We need to stop making things out of plastic, where any alternative exists.
The stuff is going to be the asbestos of the 21st century. Microplastic has been vastly, vastly underrated as a problem. All my lifetime the attitude has been that plastic takes eons to degrade and pulverize, but when it does, the problem of unsightly or dangerous litter is presumably finished. Now we're seeing the opposite: plastic dust is a poison sponge that bioaccumulates and has got absolutely everywhere.
Plastic is an amazing material. You can thermoform it, it's a great insulator, molds and fungi don't feed on it, it's incredibly strong (e.g. UHMWPE rope a.k.a dyneema) and so on.
The trouble seems to be we don't really respect the environment enough, so we use it in terrible ways, like single use products. We often don't need those nice properties in single use products, yet we use it anyway because we don't pay due respect to the long term consequences. So we use things like plastic containers, forks, cups, bottles and spoons.
What are some alternatives? Should we go back to glass bottles and paper bags?
In the Caribbean Soda use to come in glass bottle with a $0.50 deposit.
You would never find a bottle on the side of the street, kids lamented losing their deposit if they broke a bottle(also ran the risk of getting yourself cut if you did) so they made sure to hold on to those bottles with both hands.
Now soda comes in a plastic bottle with no deposit on it and isn't recycled on the island.
The side of roads and nearby bushes are filled with these plastic bottles. Drains are clogged with them. Its an absolute nuisance. I dont know why the government even allowed the switch over to plastic....Ok I lied, I know. the glass bottles were costly to the breweries and they are the government biggest campaign supporters.
If what you care about is pollution, just tax the pollution instead mandating a specific solution. In this case, it seems easier to add a $0.50 deposit to the plastic bottles.
Technically it is a solution, but it sounds like you don't like it for cultural reasons.
This gets into the purpose of governments in general. Culturally, let's say you don't want pollution. How do you solve that? You can try and convince your neighbors piecemeal, or you can create a governmental solution. Governments have a relatively limited set of options for creating change. Taxes are one of the least invasive options, and significantly lighter weight than regulation and police enforcement.
Isn't that a problem that could be solved with law enforcement and cleaners like what developed countries do? That still seems to be cheaper than glass bottles.
more anecdata - I have the same experience, I cannot tell if it is in my head [0] or there is actually a difference
[0] for example some people claim food tastes different based on weight of their utensils etc... It is hard for me to accept my brain is not tricking me when drinks in glass taste better than can/plastic of the same drink
> It is hard for me to accept my brain is not tricking me when drinks in glass taste better than can/plastic of the same drink
Although we use the word "taste" to describe the experience, even that is well understood to be a methaphor for taste and smell.
What's more, I think it's also pretty well understood that texture is an important component of how people perceive (dare I say "taste"?) what they eat.
As such, I don't think you need to resort to accusing your brain of trickery to conclude a different experience when drinking from a can or from bottles of different composition.
On the other hand, if they're both first poured into identical glass highballs before being consumed.. that's another matter.
Yes there are law's against littering and that doesn't mean much.
I live in New York City(in a "developed" country). Yet some streets can become pretty littered.
The glass bottle made the people police themselves instead of having the governments use public resources to do it.
> We often don't need those nice properties in single use products, yet we use it anyway because we don't pay due respect to the long term consequences.
Those properties are also used in place of other materials. Gears in devices that were once metal are now plastic which works OK for w while but it's not even close to the durability of metal.
The result is the device with plastic gears fails and a new one is made to replace it, maybe two or three times in a decade. Meanwhile a device with metal gears may last decades.
How many vacuum cleaners, washers, dryers, microwave ovens from the 1970s and 1980s are still in use versus the same devices from the 1990s/2000s?
Modular devices that can be updated to suit whims of fashion. And technology which use durable metal parts would make more sense and cut down on plastic waste plus the sheer volume of old failed devices.
> How many vacuum cleaners, washers, dryers, microwave ovens from the 1970s and 1980s are still in use versus the same devices from the 1990s/2000s?
I don't doubt that metal is more durable than plastic, but there's some survivor's bias in that statement. We usually think of 70s and 80s appliances being more durable because we see people still using them. The truth is that we've always had a mix of cheaply made vs durable products, and the cheaply made stuff broke years ago and was replaced. We're comparing our cheapest made products of now to the most durably made products of decades ago.
Older stuff generally had poorer tolerances and in some cases barely worked. However when it did it was easy to fix and was generally designed with a large margin.
Nowadays we make things with a lot more precision and the mechanics will go a lot longer without needing repair. However if anything goes wrong the whole thing needs replacement as it's not designed for repair.
Sure, and I agree that many products aren't built like they once were (with or without survivorship bias, as well as the ability to fix older products is way easier than newer products) but, the cost of metal gears versus plastic gears, for instance, was much much higher. (now with Metal Injection molding, the prices would be closer, but the MiM are still more expensive.)
For better or worse, people are almost always going to choose cheaper products.
> Should we go back to glass bottles and paper bags?
If you put a price (read: tax) on plastic, I'm sure many folks would jump at the opportunity of replacing plastic-heavy stuff with no/minimal plastic options possibly using glass or paper (or metal where things are disposable that shouldn't be).
Thing is, plastic has a subsidized price right now due to petroleum supply chain being subsidized - plastic is a byproduct (we even fight wars to keep the price low).
