We have separate trash, recycling, and compost bins. Our city hands out free compost from the facility that handles the compost bins. I would never spread that compost on my property or eat anything grown from it. I mean, have you seen how terrible people are at sorting trash? Who knows what atrocities have happened in that composting facility!
My own wife dumps non-compostable stuff in the compost all the time, is annoyed at me when I point it out, and then somehow doesn't think twice about taking the free compost for gardening.
This may seem ignorant or cynical, but my baseline assumption is the contents of all bins end up in the same landfill. I'm pleasantly surprised to learn that your garden/organics/green bin actually goes somewhere other than straight to landfill. Although it's entirely possible that the capital and labour required to make it into compost and give it away for free cost more than handing out vouchers to citizens to buy compost on the free market. An analogous false economy happened in my city with a 24-hour/day train trial; when they did the math it turned out it would have been cheaper to give every single passenger an uber to their destination.
In my city (a suburb of LA), the trash contractor says they don’t have separate bins because they “separate recycling at the facility”. What a joke! As if they’ve got someone going through your trash like a raccoon, picking out the bottles.
I get that the plastics industry has an interest in making recycling appear seamless and efficient, but what a crock.
You can buy hardware which does a lot of the sorting†, and you can pay minimum wage for people to pick harder-to-identify elements out of what's left. There really are plenty of sites doing that.
† The very easiest is steel which you just sort with magnets, but aluminium is more valuable and it's not that hard for machines to sort it, paper/ board can often be machine sorted too.
There's definitely sorting going on (including hardware, such as magnet, utilizing gravity/shaking, chemical) but still plastic often ends up in landfill because it's not profitable. Even China who used to do "hire minimum wage workers" to do recycling but at global scale ended it because all the adverse health/environmental effect making it worse than not profitable [1]
The ugly truth is that most plastics aren't really recyclable, especially not in the form of "big glob of mixed mystery-polymers with a dash of food residue and other organics". What usually happens is it's either downcycled into a significantly lower-grade material, or depolymerized and turned into fuel.
PET recycling is the one exception, where you can relatively reliably get reasonable (but lower) quality plastics back out of the process.
Perhaps your interpretation is right, but that would mean there's some group of people who simultaneously says "I know people put toxic chemicals into this industrial compost I use but I'm totally fine with that" and also "I only eat vegetables I grow myself". I highly doubt any such person exists.
As much as ~88% of tested kale contained PFAS, and it's because of commercial compost. Organic kale has more PFAS than non-organic because it uses more compost rather than more synthetic fertilizer.
Does it eliminate heavy metals? PFAS? Every type of plastic? Literally every other type of contaminant that I haven't thought of? Is every batch of the end product tested thoroughly? Even if contamination is rare, is it as rare as other sources of garden soil? Why would I chance it when I know the source is dirty?
Also how do you even test something like compost properly? It is not that uniform product, so test samples could be fine, but other parts metres away could have high levels of contaminants...
I can buy a 'quality' 25l bag of earth for $14 (Switzerland) and still be sure to find visible plastic parts in it. The earth the farmers buy here locally is rainbow colored if you look closely enough.
I introduced the majority of plastic in my garden trough expensive earth & compost.
I only use Coco at this point (what is crazy considering there are no coconuts where I live)
It's mind blowing to read this here, thinking it's somehow just me buying always the wrong stuff.
But welcome to our reality where we complained about micro plastics so long without doing something that you cannot actually buy earth/compost without macro plastic anymore.
If you’re referring to the shiny pieces in soil you buy from a garden shop, that’s actually perlite - a natural volcanic glass that’s added to improve soil drainage.
I mean, maybe I shouldn't be that hard on them -- you do need to reuse human and animal waste if you want to be sustainable, and this is a plausible way to do that, and they weren't thinking about PFAS at the time (only PCBs are mentioned in that document) -- but it should be obvious now that the current sewage system is not compatible with this use case. Too many nasty things can get into it. Which does create a problem -- if you don't apply the sludge, then what do you do with it? It's like we need a whole separate system for only organic waste. Or we have to stop selling to the public -- or to industry -- any compound we're not willing to eat.
It legal to have a certain limit of plastic in it.
But does it matter? Food touches plastic throughout the preparation phase. Most factories have plentiful plastic components. Workers have plastic gloves. Then the final product is wrapped in plastic.
