Americans' plastic recycling is dumped in landfills

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/21/us-plastic-recycling-landfills

by srameshc • 7 years ago

342 282 7 years ago

deogeo• 7 years ago

The large quantity of plastic waste in the first place is due to plastic industry lobbying: https://theintercept.com/2019/07/20/plastics-industry-plasti...

mc323• 7 years ago

Isn’t burying plastics one of the better options for it in terms of sequestering carbon? It goes back into the soil.

wmf• 7 years ago

But you have to admit having people sort plastics into recycling bins and then having the recycling company sort them again is a pretty inefficient way to get to the landfill.

mc323• 7 years ago

Yes. On the other hand, this “sorting” makes people feel better. We don’t feel like we’re the baddies.

From a realistic POV, yes, make people put plastic in a “landfill” bin, from a psych POV, make them do busywork so we feel better about ourselves.

Arbalest• 7 years ago

You'd hope that the sort would be less intensive though. You might not need as many eyes to check that all the inappropriate stuff is out of the stream.

McAtNite• 7 years ago

From what I heard it’s largely due to a concern that admitting recycling doesn’t work would make it extremely difficult to get it back up and working again once the issues have been addressed.

Likewise a lot is the “sorting” people do when they throw out their trash is pretty bad. For example, a plastic bottle the cap on can’t be properly cleaned so it doesn’t get recycled. A pizza box in a stack of cardboard ruins the entire batch.

Planet Money did a really interesting two episode series on recycling. That goes into why things are ending up in landfills and why we continue to practice the ritual of splitting our trash.

https://www.npr.org/2019/07/12/741283641/episode-926-so-shou...

mkl3• 7 years ago

I view plastics in landfills to be temporary. I think one day it will make economic sense to dig it up and use it, and pre-sorting it probably makes that day closer.

Here's a TED talk (from 2011, not sure what's changed if anything) about this: https://www.ted.com/talks/mike_biddle?language=en

And a key quote: "Now when you see these mountains, most people think of garbage. We see above-ground mines. And the reason we see mines is because there's a lot of valuable raw materials that went into making all of this stuff in the first place."

01100011• 7 years ago

Yes. It goes into cheap storage until we can figure out something to do with it. It's not killing turtles or turning into microplastics in the ocean. We should probably skip the recycling step though, or at least keep the plastics together in one place to make it easier to sort in the future.

JudgeWapner3• 7 years ago

This, plus: how about regulation that forces waste management to bury all the plastic in one spot in the landfill, so that its more easily retrievable in the future? Whether for reuse, or if a plastic-consuming incinerator or microbe is ever viable, then you can point it to the quarantine.

VBprogrammer• 7 years ago

It doesn't count as sequestering when the original input didn't come from the carbon dioxide in the air. In effect we are putting perhaps 1% of the fossil fuels back underground.

With biochar the land is improved for growing crops where as landfills are unlikely to be useable in any form in the near term.

garmaine3• 7 years ago

A lot of plastic ends up in incinerators, which does put it in the air.

apo• 7 years ago

“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.”

All is not lost. Consumers can be responsible by radically cutting consumption.

realshowbiz• 7 years ago

Consumption of what?

For example: Virtually every food item is packaged in plastic. And it’s not consumers who decided it was more cost effective to use disposable plastic than wash a reusable container.

riffraff4• 7 years ago

Virtually every food item is packaged in plastic

Is it? Most of what I buy (vegetables, fruits, bread, eggs, milk, pasta, flour, sugar, salt, oil) is not.

Meat, fish, rice, and cheese are the things that require some plastic, afaict, but do not constitute the majority of food.

tonyedgecombe3• 7 years ago

There are some seeds of change in this, one of my local supermarkets is running an experiment with more loose produce.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48498346

robocat4• 7 years ago

Consumers can be responsible by radically cutting consumption.

If I drop my consumption by $20k, I believe my extra investment of $20k will get consumed elsewhere in the economy.

If I spend that $20k on eco-friendly shit, I believe that the people I spent it on spend the majority of that on non-eco friendly shit (e.g. international travel holidays).

I want a better answer - one that isn't some simplistic catchphrase.

beatgammit• 7 years ago

Invest that money into eco-friendly companies? Or donate it to eco-friendly causes.

prawn2• 7 years ago

Dropping consumption means not spending that money. You keep it. Nothing to do with spending on eco-friendly things?

Independent of that, you can make specific decisions to avoid plastic-wrapped things. I’m visiting the US at the moment and I’ve seen plastic-wrapped corn, individually plastic-wrapped potatoes (!?!), eggs boiled shelled and in plastic, plastic cutlery individually wrapped in more plastic, straws given with every water at a restaurant (for adults?), plastic cups with plastic lids and plastic straws for every child, motel breakfasts with disposable plates and cutlery (they use a styrofoam cup for five seconds to get waffle batter and pour it in the cooker).