Most plastic waste does not come from rich countries with decent waste infrastructure. It comes from shipping and fishing and industrial vessels who dump their garbage into the ocean, and developing countries who dispose of all of their waste by throwing it into a river or the ocean to be washed away.
You can't tax them because they are not in your country. You would have to stop the plastic being created at it's source, and prevent it from ever being released into the environment.
I can't stand these various doomsday scenario stories. Yes, it's certainly wasteful to have single use plastic products. Consumers like them, though, and they're sometimes the only way to comply with various regulations about cleanliness. For example, washing and steam cleaning glass to sterilize it uses more energy than just making a plastic bottle.
Did you read the original article? Where do you think a lot of the waste from China comes from (hint - we send it there). A lot of the plastic 'recyclable' waste we ship there can't actually be recycled (clam shell containers, contaminated plastic), and ends up as part of the waste stream.
> You would have to stop the plastic being created at it's source, and prevent it from ever being released into the environment.
Then let's do that! Sure, you can't police a fishing trawler or some guy in a Third World country throwing plastic bottles into the water, but petroleum production and refining are very big, visible, highly centralized industries. It would be entirely feasible and desirable to put a hefty tax on the production of plastic.
And basic economic theory says that's the most efficient way to do it: apply a tax to cover the negative externalities, and let the market figure out how to optimize from there.
The developing world has their own problems - how is a developing country going to deal with these problems without first getting the infrastructure needed? Let's focus on our wasteful selves - we're the one's who've been benefited from the consumption of cheap, throwaway products.
Taxing the usage of plastic will reduce it's use because it kills the market and reduces.
Just like GDPR killing off companies that could only exist where reasonable regulations didn't exist, the same would apply of plastic.
If taxing plastic in US/EU creates alternative packaging/disposable options that are cheaper or more effective (doubtful but possible) then the developing world can leapfrom from plastics to non-plastic.
Also you're ignoring all the waste that's not ocean-dumped. The billions of tons in landfills.
Not necessarily. In 2004, Germany introduced a 25 cent deposit on single-use plastic bottles [1] for types of beverages where single-use bottles were much more common than reusable bottles. The intention was like you describe: to encourage consumers and manufacturers to prefer reusable bottles. However, the opposite happened.
In the first few months after the law came into power, each retailer would only take back bottles purchased at their own stores, leading to a public outcry. Retailers eventually came together to form a single deposit system for single-use bottles. Bottles purchased from any of the participating retailers could now be returned to any other participating retailer.
That's something that's pretty much impossible for reusable bottles: When you return a reusable bottle, the store that takes it back must have a supply chain to ship the bottle back to the corresponding beverage factory. Single-use bottles, on the other hand, are just destroyed and recycled, so the supply chain is much easier.
In the end, the deposit system for single-use bottles functioned so well (both for customers and retailers) that manufacturers switched from reusable to single-use bottles. For example, Coca-Cola used to produce only reusable bottles (and single-use aluminum cans). Now they sell a large amount of single-use bottles. A lot of retailers (e.g. the almighty discount chains) sell only single-use bottles because they don't want to bother with collecting reusable bottles.
[1] For comparison: Deposits on reusable bottles are either 8 cents (glass, e.g. beer) or 15 cents (plastic, e.g. juices; sometimes glass, e.g. brand sodas).
Here in Colombia the plastic bags in stores cost some (very little) money now.
Suddenly, people discover that are not as necessary!
Now, people take stuff with their own hands (before EVERYTHING was put in a plastic bag, event single units that are already in plastic bags!) or use bags made of fabrics or just get one with them...
You need to pay 10 cents for a bag, period (it goes to the city). While slightly annoying at first, you quickly adapt. (I haven't bought a bag yet, its the principal. It also turns the question "do you need a bag" in a hostile one).
Glass jars/bottles and metal cans are great for recycling (sometimes even reuse if standards are high enough).
Paper bags are also a great technology.
I could see a standardized beverage container format (including a paper wrapper lightly glued on) and cheap reusable metal 'silverware' that is also magnetic (because we're a nation of idiots and this stuff is going to get in to the waste stream) working out.
Glass is a terrible material in a recycling sense, as it's weight makes transport costly and wasteful (fuel). The raw material is essentially sand (silica) which we're not going to run out of, soon. Burying it in a landfill won't make a worst landfill - it's essentially inert.
It's literally better to NOT recycle glass than to recycle it. Reuse it.
The #1 ingredient in glass isn't sand, it's previously manufactured glass. You can pretend it's sand, but it's not.
The economics of all this is very geographically dependent.
In many parts of the country, the transport cost isn't a big deal because there are glass manufacturers who use cullet nearby. It's not clearly superior to transport glass to a landfill instead of a place that can recycle it.
Glass recycling isn't economical enough to reuse brown bottles in Montana? Understandable - so it's not collected.
Saying that glass recycling is economically and ecologically unsustainable everywhere is a bold statement.
I don't understand why it's better to not recycle glass. Yes transporting used glass is costly, but isn't collecting and transporting sand even more costly? And while we won't run out of sand, good sand is limited. Or can you use any sort of sand to produce glass instead of a specific type of sand? Doesn't refining sand into glass take additional energy compared to melting existing glass?
It's easier to sort broken glass cullet than bottles.[1]
The actual sorting step scans each small piece of glass cullet individually, and air jets kick different types into different outlets. This is very fast - 30 metric tons an hour.
