undefined | Better HN

story

0 pointskennywinker3y ago0 comments

> Recycling has become incredibly expensive [1] and it's hardly making financial sense anymore

Small quibble with your wording there - recycling hasn't BECOME more expensive: for the most part it was never real. China was taking our "recyclables" that were never actually recyclable, telling us they were recycling it, and instead dumping almost all of it in landfills.

I recently got into 3d printing, and was sucked in by the promise of everything being PLA bioplastic. I've diligently saved up my misprints and plastic scrap, and now that I have a decent amount collected, I'd like to dispose of it responsibly. As far as I've been able to find, my options are: landfill, or shipping it at my expense (and the planet's) across the continent to the one place that claims they recycle filament. I can't even compost it anywhere local. Disgusting.

0 comments

Clubber3y ago

>China was taking our "recyclables" that were never actually recyclable, telling us they were recycling it, and instead dumping almost all of it in landfills.

I wish more people understood this. Plastic recycling is mostly a lie and has been for decades. If you use plastic, it's not getting recycled. All your plastic packaging, water bottles, everything ends up in a landfill if responsibly disposed of, or in the ocean if not.

https://www.plasticsoupfoundation.org/en/plastic-problem/bog...

We should really stop using plastics for the vast majority of packaging. Return to wax paper and cardboard, glass bottles, etc. An easy way to regulate this would be to include the cost of recycling, so selling plastic becomes more expensive than traditional methods of packaging. Another is to limit the amount of stuff you can put in a single plastic container by volume, say nothing smaller than a gallon / 4 liters can go into a plastic container. That would be a start.

It's not going to happen because our politicians' election campaigns are funded by corporations. They can't get elected without taking money from corporations. The person who can get the most donations from corporations wins. The exceptions aren't numerous enough to change any congressional votes. This recycling lie, that's been going on since at least the 80s, was conjured up to prevent pressure of regulation. Nothing to see here, it's recycled. Problem solved.

concordDance3y ago

I still don't understand what people have against putting plastic in landfill.

In developed countries they are well sealed, so you're not getting groundwater contamination, and they're eventually topping off and can be used for pasture or a park.

kennywinkerOP3y ago

Specifically for PLA, there's the issue of methane I linked in my reply to your other comment. For other plastics, the problem I see with landfilling is mostly that you spent a lot of energy creating this material, and now you're throwing it away and spending that energy again to create more. On top of just being wasteful, and emitting a bunch of carbon, all that material production is also funding an industry that is hellbent on destroying the planet.

leipert3y ago

You can recycle PLA scraps yourself. The only problem is that devices for this are so expensive that it isn’t worthwhile economically and you likely do not have enough scraps.

you also need to separate your prints properly so that other plastics are not contaminating the scraps.

You also need to buy pellets in order to get a good color.

And also the recycled PLA will probably end up being inferior to the stuff you will buy.

kennywinkerOP3y ago

I've seen those - they look like fun projects, but they aren't really a viable solution to 3d printing plastic since not everyone wants to build and learn how to use and maintain one of those, especially since as you say most people won't create enough scrap in the lifetime of their printer to make enough reels to offset the cost+time. What there needs to be is somewhere local that I can take my filament scrap to. But then there's the trust issue: they can't know for sure that my box of scrap contains ONLY PLA, and the consequence of me slipping up and giving them some PETG are pretty high. If PLA recycling were commercially viable to do, I expect it would have been done by now...

Which means PLA is not actually a functionally recyclable or compostable material. Technically, yes. Functionally, no. Which means anything I do on my 3d printer is destined for the landfill, the ocean, the groundwater. Which is why I'm going to avoid 3d printing in the future except when it's absolutely the right tool for the job.

concordDance3y ago

Just use landfill.

A modern Western landfill is quite safe.

kennywinkerOP3y ago

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2017/12/13/the-truth-about...

> As a result, bioplastics often end up in landfills where, deprived of oxygen, they may release methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

concordDance3y ago

Methane is also quite short lived in the atmosphere, right?

tremon3y ago

...and then decomposes into CO2 anyway. So you get a short-lived (10 years) very potent greenhouse gas, and then the long-term effect of CO2 on top of that. So whichever way you slice it, releasing methane is strictly worse than releasing CO2.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

Clubber3y ago

>China was taking our "recyclables" that were never actually recyclable, telling us they were recycling it, and instead dumping almost all of it in landfills.

https://www.plasticsoupfoundation.org/en/plastic-problem/bog...

concordDance3y ago

I still don't understand what people have against putting plastic in landfill.

In developed countries they are well sealed, so you're not getting groundwater contamination, and they're eventually topping off and can be used for pasture or a park.

kennywinkerOP3y ago

leipert3y ago

You can recycle PLA scraps yourself. The only problem is that devices for this are so expensive that it isn’t worthwhile economically and you likely do not have enough scraps.

you also need to separate your prints properly so that other plastics are not contaminating the scraps.

You also need to buy pellets in order to get a good color.

And also the recycled PLA will probably end up being inferior to the stuff you will buy.

kennywinkerOP3y ago

concordDance3y ago

Just use landfill.

A modern Western landfill is quite safe.

kennywinkerOP3y ago

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2017/12/13/the-truth-about...

> As a result, bioplastics often end up in landfills where, deprived of oxygen, they may release methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

concordDance3y ago

Methane is also quite short lived in the atmosphere, right?

tremon3y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse