My take.
The current sense of a plastic waste crisis is that a certain fraction of plastic gets chucked outside and will find its way to the ocean where it will be mechanically broken down in harmful ‘microplastic’ and ‘nanoplastic’ particles. No form of recycling will work if people don’t use the bin.
If, in the other hand, people throw the plastic in the trash bin it will be buried and spend a long time (100-10,000 years?) underground and will at least somewhat decompose. Any environmental threat is kicked far into the future.
The trouble with chemical recycling is that it produces the kind of chemicals that come out of an oil refinery/petrochemical complex (which are used to make plastics) and those are all worth about 50 cents a pound.
>No form of recycling will work if people don’t use the bin.
blaming consumers for the industry waste that's being released from their factories into the public environment is diluting responsibility. If the governments were not subjects of the big multinational petrochemical corporations, they should charge a deposit for every gram of plastic that customers acquire, similar to the German Pfand for plastic bottles and cans (0,25 euro cent).
If a plastic contains 33 grams of plastic as described in their QR code or instruction manual, charge the customer a deposit of 3,3 dollars for each product and pay the customer 3,3 dollars for bringing back that amount of plastic. The environment would be pristine
Plastic is cheap because the future generations are paying the price of pollution
Several US states have this program for glass and cans and yet both glass and cans are still found on the side of the road.
"Are still found" implies we can only accept perfection. Back in the real world, bottle bills double rates of recycling (33% to 70%).
Keep America Beautiful, a packaging industry greenwashing group, developed the industry's modern response to policy. They're against bottle bills too, despite the fact that they're an extremely cost-effective anti-litter policy.
Back when the 5¢ deposit was introduced it was equivalent to more than 25¢ today, so today's policy is limited by a failure to update with the times. In Michigan (which has a still-pretty-measly 10¢ deposit) they see recycling rates of 97%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_deposit_legislation_...
not debating in either direction, but wouldn’t it be arguable that bottle bills are merely associated with increased recycling, since probably they are voted in by constituencies who are already more likely to recycle?
The hypothesis is easy to test by looking at historical recycling rates. If they track public opinion then it's confirmed, but if there's a sharp increase when bottle bills pass then it's mostly the (predictable) price signaling effect.
I find the doubt that prices work a bit surprising, since generally HN audiences tend to be above average in market literacy otherwise.
https://www.bottlebill.org/index.php/benefits-of-bottle-bill...
ok, but visit a beach in a country where the people put the plastic in a bin, and then visit a beach in a country where the people don’t put the plastic in a bin.
Yea the graphic/map with source of plastic pollution per river delta is pretty eye opening.
Which I suspect is why it's not better known or distributed.
Do you have a link with more tangible details?
I was under the impression that ocean plastic was comprised largely from discarded/lost material from ocean going industries followed by tyre dust.
A quick google didn't reveal much more than organizations think science is done by SEO.
Found a lot of incomparable data being compared. Measurements by mass, measurements by particle. Varying definitions of what constitutes a microplastic. from >2cm to >0.1mm
I found claims for top 10 rivers ranging from 95% to 18% of the river plastic. In general a lot of percentages, and few absolute numbers. In general it makes me despair for finding actual data. I'd like to be able to at least check that they calculated the percentage correctly mathematically. Preferably I could also know what as a proportion of what was being calculated so I could have some confidence that they were at least the same class of thing.
This one? https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Mass-of-river-plastic-fl...
I don't know enough to distinguish that this isn't just a graphic of population x flow rate.
If you believe that (it's the fault of the industry) a common answer is to put a cap on plastic production, just like we put a cap on ozone destroying CFCs. First you prevent growth in the industry (it's easier to tell the industry not to build more factories than it is to tell them not to use the ones they built) and then you phase out.
> blaming consumers
Why not blame consumers which would dispose their garbage wherever they want instead of a bin? I would rather criminalize this. It's so easy to put an empty plastic bottle in a bin yet they insist on throwing it on the ground.
You should know you're repeating verbatim a propaganda line developed by the packaging industry to avoid (at the time impending) regulation, similar to the plastic industry's "recycling makes it all okay" and fossil & tobacco's "scientists disagree."
https://web.archive.org/web/20050401181834/http://www.altern...
