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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/21/us-plastic-recycling-landfills
A Guardian investigation reveals that cities around the [US] are no longer recycling many types of plastic dropped into recycling bins. Instead, they are being landfilled, burned or stockpiled. From Los Angeles to Florida to the Arizona desert, officials say, vast quantities of plastic are now no better than garbage.
The "market conditions" on the sign [Pearl] Pai saw referred to the situation caused by China. Once the largest buyer of US plastic waste, the country shut its doors to all but highest-quality plastics in 2017. The move sent shockwaves through the American industry as recyclers scrambled, and often failed, to find new buyers. Now the turmoil besetting a global trade network, which is normally hidden from view, is hitting home.
"All these years I have been feeling like I'm doing something responsible," said Pai, clearly dumbstruck as she walked away with a full bag. "The truth hurts."
[...] [Cobe] Skye and [Habib] Kharrat emphasized that the situation was not unique to Los Angeles. "From what we're hearing from our colleagues, what's happening in Los Angeles county is representative of what is happening all over the US and all over the state as a result of these international policies," said Skye.
The China ban revealed an uncomfortable truth about plastic recycling, Skye said: much of this plastic was never possible to recycle at all.
"[China] would just pull out the items that were actually recyclable and burn or throw away the rest," he said. "China has subsidized the recycling industry for many years in a way that distorted our views."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by isostatic on Wednesday June 26 2019, @11:49PM (26 children)
Other countries recycle it, it's just more profitable to ignore the externalities. Capitalism FTW!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday June 27 2019, @12:11AM (13 children)
Citations of other countries recycling the stuff. The best use I know of for some of these plastics, is to incinerate them for power. Fact is, much of this stuff is a frivolous use of resources. It's possible to go to the store, scoop up three tomatoes from a bin, put them into a paper bag, pay for them, and take them home. No plastic necessary. For added feel-good, you can even use the same paper bag the next time you go buy some tomatoes!!
India bought up much of the world's waste plastic before China got into the market. Both countries have stopped buying the stuff, because it has no real value.
If you care to win world acclaim, maybe you can find some meaningful use for the stuff.
(Score: 3, Informative) by fustakrakich on Thursday June 27 2019, @12:55AM (6 children)
If you care to win world acclaim, maybe you can find some meaningful use for the stuff.
Well, at least somebody is trying [bpetfilament.com]
Livin' large on plastic [wikimedia.org]
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Thursday June 27 2019, @01:11AM (5 children)
PET drink bottles. especially clear, would likely be one of those high value plastics that don't get incinerated. The plastic pouch that once contained lunchmeat and is covered in salty liquid on one side and paint on the other? Not so much.
(Score: 3, Funny) by fustakrakich on Thursday June 27 2019, @03:22AM (4 children)
The plastic pouch that once contained lunchmeat and is covered in salty liquid on one side and paint on the other?
They can chop that up into nano-particles an just mix it into our Oatmeal and canned beans. Nobody will ever know.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2, Touché) by bob_super on Thursday June 27 2019, @08:11AM (1 child)
Trump failed at starting the Iran war, so we're dangerously low on some critical Soylent ingredients.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday June 27 2019, @07:06PM
Trump failed at starting the Iran war
Patience. The day is still young.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday June 27 2019, @01:37PM
Great. You shit the nanoparticles out, flush them, and they go out into the Pacific, or the Gulf, or the Atlantic, or even the Great Lakes. We all realize that all of our cities use one of those bodies of water as a cesspool, don't we?
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday June 27 2019, @10:21PM
I foresee a new fast food chain starting up...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by RedIsNotGreen on Thursday June 27 2019, @01:43AM (3 children)
The paper bags are delivered to the store in plastic packets, wrapped into bigger groups of plastic packets. The tomatoes arrive in plastic-paper boxes wrapped in plastic with plastic stickers on them.
(Score: 4, Touché) by bobthecimmerian on Thursday June 27 2019, @02:28AM (1 child)
Right. To really make a difference you should use your reusable bag with a farmer's market or something like it, where most of the produce is shipped from a local farm to the store in reusable crates and disposable plastic isn't involved.
The problem is, megacorps inc. grocery stores are open 24/7 or something near and all of the places I can get local grown produce have restricted hours. If I could convince my employer and the school district to move their hours around I can work with that, but no luck so far.
