Endlessly recyclable plastic (Javascript required.)
By separating plastic monomers from chemical additives, researchers may have created fully recyclable plastics.
Molecular scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory developed a new type of plastic: polydiketoenamine, or PDK. When immersed in an acidic solution, PDK monomers were broken down and were freed from the additive compounds used in plastic production.
Berkeley Lab staff scientist Brett Helms said: "With PDKs, the immutable bonds of conventional plastics are replaced with reversible bonds that allow the plastic to be recycled more effectively."
Commercial plastics generally contain additives such as dyes or fillers to make them hard, stretchy, coloured or clear. The problem is these additives have different chemical compositions and are hard to separate from the monomers.
Also at Berkeley Lab.
See also: Researchers develop plastic that they are calling the 'Holy Grail' of recycling
This infinitely-recyclable plastic might help us finally clean up landfills and oceans
Closed-loop recycling of plastics enabled by dynamic covalent diketoenamine bonds (DOI: 10.1038/s41557-019-0249-2) (DX)
(Score: 4, Funny) by krishnoid on Thursday May 09 2019, @07:25AM (3 children)
See? There's always a catch. It's probably cursed.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Thursday May 09 2019, @01:23PM (2 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday May 09 2019, @04:49PM
That's not a bad point, but the wooden comb that I bought feels far inferior to the previous plastic one. I just hope it lasts 5 times as long.
There are lots of thing cellulose is good for, and we should be using that more. But it sure isn't good for everything. And as for this latest offering....it wouldn't make good vinegar bottles.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Immerman on Thursday May 09 2019, @04:59PM
>What's wrong with cellulose?
Water-solubility. Also flexibility, transparency, tensile strength, production complexity, environmental impact...
Granted using grasses, hemp, etc as your feedstock instead of wood drastically reduces the environmental impact, but the others are more difficult to address. There's a reason plastics are so popular. Micro-, and especially nano-cellulose has some really impressive properties (think "transparent aluminum" for nano-), but they require a lot more processing to produce than simple pulp. And neither is that great for making beverage containers as they're still water-soluble.
Recycling can be done with moderate degrees of efficiency (not composting and regrowing, but more direct product-to-product recycling), but the cost of recycling tends to rival if not exceed the cost of fresh material, and it can mostly only be down-cycled, which makes a strong business case against it.
Overall, lots of promise for some things, but that water solubility is a major stumbling block for most that can mostly only be worked around by covering it in a protective layer that makes recycling non-viable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @08:27AM (1 child)
Seems to work just fine. Perhaps there are some bells and whistles missing but I can read the article just fine.
Apparently the actual article is at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41557-019-0249-2 [doi.org] (Nature, paywalled)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @05:32PM
Oops, I accidentally hit https://sci-hub.tw/10.1038/s41557-019-0249-2 [sci-hub.tw] and got the same paper.
ed2k://|file|10.1038@s41557-019-0249-2.pdf|1822276|61F8174755F9D503CA2B794F38C45ADB|h=2RWO6E57EUM2OCJFLR6YUTNLNSTII7VW|/
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @08:50AM (19 children)
This is quite utterly irrelevant to average schmo. We don't have a recycling problem, we have a collection problem.
1. most of the stuff that comes in is contaminated with food and other crap
2. large of the stuff is composed of multiple materials
3. even larger amounts are never collected as recyclables
The bottom line is, if human recovered even 90-95% of the plastics we produce, we would not have it floating in our food and in our water. What to do with it afterward is quite irrelevant. Today, we burn 90 MILLION barrels of oil per day. We burn quite a lot of this just to keep electricity on - yes, there are oil burning power stations. Only a tiny fraction of these 90 MILLION barrels of oil per day turn into plastic. Plastic burns just as well as any oil.
So, we do not have a recycling problem. We have a collection problem. Then just burn the darn plastic and make another. When we can do that, we can worry about closed cycle recycling system.