Phenomenit2• 7 years ago

If you can accept losing money to reduce consumption you could withdraw your 20k In cash and let them sit in a safe? But yeah one way or another money will be spent to spin the economy if there is incentive to do it.

Another way might be to accept a smaller salary and work less. The salary economy requires a lot of consumption compared to just sitting at home doing nothing.

austhrow743• 7 years ago

Don't produce more than you need to trade to cover your now lower consumption.

quickthrower23• 7 years ago

Take Fridays off work.

dang2• 7 years ago

Related and recent:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20433851

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19889365

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19399543

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19346342

Not quite as recent:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18893252

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17841584

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17677698

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17409152

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16174719

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15888827

blaser-waffle2• 7 years ago

We need some sort of reddit-style repost bot.

"Times we've talked about this before...

...

-Love, Repost Bot"

dang2• 7 years ago

I'm reluctant to do that because it often takes human intervention to find the good ones or drop the bad ones. For example, in the above case I searched on both recycling and landfills. Also, we don't allow bots to post HN comments. For submissions, the whoishiring ones are done by software, but that's it.

dsfyu404ed2• 7 years ago

I don't know why landfills are so controversial. Shit doesn't decompose there which means it doesn't find its way into the ecosystem. Undisturbed in a big pile underground is a great place for all sorts of other nasty things.

Moru• 7 years ago

That's what we thought in the 70ies. Now we know better.

celeritascelery• 7 years ago

Care to elaborate? I certainly don’t “know better”.

JTbane• 7 years ago

I don't know why landfills are so controversial.

Well, when corporations and governments say "it's properly lined and safe" and then years later the groundwater gets contaminated, people start creating controversy.

robbrown4514• 7 years ago

Groundwater doesn't get contaminated if it is done properly.

It's true that it is possible for it to be done badly. It seems a lot more likely that the public will care, and pressure people to make sure it is done right, if they aren't spending their energy sorting their supposed recyclables and thinking everything is taken care of.

jnwatson5• 7 years ago

I'm not aware of any modern landfill in the U.S. that has leaked into the groundwater.

jquast• 7 years ago

That's a rosy picture of landfills, have you heard of the one with an underground fire approaching nuclear waste? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...

geerlingguy• 7 years ago

There’s an area about 10 square miles around there that smells like rotten waste, perpetually. It’s crazy that there’s a bunch of business and residential development there too.

jnwatson5• 7 years ago

The vast majority of landfills are well run and are closely monitored.

JudgeWapner3• 7 years ago

so one had a problem, therefore they're all bad? Well, here's one battery recycling [1] plant that emitted toxins. Guess I better not recycle car batteries anymore.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exide_lead_contamination#Los_A...

xvilka• 7 years ago

There are better landfill technologies from Japan[1][2], Shanghai recently switched[3][4] to them. But they still require careful sorting of the garbage, removing dangerous and easily decomposable organic materials. So maybe it is time for the US to learn from Japan?

[1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2017/02/18/environment/was...

[2] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/2019/04/29/special-supplements/...

[3] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3016801/shan...

[4] https://qz.com/1650893/japan-wants-to-become-southeast-asias...

blisterpeanuts• 7 years ago

Where are we with compostable plastics? For retail packaging of products that move fairly quickly, it seems like a reasonable solution.

nkurz• 7 years ago

I posted this article earlier today, which summarizes some of the positives and negatives of compostable plastics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20547252

schoen• 7 years ago

This article seems to break it down very well (no pun intended).

justin662• 7 years ago

I recently dug a black plastic flip-close food container that was marked "compostable" out of my parents compost pile, after burying it there almost exactly four years ago.

It looked exactly the same as when I put it in there. Interesting experiment but that's what I was already expecting, based on the very small amount I'd read suggesting that one needs to put plastics marked "compostable" into some kind of weird high-temperature bioreactor in order to get them to break down. nkurz's article seems to delve deeper into this topic.

lh7777• 7 years ago

We have municipal composting here in Seattle, which can handle everything from food scraps to yard waste to bioplastics. The city incentivizes recycling and composting by charging a lot for trash collection, less for compost, and nothing for recycling. I’ve known for some time that much of my recycling is really going into a landfill, but there’s still value to separating for me because I can use a very small (low rate) trash can as there’s hardly anything left that goes in the trash. I wonder if composting is really a net benefit, though.

torgian• 7 years ago

I remember asking my parents about this in the late eighties and early nineties. We went to the landfills several times a year, and I saw so much plastic that I asked why plastic was being dumped here if we were supposed to be recycling.

I think he said something that not all plastic is recycled or something.

ggggtez• 7 years ago

Just one more reason to hold corporations accountable for pollution and global warming. The free market is not going to solve this one, even when you give people warm and fuzzy feelings for "doing the right thing". It's just not profitable to be Green yet, and maybe that won't change until companies have to pay for the second order effects of their products.

dehrmann2• 7 years ago

What does plastic that went from the recycling bin to the landfill have to do with "pollution and global warming" beyond plastic being an almost trivial use of oil?

sh-run• 7 years ago

This is a question I've found myself asking quite a bit lately. Paper products are often marketed as a 'green' alternative to petroleum products. IIRC much of the plastic we use is made from a byproduct of the oil refinement process so it's something we have anyways. Even though paper products biodegrade quicker, it seems like unless the paper product is made from 100% post consumer waste a properly disposed plastic product is better for the environment.