I am far from an expert, but here in germany glas gets recycled in 3 bins, brown, green, white - and get usually smashed by people throwing those bottles in.
So not much air.
And cleaned they still can get (and should)
Germany is quite ahead of the curve when it comes to recycling.
Here in Boulder, CO, USA, recycling goes only into one bin. It then needs to get sorted at the recycling center. We're told not to smash bottles. Glass has to first be sorted by color.
Also we have nothing at all like the Pfand system. I pay for the privilege to have recycling taken away, not the other way around. What Germany has is awesome.
From the first article,
"In some applications, natural aggregate can be replaced by or supplemented with recycled materials, but the possibilities are limited. "
It doesn't go on to why that is, but the conclusion is that recyclable glass won't work(?).
The problem, if i remember correctly, is that you cannot control the purity of recycled glass very well. The last time I checked it was mostly used to lower the temperature needed for the furnace.
But if you want to make pure boro-silicate glass, you cannot tolerate much contamination of oxides, lime, lead, dolomite, salt, etc. or your glass will be tinted, full of bubbles, and possibly even cracks while cooling.
Even with the recycling system in Germany where you separate glass by color, people will not distinguish a soda-lime, boro-silicate, or lead glass. And I don't know a process that could extract the pure SiO2 from old glass (though I'd love for someone to jump in and tell me about a cheap method)
That's surprising to me. By not recycling glass you pay the fuel costs to move that glass to a landfill and you pay the fuel costs to move sand to your glass production facility.
Is the final cost lower just because landfills and sand are everywhere, but recycling facilities are farther away?
Recycling glass is essentially pointless. It costs the same amount of energy to recycle glass (possibly even more, due to transport) as it does to just make new glass, and we're never going to run out of sand.
The raw materials for making new glass also need to be transported. Why is transporting raw materials better for the environment than transporting existing glass?
Pristine, beach-quality sand in the right, profitable resort areas and industrial-quality sand harvested off somewhere where it's freezing cold are very different animals.
A lot of the time you can substitute paper, glass, wood, wicker, wax, natural fiber cloth or string, the things people were using at the turn of the 20th century before any plastic other than rubber had been commercialised.
There are also bioplastics that degrade quickly, and those could cover some of the remaining gaps.
I don't think even long use products are good uses for plastic, TBH. Long in whose terms? Plastics will hang around for longer than we have had agriculture. Imagine if the Sumerians had made plastic. We'd still have their plastic temple tat, ox yokes, obsolete plough parts etc littering up the Iraq desert.
> Imagine if the Sumerians had made plastic. We'd still have their plastic temple tat, ox yokes, obsolete plough parts etc littering up the Iraq desert.
That would actually be great for archaeologists. /s
Glass isn't biodegradable either, but for some reason that's OK. Paper uses more energy (fossil fuels) and pollutants in production than plastics. Taking a rational look at environmental impact of different materials contradicts the knee-jerk anti-plastic attitude that is popular. Unless I am missing something, I can't see a rational reason that using plastics for packaging, then properly disposing in a land fill is not the sky-is-falling bogeyman it is portrayed to be.
> Glass isn't biodegradable either, but for some reason that's OK.
Regular glass in the environment is eventually pulverized into dust, it doesn't react with much of anything, and if the little bits that persist longest in the environment are ingested by an animal, it's handled biologically like any other nontoxic stone or grit. Pretty much the worst you can say about its environmental effect is that the broken bits can be pretty sharp when they're new and it's rather heavy, making disposal and recycling expensive in some respects.
The fact that it doesn't biodegrade easily is what makes it accumulate in the environment, with more and more toxic effects as we go up the food chain.
There are many different types of plastics. Some end up in nature as tiny pieces like you mention and are indeed very bad for the ecosystem. But it's also possible to set up a proper recycling & valorization system. Northern Europe already does it: over 98% of consumer plastics are either recycled or valorized through heat (producing power or city heating).
Preventing plastic in Europe would have basically no effect on plastic in the ocean. The problem is people with poor waste management infrastructure tossing their junk into the rivers and oceans in developing countries.
I have a separate bin for plastic, food/garden, paper/cardboard and general waste. Glass and clothes are collected at the supermarket. Most glass and plastic drinks bottles are reused, you pay a deposit for them (excellent system!).
Oil, batteries, light bulbs are collected at schools/supermarkets. Electronics can be returned to stores or more often taken to the skip. They're put in shipping containers and I assume sold somewhere.
Recycling is less help than it looks. Assuming it's captured (big assumption with a lot being binned and straight into landfill) it gets made into degraded products, it can't cycle back to the original use good as new like glass. And a lot of those products are things that look like big plastic dust sources.
I predict it won't be long before using non-biodegradeable plastic in any packaging or short-lived product will be banned. It's outrageous that everything is packaged in material that will almost certainly not be properly recycled, and end up in landfill or the ocean.
For a while I've been scavenging devices. So I have my eyes on people's waste quite regularly.. I'm thinking of starting a recycling factory. If people just threw all their waste in my yard I'd be rich.
- Tons of cardboard
- Tons of batteries
- Tons of partially working devices
- etc etc
The thing is, 'you' buy the packaging most of the time. People are stupid, they just follow the stream of 'nice' from nice looking store, to nice looking brand name, to nice looking package. I'm sure if you made everything in thin
cardboard with minimal markings, they'd be angry.