It's like Green Party is campaigning about closing down nuclear power while world is on fire. How about stop using fossil fuels first?? Worrying about easily recycle plastics is nice, but it's a research problem not a society problem. Society has collection problem, not recycling problem. Oceans are prime examples of this collection problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @09:57AM (3 children)
And eat about the same mass of food in that same day. Your point being?..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @10:42AM (2 children)
You are rather poor at this "reading comprehension" thing? Can't even read to the end of the paragraph?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @11:02AM (1 child)
if this tired ad-hominem is the only one you could memorize.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @12:46PM
Ok, got it. You are just an idiot that can't read to end of paragraph and everything is "FUD" and "ad-hominem".... reality, what reality? facts? what facts!! You don't need them. You already know what was written later. Fucking sad.
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Thursday May 09 2019, @10:57AM (5 children)
Maybe you acquired a taste for dioxins [www.wecf.eu]? Styrene perhaps? Or is it you just can't live without furans, mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls? [sciencedirect.com]
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @12:43PM (4 children)
Ever heard of pyrolysis? I'm not sure if it's just plain ignorance here, but if you are burning properly, you don't get any furans or dioxins. Those are *fuels*. No one is advocating you burn your garbage on a pile.
https://phys.org/news/2013-12-plastic-cleanly-natural-gas.html [phys.org]
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-14/how-would-burning-rubbish-like-sweden-work-in-australia/10115694 [abc.net.au]
The reality is plastic burns the same as oil. And if you burn oil or tar at low temperature, you get same shit as from burning plastics.
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Thursday May 09 2019, @01:16PM (3 children)
Wonder why all the pyrolosis startups gets belly-up if not subsidized?
Because the energy required to break the polymers into smaller components makes a very low profit commercial application.
If the plastic comes dirty and/or wet, you have a big problem in your hand - not only you'll consume more energy, but the pyrolysis reaction of plastic get "poisoned" - you'll obtain a big lump of char with too little liquid or volatile compounds.
Even more, it depends a lot on the type of plastic: feed PVC into the reactor and you'll ruin it and you'll need to install scrubbers; 'cause, you see that ending C? It stands for chlorine - not a nice gas when heated to 800C.
---
In the very link you picked from abc.net.au
Which sorta contradicts the
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday May 09 2019, @04:46PM
The Ralph Nader Enviro Nuts, since the 70s, have been screaming for the ban on Poly Vinyl Chloride. Also known as, PVC. Because, "oh, cancer!" We've been using that one for so long, where is the cancer? But they did the ban in Nassau County. Not the whole county, little town called Glen Cove. Very small and, it's going to stay that way. You go (foolishly) to the restaurant in Glen Cove. And, you ask for the take out container. Sorry, they can't give it to you. No PVC allowed and they can't do the Styrofoam either. It's absolutely killing the economy there. They made a dumb move, too bad. But, don't worry. We will NEVER do that for the Federal!!!!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @06:45PM (1 child)
It's a burning process. You just add oxygen.
But in either case, the purpose of burning properly is not to be economically competitive with gas powered plants that gets its fuel from a pipeline. The purpose is to reduce garbage and harm that it causes. I hope you agree that harm reduction is priority before we can have some panacea solution to this problem?
TFS gives us academic lego block in solving a tiny portion of the issue. But it does nothing for policy or solution to the plastic problem.
That's true - it's reactive. But this problem is solved, long time ago.
https://waste-management-world.com/a/pvc-to-burn-or-not-to-burn [waste-management-world.com]
Also, we have technology to monitor these emissions. And as you can see, coal is the problem, not garbage burning.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/chem/surface/level/overlay=so2smass/orthographic=-78.02,25.18,427 [nullschool.net]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday May 09 2019, @10:33PM
It's a burning process. You just add oxygen.
Pyrolysis [wikipedia.org] is not burning.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @11:34AM (4 children)
Society doesn't have a recycling problem or a collection problem.
Society has a consumption problem.
It doesn't matter how efficiently we recycle plastic bottles because the energy isn't free. The problem is all of these single use containers like plastic milk jugs that used to be reusable glass.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @12:58PM (3 children)
Yes, energy is not free. That's the principle reason for replacing glass with plastic. In many nations you have significant deposits on these bottles too so that even when they are thrown out, homeless collect them (yes, really, if you would find 10 bottles an hour around here you make more money than minimum wage).