Throwing plastic on the ground instead of in a bin is already illegal, and often carries $1000 fines if you are caught. And putting it in a bin already is just kicking the can down the road. I say we blame the corporations who are making materials that are nearly impossible to effectively recycle, don't biodegrade within several human lifespans, and break down into something that may very well be poisonous to us and our ecosystems.
Blaming consumers for this is like blaming them for lead in gasoline.
> Throwing plastic on the ground instead of in a bin is already illegal, and often carries $1000 fines if you are caught.
Is this ever enforced anywhere outside Singapore? I don't think anybody cares.
In state parks, but I haven't seen it really enforced in most of the US. The point is that litter isn't the primary problem with plastic. Most of the issues with it have nothing to do with the littering of random citizens, to the point that it's not even worth bringing up in a conversation about plastic.
I've lived on an impoverished tropical island which was covered by a thick layer of plastic and cans. Somebody explained to me: "these folks have been throwing away their waste mindlessly for generations, the problem now is that all this pollution does not degrade"
>It's so easy to put an empty plastic bottle in a bin
you're not solving the plastic pollution problem, you are only sending your waste to pollute Thailand.
The solution to the mass-death that a plasticised environment is causing is not to blame the victims, but to analyse the root of the problem: entrepreneurs and factory owners who abuse plastic because it's cheap
> you're not solving the plastic pollution problem, you are only sending your waste to pollute Thailand.
Every time I walk a road in Thailand, also anywhere else, I pick up every piece of trash I stumble upon to throw it into the first bin I encounter. Thanks G-d I haven't been to the places where there is too much garbage and no bins.
Almost all of the waste plastic comes from the offering of cheap wrappings by cheap companies (i.e. super conglomerates) used by cheap people who simply do not care. Make it expensive and all these people will complain you are impinging on their freedoms.
The oil industries will complain The single use plastic purveyers will complain and the lazy consumers will complain, yet exactly like Germany, it must be done.
Some people think it's cool to burn money, while others purchase unneeded AI farms.
We, companies who make, companies who sell, and consumers who use as well as permissive governments all dilute responsibility, and a vast majority of plastics I pickup are simply the tops of plastic food containers.
How many are sealing reusable containers? Zero. how many straws? Thousands.
Make plastic straws the gold standard for recycling. worst offenders? The top fast food venders in food deserts. Cheap companies serving cheap lazy customers.
The poster is absolutely right.
You forgot about the health and safety regulators
Burying plastics results in leaching phthalates, estrogen mimics and assorted other crap into the ground, and groundwater, in the near term, not the far future.
How much of the decline in testosterone among young men may be attributed to the plastics?
https://www.urologytimes.com/view/testosterone-levels-show-s...
It's strange that the article makes no mention of the absolute abundance of pornography/porn addiction? I thought it was a fairly well established link.
It's not well established at all. I don't think a single study has conclusively and causatively linked pornography use to lower testosterone levels.
Using less of it and standardazing on what kinds of plastic can be used + burn the waste seems the only reasonable solution to me.
Nobody is telling you to bury them in your backyard, modern landfills take all this and much more into account.
Now of course an average 3rd world country doesn't have any of that, but if you would actually travel there you would see plastics everywhere, in the sea, on random land, in the mountains, in the rivers etc. While still leaking what you wrote but way more directly.
Not saying it is perfect, but modern landfills are sealed on the bottom.
> Modern landfills are completely sealed to reduce contamination of the nearby groundwater. First, the ground is lined with clay. A thin layer of flexible plastic is placed on top of the clay layer. That allows the collection of leachate, the liquid that passes through the landfill and may draw out toxins from the trash. The leachate is collected though a drainage system that passes this contaminated water through pipes to a pool where it can be treated to remove the toxins before being released back into the environment.
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/landfills/...
Yea, plastic in a landfill is basically the perfect form for 'carbon capture'. For those that think that carbon needs capture.
But acting like plastic isn't 100% bad goes against the narrative, and happens to align with those who don't think carbon needs capture. Just throw it away.
The BPA and other additives will leak into water. PVC will break into VC and that will leak and cause cancer. And so on. Plastic is bad, especially single-use plastic.
Though you are right about the pollution, plastic isn’t all bad.
It’s much more efficient than other materials in many ways.
If every single-use plastic container/wrapper had to be replaced by some kind of paper or waxed paper doing the same job, we’d need dramatically more of that material than plastic (barring clever inventions).