I do think part of the problem is that so many of our landfills are poorly managed. In high school I used to spend my summers working for the public works department in the rural community I grew up in. A few days out of the month we had to go out to the fields near the landfill and pick up plastic bags and other bits of trash that had blown out of the landfill before being covered.

I say this as someone who avoids single use plastics, drinks tap water, recycles, etc.

avip• 7 years ago

Both are symptoms of the same issue (environmental damage not being priced into products and services to reflect its actual cost)

TeMPOraL• 7 years ago

Not much. The high level view is like this:

Burning fossil fuels -> CO₂ emissions -> Climate change -> Widescale ecosystem collapse, people dying.

Disposable plastics under open sun -> Microplastics -> Unknown damage to the whole foodchain -> Possibly (we don't have good data to work off), widescale ecosystem collapse, people dying.

These two issues are frequently conflated together, to the detriment of the overall discussion. But it is true that they both ultimately are results of the same failures of market-based economy. If you do root cause analysis on both, you'll end up in the same place. But since it's (AFAIU) unpractical to address the root cause directly, we need to consider which of the two problems to focus on; I'd argue we should focus on the emissions first.

neom• 7 years ago

David Attenborough says air travel should be more expensive to fight climate change https://7news.com.au/news/environment/david-attenborough-say...

beachy2• 7 years ago

I find it amazing that if an alien civilization descended on us and taxed all fossil fuel usage by 100%, and took all that money out of planet Earth forever, both we and the aliens would be better off.

BigJono• 7 years ago

This might be off topic but why does the Australian media constantly source their "expert" quotes from the Institute of Public Affairs? The entire organisation is complete bullshit. Surely they can find people with actual credibility to put up an opposing argument once in a while.

distances• 7 years ago

I wonder why the comment is called "incendiary" in the article. Flight prices are ridiculously cheap, especially in Europe. As far as I know the jet fuel isn't even taxed, while it would make sense to tax it harder than fuel for other uses.

I do take advantage of these almost-free flights, but often wish they'd be more expensive -- to make rail travel more competitive if nothing else.

mr_toad• 7 years ago

The free market is not going to solve this one

We’ve known this for over 100 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality). And solutions to the problem have been proposed for as long (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax).

The problem with implementing these taxes are political; people with vested interests will argue long and hard against any new taxes, and any working solution needs to be global.

cheez4• 7 years ago

Where I live, there is a waste tax and guess what, it goes into the general fund and is not used for reducing waste.

perlpimp• 7 years ago

Yes, give the corporations this as something to be sold then it can be a part of a product, making people(or corporations) do things is last resort imo.

beefield• 7 years ago

We’ve known this for over 100 years

It looks to me like outside this we there is a significant bunch of people who do not know or accept this. Actually, at some point I was pondering whether the main distinction [1] between conservative-populist movements and "the elite" these movements are against is exactly the point that "the elite" understands and acknowledges the concept of externality and wants to address this market failure with something, while the populists refuse to understand or accept the issue.

[1] At least we can be confident that the distinction is not wealth, money or political influence, what one could naively think elite has and non-elite not.

amelius• 7 years ago

The problem with implementing these taxes are political; people with vested interests will argue long and hard against any new taxes.

Why not have these taxes and also have subsidies that cancel them? At least you're naming the problem then, which would be a great step forward.

and any working solution needs to be global.

I suppose you could introduce import taxes to solve this problem.

BurningFrog• 7 years ago

The free market solves this easily, if given the correct incentives.

It's up to the political system to to produce those, and it's proven incapable.

For example, we've known for a long time what will solve global warming most effectively: Carbon taxes. Preferably global ones, but local ones are the correct regional step.

And our political systems have spent decades doing everything except this simple thing that will actually work.

saila• 7 years ago

It sounds like you’re saying that regulation, not an unrestrained free market, could solve this problem.

rebuilder• 7 years ago

There's no such thing as a free market, except as a hypothetical construct. Markets are always regulated, if not by governments, then by large market participants who can use their clout to create conditions favourable to themselves.

ced• 7 years ago

Being "Green" was always about Reducing first and foremost, which is what would happen collectively under a carbon tax scheme.

Cthulhu_• 7 years ago

It's just not profitable to be Green yet, and maybe that won't change until companies have to pay for the second order effects of their products.

It will be as soon as plastic recycling becomes economically attractive. I think it'll take a ban on new plastic production and consequent shortage for that to happen. Until then, I'm sure there's a few of these dodgy "recycling" businesses that put plastic in landfills with the intent of mining it for resources again in a possible future.

garmaine3• 7 years ago

Except that throwing plastic in a landfill is carbon sequestration, and way, way better for the environment than “recycling” which usually results in it shipped to unaccountable companies overseas that dump it in the nearest river, or ending up in an incinerator and releasing it as CO2.

chimprich• 7 years ago

way, way better for the environment than [...] ending up in an incinerator and releasing it as CO2.

