it would take to change all to these soft paper envelopes. If all retailers changed to these, it would be so much easier to recycle.

Burning waste correctly is actually a really good way to recycle. For example, Vienna incinerates it&#x27;s garbage and plastic to provide heating for almost half the city. The emissions from burning 1 persons yearly garbage is estimated<p>It&#x27;s estimated that incinerating the entire annual waste for one person in Vienna produces the same carbon emissions as driving a car 100 km. [0]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Ml0gXre_V-U?t=80" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Ml0gXre_V-U?t=80</a>

Does anyone here have any experience with Ridwell? They claim to collect and recycle hard-to-recycle materials, like the bags potato chips come in.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hrw.org&#x2F;report&#x2F;2022&#x2F;09&#x2F;21&#x2F;its-if-theyre-poisoning-us&#x2F;health-impacts-plastic-recycling-turkey" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hrw.org&#x2F;report&#x2F;2022&#x2F;09&#x2F;21&#x2F;its-if-theyre-poisonin...</a><p>I would prefer a system were each country cleans up their own mess but robots are more expensive than people.

If we cannot find a way to dispose of plastic without damaging people and the environment, perhaps we should stop producing it.

The opposition parties in India like AAP and Congress are also playing a dirty game as they have investment in some of these companies, instead they blame random one off days like Diwali for fireworks to take the attention off this plastic and crop stubble burning

We should be saving this stuff in a safe large landfill here in the states. With improvements in recycling economy, perhaps in 25years a large plastic landfill would worth an lot of money. Trash futures anyone?

Please could someone provide a reliable source of what happens to recycling by material and country?

Amazon is highly irresponsible company. It wastes so much packaging for each shipment.

Soft plastics haven&#x27;t been recycled in a long time. I trash those.

This was quite hard hitting. I mean, if you&#x27;re a consumer in the US where even a simple piece of fruit comes packaged often in plastic, you know the piece of plastic isn&#x27;t going to be completely recycled. I always thought this ends up in a landfill which is bad in itself!<p>There have been a few other outlets that have focused on this problem in the past. John Oliver did a segment too.<p>Are there any startups working in this space? Incineration is quite bad if the fumes aren&#x27;t contained - is there research happening in controlling&#x2F;eliminating toxins even if incineration is done?

&quot;recycling&quot; is mostly an illusion

This headline is the definition of clickbait. And the entire article is clickbait too.<p>Article has nothing to do with Amazon it&#x27;s about recycling.<p>And they&#x27;re not burning packages they are burning a small amount of plastic contamination mixed into paper recycling.