(Score: 3, Informative) by isostatic on Sunday July 07 2019, @07:10PM
Our local farmstores do deliveries 7 days a week in slots from 6am to 9pm
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday June 27 2019, @01:40PM
Paper bags can be bundled with hemp strings, or baler twine, or even wire. No plastic needed. Those boxes? Reusable. It would be better to eliminate the plastic in the boxes, but still, reusable is reusable.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @02:28AM (1 child)
That paper bag is probably most costly and destructive to the environment
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday June 27 2019, @01:41PM
Not if you mulch your paper bags when they can't be used again, and feed them to your vegetable garden. That way, you can eat your bags, indirectly!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @12:11AM (10 children)
When you call 'recycling' burning or shipping it to China or shipping it to the Philippines. Sure "recycling".
Turns out plastic recycles very poorly and they were lying to us.
Honestly, I have been giving this some thought. It is better to bury it than burn it.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Thursday June 27 2019, @01:12AM
carbon sequestration.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by EJ on Thursday June 27 2019, @02:38AM (7 children)
It's better to just not make it in the first place.
(Score: 4, Informative) by khallow on Thursday June 27 2019, @03:08AM (6 children)
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday June 27 2019, @10:24PM (5 children)
Plenty of things are useful, plastics just happen to be convenient and cheap because the majority of the true costs can be externalized.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 28 2019, @04:58AM (4 children)
They happen to be convenient and cheap even when considering the true costs.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday June 30 2019, @10:49PM (3 children)
We've never been even remotely close to having users pay for the true cost of petroleum and plastics. Those costs have always been and still continue to be passed on to future generations.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 01 2019, @02:23PM (2 children)
Unless, of course, you're wrong. Then we have been so close. That's the problem with making unfounded assertions. They can be wrong.
I'll note here that we're seeing the hypocrisy of the entire recycling movement. It was more important to appear to be recycling plastics than to actually do so. And what exactly is the "true cost" of petroleum and plastics? It's just not that much by the evidence. All these people are already paying for landfill disposal as well as litter cleanup, for example.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday July 02 2019, @09:36PM (1 child)
Are you really that blind to all the negative effects of the fossil fuel industry? Try a few minutes with a search engine. We have over seventy plus years of various disasters and reports of the effects of pollution from the petroleum industry, far, far more if you include coal. That a few profit from something doesn't make it without accountable cost, although that does seem, from your various posts over the years, to be the philosophy that guides you. Everything has a cost, passing it on doesn't eliminate it, neither does burying it in landfills. Plastics are easy to manufacture and easy to use, but that is because we don't require the full costs to be paid for at the source, use or disposal. If we did, glass and wicker might still be more prevalent, or at the very least we might have created a far more sustainable plastics industry.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 03 2019, @01:52AM
Are you really that blind to all the positive effects of the fossil fuel industry? If we're going to start charging for negative externalities, then we need to start giving back for positive externalities.
Indeed. Which is a large part of the reason I don't think there's a large negative externality in the first place. They'd have found it by now, if there was one.
Except of course when burying it does eliminate that cost. Let us keep in mind that over those seven plus decades we figured out a lot of ways to reduce the negative externalities of fossil fuels while increasing their benefits. And when simple techniques, like burial in a landfill eliminate a cost, then there's no valid reason to consider the cost any further for such buried materials.
And my point is that the full costs aren't much greater. It's time to stop playing this dishonest game.
Or maybe not. Because there's more important things that you aren't considering.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Thursday June 27 2019, @02:32PM
Plastic can be recycled multiple times before it turns into unusable sludge. At that point there's an argument for either high energy incineration (1000C temperatures) or burying properly (so it doesn't leak into the environment) like we do uranium. Either way the costs of those solutions should be born into the chain.
The majority of plastic can be recycled multiple times - it just is cheaper to dump or burn without doing it properly.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheRaven on Thursday June 27 2019, @07:41AM
Technically, most plastic is downcycled, not recycled. Recycling involves turning it into the same kind of material as before, plastic is turned into lower-quality plastic. This can be more efficient than making lower-quality plastic from scratch, but it doesn't eliminate the problem of there being a huge quantity of low-quality plastic that needs disposing of... somehow. Themoplastics can often be melted and reformed, but only if you can separate them by purity, which is an energy-expensive process. As another poster pointed out, it's better for the environment to burn it than to let it degrade into nanoparticles and enter the water supply. The best thing to do is use less plastic.
It makes sense to recycle things like aluminium, because easily-accessible aluminium deposits are a finite resource and there's a huge cost to extracting and purifying them. Plastics, on the other hand, are made out of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen: three of the most abundant elements on the Earth's surface. Literally the only cost in making plastics is the energy cost in cracking and polymerising them. Recycling them will often consume more energy than growing a bunch of high-oil plants and turning that oil into new plastic (and much less than using fossil fuels, though that has other externalities).
sudo mod me up