Removing it from feed wouldn’t do much in terms of exposure.
Obviously, labeling things "Recyclable" satisfies an intense emotional need for many people. Regardless of where the stuff they dump into their "Recycling" bins actually ends up.
But at what point would it actually be better - for both the environment and human health - to invent a clean (~no toxic outputs) and efficient-ish way to burn mixed plastic waste as fuel, and to just use that?
It would be better to only allow a small list of approved plastics for uses like packaging with much more obvious labeling to distinguish them (e.g. require a particular color or very clear markings), more carefully regulate mixed/composite materials, charge manufacturers an extra cleanup tax for whatever materials they use, and try to carefully regulate many types of single-use plastics out of existence in favor of biodegradable or environmentally neutral alternatives (as a trivial example, there's no good excuse for candy wrappers to involve plastic), and force every municipal trash collector to also collect "compost" including food waste, soiled cardboard, and biodegradable plastics.
It should be possible for relatively incompetent consumers to tell at a glance precisely which plastic something is made of and figure out how to sort all of their recyclable plastic waste into 2 or 3 categories.
* * *
Or at a higher level, there should be some people with significant systems thinking training doing full society-wide audits of the sources and treatment of materials including plastics, and then regulators should be making targeted policy to fix harms (whether environmental, human health, economic, ...), starting with the most significant ones and working their way down from there.
It should be possible for relatively incompetent consumers to tell at a glance precisely which plastic something is made of and figure out how to sort all of their recyclable plastic waste into 2 or 3 categories.
Do you honestly think that would be sufficient? I expect you'd get significant amounts of the wrong material in all the bins.
This is why we should get rid of as many of the distinct types and uses of plastic as possible, with the remaining ones as non toxic as possible, and some kind of explicit tax on manufacturers to pay whatever is necessary to handle all of the costs of cleanup.
If there were 2 types of plastic packaging and they were very obviously visually distinct, it would be much easier for anyone involved in the process to sort them (whether at home or at a recycling plant) compared to the current system with hundreds of distinct types of often visually indistinguishable mixed-material packaging much of which we can't do anything with except chuck it in a landfill.
Let's call it "recycling theater" like we do for security. Maybe there were good intentions at one point but so much of it seems like marketing now.
Most cities only have a few collection spots. It would make way more sense to try to separate the trash at the trash location than asking millions of individual people to try to do it correctly, 30% of which can't do it correctly, 30% of which don't care. I'm not sure I've ever seen a single trash can that has 100% of the correct trash in it, even at a FAANMG company that claims to hire the best and brightest.
Then you get ambiguous things like plastic coated paper, marked with a recycle symbol. Or cardboard milk cartons with a plastic cap and plastic infused cardboard (or is it wax?)
Sure, maybe you're supposed to cut the cap part out but lots of people don't know, can't be bothered, won't do it.
If you want this to actually be effective you really need to do it in as few places as possible, the trash collection companies, where a few inspectors can make sure it's being done correctly and a few reporters can check
Recycling is much more meaningful if it's done by the designers of the recycled thing and not by some third party.
I'd like to see a world where if you're not sure, it should go in a pile that gets shipped back to the manufacturer... On their dime if labeling standards weren't met, on your dime if they were.
This would give manufacturers a reason to build things in a way where they want the discarded thing back (like how they do with toner cartridges).
which has a metabolite which is almost a cancer-causing drug. In principle you could pyrolyze plastics all the way down to carbon monoxide + hydrogen syngas and then build that up to molecules you want with C1 chemistry
but most of the people who are trying chemical recycling by pyrolysis are trying to cook the molecules partially so the output fuel is a witches brew rich in hazardous aromatics. There is a lot of research into cleaner processes for chemical recycling such as
and that one at the top but every large scale plant I've seen is a pyrolysis plant that's had to fight with environmentalists to start operations. From the viewpoint of a chemical engineer making fuel is for the birds because gasoline costs 50 cents a pound and (almost) any other chemical costs a lot more than that.
That paper is not too remarkable, it's (1) the first one I found and (2) it uses extraordinarily mild conditions.
The gap between the bench and a commercial factory is immense and there are many areas where people write papers like this for decades but nothing really gets built. I think the usual excuse is that the factory is large enough that it needs to gather waste over a huge area and that transportation of EPS is prohibitively expensive. It doesn't help that styrene monomer is worth only 50 cents a pound, about the same as gasoline.
