
The Violent Afterlife of a Recycled Plastic Bottle - nkurz
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/12/what-actually-happens-to-a-recycled-plastic-bottle/418326/?single_page=true
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ams6110
_A MRF sifts through recyclables to recover ... glass, metal, and plastics
with the resin code #1 or #2 (that’s the little tiny number in the triangle on
the bottom). It discards the rest._

I have heard this, that a good bit if not the majority of the waste that
people think they are recycling ends up in the landfill anyway. Would it not
be more efficient to just say "don't bother recycling anything except metal,
glass, and #1 or #2 plastic." The rest can be trucked directly to the
landfill, saving the extra trip and energy used to take it to the MRF for
sorting.

I think there's a good bit of political deceptiveness going on, people like to
think that they are recycling and helping the environment so local government
sets up a program to make it appear that they are. I wonder how many would be
shocked to learn that half of what they recycle ends up in the landfill.

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merpnderp
I have a friend who's an environmental engineer and he say's while no one says
this publicly, the only thing that is clearly a win for the environment is
recycling aluminum. The rest is either questionable, or not even close.

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Laforet
Glass, copper, steel and even asphalt scraped from roads are eminently worth
recycling, plastics and paper recycling tend to be swayed by commodity prices,
but you can't have a policy that recycles only when crude price is above $60 a
barrel.

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Animats
At one point, California had about 110% plastic bottle recycling. Then the
California Highway Patrol caught the outfit that was bringing in semis full of
crushed bottles from out of state and the recycler that was paying for them.

~~~
ams6110
Kramer and Newman?

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Zhenya
"Metals, such as, tin and aluminum are then extracted by magnets. "

umm, what?

I know aluminum can be slightly magnetic under intense magnetic fields, but
surely this isn't the case in this situation?

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pwg
The article should have said: "by magnetic induction". An AC current driven
electromagnet induces a current in the metal, the induced current in the metal
also has a magnetic field (basic physics), and it is this magnetic field that
is then used to "sort" the conductors (metals) from the non-conductors (non-
metals).

But then, the article was likely written by someone lacking an
engineering/physics background, and so "extracted by magnets" was likely as
much as they could comprehend of the process.