If most of the weight you transport is glass, not the actual drink, where is the energy? And do you get your tomatoes or grapes at the store with in plastic or without? Shampoo? Dish washing detergent? All plastic containers, not just PET bottles.
Almost 8 billion people. They want to live. Living makes garbage. We need solutions, not punting the problem elsewhere.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday May 09 2019, @05:06PM (1 child)
Why ship things in bottles at all? Bring your desired bottle into the store and fill it from their cask. Use any size, shape, and material you want, with no energy wasted producing or shipping single-use consumption-sized containers.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday May 09 2019, @07:16PM
Bingo. If we all had suitable glass containers we could do exactly that. We would buy new glass containers as needed, but otherwise save up a collection of glass. Either that, or we turn in our containers to the grocery store, they clean them, and then refill them. I saw that in Germany in the 80's.
The problem is this leads to wholesale prices like Costco, and single use containers allow to sell ridiculous small amounts for higher prices.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @06:56PM
You want a solution? Sorry, I'm not here to break the second law of thermodynamics for you. That there are almost 8 billion people on this planet only further illustrates my point. Do you think the Earth could sustain 8 billion people before the industrial revolution?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ledow on Thursday May 09 2019, @01:20PM (3 children)
The problem is indeed in the logistics.
For instance - when I was a kid, a truck turned up to each house in turn, took away bins of rubbish and landfilled/burned them en-masse.
Now - I have three different trucks, they each turn up and take only a particular bin. They inspect the bins and reject those that have anything they shouldn't. They each then load that bin into a truck carrying only their types of waste (which can include dozens of individual materials). They each then take their waste to a recycling centre where it's: a) sorted and composted, b) sorted and some small percentage (the profitable stuff) recycled, the rest landfilled, c) landfilled because it's "unrecyclable" waste.
Each truck comes on a different day. Each truck visits every house. Each truck takes the waste somewhere different. Each truck is manned by the same number of people as the old truck used to be (in fact, more, because they sometimes sort at the roadside!).
Out of that, a tiny percentage gets actually usefully recycled. Old food waste rots and turns into compost... which it does anyway. Contaminated and "unrecycleable" waste is landfilled. Like it always was. And the sliver in between has large amounts of energy and chemical applied to it (maybe not so much as initially production but certainly significant) and turned into poor-quality materials.
Now, you can argue that the technology exists to make that better - we can recycle a lot more than we do. We could easily make better-quality materials (but we don't... most plastic waste does not go back to anywhere near the grade of plastic it started out as, and even things like the lithium in lithium batteries IS NOT recycled back to the quality needed to make... say, a lithium battery). We could, but we don't.
If something's not commercially viable, that usually means that it's not worth doing, or that it needs to be made commercially viable before it'll ever happen (no company is going to lose money to recycle plastic on our behalf!). This is why subsidies and incentives exist.
Tax the plastic-users (i.e. literally tax plastic production, packaging, etc. and let that filter down into the economy). Provide subsidies to plastic destruction / safe disposal / recycling / reuse. Double-whammy, suddenly your shops will be full of non-plastic packaging or too expensive for you to consider against the alternative.
Consumers can't fix it. I can't go out and pay more for my food just to not use plastic. I already do more labour involved with sorting / bin collection than I ever want to do, and I disagree with it as I *ALREADY PAY PEOPLE TO DO THAT* - that's what my council tax is for (and, literally, given the choice between "raise it and someone else does all that crap" or "keep it the same and have to do it myself and get penalised if I get it wrong", I know why I go to work each day and earn good money!).
Scientists won't fix it. They'll be a part of the solution, but scientists have to be paid, whether for their time or their patents.