Not necessarily. Just thinking about total CO2 released, it should be better for the environment to release the energy in the oil you have currently (in plastic form) than burn extra CO2 extracting an equivalent oil from the ground, refining it, transporting it, etc.

The equation might be different if you're getting your energy from non-fossil fuels. In this case, the correct answer is probably to recycle it properly rather than ship it to a third country for an unknown fate.

EDIT: I'm assuming here that your incinerator is a modern one that generates energy and that you're not just burning things because they're inconvenient.

cltsang• 7 years ago

When the market is not informed or cared enough to make the move, it needs external push from the government.

This is exactly why I see a ray of hope since Canada announced she will ban single use plastic in near future [0].

I hope international cooperations grasp this chance to abandon as much plastic as possible altogether in the global supply chain, not just to cater to Canada's upcoming regulations.

[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/06/canad...

hkai• 7 years ago

Why would you hold corporations accountable for people in developing countries throwing plastic into rivers, which is the source of 80% of ocean plastic?

jessaustin4• 7 years ago

Maybe some of that comes from garbage shipped to those countries from abroad?

carapace5• 7 years ago

Plastic recycling is "solved":

Thermal Depolymerization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization

Even better: Molten Salt Oxidation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_oxidation this is an exothermic reaction!

I wish I had the gumption to make a start up out of MSO.

chii• 7 years ago

Molten Salt Oxidation

but then how do you get rid of the salt afterwards when it is fully saturated?

carapace5• 7 years ago

Well, worst case scenario: that's your trash, and at least you saved all the other atoms from the (toxic!?) landfill.

That's the floor. The ceiling would be some sort of automated chemical/mechanical filter and recovery system. Technically all those "waste" molecules (chlorine and stuff) are useful industrial material, just in the wrong place.

In the long run we should retire most toxic stuff, just stop using it as much as we do now. Spend out "pollution budget" on rockets and such.

08-15• 7 years ago

Landfill it, it's harmless. And since it's only ash that messes up the salt, the mass is tiny compared to the input. Plastics produce virtually no ash.

Salt disposal could be a problem if it contains heavy metals, or if it contains something you want to recover (possibly phosphorus). Either way, MSO ended up concentrating the material in question and transforming it into a simpler chemical form, reducing the disposal problem, or making the recycling easier.

hinkley2• 7 years ago

I think you need to read that TDP article a little more closely. I followed this story leading up to them building the first plant and for a while after that, as the whole thing fell to pieces.

That plant had problems due to welds that weren't capable of handling the pressure. The smell was horrible and the neighbors considered it a nuisance. And the company went bankrupt. Ten years ago.

Has anyone else tried TDP since then? If so then please update the article.

carapace5• 7 years ago

The article says they didn't have odor problems:

The pilot plant in Carthage was temporarily shut down due to smell complaints. It was soon restarted when it was discovered that few of the odors were generated by the plant.[14] Furthermore, the plant agreed to install an enhanced thermal oxidizer and to upgrade its air scrubber system under a court order.[15]
According to a company spokeswoman, the plant has received complaints even on days when it is not operating. She also contended that the odors may not have been produced by their facility, which is located near several other agricultural processing plants.[16]
As of August 24, 2006, the last lawsuit connected with the odor issue has been dismissed, and the problem is acknowledged as fixed.[19] In late November, however, another complaint was filed over bad smells.[20] This complaint was closed on January 11 of 2007 with no fines assessed.[21]

To me that sounds like people complained speciously.

It also says,

In April 2013, CWT was acquired by a Canadian firm, Ridgeline Energy Services, based in Calgary.

So who knows? In any event, that's why I used "scare quotes" around "solved": TPD needs work; MSO is used to dispose of munitions and stuff but there's no mass plastic recycling center in the world (yet) using it.

youngtaff• 7 years ago

Not sure whether this is TDP too but…

There's a commercial plant in the UK that's going to come online this year that breaks down plastics into hydrogen, methane and other gases.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/20/how-plas...

jnwatson5• 7 years ago

Recycling has little to do with the environment except for the minor factor that transfer trucks will have to drive slightly farther as the close landfills fill up.

ars2• 7 years ago

Why are people so against burning plastic? It's easily the most environmentally friendly option.

Plastic has a lot of energy, burn it and use that energy. Then you don't need to dispose of it, and you can pump slightly less oil.

aikinai• 7 years ago

This is what Japan does.

Phenomenit2• 7 years ago

Nordic country's as well.

hanniabu5• 7 years ago

I love plastic fumes in the air I breathe /s

ars2• 7 years ago

There are no fumes in a modern incinerator.

