Polluters get away with overusing plastic packaging precisely because consumers stop caring when they think it can be recycled.
But there's no practical way to buy milk, ice cream, detergent for dishes and clothes, prescription drugs, etc. So I end up saving containers, thinking that I'll find some use for them. But it's pretty hopeless.
So yes, I'd say that we need regulations.
Hell, I even saw some fruit, fruit, in plastic containers at the supermarket. I guess to stop it getting bashed. It was peaches.
This. Plastic _was_ developed to be long-lasting, the indestructibility is _by_design.
Plastics are hard to recycle because their melts don’t mix. As a result, when cast, you end up with an interface inside your part where the plastic can delaminate and fail.
Therefore, to recycle plastic you have to classify it according to type (plastic things usually have little numbers stamped on them indicating type) and you have to be right over 99% of the time.
Great intentions do not always lead to great outcomes (often the opposite).
The real problem is recycling is itself a charade. Most of what is "recycled" just ends up in landfills in the developing world.
The idea however is nice: I'd say let's make all packaging of any product a standard color (we could also allow a picture of the product as is). Less crap to falsely differentiate a product from another, less visual clutter, less messing with our brains to consume! Products would have to be attractive for what they are!
Which is great, because pizza is a whole thing in this town. We eat a lot of it.
So I was surprised to learn, if you go poking around and find the RecycleCT website [1] and hover your mouse over the pizza box, up pops this note. "No food residue. No liner."
Never in my life have I had a pizza box without grease soaked through it.
Maybe they've just given up, and knowing it won't be recycled anyway, they don't bother to make a fuss about what can go in the bin? Is this flyer just there to make us feel better about our waste? Because otherwise that's a pretty major note to forget to mention. Pizza boxes are recyclable, just as long as there's never been any pizza in it.
[0] https://www.newhavenct.gov/civicax/filebank/blobdload.aspx?b...
You might find that greasy, unlaminated cardboard is recyclable in the food/organic waste stream, as it is here in London.
"BEVERAGE BOTTLES Recyclable. Be sure to remove the plastic film label, which isn’t recyclable." FFS. Have you ever tried to remove one of those labels? It's impossible.
"A bottle with a cap or an opening the same size or smaller than the base of the bottle is probably going to be recyclable." -- WTF does the size of the opening have to do with it?
"The How2Recycle label is showing up on more products at the grocery store ... GreenBlue says that there are more than 2,500 variations of the label in circulation" 2500 different recycling rules?!
This is not a consumer-level problem. It's completely ridiculous to expect millions of ordinary people to succeed at this kind of task on a daily or weekly basis. It needs to be solved further up the supply chain, or processors need to be centralized and standardized. Period.
Now I have a load of garbage to empty a little less than once a year and a load of metal and plastic recycling once or twice a year.
Plus my food tastes better and costs less.
Everyone is free to do what they want, and experience shows someone will have to tell me the solution doesn't work for someone, but I hope people do similar so the manufacturers' warehouses fill with plastic instead of the oceans and they stop producing it.
No more chocolate bars, ready meals, pot noodles, bags of crisps or whatever else.
Even if you end up buying a bag of rice in plastic you're cutting down the waste by a huge amount because even a small one gives you ten or more servings.
But yeah, it is possible to avoid a lot of it. And if you're really dedicated, you can essentially get to zero waste. Here's someone that was able to fit 5 years of their trash into mason jar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT0uqEPzbd0
The insane amounts of damage we are doing with all this plastic needs to be controlled. Recycling is not the answer, reduce and reuse is.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BW1DSMV
Way better than the plastic bags at the store.
We were able to reduce our garbage and recycling in half.
But I also think taxing and or regulating packaging at the manufacturer for the rest is needed.
Is it aluminum? Recycle it.
Is is not aluminum? Don't recycle it.
Steel can be recycled many times with virtually no degradation.
Could all(?) packaging intended for recycling by made from aluminium?
As a consumer in North America, it's not easy. Japan has stronger national regulations, however, and beverage bottles universally have labels with either perforated strips or peel-up corners, to facilitate removal. Plastic caps are also easily removed from glass bottles - peel the cover back and it splits in half and releases from the bottle.
So, agreed on your final point. It can be done easily, and not necessarily at additional cost. Manufacturers just haven't been motivated to do so.
OTOH Japan wraps pretty much everything in plastic, usually multiple times over.
I don't think 2500 variations is actually excessive, when you look at how the labels actually work.