That comes with its own side-effects. More dead trees if it’s paper vs plastic, more metal mining if it’s metal vs plastic, more weight being shipped around, in many cases more energy being used to produce the alternative packaging in the first place. And all that to have packaging that’s functionally worse than plastic.
My dad grew up in a world without plastic. Packaging of food and goods was orders or magnitude less than now. Most of it is completely unnecessary.
There's definitely more plastic than we need. I've seen individual bananas sold in styrofoam.
But I think that's a tiny % of plastic waste and the vast majority comes from the production processes.
Factories wrap things up heavily before sending their items along to the next step in the value chain.
Farmers sometimes lay down plastic sheets on the ground.
I hate it as much as anyone but removing any of it will have knock-on effects.
It's better to wrap that pallet in an extra pound of plastic rather than it getting damaged and having to re-produce the whole 1000-2000lb amount of goods.
It might be better to lay down the sheet and use less pesticide & water, or be able to grow crops closer to the point of use.
I used to toss bananas in my cart without any plastic bag around them. Nature packages them already!
Now if I want organic apples or something, I may be forced to choose a pre-bagged selection of far too many; take it or leave it.
It was also a time when grocers kept a lot of goods in bulk, and customers were given portioned quantities wrapped in paper, or in paper bags. The additional labor costs were the reason this practice was ultimately replaced, largely by single-use plastics. Of course, capitalism and market forces mean that this is more efficient and profitable (even though they do not take into account externalities and future deficits caused by the damage these products inflict. I would suggest that the costs were more inline with reality, and in a time when folks are already too isolated, I would pay a premium to frequent an establishment that still offered that sort of full-service, more sustainable practice.
> It’s much more efficient than other materials in many ways.
That does not matter if it's poisoning us. And if we end up in a situation where energy is cheap (thanks to PV or whatever), it might be much better to use less efficient less poisonous materials, like glass or ceramics (and so on).
BPA might have its negatives, but it at least locked itself and all the other chemicals into the product.
Making it into a boogeyman has ironically caused the remaining chemicals to be more leechable, as the substituted hardeners don't work as well, yet likely have similar negatives as the BPA replaced.
It's the unlearned lessons from asbestos all over again.
I wonder if the your argument holds true for organic food as well.
The farmers have to fight off the same pests and weeds, just with “natural” compounds instead of strong, tailor-made artificial ones.
But surely the natural spray and the artificial spray has to have either the same active ingredient, or ingredients that are chemically very similar? And if it doesn’t work as well, the farmer will surely end up using even more of “natural” compounds than he would’ve if he just went with RoundUp?
The alternative to Roundup is labor. Mulch, weeding, interplanting, and others. Similar for many pesticides: instead of spraying chemicals, you use different planting techniques, including more diversity in your fields.
That was the original definition of "organic" farming. It's not the food that's organic; it's the farmer.
That has since become captured by agribusiness, who wrote the rules to exclude the kinds of small farms that practiced organic farming before it became a buzzword.
I’d like my carrots to cost less than $100/lb thanks
It is more expensive, but it's twice as much, not orders of magnitude. And given that we now consume twice as many calories as we need, we can eat vastly better on the same budget without destroying the environment.
It's unreasonable to expect 100% of our food supply to come that way. But we can do a lot better than we do, and actually looking at the numbers instead of guessing makes that clear.
It is not a simple story
https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2021/07/09/organic-vs-con...
The most important advantage traditional agriculture has is that it uses less land and frees up space for nature.
It’s a good thing that’s an exaggerated and disingenuous notion, then.
A natural defoliant? Would be what, rubbing alcohol? I think they have to pull the weeds or lay a ground cover
> PVC will break into VC
No it will not, stop pushing junk science. Vinyl Chloride is a chlorinated double-bond. PVC is made by opening the double bond to form connected monomer units (i.e. polymers).
PVC doesn't "degrade" back into a higher energy state compound.
Even if you left it you in the sun where UV might re-double bond it, the molecule itself is incredibly reactive - it's environmental lifetime is basically zero under those conditions since it'll oxidize and break down in air in a few days at most, and photochemical reactions are amongst the slowest and most inefficient.
Buried PVC doesn't even have the energy to do that.
Yeah. Recycling is a long and problematic chain, and no magical miracle chemistry chain-link could change that.