Is that why people are against it? They think there are fumes?

aitchnyu3• 7 years ago

I learned about these from this discussion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_oxidizer

blhack• 7 years ago

Realistically because a “free” fossil fuel is going to harm efforts to build wind/solar farms.

Long term it seems that carbon-resource extraction should be expensive and hard. At least harder than solar/wind.

peteretep• 7 years ago

Why are people so against burning plastic? It's easily the most environmentally friendly option.

As someone who thinks they're pretty well-informed, I was under the impression that it would heavily pollute; so assuming what you're saying is true, it's a perception / education piece.

garmaine3• 7 years ago

It turns plastic into CO2. That’s not helping...

tonyedgecombe3• 7 years ago

If it offsets some other carbon based fuel then it's at least neutral if not a small benefit.

nkkollaw• 7 years ago

Same thing in Italy. In many regions citizens separate waste, and they mix it back into a single landfill to save money or because they're not organized to dispose of it properly.

philliphaydon• 7 years ago

Singapore burns it all and turns it into reclaimed land.

PeterStuer• 7 years ago

And now you know why you have been seeing all those 'landfills are not all that bad' spindoctor articles of late.

B-Con• 7 years ago

It's going to landfills for a reason. This has prompted people to investigate why and then write about it.

hanniabu5• 7 years ago

Wish there were separate landfills for these recyclables that aren't being recycled so that in the future they can be dealt with in a more proper manner. This can either be the ideal recycling we all imagine when we put a bottle in the bin, or it could be further advanced plastic decomposing microbes and worms.

pmontra• 7 years ago

How about allowing only plastic that can be recycled and banning everything else? This is also going to open a market for companies that create ways to recycle unappealing plastic types (but beware for shady companies that pretend to recycle and actually dump.)

mrhappyunhappy• 7 years ago

This would be ideal but unfortunately laws are written by corporations that profit from plastic.

logifail• 7 years ago

It's not as though this issue only affects the US:

"Between January and October 2018, Germany exported 114,000 tons of plastic rubbish to Malaysia, an increase of 125 percent"

"Germans are great at separating their household waste, and the country is not allowed to export plastic unless it's for recycling. So why are there piles of German garbage all over Malaysia?"

https://www.handelsblatt.com/today/politics/the-plastic-trai...

neuronic2• 7 years ago

This fails to mention that German recycling of paper, biowaste, cans and bottles is excellent.

Plastic is a huge problem because it is a different beast and technology isnt there to efficiently recycle a lot of different plastics economically at nationwide scale.

Some plastic needs to be used as ignition help when burning other garbage in power plants (where filtration massively reduces negative effects from burning in a centralized manner).

Brotkrumen• 7 years ago

Schwandorf charges €150 per ton of industrial waste but this can increase to €800 per ton depending on the material.

That's about 3 cent per package if the average package weighs 42g. That's dirt cheap for a pretty clean solution. We suck as a society.

samirm• 7 years ago

Not sure what the point of this comment is. It's not as though this article said this issue only affects the US...

dharma1• 7 years ago

I wish biodegradable polymers would take over non-biodegradable plastics in many applications. There are many interesting research avenues, I wish more money was thrown at it to accelerate the future.

Here is a good summary of SOTA - https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/searching-for-biodeg...

From the article (quote by the inventor of a biodegradable foam) - ’I see now that the main hurdle we face is financial in the sense that if you want to go large you need to have financial guarantees because you are not yet selling the product,’ he says. ‘That is still very hard to find – there are very few actual risk investments in the field of chemistry… it’s very traditional.’

I think there are VC scale returns to be made if the stuff took over conventional plastics but it seems largely overlooked by venture capital. I think regulation could help here too.

stunt• 7 years ago

You only realize how much plastic waste we are generating, when you start separating your own plastic waste.

jakobegger• 7 years ago

One thing I don't understand is why nobody seems to consider the obvious solution: put an exorbitant tax on every piece of single use plastic.

If you had to pay $1 for your coffee cup, and $1 extra for the lid, you might consider foregoing the lid. Or maybe you would even bring a reusable coffee cup from home.

mavhc• 7 years ago

Tax everything the amount it costs to clean it up. That way a) people will reduce the pollution it causes so they can sell it cheaper, and b) people will invent cheaper ways to clean up pollution.

If it costs $1 to clean it up, but only $0.50 to collect and recycle, problem solves itself.

eb0la2• 7 years ago

Tax everything the amount it costs to clean it up.

And don't forget to keep that taxes up to date so recycling still costs less than cleaning in the future :-)

yur3i__• 7 years ago

obvious to us yes, to big corp this is the opposite of a solution.

radiator• 7 years ago

In Germany you pay a deposit of 0,25 € for your plastic bottle of water, which you get back when you return it empty in the supermarket. The empty bottle gets shredded, not sure where it ends up, though. This could be probably be extended to other kinds of plastic.

mffnbs2• 7 years ago

I don't like the trend of putting the environmental onus on consumers. If you want to stop single use plastic then ban companies from producing it.

vectorEQ• 7 years ago

nice, over here in my country we just burn it :D good stuff, separating trash to have it re-combined at the burners :D

euroclydon• 7 years ago

Putting plastic in a landfill is not a crisis. Sending it to Asia to be processed out in the open where storms carry it off to sea is. Just throw your plastic in the garbage like I started doing after watching Plastic China.

