I try to be conscientious about recycling. I carefully separate out plastics according to the number embossed on the bottom, putting only those numbers that are wanted by the recycler in the appropriate receptacle. I also recycle aluminum and other metal cans. My building also recently started accepting organic waste for composting, so now food waste goes into a separate container that is periodically emptied into a common bin outside that is collected by the waster disposal company to be composted.
At least I hope it is.
While I do all these things in an effort to contribute in some small away to protecting the planet and reducing greenhouse gases, I sometimes wonder if all this is mere theater, to divert our attention from the real menace to the planet, and that is the manufacturers who churn out plastics and other forms of packaging in massive amounts without thought for the consequences, and to the fossil fuel industries that are responsible for most of the greenhouse gases.
It is the sheer amount of stuff that is being produced that is the problem, and all our efforts after the fact to recycle may not be helping that much. As this article points out, the world is drowning in plastics and we are constant propagandized by the plastic industry that new technology will take care of the plastic problem when it won’t. There have been reports of plastics that are biodegradable. But usually these degrade only under optimal conditions of industrial composting systems. If they end up in a landfill, they not only won’t degrade, they may make the problem even worse. We know that even food waste can last for a long time when they are buried under huge amounts of trash in garbage dumps and not exposed to air and moisture, so expecting plastics to degrade is unrealistic. Then we had reports of the development of bacteria that can eat plastics but I have not heard much about that lately and scientists are warning that this is not going to solve the problem and viewing it as such is a mistake because it shifts attention from what actually needs to be done, and that is curb production.
Prof Steve Fletcher, director of the Revolution Plastics Institute at the University of Portsmouth, said the most effective way of tackling plastic pollution was to agree on global legally binding cuts in plastic production.
He told BBC News: “Care must be taken with potential solutions of this sort, which could give the impression that we should worry less about plastic pollution because any plastic leaking into the environment will quickly, and ideally safely, degrade. Yet, for the vast majority of plastics, this is not the case.”
Now the plastics industry is heralding something called pyrolysis.
Plastic doesn’t break down in nature. If you turned all of what’s been made into cling wrap, it would cover every inch of the globe. It’s piling up, leaching into our water and poisoning our bodies.
Scientists say the key to fixing this is to make less of it; the world churns out 430 million metric tons each year.
But businesses that rely on plastic production, like fossil fuel and chemical companies, have worked since the 1980s to spin the pollution as a failure of waste management – one that can be solved with recycling.
Industry leaders knew then what we know now: Traditional recycling would barely put a dent in the trash heap. It’s hard to transform flimsy candy wrappers into sandwich bags, or to make containers that once held motor oil clean enough for milk.
Now, the industry is heralding nothing short of a miracle: an “advanced” type of recycling known as pyrolysis – “pyro” means fire and “lysis” means separation. It uses heat to break plastic all the way down to its molecular building blocks.
However, the article goes on to say, there is much less to pyrolysis than meets the eye. The plastics industry is spinning a yarn to make us think that they are part of the solution when they are the problem.
We all need to remember that the three Rs of planet protection, Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle, are in descending order of priority. It is the first two that can really make a difference. In the Reduce category, before I buy anything, I ask myself if I really need it and if I can do without, I do, even if having it may make my life a tiny bit easier or pleasanter. For some people, buying something new gives them an emotional boost. I sometimes hear people say they go shopping when they are feeling low. For me, it is the opposite. I feel a sense of loss when I buy anything other than food or other essential items for daily living. After doing this for many years now, I find that not buying things makes me feel good.
I also reuse everything to the extent possible. This is especially true for clothes. I will wear them over and over again until they become frayed, and even then will continue to wear them even if I look a little shabby, though it has not yet reached the stage where kind strangers take pity on me and offer me money. When my clothes really start falling apart, I just wear them around the house and the last stage is to be used as rags for cleaning. As a result of this policy, I rarely buy any clothes and when I do it is only to replace an item that is no longer usable. It helps that I do not care about fashion and have never worked in a job that required me to dress well. That is a luxury that many people do not have.
By reducing and reusing, I have managed to reduce the amount of trash I send to the landfill to about one four gallon bag per month, and I think this is far more beneficial to the planet than all the time I put into recycling. I will continue to recycle because to not do so will make me feel guilty. But am under no illusions that that will make a major dent in the problem. Real progress must come from putting pressure on the industries that create all this stuff.
What we should all be aiming for is the town of Kamikatsu in Japan that in 2008 set a goal of zero waste by the year 2020.
This is a town singularly focused on banishing waste – all waste – by 2020. The 2,000 people of Kamikatsu have dispensed with public trash bins. They set up a Zero Waste Academy to act as a monitor. The town dump has become a sort of outdoor filing cabinet, embracing 34 categories of trash – from batteries to fluorescent lights to bottle caps.
…The change has spread to the minutia of life. Local merchants offer raffle tickets for empty cans and hold drawings for small prizes. People volunteer to pick up illegally dumped materials and snatch up everything that passers-through toss on the road.
Sonoe Fujii, who runs Zero Waste Academy, says she sees more people eating with reusable chopsticks and carrying ecobags, including some made by local women from waste materials.
A resident says that this attitude is based on a long-standing work ethic. “Each person has to do something,” Mrs. Nii says, “so their children and grandchildren can have a more peaceful life.”
The town has not quite reached that ambitious goal but it has gone pretty far towards it.
While the town has so far fallen short of that lofty goal, initially set for 2020, Kamikatsu recycled 81 percent of all its waste in 2020, according to Ministry of the Environment data, up from 58.6 percent in 2008, and much greater than Japan’s national average of 20 percent.