> I'm sure if you made everything in thin cardboard with minimal markings, they'd be angry.
If only some things had minimal packaging, those vendors would be a competitive disadvantage, but if everything had minimal packaging, maybe consumers would be angry for five minutes, but then they'd get used to it. In other words, this is exactly the kind of coordination problem that governments were invented to solve.
Green and politics rarely go well together methinks, this will never be seen as a valueable politician time (and I'm sure they'll despise having less shiny on shelves).
You'd need some economical model to make packaging too costly and thus explain why a law reducing them interesting.
In my area there's a market around finding used items at Goodwill outlets, fixing them up, and reselling through Craigslist/Offer Up/neighbors/etc. My wife and her mother find a lot of useful, inexpensive things at Goodwill outlets, including nice furniture, kitchen utensils, decoration, and electronics I now use daily. As someone who used to shop by hunting down brand name products in big box stores when I needed anything, the realization that used, nearly-free items are both readily available still functional was surprisingly profound.
That's exactly my conclusion. With a bit of time, friends/family (the more the merrier in a way), you can have a shit ton of things for a few bucks.
Another thing is that after a while I started to realize that sometimes I spend more hours on fixing than buying a new one. Also I felt I could just be a customer for someone invested into a whatever store (social feelings) and I could find my own spot to make more use of my time.
/me back repurposing 'dead' laptop batteries with a 1$ li-ion charging pcb :)
> Unfortunately, not all bioplastics compost easily or completely and some leave toxic residues or plastic fragments behind. Some will break down only at high temperatures in industrial-scale, municipal composters or digesters, or in biologically active landfills (also called bioreactor landfills), not on ordinary home compost heaps or in conventional landfills.
This is not that big a problem. The solution to it is municipal composting, instead of chucking it in your back yard.
Bioplastics aren't a panacea, but biodegradable ones are. We want durable materials that don't biodegrade. That's why we use plastics. Ideally, there should be a way - some catalyst, or some environment in which they do degrade. Industrial composting of biodegradable plastics is just that.
Unfortunately, it does not really solve the microfiber problem. We can't make clothing out of biodegradable plastic.
I take it you didn't read the link. The problems with "biodegradable" is that often times it's not 100% and will result in particulate and toxins.
If someone is composting they'd prefer not have toxins in there - goal is to grow stuff using the compost. So how do you get rid of this stuff cleanly?
Although not yet commercially viable there are a few companies trying to address this problem. Algopack[0], a French startup is making plastic like material from seaweed (brown algae) and there are others that are trying out bioplastics made from sugarcane
Have you seen what goes into our childrens' clothes and toys lately? My kids and house are always covered in this microscopic glitter stuff that falls off their clothing and toys. The winter holidays are the worst. I never buy it but inevitably someone will get this junk for my kids, and I'm the evil dad if I say "no". I hate to be a grinch, but I really wish we would stop importing and/or selling this stuff. But nope, we seem to value cheap thrills over the future of our natural environment.
The problem with switching to alternatives like "compostable plastics" is they need to be composted in a special facility that most people aren't going to have easy access to so they'll either throw them in with their recycling (which contaminates the recycling stream) or they put them in with their garbage (which, in a oxygen starved environment like a landfill, causes them to release a lot of methane as they decompose).
So now the consumer often has to to decide if they want more greenhouse gases or more microplastics in the environment.
Problem is, plastics are entirely a byproduct of the hugely dominant petrochemical industrial complex (sibling of Big Oil). Bioplastics exist, but the reason we use so much plastic instead of glass/paper is because it's cheap because it's actually a waste product of oil refinement.
Realistically, yes, it's poisonous (so are the superfund-sites-to-be we call gas stations, not to mention the offshore rigs, refinery sites, etc) but Big Oil is super powerful.
Ironically Aramco in planning for future with less petro-derived fuel, is planning on making other things from petroleum, mosltly more plasticky stuff... Can’t blame them much since that is the source of ~80% of their revenues...
The biggest problem with making statements about "plastic" is that it's such a broad category of materials that you almost invariably doom yourself to talking nonsense.
Most plastic (particularly PET, PP, HDPE, and LDPE) is not poisonous, even when decomposed, and does not bioaccumulate in the conventional sense. Perhaps by "poison sponge" you don't mean that it's poisonous; you mean that it absorbs poisons. Well, isn't that what you would want to do with poisons? Clay and activated charcoal absorb and adsorb poisons too. That's why you feed them to poisoning victims. The problem is the poisons, not the plastics.
Using alternatives where they exist may or may not be an improvement. Usually you can use glass bottles instead of plastic bottles, for example. But a PET 2-ℓ bottle might be 27 grams of extremely nontoxic PET. The corresponding glass bottle weighs nearly a kilogram, 30 times as much. This means that most kinds of environmental damage associated with it increase by one and a half orders of magnitude; you need 30 trucks instead of one to transport the bottles to the bottling facility, 30 tons of raw material instead of one to make 30,000 bottles, and so on. The glass also needs higher processing temperatures, using more energy, and produces broken glass when discarded, so the disparity is actually somewhat larger.
Similarly, a traditional plastic shopping bag is entirely nontoxic, weighs 100 milligrams, and can be reused three or four times, but is sterile the first time you use it. If you replace it with a canvas bag that weighs 65 grams and can be reused hundreds of times, you're using 650 times more material in exchange for only 100 times more uses, and you dramatically increase your risk of food poisoning from raw vegetables. Washing the canvas bag once will typically use both more energy than the plastic bag used during its entire lifecycle and also more material — it's hard to get it clean with only 100 milligrams of soap!
