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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: 3, Insightful) by ledow on Thursday June 27 2019, @08:06AM (1 child)
Work costs energy.
Pressing / extruding costs energy.
Heat costs energy
Drying costs energy
Washing costs energy
Shredding costs energy.
There is a universal rule in play here - if you just exclude profit margins, and assume that all these companies will do this out of the goodness of their hearts for you, there is still so much work involved that it's not worth doing. Literally until you're unable to move for plastic underfoot, it makes no sense to be using all that energy to get a pittance of low-quality recycled plastic.
If something costs money, that's pretty representative of what effort is involved in doing it - in complying with the law, in keeping the emissions down, in getting the power to do it, in dealing with the waste, in collecting it... the money that it costs is pretty representative of quite how much work is required, how many people have to get involved, how many stages it takes, what kind of plastic you end up with as an end product, etc.
And as soon as China said "No, you're not dumping it here, in this land of no regulations and pitiful wages", nobody could find a buyer for it.
That tells you absolutely 100% everything you need to know. It costs to recycle. It costs more to recycle - even though on paper it might sound good - it costs more to recycle than to make new plastic. If it didn't, there wouldn't be a plastic waste problem at all. People would be crawling over rubbish tips picking up every scrap, like they do for metals.
Your green credentials, no matter how much you might hate it, are inherently linked to the profit of the venture you're undertaking.
And the fact is - all green initiatives cost money, make little profit, and are heavily reliant on subsidies. The only way we can make these things work is to pay people explicitly to do them... and even then they cheat because it's just such low margins and so expensive to deal with that it's cheaper to landfill, pay the cost, and lie about what they're doing, risking fines etc.
Now, there's an argument that just because it's hard/unprofitable to do, doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing it anyway. It's a lovely sentiment. Of course. Saving the planet is something we should be *spending money on*.
But expecting plastic recycling companies to spend that money for you out of the goodness of their hearts is never going to happen. It can't. That's not how the economy works. "Hey, you, clear up our mess and we don't care that you'll be bankrupt next week trying to do so".
The only way to make it work is for the government to step up, implement taxes on usage/manufacture, provide subsidies on re-use/recycling, and throw money at people to solve a problem that is economically unviable to solve any other way than throwing money at it. That means regulation, to avoid abuse, too.
Now make that case to the taxpayers and businesses who are *funding* it, not the ones who are paid to do it. Political suicide.
Anything else, literally every green initiative that I've ever seen, is basically throwing money away, or doing things so badly you're actually making the problem worse elsewhere (e.g. plastic "bags for life" which have to be used over 150 times in order to use less plastic than equivalent "single use" plastic bags... which on average they aren't... and yet everyone has a bunch of dozens of single-use ones that they continue to use year after year after year. We are literally using more plastic, sticking a "green" moniker on it, in a minor pathetic way, and people actually think they're making a difference!). Energy saving lightbulbs... solar panels... everything. Every thing you're told is saving the planet is actually making it worse in some other way. We were all told to stop using single-use plastic cups. So we all went and bought much larger plastic and silicon drinks cups, and starting breaking/losing them all.
If something is not economically viable, you are actually using more energy, materials, labour and money trying to do it than if you just did nothing at all.
All you do if shift the problem elsewhere. Plastic use turns into energy consumption. Energy generation turns into concrete, plastic and rare earth use. You just shift the problem so your product "uses less plastic" but keep quiet about what else it does. For years we were concerned about chopping down the rainforest... to the point that we literally still take out football fields of trees every day from some of the best preserved forests on the planet, but now we using more paper than ever. Then we were concerned about mining and tearing up the ground and polluting the groundwater trying to extract metals, but now we're making metal drinks straws. Now we're concerned about a glut of waste plastic, so we're actually using more paper and metal instead, and still landfilling old plastic because there's nothing we can do with it without using more energy and polluting the air more and ending up with useless low-grade plastic. Despite everyone's hype about recycling, we still cannot take a lithium battery and recycle it into a lithium battery. It doesn't work. It's a lie. Recycled lithium is never used for new batteries. It's used for other things, but never new batteries because it's too low a grade and it would take more energy to make it decent again than it does to just dig up more lithium.
The green thing is a scam predicated on "if we all just did this, this week". It makes people feel useful. It makes no overall difference. It just shifts the problem. It's like one of those management games where as you pull one slider down, all the others go up a little. Sure you can balance things but you're not actually reducing anything overall and there is no magic "recycler" you can build in-game to fix it all.
The height, the pinnacle, the absolutely infamous example of a green initiative that worked was banning CFC's to fix the ozone. We did that. Nobody can deny that we fixed the problem there. The ozone hole is slowly recovering but it'll take until 2075 to actually get back where it was. The icecaps are still melting faster than ever before in recorded history. We have a range of materials that are less efficient but "safe" and now used worldwide. We used freon, because it wasn't a CFC, and now we realise that's it's still a global warming gas and are trying to replace it with something better. One of the replacements is basically propane/butane. A fossil fuel. Which we've been fighting to reduce use of for even longer than the ozone layer was known to be damaged. Now we're looking at mixing the replacement gases with some of the dangerous gases we replaced in order to stop them being so flammable.
We just move in circles, stating "this statistic is better now", ignoring the 20 things that clearly aren't better, and never stopping to think about the overall picture.
Meanwhile, energy usage, plastic usage, deforestation and everything else still just escalates and scales with human population. Sure we're using "less plastic" in each product now, and then buying more of them every day.
And the only "green" efforts we see are throwing money away on initiatives that can't ever be profitable and which *also* don't make any practical difference. Global plastic production is constantly increasing, with no end in sight. https://www.statista.com/statistics/282732/global-production-of-plastics-since-1950/ [statista.com]
There is no easy solution. But throwing good money after bad for inferior products isn't one at all.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by CZB on Thursday June 27 2019, @03:03PM
Yeah, lots of problems. The energy isn't one. Plastic burns good.
I'd rather spend the time making a recycled plastic product then pay someone else to make it for me. Seize the means of production!