The label has four parts [1]:
• One part tells what preparation is needed, such as whether you need to rinse the item before recycling, whether you need to remove the label, and things like that. There are 13 possible options for this part.
• The next part tells you if the item is widely recycled, not yet recycled, requires store drop off, or varies from place to place. There are 4 possible options for this part.
• The next part lists the type of material the item is made from, such as paper or glass. There are 6 options.
• Finally, the last part tells what part of the item the label applies to. Values include bottle, tray, insert, and 6 others, for a total of 9 options.
13 x 4 x 6 x 9 = 2808.
Also, a given product can have more than one label. E.g., a frozen entree might have a label for the plastic tray it is in, another label for the plastic film that covers the tray, and a third label for the box that the tray is sold in.
> last part tells what part of the item the label applies to (...) given product can have more than one label. E.g., a frozen entree might have a label for the plastic tray it is in, another label for the plastic film that covers the tray, and a third label for the box that the tray is sold in.
This alone cuts down on amount of useful/correct sorting done. The worst is packaging you actually have to disassemble yourself - e.g. something that looks like cardboard (but probably has a thin layer of plastic on top of it; you can't easily tell), but has inserts of thin transparent plastic.
> whether you need to rinse the item before recycling
And this, I believe, essentially kills of recycling as an idea. Not only most people won't bother (and it's a coin toss whether they'll throw the dirty container into general/non-recyclable or recyclable bin), individuals cleaning plastic packaging is a ridiculously inefficient use of water, energy for heating that water, and likely detergent too. I don't have numbers on it, but I wouldn't be surprised if the resource use delta between individuals cleaning and doing the cleaning at recycling plant is actually greater than recycling process itself saves.
The rules for recycling when you exclude all plastics are pretty simple.
(Landfills are quite good at keeping plastic out of the environment. It's the stuff that doesn't make it into the landfill that you have to worry about.)
It's insane.
Where I live, we have like 6 different containers (PET bottles, other plastic, glass+cans, cardboard/paper, burnable garbage, unburnable garbage).
Coming from Sweden, it's actually a bit easier here (e.g. in Sweden cans, clear glass, colored glass were all separate, and aluminum drink cans had a deposit so you took them to the supermarket)
But now the question is: why pretty much NO government has ever succeeded in this?
My view is that the only hope is an EU-wide requirement to change packaging, etc to be able to still sell to the EU. That would be a big enough market for every single company to comply.
Living in a country where the majority, including me doesnt have to deal with their taxes, I cant help thinking maybe that's the solution. Whether the onus is put on manufacturers to make things trivially recyclable, or on recyclers to sort of a big bag of mixed waste, or some combination I don't know. Does seem silly for everyone to have to become domain experts in recycling though.
Example: In Japan, the plastic film label is perforated no glue is utilized. It is fairly easily removed.
More difficult simply tossing a bottle, sure.
Think for a moment instead of raging. 2500 variations does not mean 2500 different recycling rules. There are more than 2500 variations of your potential mate, that doesn't mean there's 2500 different ways to mate.
It is a consumer problem, consumers will have to deal with the results.
It sucks to push the packaging crimes of businesses onto consumers, but I think improving the public's understanding of what can and cannot be recycled can still have a massive impact on the effectiveness of recycling programs.
San Francisco has a great website to help you figure out what goes in which bin: https://sfrecycles.org/
(Note that you can recycle fabrics -- this isn't possible through most recycling programs!)
"Don't worry, you can consume as much as you want and as long as you put it in the recycling bin its all good"
[0] https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2018/06/18/weg-met-plastic-in-laag...
Indeed, recently we were looking into getting bio-degradable / compostable cups for an event, however:
* you need "industrial" (high-temperature) composting, your garden's compost pile is not going to work (it will probably degrade over time but very slowly)
* the average collection center can't easily differentiate between bio-degradable and regular plastic (you have to check each cup individually) so they just reject everything
I've tested composting a couple of compostable nappies (aka diapers) in my under-used, low temperature, domestic compost bin. After about 3 years we emptied it out and there was no sign of the nappies at all.
If an animal eats the corn-starch (or whatever compostable type it is) cup then it's not going to be especially harmful to them. Moreover, it appears from what I've seen that the compostable materials will not retain mechanical integrity after a small time of exposure to weather, this is good too.
It's not all sunbeams though, we had a fairtrade chocolate bar for sale in our store that was wrapped entirely in compostable wrapping (with vegetable dye printing, etc.), the compostable "cellophane" wrap was incredible. Completely transparent, flexible, shiny. But [I believe] the humidity was too high and the wrap grew sticky before the shelf life of the chocolate [<1y] had come.