A better tradeoff is to use slightly thicker plastic bags which can survive dozens of uses, use new plastic bags for your raw vegetables, and bury the plastic safely when you're done with it. (A common pathological effect of regulations against plastic shopping bags is that people have to replace them with plastic garbage bags.)
Being able to use 30 or 100 times less material, and common, nontoxic materials like carbon and hydrogen instead of rare, toxic materials like boron and chromium, are major environmental advantages of many plastics in many uses. There are some uses of plastics which are environmentally harmful, and there are some plastics which do generate toxic products if they are allowed to break down — most notably PVC.
Car fuel consumption is, generally speaking, closely proportional to weight; and, for a given emissions control system, harmful emissions are closely proportional to fuel consumption. Individual car weight has diminished enormously during the last 50 years primarily due to greatly increased use of plastics, though improved metals have also played a role. You can build cars almost entirely from metals, with only a few crucial components such as gaskets and hoses made from plastics, but doing so is environmentally harmful.
So why is there so much anti-plastic sentiment? I think there are four main reasons, aside from the actual environmental damage from some uses of plastics.
1. Plastic is very visible, and renouncing plastic is a low-cost, high-visibility way to advertise your virtue as an Environmentally Conscious Person. Doing things that would actually have a significant benefit to the environment, such as not having children, not eating meat, not financially supporting the US military through taxes, carefully weighing the costs and benefits of possible actions, and using passive solar climate control in your house, is costly and therefore unpopular.
2. I'm a hippie, and the horror at what industrial civilization is doing to our beautiful planet leads many hippies to reject industrial civilization entirely. This kind of anarcho-primitivism, which I do not agree with, considers products of industry and especially petroleum and chemistry to be undesirable, at times even ritually impure, like cannibalism. Thus canvas bags are preferable to plastic bags, wool (such as actual fleece) is preferable to microfiber polyester ("polar fleece"), and brass is preferable to plastic, entirely independent of their actual environmental impact. This creates a sort of coincidental association between environmentalism and the rejection of plastic which provides fertile ground for anti-plastics arguments and barren ground for pro-plastics arguments.
3. At least in the US, the upper class considers wool preferable to microfiber polyester and brass preferable to plastic for an entirely different reason from anarcho-primitivists: they consider innovation and cheap goods to be déclassé, deriving much of their social value from a traditionalist, Romanticist value system. Cynics might also point out that using expensive goods where cheap ones would do serves as a form of conspicuous consumption, reliably signaling the wealth of the consumer to observers. Either way, the upper class — which still controls much of the press in the US, and thus has a powerful role as tastemakers, despite the rise of lower-class celebrities like the Kardashians and Trump — is also fertile ground for anti-plastics arguments and barren ground for pro-plastics arguments.
4. Selling alternatives to disposable plastics is very profitable. As a simple example, a supermarket can sell cloth bags instead of giving away plastic bags for free. Many times, its customers will forget to bring cloth bags with them, and will buy more bags than they need, so in practice a single cloth bag will replace 10 plastic bags instead of 100. This works as a form of price discrimination, since customers on tighter budgets will be more careful to bring bags to avoid the artificially imposed cost. Finally, this makes the supermarket appear upscale, both because it's advertising its hip environmental consciousness, and because it is less associated with déclassé things like plastic bags. This enables it to charge higher profit margins on its other merchandise.
> Individual car weight has diminished enormously during the last 50 years
Actually quite the reverse. Individual car weight has increased enormously. The Mk1 Volkswagen Golf (1974) weighed 790-970kg. The current Mk7 weighs 1351-1395kg. An F Type Jag is 200kg heavier than an E Type.
Cars have been increasing in size such that a "Mini" is anything but (try parking one next to the original Issigonis Mini). They contain a vast range of electrical toys like aircon, ABS, airbags that add a lot of weight, and structural features like crumple zones, catalytic converters and so on. Some is the result of mandated emissions and crash regs, a lot is a result of feature-itis from the manufacturers.
That's quite apart from the trend of people choosing ever larger models, and SUVs over saloons and hatchbacks. That fashion just exacerbates the issue.
Hmm, is that really true? Or is it a matter of those particular makes moving upmarket? As you say, if we take into account the shift to SUVs (arguably a reaction to their effective exemption from CAFE standards in the US) cars have gotten heavier — but is the same size of car really heavier now than 40 years ago? You've got me doubting, but I don't know where to get good data on dimensions of different car models over the years.
I'd think that the modern equivalent to a 1974 Volkswagen wouldn't be a 2018 Volkswagen, though, but something like a Chery or Daewoo.
Hard to be sure, but the Golf is occupying the same niche, small hatchback, that it was 40 years ago. Half a tonne of extra weight is hard to explain easily though. Wikipedia shows basic dimensions, but doesn't really explain where the weight went. But it's all cars, in all categories, getting bigger and heavier and almost becoming the next model up. There's nothing in what used to be small any more. A BMW 1 series is bigger than the old 3.
