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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.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(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?
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(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.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(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!
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(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
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @12:17AM (1 child)
https://preciousplastic.com/ [preciousplastic.com]
"Open source machines, tools and infrastructures to fight plastic pollution from the bottom up. For free."
Also: http://www.google.com/search?q=precious+plastic [google.com]
~childo
(Score: 4, Interesting) by hemocyanin on Thursday June 27 2019, @01:15AM
That's all fine and neat -- I even have my own filament making device -- but if we are being honest, there's a heck of a lot carbon that goes into steel, circuit boards, machining the stuff, shipping the stuff, etc., just so some goober like me can make a few kilos of filament in his garage.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @03:05AM
As long as the throwing part means safely sequestered in landfills you're doing recycling right.
But the problem was/is lots of thrown plastic eventually ended up in the ocean.
The thing is China already burns tons of dirty coal for energy. They should reduce the amount of coal burnt by burning tons of unrecyclable plastic for energy instead. There are cleaner ways of burning plastic. Sweden and Japan can manage to burn waste fairly cleanly at least by China's abysmal air quality standards ( http://cdn.theatlantic.com/newsroom/img/posts/2014/04/ChinaPollutionLevels/6c54d3685.jpg [theatlantic.com] )
The real surprise is China didn't manage to figure out a way to burn most of the plastic for energy. After all imagine countries sending you tons of fuel and PAYING you to do so.
(Score: 2) by CZB on Thursday June 27 2019, @04:04AM (2 children)
I've been looking into plastic recycling so I can make cool stuff out the hundreds of pounds of HDPE my job generates. Its not hard. Just have to:
Shred, wash, dry, heat, and press/extrude the plastic.
I'll either be making little waterproof storage sheds, or plastic fenceposts.
When it get around to it. Its a lot of work.
(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!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @04:10AM
Our town has curbside recycling, with separate recycle and trash bins. Sometime back the town website was updated, now they only want plastic of types 1 and 2. The rest is landfilled (no market), so the nice thing is to just put that in the trash.
If you have any quantity of type 5, PP – Polypropylene (common for yogurt containers, among other packages), it turns out this is easily recycled, provided you do the separation and can find a dropoff location. Ours is at a Whole Foods store--take to the customer service counter, they told me that a bin left out in the store was mistakenly used for all types of plastic (by ignorant people). Some more details here, https://www.preserve.eco/pages/gimme5-overview [preserve.eco]
Our town seems to have a market for all kinds of paper and also metals.
For glass, they only want clear, no local market for different colors of glass.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Snotnose on Thursday June 27 2019, @04:13AM (2 children)
Was it third world countries didn't want our plastic trash anymore? Nope. (6 months ago?)
Was it China saying "we don't want your trash!"? Nope (3 months ago?)
Was it finding out I was supposed to wash my recyclables before recycling them? DING DING DING (2-3 months ago?)
You might get me to rinse out my 2 liter Pepsi bottle. Emphasis on the "might". Is it worth $0.05 to me to not only rinse out that bottle, but to take it to a recycling place and prove I rinsed it? Notsomuch.
That plastic bottle of mustard? Yeah, not happening.
Reminds me of newsprint. Back in the 80s I was president of our HOA. We had an issue with the trash company quit picking up the newspapers. Turned out nobody wanted old newspapers (and cardboard) to recycle, there was a glut and nobody was buying. So for a couple months we paid the trash company to pick up our recycled newspapers. Except A) they were dumping them into the regular trash; and especially B) when members of the HOA found out we were paying the trash company to pick up our recyclables, well, 30 years later I still find feathers in my sheets and tar to scrub in the shower.
Relationship status: Available for curbside pickup.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @05:26PM
Username origin story confirmed! :D
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday June 27 2019, @10:30PM
I toss mine in the sink with the dirty dishes. When I turn on the hot water faucet to wash the dishes I direct the water into the various recyclables until it is hot enough to start filling the dishpan, that way I rinse the recyclables with water that would otherwise just be going down the drain unused. If the item being rinsed is something like a beer can or bottle, that water gets poured into a larger container and used to water plants.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DannyB on Thursday June 27 2019, @02:01PM (1 child)
Even if plastic ends up in landfills, perhaps it could end up segregated in landfills. That way, when some efficient way of recycling plastic is developed, we would know where rich deposits of plastic are located, conveniently segregated from other landfill materials.
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by istartedi on Thursday June 27 2019, @05:05PM
Throw everything in the trash, and bring back segregation. We'll really make America great again! /sarcasm.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by Tokolosh on Thursday June 27 2019, @03:09PM (1 child)
I'd rather my plastic go into a well-managed, local landfill than being shipped to China to end up in the ocean.
Landfills are the solution, not the problem.
https://www.perc.org/wp-content/uploads/old/ps28.pdf [perc.org]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday June 27 2019, @08:01PM
Maybe China was buying our landfill / recycling for bulk filler in pacific islands.
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @07:30PM
i don't like big government but if we're going to have it why not make any manufacturer who produces plastic or any other toxic substance pitch in a percentage based on their production towards recycling stations. why should they get to pass the buck. it's not like there is plenty of competition for consumers to decide how things get packaged, etc. this is not rocket science.