It mightn't be perfect but it's a good way better.
Those rules can evolve very fast, and unfortunately the communication is lacking. A lot of people still use the rules of several years ago, not recycling things that are now accepted.
There is also an issue on products labels: a lot of them will say something isn't recyclable, while it can be in some cities. Only the most dedicated consumers will be able to correctly understand what they should do.
[0][French] https://www.paris.fr/pages/en-2019-paris-vous-facilite-le-tr...
They are a tiny portion of what's getting produced every day. And as long as petroleum keeps getting pumped out of the ground for dirt cheap and getting burned, plastics will be an inevitable byproduct.
It just costs pretty much $0 to make new plastic from that stream of petroleum, versus recycling which takes human effort, more equipment, logistics, etc.
Until we tax petroleum coming out of the ground for all the later problems it causes us, I too am disappointed but resigned to having recycling being a further waste of resources.
* CO2 emissions through burning fossil fuel
* plastic garbage with 1000 year lifetimes being littered around the planet
While we should absolutely be addressing both, you have to target these 2 problems separately
Edit: To clarify what I'd propose would be a tax on fossil fuel production, and then an additional, much higher tax on production of things like plastic bags
It seems that using mined virgin oil for plastics that gets tossed in a landfill means that at least a little more of the oil we are mining ends up not getting burned and emitted as CO2. In this way, we're creating non-global warming demand for oil which competes with the energy demand in the market. I don't know if this is a reasonable way of thinking about it.
Of course, the energy required to haul a bottle of water hundreds of miles is huge, so I'm not arguing for buying more plastic waste, just not sure how recycling existing plastic waste affects global warming in particular.
Ultimately in time I suppose you could consider plastics recycling as a way to extract less oil. If, for example, you could recycle 80%, then you only need to extract 20% of the oil, which is likely to be far better for the environment (less fracking etc).
On geological timescales a lot of the stuff we are doing is bonkers. It looks sort of OK now because we've 'only' had 100 years of it.
New Recycle
Glass: GN Kwh GR Kwh
Plastic: PN Kwh PR Kwh
Aluminum: AN Kwh AR Kwh
SI prefixes and units are case sensitive.
"k" is the prefix for kilo; "K" is Kelvin.
Similarly, "W" is Watt. "w", as far as I'm aware, doesn't mean anything.
"h" is the accepted symbol for the use of hour with the SI.
Basically, you just shred the donor plastic, heat it to 300-350F, press the air out, and let it cool. With LDPE plastic wrap, you can fold and stack it instead of shredding it. You can also get cool tie-dye effects by using multiple colors in the same batch.
You can use plywood for the walls of your molds, and a toaster oven that you don't plan on cooking with ever again can be a reasonable furnace. To compress the hot plastic, try making a loose-fitting lid and tamping or clamping it down while the plastic heats.
But make sure that it is polyethylene - some plastics, like PVC, release highly toxic fumes. And others, like polypropylene, are often mixed with plasticizers which evaporate into nasty fumes and reduce the quality of the recycled plastic.
>How To Recycle HDPE Bottle Lids Into Flawless Flat Sheet Material
Decent video on how to make HDPE into new materials
Here is a cool video that explains this - Asian Nations Reject Western Trash - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-htnUTN4mH0
For example, for recycling plastic bottles, we are supposed to take the plastic lid off, and even remove the attachment of the lid and separate it from the main plastic body.
Otherwise, the bottle can't actually be recycled. Single use plastics are everywhere where I live and more prevalent than ever: you want to buy 4 peaches at the supermarket? They come in a small plastic box wrapped in a plastic sheet.
The only way is going to be to make it illegal and force people to use paper bags or reusable bags, not only for carrying the groceries but also to separate fruit, use reusable containers for grains, etc.
But it has to be mandatory for everyone in order to make any significant difference.
Force companies. Individuals don't get to choose what the packaging is made of. And making it too inconvenient for end users is going to get pushback we don't need.
I'm wondering if there should be a mandatory deposit scheme on all packaging as there currently is on glass bottles in some place. Give people a few cents for returning a plastic bottle, and make it the manufacturer's problem to recycle or dispose of it. If your deposit-return system scans the barcode, it knows what product it is and which recycling stream to put it into ...