Spread the word.

If you could be assured it would be burned, then separating it would make some sense, but as long as we're looking for a cheap feel-good moment from the recycling bin, there is no assurance of what will happen to it. A properly designed landfill is the best place for plastic right now, unless it can be shredded and mixed with bunker oil to provide a cheap fuel -- that might actually make it more valuable.

gingabriska3• 7 years ago

Why is it a surprise? Isn't the whole idea that at present we do not have economically viable recycling process and it's much cheaper to set it in a pit then dig it out later once we are able to convert plastic into something useful for cheap.

That makes putting plastic in landfill first step towards recycling with more steps to come later.

So I think we can call it recycling.

benj1112• 7 years ago

If that's recycling everything's recycling, rendering the word meaningless.

gingabriska3• 7 years ago

Not really, if the companies are putting plastic in unrecorded landfills, we can claim they are just dumping and not really recycling (this happens in South Italy). If the landfills are documented and it's not easy to make any place a landfill without going through a proper regulatory process, then it can serve as a good recycling step.

quickthrower23• 7 years ago

Probably the pre separation. Mixed waste would be harder to future recycle.

Causality1• 7 years ago

Good. The carbon footprint from recycling plastic is larger than that from just making new plastic. https://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/fac_journ/774/

A 35 square mile landfill could accommodate the total waste of the United States for the next thousand years. https://books.google.com/books/about/U_S_Wastepaper_Recyclin...

It would be great to develop technologies that would allow us to efficiently recycle plastic. We don't have them yet, and until we do, landfilling plastic is better for the environment and the climate than recycling it.

njreid777• 7 years ago

The same people who make this argument usually take the view that government can't get anything done...

Or, corporations are far far more effective at tax burden reduction than governments are at revenue maximization, all things held equal.

stesch• 7 years ago

Americans have landfills and Germans recycle and burn the plastic.

Where is all the plastic in the oceans coming from???

neuronic2• 7 years ago

From all over the world. Germans cannot recycle most plastics - it's simply not viable at scale at this time. Therefore things are shipped to Asia.

The plastic created and received in Asia often lands in landfills and subsequently in rivers. A handful of major streams transport massive amounts of plastic waste into the Pacific ocean [1].

That's at least where a good chunk of it is coming from. That's how you get US or European plastic running down rivers in China into the Pacific.

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...

tim333• 7 years ago

Sticking plastic in landfills is a sort of recycling - before human intervention the hydrocarbons were in the ground as gas or oil, we bring them up, use them a bit then put them back in the ground again.

JulianMorrison6• 7 years ago

The correct place to take plastic out of landfills is by forbidding its use in manufacture, for anything except unavoidable necessities such as medical uses.

You can use glass bottles and wash and reuse them.

You can package things in wax paper.

You can wear clothes made of natural fiber.

Plastic needs to be treated like asbestos: useful, but the uses do not justify the risk in most cases.

wormseed3• 7 years ago

What's wrong with putting plastic in landfills?

JulianMorrison6• 7 years ago

It doesn't stay there. And microplastic looks very likely to be an asbestos-level menace up and down the food chain, including to humans. The more it breaks down, the worse it is. The only safe way to dispose of plastic is incineration, adding to the carbon dioxide problem. The best way to avoid this is not to make it.

mkl3• 7 years ago

Plastic needs to be treated like asbestos: useful, but the uses do not justify the risk in most cases.

Asbestos kills people. What plastic risk are you referring to, environmental pollution?

ryanmercer3• 7 years ago

Asbestos kills people. What plastic risk are you referring to, environmental pollution?

Plastic likely has all sorts of medical complications, that we will probably start to see manifest here in the near future now that it is now in the food and water we consume [1], now in the air we breathe [2] and even in our poop [3].

Ingested microplastic particles can physically damage organs and leach hazardous chemicals—from the hormone-disrupting bisphenol A (BPA) to pesticides—that can compromise immune function and stymie growth and reproduction. Both microplastics and these chemicals may accumulate up the food chain, potentially impacting whole ecosystems, including the health of soils in which we grow our food. Microplastics in the water we drink and the air we breathe can also hit humans directly.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/from-fish-to-huma...

[1] https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/news/were-literally-eating...

[2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/04/micro...

[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2018/10/22/guess-what-...

jokoon• 7 years ago

Yesterday I posted on /r/crazyideas about doing a startup that would design reusable, standard packaging of difference shapes for all possible food forms. It could be made of high quality plastic, glass, maybe stainless steel, etc as long as it can be easily recycled and that brands can put paper stickers on them. Those can be returned/sold back.

