Plastic Recycling Is a Hoax.
Last year, Americans recycled at most 6% of their plastic waste, according to a report released Wednesday by a pair of environmental groups. It’s a number that’s even worse than it used to be. Every American produced an average 218 pounds of plastic waste in 2018, per Reuters, and the recycling rate stood at 8.7% that year, the last for which the EPA published relevant data. As for the decrease, it’s not just that people aren’t using recycling bins; the problem is that plastic isn’t very recyclable, and it never has been.
The report’s authors lay blame on the plastics industry itself. As Judith Enck of Beyond Plastics puts it, “[Plastic recycling] does not work, it never will work, and no amount of false advertising will change that.” Coauthor Jan Dell of the Last Beach Cleanup adds, “There is no circular economy of plastics. Companies co-opted the success of other material recycling and America’s desire to recycle to create the myth that plastic is recyclable.” As EcoWatch reports, the recycling of other materials has been effective; it cites paper recycling rates around 66%, glass around 30%, and cardboard at nearly 90%. Only plastic recycling rates have never cracked 10%.
Indeed, USA Today reports that, at best, just 9% of plastics ever produced have been recycled, and even that figure is probably exaggerated: The US counts exported plastic waste as “recycled” even though 25% to 75% is “inadequately managed in receiving countries.
There are too many different types of plastics in use today. They are incompatible chemically and will turn into completely useless crap when mixed together. Take plastic bottles for instance – The cap is a different material than the bottle. If you leave the cap on it when you drop it in the bin it will contaminate the resultant material. There is no practical way to sort them except for someone manually picking up each piece and looking at the recycling code.
Even with that, the different molding methods used, along with pigments, performance additives and reinforcing fibers added to different products means that any mixture of recycled plastic will have varying degrees of performance properties. Nobody will trust them.
I think the only successful recycling effort so far has been those plastic boards you see on park benches.
Ugh – why did my avatar not show?
^^^
If I use my tablet my avatar is a no show.
You are completely correct about the plastics.
If everyone used trash to energy plants it would be much more efficient.
Our town has recycling but we also have a trash to energy plant so I don’t care if the recycling goes out or not. The recycling bins are convenient for big cardboard pieces from boxes and such.
Manually sorting plastic discards by code, removing caps and labels, and operating the equipment is a nasty task perfectly suited for convict labor. And it is my fervent hope that the inmate population will get a big boost when all the Dems and RINOs are convicted of conspiracy, sedition, and insurrection in the near future (but I’m not holding my breath).
Jethro: You probably mistyped your email address. That happens to me sometimes. Some browsers suggest the password (depending on the device), some suggest part of it (but not all) requiring me to type the rest. That is where I mistype it.
Trash to energy is probably the best plan and the resulting ash (from fillers, etc.) is probably on par with coal plants (mostly gypsum aka drywall board).
Plastic is NOT truly recycled as the molecule chains get broken down with reprocessing making softer and weaker materials. Post-consumer is worse with the various coatings on bottles contaminating the mix.
Great idea for “recycling” the demoncraps…
Jethro: You probably mistyped your email address.
That has happened to me a few occasions. The tablet remembers my info, but I have to type it in when I use the computer. Browsers differ.
Plastics are carefully sorted out then packaged in tight bundles then hauled to the desert and buried. Why? I know for a fact that it is being made into fuel now. But not in high production yet.
There is a great new technology called “Fire”.
It can even be used to generate clean electricity!
At $6 per Gallon, no one is recyling plastic, even IF they wanted to.
way to energy intensive
Polyolefins are the biggest volume and the easiest to “recycle”, by incinerating them. They are a great fuel to insure more complete and cleaner waste incineration.
I would like to see PVC taken out of the packaging market and used in the applications where it is used long term like pipe and wire insilation.
A friend of mine had a trash service. The “value” of unsorted recyclables was $60 per ton. How many plastic bottles does it take to make a ton?
He only had 10 trucks, by the time he figured the extra containers, man hours, a separate truck or multi-compartment truck, he was losing money to collect recyclables.
I just weighed a heavy T-shirt bag @ 7gm. So 129,714 bags would make a Ton.
Heavy liter bottle 37gm. 24,540 = 1 ton.
If they really wanted recycling, they would create a better market.
By Marian L. Tupy
Remember George Carlin’s hilarious skit about plastics? Here is the transcript:
“The planet … is a self‐correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age‐old egocentric philosophical question, ‘Why are we here?’”
Not so fast! According to a new study published in Environmental Science and Technology by co‐authors Professor Jun Yang and Yu Yang of Beihang University, and Stanford University engineer Wei‐Min Wu, plastic is biodegradable.
“Plastic, long considered nonbiodegradable and one of the biggest contributors to global pollution, might have met its match: the small, brownish, squirmy mealworm. Researchers have learned that the mealworm can live on a diet of Styrofoam and other types of plastic. Inside the mealworm’s gut are microorganisms that are able to biodegrade polyethylene, a common form of plastic.”
Good news for the planet and for humanity.
cato[dot]org/blog/revisiting-george-carlins-skit-about-plastics
As usual, the “recycling” scam is ripe with the smell of bullshit.
Plastics, ALL plastics, can be recycled and rendered into Hydo-Carbons which can be made into fuel – BUT – and that’s a BIG BUT (like “Tank” Abrams or Lindsey Graham) – the cost is prohibitive – AND – the lying maggot pro-Globaloney Warming/Enviro-Nazi/Self-Righteous $Billionaires (Gates, Buffett, Soros, Bozo, the Hobo-looking guy, &c.) won’t put up the cash to make the processes more affordable. They’re too greedy by half.
Say what you mean, mean what you say.
mortem tyrannis
izlamo delenda est …
We use plastics because of retards that can’t go shopping for mayonnaise, ketchup, soda, salad dressing, etc. without holding it in their hands and dropping it on the floor before putting it in the cart.
And of course, weight. You can ship more product in plastic than glass when it weighs less. Producers need to pinch pennies.
Yet somehow pickles are still in glass jars, some jellies, olives. I say if they can still ship their product in glass, so can everyone else.
And if you want to create jobs, bring back butchers who wrap your steak in paper. Why am I paying $13/lb for a steak that’s in styrofoam and plastic (for who knows how long?) with no customer service? Probably by a pimply faced mexican in the backroom spitting in it too, who calls me a gringo when I dare ask for a certain cut. Ridiculous.
The so-called trash to energy is a wasteful boondoggle. Spokane has a “Waste to Energy” that I call Wasteful Energy. If you compare the cost of its construction and operating costs to MWh produced each year, it will never pay for itself. In this it is just like wind turbines.
The very first paradigm to eliminate is that of ‘waste’. There is no ‘waste’, rather byproduct and conversion remainders. The job is to make use of the remaining product in some way. Plants produce oxygen as a conversion remainder, people produce CO2 as a conversion remainder.
^ 2nd Law of Thermodynamics –> increasing Entropy from ‘waste heat’ that can never be recovered.
since we’re talking about recycling plastic, what about all the microplastic fibers and particles that people inhaled when they wore the cheap ass chainese masks? That issue is down the road.
“Environmental groups say the plastics industry has been lying all along”
If anybody knows about, besides politicians, lying it would be environmental groups. New ice age, global warming, climate change, renewable energy, all scams designed to control the peasants and put money in the pockets of parasites.
Sure, the cost of turning plastic into fuel is cost prohibitive. Now.
Who knows what gas will be at next week?
You just need 600 degrees and some vacuum chambers. It comes out at above 91 octane.