This will vary depending on the recycling facility, but where I live in Japan, you're supposed to separate the plastic label and the screwcap. According to a documentary about the recycling facilities here, the machines are able to automatically separate out the different kinds of plastic on PET bottles (bottle/cap/label), but the more there is that gets separated off, the more it slows down the process. So if one person forgets to separate their bottle's components, it's fine, the machine handles it, but if nobody separates, then the process takes too long and they can't keep up and have to divert unprocessed plastic to the incinerators.
If you have metal, aluminum especially is a very valuable recyclable, so definitely keep recycling that.
It doesn't matter what is theoretically recyclable. All that matters is what the recycler can handle.
So the rule of thumb is: there is no rule of thumb. Follow the local rules.
Plastics is a term which applies to thousands of different polymers. Some it makes sense to recycle, some don’t.
We can then begin to whittle down on the plastics we allow on the items which make most sense. For example we don’t needs tends of different plastics just because one vendor prefers the aesthetics of one over the other. Give them a select choice rather than an infinite choice.
Then label the packaging simply with simple easy to understand labels which are clearly visible. Avoid mixing incompatible plastics.
https://www.greenlivingtips.com/articles/recycling-by-the-nu...
Prices are dynamic though. Some things make sense to recycle today, but may not tomorrow, and some things may not make sense to recycle today, but may tomorrow.
That’s actually an interesting idea.
If it actually worked that way, there would be an amazingly high incentive for sellers to minimize packaging waste.
It would also have a side effect of making high-waste packaged goods much more expensive than low-waste packaged food, promoting the purchase of eco-friendly packaging.
I wonder if there’s a less radical way to implement these kind of market incentives.
Taxing packaging by weight and type would theoretically work to minimise packaging and encourage eg. Bringing a tupperware container to the shops. The standardised (countrywide) container types would mean you could eg. Put your standard coffebean container under the supermarket dispenser and do away with packaging.
The taxation would apply to manufacturers (import) not consumers, thus incentivising them to advertise green credentials as a feature, and to cut down packaging or pass the cost on (at which point most customers would move to the cheaper product).
As far as non-homogeneous packaging goes, if it takes longer than 5sec to separate each bit into homogeneous parts, then I'd class it as non-homogeneous.
I'm sure there's a lot of "it depends" in this answer, just as there is for most parts of this article. Still, even a ballpark answer would really help with the applied question of how much confidence in an item's recyclability one should have before putting it in the bin.
If I'm 95% sure then I'll do it. If I think the odds are 10% I won't. But where is the line? This depends on the cost of being wrong in terms of processing effort/energy, potential to ruin surrounding goods items, etc
The https://preciousplastic.com/ project takes this much further.
This is probably a poor example, as I'm sure there must be some reason to do this with batteries, but so many things we buy online now come with mountains of non-recyclable plastics that just create more waste. I'm with other commenters here: tax the hell out of this stuff and force retailers, especially ones with clout like Amazon, to develop different packaging technologies that don't overuse plastics for literally everything.
(1) the training data is readily available. there are human sorters who already are classifying everything in real-time as they pick stuff off the conveyor and move the item to the right bin. train cameras on the conveyor belt and the analyze which items are picked out and which bin they get tossed in.
(2) the NN doesn't have to be anywhere near as accurate as, say, a self-driving car. tune the classifier to minimize false positives. If the resulting NN can classify only 70% of the items, but accurately, that means 70% of the garbage stream can be automated and run 24/7. Humans can still go through the remaining 30% if it economically makes sense.
Sealed packets are also commonly foiled though mixed with plastic (for e.g. quick-close bits). Dunno how that works out for recycling, just burn out the plastic?
I would guess that most other kinds of foods need other shapes of packages, for which aluminum is likely to be more expensive than e.g. plastic.
Aluminum production takes a ton of energy.
What I mean to ask is, why don't we incentivize manufacturers to use more expensive aluminum packaging? It seems reasonable that the cost of manufacturing aluminum may be less than the sum of all costs of using plastic. It also seems that no companies will choose to do this without incentives.
This year, we did the same and noticed the recycling collection bins were gone. Went inside to inquire and were proudly told, “Oh, we got a big new landfill opened up with plenty of space; we don’t have to recycle anymore!”
Ugh.
Also when it comes to products that present contamination risks, plastic is an excellent barrier to prevent the spread of microbes.
Or is the dissolving-into-acetone part a non-reversible operation and one ends up with a boatload of contaminated acetone?
Some plastic types should be banned, it would make recycling more viable...
I'm really curious how much plastic China was importing, and what they were doing with it.
On a more serious note: This is far too confusing, and most of this burden belongs to the recycling processor, not the consumer.