[HN Gopher] Plastic industry knew recycling was a farce for decades
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Plastic industry knew recycling was a farce for decades
Author : wooptoo
Score : 110 points
Date : 2024-02-16 21:01 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.euronews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.euronews.com)
| Guthur wrote:
| Recycle was always suppose to the last resort.
|
| It was Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. But it doesn't take much thought
| to realise which one had the highest economic incentives.
| gipp wrote:
| Pretty sure I saw an episode of Penn and Tellers "Bullshit"
| pointing this out like 20 years ago
| RandallBrown wrote:
| Looks like you're right! https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0771119/
| amelius wrote:
| Others long suspected it.
| _ink_ wrote:
| I am shocked!
| boring-alterego wrote:
| Hi shocked!, I'm boringalterego.
|
| Yes I felt bad typing that.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I had always suspected this to be true and also wondered how it's
| allowed to spray cardboard with plastic making that also
| impossible to recycle.
|
| I'm willing to bet even glass is still difficult to recycle let
| alone plastic with hundreds of different types and colours.
|
| So now that we know this can we start making changes now? I often
| wonder what happened to feeding seaweed to cows reduces their
| greenhouse gas impact from methane... I presume we never actually
| implement these findings and just carry on boiling ourselves
| alive.
| XorNot wrote:
| Glass is mostly recycled into fill, not new glass.
|
| It's relatively worthless to recycle because it's about as
| energy intensive to do and sand is cheap.
| malfist wrote:
| Glass is awful for recycling. It takes nearly as much energy to
| recycle as it does to make new. And it's raw materials aren't
| rare
| smegger001 wrote:
| Glass containers are great for reuse though. For years beer,
| soda, and milk bottles used to be returned washed and reused.
| You don't need to melt them down and remold them.
|
| Reduce Reuse Recycle in that order. Big plastic really wants
| you to ignore the first two.
| neRok wrote:
| There was a recent article on the seaweed: [Australian red meat
| industry says it doesn't need to meet its self-imposed net zero
| target](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
| news/2024/feb/08/austr...)
|
| > This includes feeding cows seaweed based additives, but one
| of the longest commercial trials failed to meet hoped-for
| methane cuts and led to the animals eating less food. ... "The
| commercial viability of those [food additives] means they are
| not something likely to be widely adopted by the industry."
|
| So yes, business as usual. Nothing has changed.
|
| > A 2022 CSIRO report commissioned by MLA found the industry
| emitted almost two-thirds the volume of greenhouse gases in
| 2020 compared with a 2005 baseline. But it said the reported
| reductions have been driven by a decrease in land clearing and
| an increase in forest regrowth, as recorded by Australia's
| national carbon accounting system. An analysis by the
| University of Queensland said the NCAS may be grossly under-
| reporting land clearing rates.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Even single-use items like plastic forks/spoons that typically
| come wrapped in a ton of plastic these days, it's everywhere. In
| a typical delivery order they'll give you several of these even
| if you don't ask for them. CA tried to reduce single use plastic
| bag waste by mandating the 10c surcharge and "sturdy" bags, but
| now you just added a meaningless cost to the consumer who's going
| to largely use the bags in the exact same manner as before, but
| now they're even HEAVIER plastic.
|
| It's just a mess.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| The western concept of "dirty" has contributed a lot to waste.
| In certain other cultures, human hands are considered to be
| clean (with the onus being on the handler to make sure their
| hands _are_ , in fact, clean) and it's quite OK to touch
| something someone else will touch with their bare skin (or even
| eat from).
|
| It's not even a rational obsession with zero human contact. A
| (true) chef is not expected to cook with gloves on. His hands
| are going to be all over your food while he's in the back.
| Chefs probably will taste something out of the pot to see if
| it's coming along ok. We know this (though perhaps try to avoid
| thinking about it). We'll eat nasty hotdogs at the ball game
| that have been handed to you down the bleachers by eight pairs
| of hands, but insist that our plastic cutlery come wrapped in
| further plastic.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| That hot dog is wrapped in foil and probably was prepared by
| someone wearing gloves though. Health depts around the
| country are more and more insisting on glove wearing for
| basically everything, though that has its own problems and is
| debatably less sanitary in certain ways.