Someone answered me that most plastics can be recycled because he worked in a recycling plant, meaning this was a bad idea. I linked him a forbes article after a few comments and he stopped answering. It's hard to know if that guy was just astroturfing me.

_4570• 7 years ago

First paragraph - It's a good idea on paper and someone is already trying it. Not just for food by the way. Check out https://loopstore.com/

Second paragraph seems a little conspiracy theorist-y to be honest!

mytailorisrich3• 7 years ago

We need to look at things in a moderate and reasonable way instead of going from an extreme to the opposite extreme. It used to be that plastic was fantastic. Now we arguably use too much of it so some people go to the other extreme of wanting to get rid of it altogether.

The reality is that plastics are great materials that are very useful, the flip side being that they need to be properly disposed of.

Yes, they are probably over-used in some cases, e.g. packaging, but that does not mean we should treat plastics "like asbestos".

For example, you mention glass bottles: They require a lot of energy to be manufactured, they are heavy (more energy needed to transport them), they require energy, water, and chemicals to be washed. Is that necessarily more environmentally friendly that plastic efficiently recycled?

You also mention wax paper, which (as far as I know) is not very recyclable because it's waxed. Probably better to use cardboard or a type of plastic that recycles well (and is actually recycled!)

Sahhaese4• 7 years ago

A potential "solution" is to price in the externality and tax the use of plastic in manufacturing. Then the market can decide whether it's "worth" using plastic for disposable water bottles or food wrapping.

isostatic3• 7 years ago

plastic efficiently recycled

Plastic can be recycled, but only into lower grade plastic. Eventually it gets burnt or buried.

hsbaut762• 7 years ago

All single use plastics should be banned, period.

If you want to buy a drink, bring a reusable bottle to the shop and fill it up from a dispensery or use glass bottles.

The culture simply needs to change - its a habitual problem, not a technical one. We have the technology.

I think Germany has their Pfand (plastic/glass deposit) system working really really well, although admittingly the plastic gets incinerated. I don't know why more countries don't adopt these methods or similar. Homeless people pick them up, and get 25c for it, then the bottles are washed and reused. Fantastic. We should invest in optimising these ideas so they become more ubiquitous and cheaper than plastic.

spodek• 7 years ago

Exactly.

There is a major, qualitative difference between Reduce, which is strategic and lowers pollution, and Reuse and Recycle, which are tactical and mostly just shuffle pollution around.

If your strategy is in place and people support it, use all the tactics you can. But if your strategy is not in place, tactics often backfire. As this article points out, people think they're being virtuous by recycling so they buy plastic profligately -- the opposite of the strategy. I'm starting to think we should change the phrase "Reduce, reuse, recycle" to "Reduce".

I treat this more in detail in my Leadership and the Environment podcast episode 183: Reusing and recycling are tactical. Reducing is strategic http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/rants-raves-monologues-volume....

On another note:

We can each reduce our consumption and therefore demand significantly, while improving our lives. When I cut out nearly all my packaged food, my food costs went down and quality of life and food went up. The last two times I emptied my garbage were September 2018 and July 2017.

Some might say it's hard or only one person, as I would have before experiencing the change, but it was rewarding and improves my life, as it will yours. That it reduced my garbage by about 90% is a side effect. http://joshuaspodek.com/year-emptied-garbage.

I'm not saying only individuals should change or suggesting not doing other things. I support institutional change and pricing extraction and waste with taxes since the public pays for the cleanup. But everyone right here right now can cut their consumption and waste, which will lead to faster implementation of institutional change, legislation, etc.

nabla9• 7 years ago

You can burn plastics into energy or reuse it. Temperature should be high enough to avoid toxic byproducts.

Consider:

hydrocarbons -> energy

vs.

hydrocarbons -> plastic product -> possible recycling -> energy.

Plastics can also be made from cellulose. If this route is taken and becomes more popular, you could grow stuff, make it into plastics, use it, then bury it to store rid of carbon. Possibly turn plastics it into cubes and drop them into some deep place in ocean without volcanic activity where it stays inert hundreds of millions of years.

tasty_freeze• 7 years ago

Sure, you can burn plastics -- but releasing even more CO2 is not attractive. There is a lot of talk about ways to sequester carbon -- it seems like throwing away tons of plastic is doing exactly that. Now, I'm sure it could be done in a better way that is currently being done, but burning it seems like non-starter.

maxerickson2• 7 years ago

What risk?

hyko• 7 years ago

I would argue that the uses do justify the risks in many cases. Plastic isn’t just one thing, there are myriad polymers and applications for them. I’m not aware of any studies that would place all polymers anywhere near the levels of toxicity of the asbestos family, which has roughly one practical application.

snarf21• 7 years ago

I think we should figure out how to make bio-plastics. Instead of wasting all this money sorting and recycling them, make them out of things that biodegrade and use the carbon already in the air.

hammock• 7 years ago

Wax paper is made of petrochemicals nowadays...