Given that your input stream of plastic waste contains a very large number of toxic inputs, burning it without releasing toxic outputs seems pretty much impossible. It seems a similar level of problem: burning it without releasing toxins and recycling it without incorporating toxins.
Most of it is hydrocarbons, which a sufficiently thorough decomposition process ought to be able to turn into CO2 and H2O. (And maybe HCl in the case of the chlorinated plastics? I guess that's neutralized with a base to make a salt?)
I don't know a ton about this, but it looks like plasma gasification plants achieve something like this -- producing syngas (mostly H, CO), metal nodules, and a slag material (which seems to roughly be, "igneous rocks or sand, but man made"). I'm curious about the composition of the output products. But it seems to usually be net-energy-positive. This seems like a good intro:
I wonder if there are methods from physics that could be used (even if not now cost effectively) to more thoroughly isolate the various elements rather than having the (it seems not totally understood?) chemical reaction of the various components of the plasma as it cools? Like a big industrial scale mass spectrometer? Like the cyclotron scheme to separate isotopes of uranium in the Manhattan Project? Then you could know, "all the lead is in this beam over here" and "all the mercury is in this beam over here", and so on... That'd be neat. Have some plasma physicists working on recycling instead of on fusion...
(At this point I Google more...)
Interesting, so here they separate copper from zinc using a plasma centrifuge:
Is there a burn-temperature above which everything dangerous is basically rendered inert?
I.e., you make stuff so hot that whatever survives is perma-bonded to oxygen, carbon, chlorine, fluorine, etc., and has almost zero chance of reacting with living creatures?
you need to clean up the syngas to get rid of dioxins with a charcoal filter or something like that. The plasma torch is supposed to convert the organic materials in municipal waste (e.g. food waste, plastic, wood) to syngas and then vitrify the remainder as glass particles that trap toxic heavy metals (you could use it as a material for roads and buildings.) Allegedly you can burn the syngas to make enough electricity to run the torch and still sell some to the grid. I guess you'd want to try to capture mercury before it goes up the stack.
They built a few small (like 5 MW) plants to test the idea but attempts to scale up to 50 MW. For a long time the technology belonged to one of Westinghouse's ghosts (like the one that owns the AP1000) but they are still ordering AP1000s but nobody is ordering plasma torches for municipal waste.
I asked my local waste disposal company why they don't buy a plasma gasification system and they told me that the plants require so much trash as fuel that to keep them fed they'd have to haul trash from three states. It wasn't affordable to buy one just for local operation. Here's the history of attempts and current projects:
These are definitely large scale, large area systems and there have been some engineering problems. A few seem to be operating successfully. Even if the net energy production is zero that's better than it being negative. Financing has been a problem also. It still produces CO2 also, so there is that to consider. It greatly reduces hazards in the waste stream though, so it seems better than a landfill. I'm not sure it would be a good idea to turn the glass plus heavy metals that is produced into building or road materials.
My recent favorite is Amazon's "recyclable" packaging, but only if you bring it to one of their locations. I've seen other examples of the same thing, but this was the most recent. When you try to claim your packaging is recyclable but make the person jump through those kinds of hoops is not very conducive to having things recycled. It's one of the most obvious BS PR maneuvers
I'm so confused these days. We can't use compost. We can't use wood because that's bad. We can't use plastic or metal. We shouldn't eat meat or processed food (and definition of process takes care of most things outside of the produce aisle). A lot of plant foods apparently are poisoned with contaminants or are full of carbs, etc. If someone finds a way to live in this modern age and survive please let me know.
Not possible, studies have shown that living is harmful to your health. Life has a 100% death rate.
Our ability to identify things that might shorten our lifespan has far outpaced our ability to apply that knowledge usefully. For most of human history you ate what you could and hoped it didn't kill you in a few weeks. It was only relatively recently we even had the capability of discussing things like long term cancer risk or what not.
There are ways to live that can tick all the boxes except for one: It does not scale.
If we accept non-scaleable methods then household chickens are great. They keep pets away from gardens, it reduce the need to cut grass, and they are much better than composts. Naturally this method is limited to people who own a house and have garden/outdoor area that is suitable, and where local government allows it.