|
| Health depts are particularly obsessed with utensils too. The
| plastic is because of all of the hands that might be reaching
| into wherever they are if they're self-serve, if they're
| dropped, etc.
| someotherperson wrote:
| Western culture? What?
|
| Besides some filthy cultures in the East, the majority of
| Eastern cultures have cleanliness even baked into their faith
| affecting everything from how they shower to how they pray to
| how they eat.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| I put "dirty" in quotes for a reason. People are just
| expected to hold themselves to a higher standard of
| cleanliness in other cultures instead of hacking around it
| with copious amounts of plastic.
|
| Much of the rest of the civilized world holds cleanliness
| in high(er) regard, but they're not germophobes.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Which reminds me of this most likely apocryphal quote:
|
| "Interviewer: Mr. Gandhi, what do you think about Western
| civilization? Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea."
|
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/04/23/good-idea/
| Tagbert wrote:
| Being heavier plastic is good in a couple of ways. It makes
| them less likely to blow away from containers and get into the
| environment. They are less likely to float in the ocean looking
| like the jellyfish that turtles and other animals eat.
|
| there may be other problems, but there are at least those two
| advantages.
| verisimi wrote:
| > They are less likely to float in the ocean looking like the
| jellyfish that turtles and other animals eat.
|
| Everyone knows turtles eat straws. Through the nose.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| At least in Seattle (not sure if this is WA wide) the UberEats
| et al are actually required to have people opt-in to utensils
| rather than opt-out.
| sspiff wrote:
| With regards to the plastic bag surcharge, this is a policy
| that has largely worked in some parts of Europe as far as I can
| see.
|
| They charge typically 10c for a single use bag, and 30c for a
| reusable bag[0] (which is much heavier plastic indeed). And
| people actually reuse the bags, or bring their own cloth bags,
| to the supermarket.
|
| Additionally, single use plastics have been mostly banned and I
| can't recall seeing any (apart from straws, which were banned
| more recently) in the last 15 years. This was met with some
| grumbling early on, but people got used to it rather quickly.
|
| [0] To give you an idea about how sturdy these 30c reusable
| bags are, I routinely use these to transport car parts (like
| brake disks & calipers, or suspension parts), fluids, power
| tools, or even lead batteries around.
| thedaly wrote:
| Anecdotally, this seems to be much less prevalent in the US
| due to cultural differences. I live in Chicago and their is a
| 7 cent surcharge for bags. I'd say 1/3 of people actually
| bring their own even after this has been in place for years.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| The heavier plastic means those bags have a longer reusable
| life. Unlike the thin plastic bags which were often only good
| for single use yet still takes centuries to breakdown.
|
| As for the plastic bag tax, in other counties which that has
| been introduced there has been a reduction in the use of new
| bags. Every culture is different though, so it might not work
| in CA. But what they're doing is far from untested.
| proee wrote:
| Can we switch to aluminum and add in a small recycle "deposit"
| like they do on soda cans? If there is money to be made on the
| deposit, this creates a strong incentive to recycle the
| containers.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe]
|
| More discussion here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39387387
| gotoeleven wrote:
| The plastic industry knew, but not the government or
| environmental activists shaming everyone into sorting their
| garbage like a hobo for the past decades? This is the one thing
| they trusted the oil companies on? Give me a break.
| goatlover wrote:
| It's easier to put all the blame on the producer than come up
| with more effective solutions and messaging. You see this with
| climate activism all the time.
| smegger001 wrote:
| the oil gas and coal industries also spread fud about nuclear
| and funded anti nuclear environmental groups (including but not
| limited to; Friends of the Earth, Sierra Club, Environmental
| Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, and
| Greenpeace) starting in the 50s till the present day. So its
| not the only BS thing environmentalist believed big oil about.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement#Fossil_f...
| cellularmitosis wrote:
| The real problem with having a sham mixed in with non-shams is
| that I've seen folks develop the attitude of "all recycling is a
| sham!".
