I don't find this compelling at all. There's no substance here. Summary to save you the time: there's a stockpile of plastic for an under-construction plastic processing facility that needs a large stock of plastic to be economical.
Unanswered questions:
1) Is the project on schedule?
2) Is this stockpile unexpected or unmanageable?
3) Is there actually any risk that storage space runs out before the plant becomes operational?
The only remotely substantive part of the article has nothing to do with Airtags and is a shallow, uncited critique of an Exxon technology. It isn't clear if the upcoming Cyclix facility even plans to use this Exxon technology.
> One more issue that many environmental advocates raise is that the advanced recycling technology that Exxon claims to have made for recycling all kinds of plastic isn’t exactly effective.
Who are these environmental advocates you cite? What were their actual words? What does "exactly effective" mean here?
> They would also likely demand a lot of fossil fuels to superheat the recyclables, which adds more greenhouse gas emissions.
Likely? According to who? Based on what information? Texas has abundant renewable energy, where's the evidence that this requires fossil fuels?
This is a trash piece that does not pass the sniff test. It is just shallow, lazy sensationalism that plays to anti-sustainability cynicism. Don't waste your click.
I'm firmly in the "we need to do everything we can to reduce global warming to below 2 degrees C and potentially cause a mass extinction event" camp, and I get extremely irritated when folks fail to understand that demand is for energy, our energy distribution is interconnected via a grid, and those points make energy a fungible commodity.
Better than powering recycling plants, though, is to stop producing and consuming single-use plastics. A great way to do this is to stop subsidizing recycling programs and bake the energy cost into the product that must eventually be recycled.
> I get extremely irritated when folks fail to understand that demand is for energy, our energy distribution is interconnected via a grid, and those points make energy a fungible commodity.
And I get irritated when people don't understand basic economic concepts like supply and demand. Texas is overwhelmingly building renewables to meet demand. The more demand there is for energy the more renewables get built, further driving down costs. It's a virtuous cycle.
> Better than powering recycling plants, though, is to stop producing and consuming single-use plastics. A great way to do this is to stop subsidizing recycling programs and bake the energy cost into the product that must eventually be recycled.
Sure, then write a well researched article about it and back it up with facts then post it here. The low effort cynicism farming in TFA isn't helping. In fact it does the opposite because it makes people feel helpless, which only benefits incumbents.
Why would it? The only thing needed to get rid of plastic is destroying it's key advantage over other materials (price) either by force or will.
I am very convinced that science will bring us a better material e.g. by looking at nature if we are "forced" to do so, this can be through market force, e.g. oil becoming just too expensive. I'm thinking long term here.
Landfill is the only solution that is guaranteed to fail. We're living on a quasi-infinite planet with a population that is to this date increasing. It will be easier to get new resources onto the planet than it is to get them away from the planet and stuff piling up indefinitely is clearly infeasable.
I realize I may be in a minority here, but I'm willing to do quite a lot of sorting as long as someone can promise me that things are at least going into distinct separate holes in the ground, so that my efforts aren't wasted when some future situation makes it profitable to mine them out.
I stopped recycling plastic when it became clear that 70% of the collected plastic was being burned just like the regular trash. The only things I will recycle are PET bottles, glass, aluminum cans and paper.
At the start of this year my municipality recognized that collecting plastics separately was simply a net loss environmentally and economically and removed all plastic waste containers (except for PET). Instead they will now simply try to recover some of the useful plastics for recycling from the mixed trash and burn the rest with the trash.
When the plastic recycling stream contains 70% trash that you can't use, then recovering the 30% from the plastic recycling stream is barely more economical than recovering that from the mixed trash stream.
The real danger with plastic is that it'll go to some under regulated recycler which picks out the 30% of plastic that it can recycle and then dumps the rest in the nearest river. If I put it in the trash in a modern country I can be sure it'll at least end up in a land fill or the equivalent. And in contrast to the incredibly wonderful glass and aluminium recycling systems plastic recycling doesn't really save that much production energy.
The problem is that you are indeed part of a tiny minority - but that isn't a problem in practice!
Properly sorting stuff is hard. You can't just look at whether something is vaguely plastic-ish or paper-ish, you actually have to inspect every single item for the recycling label. There are dozens of tiny gotchas to stumble over.
Luckily we don't actually need to do all that. There are automated plants which can take in a mixed domestic waste stream, and separate out things like metal and the various forms of plastic. This means you no longer have to worry about people sorting it incorrectly, and you no longer have to worry about people who can't be bothered to sort at all. It's a win-win, really.
Our recycling company can't even just name the numbers that are recyclable. They give us a list of examples and name some items, but it's nowhere near comprehensive even for some things commonly used. For example, reusable plastic food storage containers (tupperware-like items) are not listed. To-go containers are prohibited, but these are heavier, more durable plastic.
If something seems recyclable, I'll throw it in on the chance that the sorters will accept it, rather than guaranteeing it goes to the landfill by putting it in the trash bin.
I have two indoor bins: one for plastics/recycling and one for garbage. I line both with trash bags.