An other great but non-scalable method is to eat anything that is invasive or which population is a major threat to bio diversity, assuming one do not cultivate or raise it. There are some obvious risk of perverse incentives, but it can be utilized to benefit the environment when done right.
Fish are full of mercury, there's even plastic in fruit[1]... we've poisoned our environment so much that nothing is "clean" any more.
I suppose your comment is more of a moan against what you perceive to be "the elite"'s (the rich, the media, the Davos class, etc) fearmongering, but hey, we're not designed to survive infinitely anyway...
All available information sources are full of bullshit and conflicting information too, so good luck quantifying any of the available information on hazards.
Frankly, ignoring it all and just living a reasonable life with reasonably low processed foods seems about right though.
I read the article and didn’t see any mention of concentrations. I suspect (though IANAChemist) that finding trace amounts of many hazardous chemicals might be de minimus. Which at the very least renders this article incomplete.
(That is not to say the article is wrong, or that recycling is perfect, just that certain facts in isolation don’t really allow you to draw any conclusions.)
Plastic for use in food packaging ought to be regulated as to what you put in it, which ought to be easy for virgin plastic (though seemingly it isn't) but would be much harder if you were recycling plastic meant for different uses.
(Of course there is a lot of controversy about the mobility of plastic components. We know the carcinogenic styrene monomer exists in significant amounts in polystyrene, what's not so clear is how much of it migrates out)
You'll easily find radioactive Potassium (K40) in bananas and potatoes. A good Geiger counter can easily pick them up. They're just bananas and potatoes.
Concentration matters and chemical detection methods are so sensitive (ppb) that without reporting how much was found in the plastic, this information is almost useless. That they didn't report concentrations is problematic.
The base study/publication is here, but I didn't see much concentration information there either.
love this genre of post on HN, the “smartest boy” post
I mean sure the article is citing peer-reviewed research but on the other hand and all, but HN thinks nobody has ever heard “the dose makes the poison” before, so maybe pollution is actually fine???
hold up, science, here comes americas smartest boy!
See also, “aha but what about [confounding factor that is super obvious and the paper already discusses controlling for]!”. Like at some point it’s just dismissive to the point of insulting to imply that nobody else has bothered to put minimal thought into something that probably represents person-years of work with the involvement of multiple subject-matter experts and peers.
the covid threads here etc were absolutely insufferable with this, and generally any pollution thread you will get some dork who’s obnoxious enough to pull “the dose makes the poison” on 2,4,7,8-TCDD or whatever - yes, it happened last week!
Look out EPA, here comes Americas smartest boy! /young sheldon adjusts bowtie
in particular with pollution and other things though it’s just gross because it’s so obviously an industry-centric spin that is designed to imply that pollution is generally ok and that there’s no real need for polluters to ever control pollution of any kind because hey, big ocean out there etc. The implication is, again, that nobody else could ever have thought of a lower limit before, and it really plays into the urge a lot of people have to be Americas Smartest Boy in discussions, even when it’s wildly inappropriate in general (like the 2,4,7,8-TCDD example). You can be the smart guy making the clever point in the debate if you just follow this simple talking point, brought to you by SmogCo!
Climate change threads are always lousy with it too. Aha but what about heat island, sun cycles, whatever. Yeah the climate scientists know already, Mr Boy. If you thought of it in five minutes then definitely one of the professionals studying in the field has raised the issue sometime over the last 100 years. And of course the obvious answer you’re proposing is… keep “studying” for decades to solve some minor quibble, and naturally to allow smogco to continue polluting in the meantime?
LOL, I'm the one who cited and bothered to skim the base study. The original post is just clickfotainment. Young Seldon, no amount of rigorous Psychohistory from Streeling University is going to inform the empire, if you won't read the sources yourself.
It’s obnoxious how many companies are throwing recycled plastics into consumer goods (watch bands, hats, phone cases, some clothes even) with no regard to health consequences.
I’m all about being better for the environment but I also don't want to be wearing plastic.
So much of this looks like green washing to me. Reminds me of those reusable coffee cups from bamboo or whatever. That ended up containing all the same chemicals...
We need to have regulations and laws that only allow a handful of types of plastics to be manufacturered, and all of them must be recyclable. The fact that we have tens of thousands of different types of plastics, all so that companies can profit from that, is why we are poisoning ourselves.