Today even downmarket brands like Kia and Daewoo don't have 70s and 80s era lack of equipment - everything comes with air bags, electric windows, ABS, GPS and so on. You used to buy a car and get a heater, maybe a radio. Pay extra for electric windows, sometimes even for mirrors and fog lights. That and more legroom doesn't explain hundreds of kilos and half tonne gains in cars of all types. I think the rest must be structural for crash resistance. Side impact protection needing thicker heavier doors, etc.
I feel like this is one of the most important underreported stories today. It's a massive, sudden change that is having ripple affects on the entire global supply chain.
We've written quite a bit about it on Waste Dive: https://www.wastedive.com/news/what-chinese-import-policies-... California is particularly hard hit and is likely to relax laws about how much recyclable material is allowed to be sent to landfills. There's nowhere else for it to go.
A useful post. Have you read the Adam Minter book Junkyard Planet? https://jakeseliger.com/2018/04/10/junkyard-planet-adam-mint.... It's a deep and excellent look into how the junk supply starts in the United States and goes (went, now, I guess) to China.
"Waste" made sense for China when the country was poor and desperately starved for raw materials. Now the country is less poor; we are going to have to somehow subsidize the recycling of waste (expensive) or landfill it (terrible for the environment).
Is landfilling truly terrible for the environment? It seems to me as though if a concentrated area were used for landfilling, that area is ruined, but overall the surface is small in the grand scheme of things, so it should have a relatively small impact. Can anybody expand _why_ landfills are bad? It certainly seems better than simply leaving junk everywhere.
Landfills are not sustainable, and are best used as a stop gap measure. It might seem like we have lots of easily accessible empty land right now, but eventually easily accessible land is going to become harder to find. It seems that it would be wise to come up with a sustainable solution, rather than assuming we can rely on a non-renewable resource forever.
That being said, why can't volcanoes be used as some sort of a landfill?
I am unconvinced by this argument. I would like to believe it, but I can't, I would need some numbers, for example, how much of the available terrain do we cover with trash each year? I think I'd instinctively agree with you if landfills were everywhere... but they are not. They actually seem to be pretty constant in proportion to the space human population occupies, and if this is so, they aren't a bigger problem than human spread and encroachment of wilderness.
> They actually seem to be pretty constant in proportion to the space human population occupies, and if this is so, they aren't a bigger problem than human spread and encroachment of wilderness.
I didn't make any claims landfills grow in space at a faster rate than other human land uses, and like you, I agree that they probably just increase linearly with human spread (maybe even more slowly than linearly).
My point is that space on earth is still a finite resource. It doesn't matter how quickly it's getting used up right now, and it may be many generations before we start to hit "peak earth land", but eventually, we'll get there.
Plus, there is something to be said about conserving resources (such as usable land) in the same way that we save money for future generations to use: you never know what unforeseen circumstances may come up requiring some "cash in the bank", so to speak.
That's why I think landfills are nothing are temporary measures, rather than a sustainable way of dealing with waste. It's not something we can hope to do for a few millennia and be cool.
By the time we hit "peak earth land," any unexploited landfill will be worth a fortune, as they will be tremendously resource rich in comparison to 'regular' land.
It's far more likely that in a hundred years (or less!) we will be digging through landfills to recycle some material that we throw away today.
Sweden has such good waste to energy plants they now have to import waste to keep them at full production. It helps that they recycle a tremendous amount so they don't have all that much to deal with.
we are going to have to somehow subsidize the recycling of waste
Our recycling would be worth a lot more if we could train consumers to stop throwing junk in the recycling. Supposedly, junk in the recycling was a big part of the crash in the value of recycled material, and China's subsequent refusal to take more.
Maybe if it's no longer something we can ship off to "far away" and forget about, people will begin to care enough to sort their recycling out better.
"Plastic Recycling" always seemed like such a scam. Very little of it can be turned into the same thing it was, before. Most of it can only be downcycled to an inferior product (and then it's mostly the end of the line). To think we've simply shipped it off to another country to deal with the problem is criminal. Another part of my childhood where the details were far less idealistic than the big picture.
Exactly this. As China bans to buy European "recyclable waste", then it is imported into countries with legal loopholes e.g. to Poland [1], Serbia, Italy[2] and so on and somehow landfills start to burn accidentally. Even if the law changes [3], there will be other places where a penality for such criminal act is lower than cost of recycling or proper storage.
100% plastic recycling is a dream.
Don't want to even start story about toxic fluids recycling... accidentaly leaking into rivers.
It basically is. The most reasonable approach to plastic waste is controlled incineration for power. That means at least the oil we dig up performs some yeoman duty as a container or padding before being turned into work and greenhouse gas.
A bit of recycling on the margins, perhaps. Biggest thing would be to stop making plastic products that fall apart into biotoxic pieces.
More like there was a huge trash problem and they don't want it anymore... how is them handing the world a problem when the root cause of the problem is unsustainable packaging and recyclables?
I think it should serve as a wake up call for the rest of the world. Sweden has had incredible success with recycling in recent years, most notably touting the fact that they import other countries' trash to use in their recycling plants [1]. How can we recreate Sweden’s model in the US and have our own solution to the trash problem instead of giving it to China?
> Sweden has had incredible success with recycling in recent years
That line is more false than true. For the most part they are not recycling their trash, they are incinerating it.
Additionally Sweden is tiny. Trash there is brought to local recycling centers with 6 to 8 or more different bins, and people are expected to sort their trash.
How would you do that in the US? Trucks with 8 compartments? Where would you even keep that many different trash cans? The US is very large, you can't expect people to transport their recycling.