Unfortunately, the city gets very upset about the recyclable materials being in plastic bags (something about it messing up their machines). I like it better this way because I don't have an indoor bin full of loose, used plastics and paper which feels unorganized and dirty.
I feel like these small, yet annoying, inconveniences hurt participation (in addition to the countless stories of plastics and garbage just being thrown into the same hole in the ground, or into an ocean patch off the coast of some other country).
Well yes, that's a lot easier than trying to do it at the recycling facility. Do you expect the garbage man to do your dishes? The easiest time to rinse off the container is immediately after it is opened. By the time the container gets to a recycler the residue will be caked on. You use plastic bags to protect yourself but you aren't thinking of anyone else.
> Do you expect the garbage man to do your dishes?
Why would the garbage man do my dishes?
Look, I throw away my trash because it's super convenient and the city provides a wonderfully helpful service of hauling my garbage off for me. But if the city comes to me and says "Hey, we want you to come out here and help us dig the landfill, because it's actually easier if you do it" -- then I'd probably just light my garbage on fire or toss it in a river.
Here's a video from my state Department of Ecology explaining why you shouldn't do this, and why you are actually making it worse for everyone. Cursory web searches on the topic say the same thing. Bagged recyclables can't be sorted so they just get diverted to landfill.
You could actually make the world a better place by throwing your bagged recyclables in the trash because then you aren't actively harming the recycling process.
That's awesome, I will look into that to see if my local grocery does the same! Now that I think about it, there's probably paper-based bin linings that you can buy from Amazon
Sorting I’ve not got an issue with at all. It’s the requirement to wash plastic containers through most parts of the UK that gets me. Not because of the effort, but because I can’t believe it’s more efficient for me to wash butter dishes and jars using warm water and soap (alongside every other house), than for the recycling centre to put in a big collective washer.
Plastic recycling is a myth. It is effectively impossible to do it in an economically feasible way.
Recycling itself was invented by plastic companies to divert blame from the company creating the plastic to the consumer. (Just recycle it!) if you don’t believe me look up the origin of the recycling symbol.
Which isn’t to say recycling of meta and glass is useless. Recycling plastic is a myth, other recycling may be of some benefit.
If it's possible for Kenya to do this with the incidental bycatch of local fishermen, I would hope an industrialised nation could manage it with pre-sorted domestic and industrial waste.
Taking a look at their website, 2 things jump out to me:
> A lean operation, leveraging Africa's strength in labour costs
Which is of course a euphemism for "leveraging the low wages of African laborers". And:
> We purchase today from out of work fisherman
So it seems that this operation can exist because their costs are extremely low due to a poor local economy and a surplus of cheap labor. This does not translate to success in an industrialized first-world country.
Aren't we at a point where recycling aluminum is a lot more energy efficient than removing it from bauxite and therefore more profitable for the industry to pull it from trash?
Some countries do recycling of aluminium well, Japan for example, most don’t.
Issues with contamination, sorting, pipeline, storage, just to name a few make it hard to implement well.
Nearly all industrial ones yes, that’s why some countries that care a lot about recycling use easy to recycle alloys for cans, like Japan. They also religiously keep contaminants and other bits of aluminium out.
At least for another "eight to nine months from now"
> But given that its operational timeline expects the processing plant to open eight to nine months from now, it means that the company will likely amass more trash before it can even open its doors
They're basically stockpiling until the plant is operational. I'm not sure how they will achieve this mythical process, but at least they have more than half a year to figure it out.
> ”They're basically stockpiling until the plant is operational.”
Sounds like a variant on the classic tire recycling scam:
1. Lowest bidder wins contract to recycle tires, by offering to do it cheaper than anyone else.
2. Starts storing tires somewhere while they “get up and running”.
3. Discovers it’s cheaper to just keep storing the tires than to actually process them, besides they bid too low to make it viable anyway.
4. Years go by and eventually an enormous tire mountain is discovered (or maybe it catches fire), resulting in big cleanup costs usually paid by taxpayers…
I guess somewhere there is a data to either prove or refute this. Look at all the current active recycling centers and look if they built stockpiles before. And which stockpiles actually disappeared after the center was operational, or which never started operating and the stockpile remained.
If you really could uncover a conspiracy like this, I'm sure big newspapers would be happy to collaborate on releasing these news :)
> Recycling plastic is a myth, other recycling may be of some benefit.
Some?! That's just a gross understatement.
For paper, recycling saves 50% of energy and 66% of water compared to pure fresh paper [1].
Glass saves about 33% of energy [2].
Iron scrap is at 72% energy savings [3], copper at 80% [4].
Aluminium is the most insane example - there, recycling saves utterly astonishing 95% (!) of the energy you'd need to create new virgin aluminium from raw ore [5].
Add to all of that: the more you recycle from these groups of valuable materials, the less environmental destruction you have from mining the ores - and the less chance there is for shit to go seriously wrong, e.g. dam breaks like [6].
The case of plastics recycling is still open, but everything else? It's just so much more efficient.
Do keep in mind that it is relative to new aluminium. It might still be far better for the environment to use other materials.