Shivetya• 7 years ago

I live in an area my friends like to tell me as, just past the banjo line of Metro Atlanta. We have no separate pickup however our county has for ten plus years published a list of drop offs for different items they would prefer to not have in the landfill, from computer equipment to batteries.

the issue is that they are not widely known and to be honest they really should be at least getting kids in school in on the act if not the schools themselves. Used to be schools had aluminum and paper recycling bins but those long left as people abused them with general junk. Now some fire stations do the same.

I think more people would play along if it were easier and more well known. Get corny if you have too, fire station drop offs, we save lives and you are saving the planet.

KibbutzDalia• 7 years ago

The woman profiled in the article would get in her car and _drive_ her recyclables to other towns that had programs for them?

chihuahua• 7 years ago

To some people, recycling is a religion, so they drive to the recycling center just like other people drive to church. It doesn't matter what happens with the stuff after she drops it off, it doesn't matter how much gas her car uses to get there. The religion demands that certain objects are brought to the sacred place and that's all there is to it.

acrossthepond10• 7 years ago

I'm hoping that applying recent advances in Machine Learning and Robotics we could build better, automated sorting facilities. Or is that being too naive?

xwolfi2• 7 years ago

It is, sorting could be done for cheap by humans like immigrants, elderly and disabled, it was done by chinese in the past.

It’s a chemistry advance you need to pray for.

thrower123• 7 years ago

This is obvious if you stick around to watch the garbage trucks roll by. The blue and the green bins get dumped right into the truck together.

xwolfi2• 7 years ago

I cannot believe all these idiots throwing away tons of plastic in poor countries with a big proud smile.

Makes me vomit honestly as a resident of China.

userbinator• 7 years ago

It is a form of recycling --- in the future, when we run out of other sources of petroleum, we can start mining the plastic we buried. ;-)

linsomniac• 7 years ago

I wonder if a deposit system or similar could help. In some ways I'm reminded of glass bottles, littering, and encouraging the collection and reuse of them. The core of the problem is that producers are blind to a significant portion of the lifecycle cost, so they'll package something in plastic, inside cardboard, inside another cardboard, inside another plastic. That's pretty much the standard packaging for small electronics these days, and it's insane. The only way I think we've come to accept this is that much of it is pretty recyclable.

pfdietz2• 7 years ago

Plastic (and paper, for that matter) is a good energy store, for use when intermittent sources become unavailable. Incineration should not be seen as a failure, but celebrated as a contribution to an integrated energy system. Of course the plastic should be sourced from non-fossil carbon sources.

Waterluvian• 7 years ago

My understanding for a while now has been that papers and glass are pretty recyclable, aluminum is super recyclable, and everything else is just garbage by another name.

g00s3_caLL_x2• 7 years ago

Whenever you try and legislate something into existence the consumer is the one who ends up paying the cost.

I think a better method would be to incentivize using a more environmentally responsible product ( glass? ) where applicable. Perhaps a tax break for companies that start taking new initiatives to promote this.

A good example would be soda: being able to fill up a glass container of even your own reusable plastic bottle. Just like many do with water at the grocery. I've often wondered why we don't do this as a society and it ( like many things...) boils down to cost.

Incentivize this cost and it will start happening.

Starbucks has done this with straws, and even their hot and cold cups. It would be great to start seeing others do the same in more areas.

georgem4• 7 years ago

We as a society need to train an army of material engineers that can design new packaging solutions to minimize impact on the planet. Recyclability (and maybe reusability), lifetime CO2 footprint, biodegradibility etc should be carefully considered and new solutions researched where they will provide the most benefit.

We should also look for low resistance ways to work in container/packaging reusability into the product supply cycle. Are there cases where collection could be done at the store with minimal effort and spare truck space could be used to transport reusable containers back through the supply chain to the originating factories? Are there ways this could be made to work for mainstream products (premium milk products sold in glass are the only case where this is being done where I live)? In Canada they return beer bottles to the store, maybe we should do this in the US if a cost/benefit analysis shows it would worth it.

I must not be the only one that thinks of this sort of thing regularly when taking a product off the shelf.

badrabbit• 7 years ago

Silly question: why doesn't trash get dumped into the dessert? There will be Minimal ecological impact if trash is dumped in places like the sahara dessert,siberia,antarctica,etc... As opposed to the ocean or near major animal and human population centers.

gridlockd4• 7 years ago

"vast quantities of plastic are now no better than garbage"

That's because they are garbage. Anything that can't be re-used without expending more resources than can be reclaimed is garbage.

This equation changes all the time, and it will change in the future, depending on technology and market rates. Today, Chinese labor might not want deal with the plastic. Tomorrow, some other country might. The day after tomorrow, Garbagebots can do the job.

That's why stockpiling and and landfilling is exactly the right thing to do, for the time being. Even burning for energy isn't necessarily that bad, modern incinerators can be relatively clean.

compuguy• 7 years ago

This is why I'm looking into buying more beverage products that use aluminum cans...they are more recyclable than plastics...

Americans' plastic recycling is dumped in landfills

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