…These efforts overlap with the traditional Japanese concept of “mottainai,” which reprimands wastefulness and espouses respect for the world’s finite resources – an ethos that has itself been upcycled for a modern era.
But here in the US concern for what kind of world we will be leaving for future generations is, sadly, nowhere near the front of people’s consciousness.
I’m not sure what the university of Portsmouth is thinking. To me, pyrolysis is just another form of incineration, or burning rubbish like my grandparents did. Breaking down plastics to molecular components is an ambiguous phrase. Some would say that a plastic item is made of such huge polymer chains that it’s like the whole bottle is one big molecule, in which case pyrolysis would mean doing nothing and just reusing the bottle. Others would say that pyrolysis would mean melting the plastic into a goo that could be immediately poured into a mold to make a new bottle or whatever. But most polymers are not thermoplastic and so that usually wouldn’t work.
What would be ideal would be to break up the plastic into the monomers that were used to make it, and then reselling those. But that is physically impossible. It’s like claiming you can just heat up a cake and get back the raw eggs you used to make it. Things just don’t work that way.
I fear that all of the above scenarios are fantasies that the U of P people want everyone to falsely assume is what is being discussed. But I fear in reality that pyrolysis here means burning the plastic into carbon dioxide molecules. There is just no place to stop energetically between having the old bottle and having the greenhouse gases.
There is no money in making carbon dioxide. So no way to pay for the heat to do the pyrolysis.
The scarce resource is not the carbon atoms, but it is the energy needed to produce molecules that are useful for making things of value. Without an energy budget that seems impossible, pyrolysis seems like a worse scam than manufacturing chemical fertilizer to grow corn and decompose most of it and capture a small fraction of it as ethanol for your car. It sounds like free energy, until you look at the energy to do it all.
So you’re right that it’s much better to reduce and reuse. Thanks.
Earlier today I biked past a local factory specialising in plastic containers for cosmetic products. Haven’t been in that area since last year -- it seems business is booming, the nearly finished new additional building is about the size of the original facility. Doesn’t look like things are changing for the better.
In discussions about plastic pollution in Germany there is always someone complaining against any measures taken because here in Germany we put everything in the recycle bin and so don’t have to change anything, unlike the people elsewhere in less orderly (white…) countries where they just drop that stuff everywhere in the landscape.
Fucking stupid, there’s quite a bit of plastic waste spread over the German landscape and as written above, plastic recycling doesn’t really work.
On reducing -- I notice that certain food items now come in reduced plastic packaging -- thinner plastic bags instead of thick rigid containers. Also, now Costco is selling some fruits and some vegetables in all cardboard packaging. Vine tomatoes are now in open cardboard boxes without any plastic wrapping. The down side of the latter is that some of the tomatoes clearly get poked and bruised by box corners, and thus start spoiling early.
On recycling: One of our local Kroger’s stores asks people to bring in any clean plastic bags. I have no idea what they do with them.
Now at work (molecular and cellular biology lab) we are collecting some clean plastics and some non-dangerously-contaminated gloves for recycling by https://polycarbin.com/ -- I hope this actually works.
Pyrolysis of plastics can go all the way to CO2 and produce heat. Natural gas will continue for the near term to be used for generating electricity. Put these two together and a partial solution to the plastics problem results. Burn it for energy.
Unless I’m mistaken, household garbage contains enough energy to augment burning methane for electricity. Driving moisture from garbage using waste heat should be part of the process. The volume of the resulting ash would take up considerably less space in landfill.
Is anybody doing this?
To me, pyrolysis is just another form of incineration, or burning rubbish like my grandparents did.
It’s not really the same. Generally speaking, the higher the temperature at which you burn something, the simpler the molecules that come out of the process. So, presumably, burning plastic at high temperatures should give you CO2, water, and other substances that could be trapped and then either stored (in much less space than plastic waste takes up) or reused to make more plastic. So it’s not really a perfect solution, and of course it will take energy to burn all that plastic hot enough; but it’s a good part of a solution, and as others have already said, it’s better than current recycling efforts.
@3, anat: I’ve been told that the composite decking people collect the plastic bags from the grocery stores and recycle them…but I haven’t been able to verify this. Also, the Costco near me also sells mixed nuts in plastic bags rather than plastic tubs.
On an only slightly-related track: Back in the 1990s, I started buying pasture-raised meat from a local farmer who used a butcher that packaged cuts of meat in butcher paper. That butcher retired, and the farmer couldn’t find a nearby butcher who still used butcher paper, so now the cuts are vacuum-sealed in plastic. I wish we had the option of butcher paper again. You could clean the paper and reuse it.
Pyrolysis of plastic does ultimately end at CO2 and water, but only if you do the pyrolysis under air. You have to get some oxygen in. You can do it under an atmosphere of some pure gas, free from the element oxygen, like nitrogen. But, I rather doubt they’d go to the expense, and so some percentage of the pyrolysis is generating CO2.
And, the tendency of solid carbon materials, when pyrolyzed, is to melt down and then turn into a solid layer of disordered graphite. So, probably some of that is happening.
I would bet that they do get some gas-phase carbon-based molecules, not the original ones they polymerized, but molecules that broke off as the plastic decomposed, and were small enough to enter the gas phase. That would be the only possibly useful product that they could “recycle”.
Yes, another scam. But thankfully, my town just banned plastic bags!!!
My town also banned plastic bags awhile back. I always bring my own bags to the grocery store for shopping, but the first time I went to the mall and bought something, I was surprised that they charged for a paper bag. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that they were also banned there, because they’re not banned for takeout food. Should I ever go to the mall again it’s simple to bring my own “fold up into themselves” bags.
Anecdotally, I’m not seeing plastic bags stuck in every tree anymore, and that makes me happy.