For example, a plastic container might result in X emissions, a recycled aluminium one in 2X emissions, and a virgin aluminium one in 150X emissions. It just means we should absolutely recycle aluminium when used, but it doesn't by definition mean we should be using aluminium in the first place.
If Evian sells its water in bottles made of 100% recycled plastic, that means 100% less plastic is entering the environment from Evian bottles than would otherwise.
I do disagree. I don’t believe a food giant such as Evian to tell the truth. I don’t believe McDonalds or Starbucks either. It’s only told for advertising purpose, at least since the 80s if not more.
That depends on the definition of "100% percent recycled plastic". What most people understandably think this means is "Made 100% from plastic that was used in some product and then thrown into a recycling bin". What the FTC defines as "recycled", for the purposes of advertising that your product is made of recycled content, can be found in section 260.13 of the FTC's "Green Guides": https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/press-re...
"Recycled content" is defined as:
> materials that have been recovered or otherwise diverted from the waste stream, either during the manufacturing process (pre-consumer), or after consumer use (post-consumer)
And they do not have to inform consumers of this distinction:
> Recycled content claims may – but do not have to – distinguish between pre-consumer and post-consumer materials.
> Recycled content includes recycled raw material, as well as used, reconditioned, and re-manufactured components ... The term “used” refers to parts that are not new and that have not undergone any re-manufacturing or reconditioning.
Well, taking what was previously waste in the plastic manufacturing process and turning it into more plastic is better(?) than nothing. But I think most people would think of this more as "making plastic manufacturing more efficient" than "recycling plastic". It makes plastic manufacturing margins more profitable, as now what was waste has value. It means that "100% recycled plastic" still relies heavily on the production of virgin plastic.
If people who would have not bought plastic bottled water DO buy it because it is "100% recycled", then the satisfaction of that additional demand requires the production of virgin plastic. Even if the number of people buying Evian bottles doesn't change, Evian is still buying the results of plastic production from plastic factories, which is likely to increase the amount of plastic in the world.
Again, it's better than nothing. But it certainly isn't a silver bullet, and many would argue that it is still not sustainable.
I might agree if it was actually zero sum, but as far as I know we still make new plastic from oil pumped out of the ground. Demand for recycled plastic is simply indirect demand for new plastic.
Even if all plastic was recycled, there is still the issue of microplastics polluting our water and food supply.
If a consumer is conscientious enough to recycle something, the counterfactual is that they put it in the trash rather than that they throw it into the nearest river. In a landfill, a plastic bottle will lock up its constituent carbon for hundreds of years. In that long we should either have learned to manage the amount of carbon in our biosphere. To the extent that the amount of carbon we pump out of the ground is inelastic, better it get locked up in landfills than that it get burned. Now actually it is fairly elastic but given how much worse carbon burned is than carbon stored for hundreds of years I think disposal is probably better for the climate than recycling.
I seem to recall that something 10% of the oil that's extracted is used to make plastics, while the rest is used for energy. Framed that way, it could be argued that it doesn't make much of a difference if it gets burned (especially if it's burned in lieu of burning some other fuel), but if it's burned there's no chance it will pollute a river or ocean.
The investigative report shows the facility is funded by ExxonMobil.
So, O&G is still trying to greenwash their wanton production of virgin plastic through recycling programs? It’s been decades since O&G’s own researchers (and later suppressed) determined recycling was not commercially viable. Public is already aware of this (woman who started own investigation with AirTags was skeptical of city claims). A mere 5% of plastic produced is recycled [1]
The real headline here is Houston (effectively O&G’s backyard) public officials are clueless.
> Wright Waste Management did not allow CBS News to enter and inspect its premises. Still, the news team's drone camera discovered that all the trash picked up from the Houston Recycling Collaboration (HRC) was apparently just sitting there on its premises, stacked more than 10 feet high.
Anyone else bothered by CBS's lack of decency here? They flew a drone inside a place they could not enter.
in the UK local councils have made a business out of paying unscrupulous firms in SE Asia and Africa to just take our “recycling” and either land fill, dump illegally or burn it - returning empty containers are very cheap transport - it even gets dumped into the ocean
Unanswered questions:
1) Is the project on schedule?
2) Is this stockpile unexpected or unmanageable?
3) Is there actually any risk that storage space runs out before the plant becomes operational?
The only remotely substantive part of the article has nothing to do with Airtags and is a shallow, uncited critique of an Exxon technology. It isn't clear if the upcoming Cyclix facility even plans to use this Exxon technology.
> One more issue that many environmental advocates raise is that the advanced recycling technology that Exxon claims to have made for recycling all kinds of plastic isn’t exactly effective.
Who are these environmental advocates you cite? What were their actual words? What does "exactly effective" mean here?
> They would also likely demand a lot of fossil fuels to superheat the recyclables, which adds more greenhouse gas emissions.
Likely? According to who? Based on what information? Texas has abundant renewable energy, where's the evidence that this requires fossil fuels?
This is a trash piece that does not pass the sniff test. It is just shallow, lazy sensationalism that plays to anti-sustainability cynicism. Don't waste your click.