OTOH, there's a lot of plastic that is discarded at larger scales (vs. Chris & Pat drop their empty bottles into bins), and a really good chemistry might make recycling a far better choice in those scenarios. And much of the world does not have well-run (especially long-term) landfills to put trash in. And there's a morale effect, too - if we quite reasonably can recycle some common types of plastics, that injects a bit of hopeful news into the generally miserable plastics recycling situation.
Are propylene and isobutylene really in such high demand that this process is worthwhile, as opposed to chucking all plastics (without sorting) into a plasma gasifier, which for plastics generates just syngas?
Out of curiosity, how often are new plastics invented, and how often are those plastics difficult to recycle?
For example I'm finding that modern computer cables are sheathed in a much more durable (less brittle) form of plastic than those from 10+ years ago. Or is that just the addition of pthalates?
Edit: plasma gasification does still produce tar, as per [1], but much less than standard gasification. There isn't much review on the effects of applying plasma gasification to plastics.
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09560...
Is there any downside to using a plasma gasifier? I still see a lot of plastics around, so I guess(?) additional solutions are needed.
Sounds promising, and plastic waste is a huge problem.
But the article doesn't address the biggest issues:
1) Do you need to separate types of plastics or clean them before using this process?
2) What are the challenges to scaling this? (They mentioned that this is an issue but didn't answer the question)
> 1) Do you need to separate types of plastics or clean them before using this process?
The whole second section of the article discusses this process on mixed plastics, including:
> Another test involved introducing different plastics, such as PET and PVC, to polypropylene and polyethylene to see if that would make a difference. These did lower the yield significantly. If this approach is going to be successful, then all but the slightest traces of contaminants will have to be removed from polypropylene and polyethylene products before they are recycled.
I guess it does hint that litter, food waste etc. are also problematic. Could be clearer though.
You may have seen on YouTube, various videos that come out of I think Pakistan of various "human powered" factories -- in many of them, they are recycling plastics into new products (I won't get into any of the safety [total lack of] or child labor exploitation aspects of this ...).
In one particular video they were shredding all kinds of waste plastic (again, not even a dust mask) and melting it to extrude into thin strings that were then cooled and chopped up yielding bags of source material for new products.
They were then taking these pellets and making "PVC water pipes" using a home-made looking propane powered extrusion machine. God only knows what kinds of plastic they were using but the pipes looked exactly like the ones you'd find at a Home Depot or similar store. Kudos to the ingenuity of the workers, but wow, I worry about the health implications not just for the workers inhaling the particles and fumes, but the end-users who are now drinking water through pipes made from who knows what plastics.
plastic waste is usually vaporised in the recycling plants by setting the whole plant on fire
If this approach is going to be successful, then all but the slightest traces of contaminants will have to be removed from polypropylene and polyethylene products before they are recycled. - well they tried
A much better title: Newly discover recycling chemistry might solve the intractable problems of polypropylene and polyethylene
I agree. Wouldn't vaporizing anything recycle it into a gas, like, by definition? (If only temporarily.)
Yes, but what gas? Maybe the title should have said either "useful" or at least "harmless" gas. The gases that come from basic polymers could be comparable in those ways, to the original petroleum. They could even be reformed into new polymers, or used as fuel.
By way of contrast: Vaporizing lead or mercury compounds, not such a good idea.
Those gases are not "harmless" by any metric. They must be promptly used or they are a much larger problem than the plastics.
But the GPs point seems to be that only those two specific kinds of plastic vaporize into those tractable gases. Most of them become all kinds of things, from wild poisons to chemical nightmares that will destroy your equipment.
Tangential Safety Note: Metallic (liquid) mercury does evaporate at room temperature, or even far below that, at dangerously high rates. Unless you're eager for brain damage, never have an unseal container of that stuff around. And treat any spill - even "grandma's old thermometer broke" - as a for-real HazMat situation.
Thanks OP. I appreciate that Hacker News has rules on post titles so it's nice to see you self-correct in the comments!
Notably the easiest way to not run afoul of those rules is to not modify the title even if the original title is bad. You do have to squash titles down to the 80 char limit and the same way to do that is delete words, preferable noise words like “very” or “novel” and past that more complex transformations where you maybe change a passive construction into a shorter active construction.
Yeah. Ars didn't have a good subtitle, so I futzed around for a minute trying to give a good 80-char summary. Then gave up.