> The US is very large, you can't expect people to transport their recycling.
It is common in rural settings in the US for people to transport, themselves, both their trash and their recycling to a central drop off point. So there are lots of US residents that do exactly this periodically.
Curbside pickup is typically a system found in more urban portions of the US, but it is far from ubiquitous across the entirety of the US.
> you can't expect people to transport their recycling
Why on earth not? The majority used to haul their own garbage to the town dump a just few decades ago (and some still do in smaller towns). Ubiquity of curbside pickup is relatively new -- doubly so for recycling. And recyclables are a heck of a lot more pleasant to carry in the car than rotting kitchen scraps.
We have curbside trash but no recycling and are about 15 miles (+3000 ft elevation change) to the recycling drop off center. I’ve wondered if cranking the engine on the pickup is worth it in fuel consumption.
Those bins looks pretty nice, although the balance between the comportments seems odd. (The paper compartment (2 of them?) is too large, as is the white one the right - is that for "other"?)
Not sure I'd be able to get that down my stairs though.
> I never transport my trash more than 5 meters.
How is it picked up? Curbside? Curious what kind of truck they use.
Also, do you keep that in your house? Do you go outside in the winter for each item? Or do you stage the trash in the house, and sort it later?
I live in a house and each bin is emptied bi-weekly by a regular garbage truck. The two front-most compartments are actually not fixed to the bin, so the bin is lifted up, the front-most part is lifted and emptied (in a vertically split compartment), then the rest in another. (I used to watch this with the kids a lot...)
Apartments often have a similar setup but with one large bin per category in the basement. There is also another system where you are supplied with color coded garbage bags for each type of waste that you then throw in the same bin.
> For the most part they are not recycling their trash, they are incinerating it.
Actually, they are doing both. They have an incredibly high recycling rate, what is left they largely burn. Over time they have increased their recycling to the point that they have large spare capacity. Which is why they now import a comparable amount to what they burn.
How far are you traveling? It's very very very unlikely that what you are doing is actually good for the environment, unless you are making a trash run only every few months.
They drastically underbid western recyclers for a long time, economically disincentiving other better solutions. Ideally, western governments should have seen this coming and fixed the problem earlier, being a failing of capatalism unchecked.
One of the unintended consequences of that is more waste import to Poland, which increased taxes on it to limit it which prompted owners of the dumps to set them on fire
No one is talking about morals here. They are just limiting how much of someone else's garbage they are cleaning up.
They are creating it, that's true. But the buyers (i.e. developed nations) know very well that the stuff they're asking them to produce is harmful for the environment, so their hands are equally dirty here. When demand goes down, so will supply.
We design the products and the packaging as part of branding. The Chinese ship us what we order.
When was the last time you bought a star wars action figure, pair of rollerblades, computer, or smartphone where all that design work was done in China? You likely haven't. We design and order, they manufacture and fill the order. Not making a moral judgement here. It's just that right or wrong, that's how things work currently.
We order the plastic, China is now saying that we have to keep what we order.
Who's buying from the Chinese? It's not like their fault that other people want to buy their stuff.
Look to the supply chain of who's putting plastic spoons/forks in restaurants in the US/EU and you'll probably find lots of profit from non-chinese companies.
What's wrong with putting it in landfills? The world has no shortage of wasteland. If we can afford to ship it to China, can't we spend the same money driving it on trucks into a nearby desert or valley?
There is a huge assymetry between shipping to and from China. Since China exports so much, those containers often come back empty. In finding something to fill these empty containers on the way back, some smart guy (proabably in China) came up with garbage.
They’ll think of something else to fill the containers with, but it isn’t that uneconomical to shop garbage to China given the circumstances.
It is a very delicate question of responsibility. Developing countries pollute the oceans most, but the source of waste is - to a large degree - western nations. So probably, the best way to put it, is to say that both are responsible. However, now things have changed, with China at least.
Seems like Northern Africa would be a pretty logical place for disposing waste. Lots of unused desert land very close to the sea for easy access by barge.
Barge access isn't the problem so much as deep-water port capacity is as most waste is transported via cargo container. It takes years to build up the infrastructure needed to handle the increased garbage and transport it to massive landfills, even if you've got cheap land for them. I'd expect that it'd stress existing African port capacity, even if we're only talking about a portion of the waste that was previously sent to China.
With luck, we'll see improvements in recycling technology and investment to compensate. In the meantime, the bulk of it's already going to landfills with all of the problems that entails.
Deserts aren't inhospitable. They're still ecosystems for animals that perhaps do not want their groundwater (perhaps) tainted by a landfill. Problems are already happening with pretty terrible materials that have been dumped,
Sort of historical note. Depending on how such a program is formed, you could inadvertently spawn e.g. Somali piracy out of illegal dumping. So while the idea could work, it could also be implemented in such a way to go horribly, horribly wrong.
I am not an expert but I am a PhD chemical engineer and I have though about this issue for years and years.
My 0.02...
Short term
---------------
a) give houses smaller trash cans and charge a lot for bigger trash cans. Town I live in already does this... at first I was like "wtf with this tiny trash can... I can throw away like one, two bags of trash tops per week"... well, now my household of 4 averages one bag of half full bag of trash per week. we do more composting and more recycling.
b) double down on recycling programs and sorting.