|
| For those not aware, recycling aluminum is absolutely not a sham.
| It takes about 2x the energy to make new steel than to melt down
| old steel. For aluminum, that energy difference is 20x!!!
|
| This is why people will actually pay you to recycle aluminum,
| because running electrolysis through bauxite ore to make new
| aluminum is incredibly energy expensive.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| I think asking whether they pay you or you pay them is probably
| a great way to guess which is good and which isn't. The cost of
| recycling something is probably mostly energy (i.e. carbon
| emissions) as is the cost of manufacturing a replacemement
| (even the materials cost itself is probably largely a function
| of energy spent to dig them up and get them to you) so if they
| pay you, it is saving carbon emissions and if not it isn't. You
| can get paid for dropping many metals off somewhere, you have
| to have your city pay to do anything with the plastic. I
| realize there are other factors but if one needs a quick guess
| that would be a good way.
|
| If people can wrap their head around the idea that landfills
| are not dumps and are instead very safe and borderline
| irrelevant, then the carbon emissions should clearly determine
| what one recycles.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| In my locale, throwing aluminum cans in the recycle bin earns
| me a disparagement from my garbage/recycling company and maybe
| even threats to cancel my service. The only thing accepted in
| the bin is relatively clean paper materials.
|
| I have to take the cans down to the recycling center and throw
| them one by one into some machine and maybe they'll get
| recycled. Any compensation I might get is from the state, which
| is basically a dime for a can.
|
| At that point I'm just going to throw them all in the trash,
| not worth my time nor fuel to drive down.
| uxp100 wrote:
| A dime a can is more than they're worth. Of course, you
| already paid that dime when you bought em, but it's not as if
| scrap value instead of deposit would make your payout go up.
| babblefrog wrote:
| Can and bottle deposits are older than the general recycling
| push, at least where I live. It was more about keeping trash
| off the road sides than re-use.
| andirk wrote:
| Because plastic isn't very recyclable, recycling is therefore a
| government scam to control the masses, according to John
| Stossel https://youtu.be/NLkfpjJoNkA?si=C-PEyGnk4M109WuP&t=333
| . He clowns the idea of reusing a plastic container as making
| people "do things they don't want to do"? What??
|
| The whole segment is so pro Capitalism that it is anti caring
| about the Earth at all. The message could have more easily been
| "We were fooled by Big Plastic for corporate profits".
| skidd0 wrote:
| Pro capitalism is not inherently anti environmentalism. See
| PERC for some info on free market environmentalism:
| https://www.perc.org/about/free-market-environmentalism/
| jltsiren wrote:
| I think this problem mostly exists in places where people have
| a single recycling bin. If each type of material is collected
| separately, it's easy to establish when recycling makes sense.
| And then you can also create incentives for using packaging
| materials that can be recycled.
| jacquesm wrote:
| When I was a kid almost everything was recycled. People took
| your metals, glass, paper, peelings, wood and so on off your
| hands and frequently paid for it. Now you have to do the
| sorting yourself and you have to pay for the privilege. The
| large conglomerates that then take your pre-sorted scrap sell
| this for the market rate. And they're sitting pretty on decades
| long contracts with municipalities.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| It wasn't a secret. Penn and Teller did an episode of Bullshit on
| it in 2004 which itself was based on an older study showing that
| recycling almost everthing is bad for the environment. It's been
| public knowledge for just as long that most of it was going on a
| boat to China.
| ericmcer wrote:
| This gave me a flashback to a public speaking class in college
| back in... 2006ish. I gave a speech about how recycling was
| bullshit and a waste of time. It was very poorly received haha.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| Plastic recycling was marketed with the goal of getting consumers
| to keep using plastic. In that respect, it worked perfectly.
| uSoldering wrote:
| If anyone is feeling doom and gloom, the field of plastic
| pyrolysis looks promising. It will require processing similar in
| scale to manufacturing hydrocarbons, but there is still hope.
| kazinator wrote:
| [delayed]
| kazinator wrote:
| [delayed]
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