Governments need to fix it. Tax it, fine it, subsidise it, make it illegal. Whatever. We introduced plastic bag charges in no time at all and nobody really cares and it worked. Fact is, it was entirely the wrong thing to do as the "bags for life" bags have to be used hundreds of times without failing before they actually start to use less plastic overall, and they just don't. We banned incandescent lightbulbs. Bam. Problem solved. Everyone's power usage lessons and no big upheaval. Fact is that lighting is a pathetically small part of our energy usage anyway, so it made no real difference, but that's not the point. Right idea, just the wrong execution (tax hot tubs and electric heaters / cookers, or better yet, just increase the tax on electricity itself and watch people go out of their way to lessen their usage!).
Governments: Don't cry at me telling me there's a problem that I have to do something about. Come up with a BETTER solution. Encourage me to use it while simultaneously punishing me for not using it. Stick and carrot combined. And if you do it at the "suppliers that might make products I happen to use" level, then it's transparent, easy to enforce, easy to collect, and catches all usage including industrial and commercial, not just personal.
WAH, WAH, WAH the world is dying! Here! You can only buy your yoghurt in a unrecyclable pot that's gonna be stained with food as we can't do anything with that! It's all your fault!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Immerman on Thursday May 09 2019, @05:45PM (2 children)
A big part of the problem is that in an effort to encourage people to recycle, we've tried to make it "easy" for them - and in the process destroyed the viability. You can't lump #1, 2, 3, etc. plastics together - it's all but impossible to separate them cost effectively for recycling ( To say nothing of the increasing trend of manufacturers bonding materials together into unrecyclable composites). The consumer needs to separate them before disposal, or we need to develop AI capable of doing so reliably so that we don't have to ship it to the other side of the world for people to separate for pennies a day. Or, we need a single "universal plastic" that can be readily recycled into whatever form and properties are needed.
Paper, glass, and metal are relatively easy to separate and recycle based on physical properties (density, magnetism, melting point, etc), though efficiently recycling glass kind of calls for us to get used to everything being either clear or mud-colored, or with a bit more sorting a small palette of different colors. And organic waste is a problem primarily when it's mixed in with paper or toxic substances that can't be readily separated out. Food deposits are not exactly difficult to remove from plastic, glass, or metal, especially after they've been shredded.
Of course the real wins would come from avoiding recycling as much as possible, and focus on reuse instead. There's no reason that you should buy so much stuff in single-use disposable containers in the first place - it used to be that you'd bring your own bottles of your desired size into the store and fill it from their casks. We could go back to that, though it would likely mean giving up having every-F'ing-thing available in thirty different varieties from ten different manufacturers.
If we want to take the pressure off consumers, while maintaining disposable containers, then I think you're on the right track - tax plastics severely (with a possible exception for this new PDK stuff that doesn't need sorting - after the traditional plastics have been mostly phased out. Or maybe allow just two of the most useful? Perhaps clear+flexible and rigid grey? Cover 80% of the usage with two obviously different varieties and you'd solve a lot of the problems), double-tax any sort of not-easily-separable composites. Tax the production of non-standard colors of glass. Make it so that manufacturers who make it easy to recycle their products and packaging can sell their products substantially cheaper than otherwise identical products that aren't easy to recycle.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @06:55PM (1 child)
In Germany (and many other nations), PET bottles cost $0.25 deposit. When you return them to machine, it gets chopped up and you get coupon back which gives you nice stream of Type 1 plastic chips. There is also collection of all packaging materials (except paper, glass) in separate bags, which should capture most of this garbage. But then they ship some of it to south-east Asia .....
https://www.dw.com/en/german-plastic-floods-southeast-asia/a-47204773 [dw.com]
So there is no easy solutions except demand a no-landfill, no-export-to-landfill solution. And sadly, the best we could hope to do is separation and burning of this stuff.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Immerman on Thursday May 09 2019, @08:40PM
Still an improvement over the US, but far from ideal.
I think a key to solving the problem is included in that article "But companies that produce synthetic materials only accept recycled plastics when they're at the same level as raw oil in terms of price and quality."
Easy enough to tilt the balance - charge a massive tax on non-recycled plastics. Perhaps 300% of the cost of the equivalent amount of raw oil would be sufficient to motivate them?