Short- to Mid-term
--------------------
c) we should be burning 100% of our actual trash in localized facilities. We trade the negative of immediate CO2 green gas emissions but we get:
-- some power in return
-- reduced diesel fuel use (at like 4 miles a gallon)... assuming the trip to local burn facility is shorter than out of landfill
-- huge reduction methane release from landfill,
-- 100% elimination of continued landfill pollution and water table pollution by god knows what (drugs, plastics, leaking batteries, etc.
The CO2 effluent stream can be captured and processed in many interesting ways. The CO2 is so clean it can be used for beverage or biotech service and/or feed for a CO2 to polymer (plastic building block) plant.
Many modern burn facilities burn so hot [and completely] they could be certified to deal with bio-hazard and chemical weapon destruction. They have gas scrubbing systems advamced enough that only N2, O2, and CO2 are emitted from the plant (NOx, SOx, etc. level are parts per billion levels)... no complex chemical species, no metals, leave the plant through the gas effluent.
We were/are doing this... but all this NIMBY nonsense is leading to some collectively destructive group-think... many folks don't want to see burn facilities near their house and there is a lot of money to be made in our current trash mismanagement system. Actually, most of our thinking is collectively destructive group-think so "what's new?"
d)We need packaging laws and taxes that address waste caused by excessive/unnecessary packaging... particularly for commercial/industrial use.
e)Society needs to refocus our value system to value simplicity and localized self-sufficiency: local fresh food over packaged/frozen goods, more reusable (and infinitely recycle-able) locally filled glass containers
f) localized recycle-to-manufacturing pipelines. Imagine a future where you could take polyethylene scrap down to a local facility get it 3D printed into something you or someone else can use (or get a spool of PE line to use in your own 3D printer at home).
It is actually amazing how something as simple as a smaller trash can can positively influence behavior.
But as a possible solution:
No need for them to go to the forest... just to the local trash accumulation facility and dump it there for free or call for curb side pickup of extra trash.
So what is the likelyhood that rich countries - not having the recycling capacity to deal properly with their own waste - find some other, much poorer countries (other than the ones mentioned) to use as their garbage dump?
Pretty easy to be negative on China when all the news come out of there are: dictatorship, imprisonment millions in concentration camps and brainwashes them, builds artificial islands and claim ownership of seas not even close to their land, blatantly disregards WTO rules and closes off its market to others, hacks and steals other countries and their companies IP, threatens to attack a democratic Taiwan every day, censorship of their citizens, threatening censorship of other countries about China or its concentration camps, depletes fishing supplies in other countries, floods the ocean with plastics, props up dictatorships in other countries, etc etc etc.
I can't fathom how you could post this or the other comments you dropped in this thread. They're obviously bannable offenses, but since you've mostly posted fine comments to HN otherwise, I'm going to assume you went on tilt for some reason and not ban you. Please don't do it again though.
I don't feel this article is particularly negative about China except title, but the negative tone in comments are surprising considering HN being tech and business focused.
May sound silly but could we send it into space instead of burying it? Surely it could be sent on a trajectory to burn up at the sun or another planet’s atmosphere. I guess the obvious issue is cost, are there others?
Long story short: China has been importing trash from many countries for the past two decades. Now they won't import it anymore, and these countries aren't prepared to dispose of the trash themselves. The 111m-ton figure is an estimate by 2030, the current amount is nowhere near that number.
Seriously? I’m going to have to follow the rules and charitably assume that you’re serious.
Rocket fuel is expensive, the process of launching and recovering the vehicle is expensive, and every kg lifted is incredibly expensive. You would also need to launch it somewhere, or you’d just be launching garbage into a decaying orbit. You might as well dispose of garbage by burning it on a pile of diamonds.
Shouldn't rather the entity importing the plastic take responsibility for disposing of it? As you say it might even create jobs, but I'd say it should befall the consumer to take care of the waste they produce in any case, instead of simply shipping it away.
plastics are now drowning the ocean, choking fishes (which the Chinese fisherman has a habit of overfishing, even going out to other countries' sea to fish). not to mention coral diseases, as well as microfibers ingested by humans. And China just dump plastics into their rivers and out into the ocean. letting the other countries take care of them.
Also, interestingly, China's boom in the early 90s came from the fact that they lacked materials, and they had to take other countries waste in order to use the waste for materials for production. Now that China's boycotting waste, the other southeast asian countries are picking up the slack (and waste), and growing their own industrial capabilities. That's why now manufacturers usually have two or three different factories in different countries, lessening dependence on China, and ready to switch when they need to (like the impending $400 billion tariff on China)
Virtually all of that comes from just a small number of nations that dump trash in rivers, and the rest from lost fishing gear.
The ocean plastic is not from household plastic use/trash in places that might recycle it. So instead of working on recycling, maybe we should work on getting those countries proper trash service.
Yep. We designed the products, and the packaging. Then ordered that exact combination to be manufactured in China.
You don't get to order a balsa wood table, of your own design, from a woodworker, and then complain that they won't take the balsa wood back when you want to throw the flimsy table away. Especially when you specifically asked them to make the table from balsa wood.
The stuff is going to be the asbestos of the 21st century. Microplastic has been vastly, vastly underrated as a problem. All my lifetime the attitude has been that plastic takes eons to degrade and pulverize, but when it does, the problem of unsightly or dangerous litter is presumably finished. Now we're seeing the opposite: plastic dust is a poison sponge that bioaccumulates and has got absolutely everywhere.