
New polymer additive could revolutionize plastics recycling - chmaynard
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170224092604.htm
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spodek
For our personal behavior, let's remember than reducing consumption reduces
pollution more than reusing, which reduces pollution more than recycling. By
the time you're relying on recycling, you've already polluted a lot more than
you needed to, all the more so at the poor efficiency the article reports.

If you don't create the plastic bottle you don't have to figure out how to
undo its pollution.

We probably can't avoid all plastic use, but we're orders of magnitude above
minimal use, considering plastic didn't exist for most of human history, and
most current use doesn't improve anyone's quality of life.

~~~
javiramos
I am very skeptical about recycling (I do recycle though) - it seems like a
tremendous about of CO2 is spent just moving the recycled goods from homes to
the recycling facilities + the energy spent recycling the product + the energy
used shipping the product to a plastics distributor. The option of filling our
landfills is also costly but is it offset by recycling?

Does anyone know how recycled plastics stack up against new plastic once you
consider the energy used in the entire recycling chain?

~~~
chr1
It's not only about CO2, burning plastics produces other harmful compounds,
and without burning they stay for very long.

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byronwall
> ""What's exciting about this," he said, "is we can go to as low as 1 percent
> of our additive, and you get a plastic alloy that really has super-great
> properties.""

The properties of a polymer are specific to the application intended. "Super-
great" doesn't appear on a spec sheet [0]. If you're making plastic for high
pressure natural gas pipe, you go with a polymer that is different from a film
resin. Plastic producers work closely with the end users to craft polymer that
matches very specific applications. It's possible that this additive can be
crafted for different applications, but combining polyethylene and
polypropylene is already starting from different beasts.

In the world of polyethylene, I previously worked at a plant that made ~50
different grades/resins ranging from low to medium to high density PE for
wildly different applications (pipe, blow molding, film, etc.). Of those 50
resins, they were made from 2 different catalyst systems and multiple actual
catalysts. All of our end product was nominally "polyethylene". That detail
worked to ensure you made exactly the polymer you wanted for the application.
It is this specification of properties that prevents recycled material from
ending up in the critical high volume applications.

If you're making millions of milk jugs a day, it doesn't matter that a single
milk jug is worthless. You're using machinery that is custom tuned to the
polymer you are running. That tuning relies on the polymer having specific,
repeatable properties. We had customers complain when an identical resin was
made from different plants at the complex.

> ""If you could make a milk jug with 30 percent less material because it's
> mechanically better, think of the sustainability of that," he said. "You're
> using less plastic, less oil, you have less stuff to recycle, you have a
> lighter product that uses less fossil fuel to move it.""

Plastic producers can already make stronger polymer that requires less
material. Presumably the milk jug folks don't want to pay the premium for it.
The same is true of this additive. What does it cost? It's the reason we don't
make everything metal out of titanium.

[0] [http://www.cpchem.com/bl/polyethylene/en-
us/tdslibrary/Marle...](http://www.cpchem.com/bl/polyethylene/en-
us/tdslibrary/Marlex%20D143%20Polyethylene.pdf)

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OliverJones
I wish I could ask the chemists this question:

How does your innovation fare when it ends up, in large quantities, in one of
the oceanic plastic gyres? Is it better / worse / the same than the equivalent
mass of polypropylene or polyethylene?

I'm asking specifically about longevity and environmental impact both of the
new "alloy" itself and its degradation products.

------
anexprogrammer
We're still asking the wrong question.

The frustrating thing is we were doing miles better in the 80s, even though to
be evironmentally aware then meant you were thought of as some sort of hippie
or anarchist type.

Lots of supermarkets still sold milk in glass bottles as used by milkmen. You
returned the empties to the store/milkman and they could be reused
indefinitely. Milkmen delivering to door were still common.

A couple of supermarkets had bio-degradeable carrier bags that were just as
good as plastic, they just had a slightly different (nicer tbh) texture. They
had mysteriously disppeared by the 90s, so presumably cost a fraction more.

Most products had yet to succumb to the insanity of plastic and packaging.
Lots of pop (soda) came in glass bottles or cans, just a few preferred
plastic. Sealed packs of 3 slices of ham or one apple were still in some
dystopian future. Paper, card and greaseproof paper were still common
packaging.

A typical family would get _nowhere near_ the amount of waste an average
family generates in these "environmentally aware" times.

~~~
Pamar
In Germany water bottles have an automatic markup of 25 eurocents/bottle.
Every supermarket has special devices that will scan the bottle barcode and
give you back 25 cents for each compatible bottle you put in - the money is
delivered as a coupon you can use at the cashier to pay for stuff (you can
also ask for cash if you want).

~~~
anexprogrammer
Sometime in the 80s or 90s there was interest in introducing the same as
plastic was starting to be used for more bottles. From memory it was very
popular with the public at the time. Nothing ever came of it, so presumably
the Thatcher govt considered it an unfair imposition on businesses.

So now we have towns and hedgerows full of discarded plastic bottles.

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andreofthecape
Is the resultant polymer recyclable?

------
martalist
> "Only 2 percent of the 78 million tons of manufactured plastics are
> currently recycled"

Is there any info/stats on what happens to the rest?

~~~
xbmcuser
What happens to the rest is mentioned in the article as well.

~~~
DanBC
From the article:

    
    
       2% recycled
      33% lost 
      40% landfil
      14% incinerated
      89% total?
    

I don't know what happens to the rest.

~~~
umbrai_nation
11% still in use?

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ChuckMcM
Nice work, I hope they can commercialize it.

One of the challenges I discovered about plastic recycling is that you can't
easily separate plastics and people do a lousy job of it. With aluminum cans
(70% recycled[1]) you can use ferrous metal screening to separate and a lot of
other impurities burn off when smelting it.

But with plastics if you mix two incompatible types (polypropylene and
polyethylene) the result is a crappy plastic that is brittle and weak. And
there is no simple way of splitting them apart when they are mixed together.
As a result it is really hard to get nice clean recycle plastic of a single
'type' and that limits its uses tremendously.

The ideal solution would be to be able to mix some magic mojo into a plastic
and turn it into the finished product (which is what these scientists propose
AFAICT).

[1] [http://www.aluminum.org/news/study-finds-aluminum-cans-
susta...](http://www.aluminum.org/news/study-finds-aluminum-cans-sustainable-
package-choice)

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jlebrech
by definition plastics are recycled crude oil, they'd only end up burned if
not turned into plastic.

the way we recycle is still broken, we separate it from our garbage thinking
it'll be recycled but it's still burned.