I don't care how expensive some types of plastics are: we should only allow companies to produce safe, recyclable plastics and not let them poison the earth just so that they can make a few basis points of more profit.
We have to stop trying to make plastic recycling work, at least until it can actually work, because it seriously hurts the reputation of recycling other materials, most of which work great. It also complicates the entire process, depending on your jurisdiction, which also acts to deter recycling other materials.
Well, the "recyclable" plastics was a great lie pushed by the oil industry to counter regulations that would restrict their usage. That's fairly well documented by now.
Maybe it's time to restrict/forbid their usage, like has been done for other products and chemicals that have turned out unhealthy and/or dangerous although highly profitable. (Asbestos, CFCs, leaded gas, tobacco, [...])
It's worse than that... Even for ideal, highly recyclable materials like aluminium and glass, the majority is thrown away globally.
Aluminium and glass are more economical to recycle than sourcing virgin materials! comparably simple and infinitely recyclable - and yet we still can't get that right - Plastic is expensive and complex to recycle, the idea that recycling it was ever a solution to plastic pollution is complete BS, there will always be a significant quantity that ends up in the ground and in the sea.
Aluminium certainly, but glass is not clear cut. A quick web search leaves me thinking it depends, not just on whether you measure energy, greenhouse gases, or cost (versus cost of disposal if not recycled), but also all of those vary between countries.
Yes, economics of recycling plastic are very bad, I wonder how high the cost of landfill would need to increase to make it more expensive than recycling.
The economics only indicate the practicality of recycling. But the other component is environmental impact for the portion not recycled... not only is their immense economic friction for recycling of plastics, but there is also a high environmental cost.
Compared to other widely used materials that are essentially inert, the environmental cost of not recycling is mostly limited to the impact of sourcing virgin materials that could have been from recycled sources.
The study doesn't go into how these plastics are harmful to your health. I doubt something like plastic in your clothing would harmful since it's not necessarily being absorbed through your skin. The most harm is likely in plastic containers that hold liquids or food which tend to be the primary source of microplastic ingestion. The article also mentions that this isn't exclusive to recycled plastic, since making virgin plastic requires tons of chemicals itself.
BPA has been shown to be absorbed transdermally [1]. Patagonia was recently found to have high levels of BPA, along with other brands [2].
Bluesign and Oeko-tex certifications test for BPA. You can find recycled polyester without this (if you have kids, Hanna Andersson's polyester lines claim to be BPA and PFAS free, most Cat and Jack clothing is Oeko-tex certified and Mamavation puts out good information on PFAS in things like children's clothing, backpacks, lunch kits [3]).
I have been making an effort to only buy athletic wear with 100% recycled polyester. I guess now I throw them all out and only buy wasteful virgin polyester athletic wear?
Or you could check out alpaca or merino wool. It's better at trapping heat when it gets wet and if you let it hang dry it doesn't smell bad like plastics do so you can wear it more than once.
This 100% - plastic clothing is sadly just a bad idea. Also, smells gross very quickly. Wool, silk, cotton and other natural fibers are great and not hideously more expensive in most cases.
> Dominic Hogg from Eunomia told BBC News: "When coal is phased out for generating electricity, incineration of unrecycled waste will be the most CO2-intensive form of generation.
> The environment minister Therese Coffey told the Commons: "In environmental terms, it is generally better to bury plastic than to burn it."
It is really difficult to recycle plastic, because there are just so much different materials that we call plastic. Some can be reshaped with heat and others need chemicals. Packaging often contains multiple different plastics and it is REALLY hard to separate them. Also the molecules break down over time/use, degrading the quality of the material.
Another nasty property is that some chemicals used to make plastic soft or change other properties (additives) often don't chemically bind with it and they leak out over time.
"Recycled" could probably be removed from the title. Plastic and its additives are very likely bad for you period. "A path towards safer reuse of plastics" is missing a more useful point: reduce single use plastic and replace if other materials make more sense for the use-case. Sure, there a many points we could improved regarding to the usage cycle but some problems are just inherent to the current set of plastics.
I try to avoid plastic as much as possible, especially for food or beverages (even more important if hot).
It's sad that such a useful and versatile group of material also has so many downsides.
My own wife dumps non-compostable stuff in the compost all the time, is annoyed at me when I point it out, and then somehow doesn't think twice about taking the free compost for gardening.