Plastic recycling a "failed concept,"
study says, with only 5% recycled in U.S.
last year as production rises
Agence France-Presse,
by
Staff
Original Article
Posted By: NorthernDog,
10/24/2022 11:27:54 AM
Washington — Plastic recycling rates are declining even as production shoots up, according to a Greenpeace USA report out Monday that blasted industry claims of creating an efficient, circular economy as "fiction." Titled "Circular Claims Fall Flat Again," the study found that of 51 million tons of plastic waste generated by U.S. households in 2021, only 2.4 million tons were recycled, or around five percent. After peaking in 2014 at 10 percent, the trend has been decreasing, especially since China stopped accepting the West's plastic waste in 2018. Virgin production — of non-recycled plastic, that is — meanwhile is rapidly rising as the
Reply 1 - Posted by:
felixcat 10/24/2022 11:34:32 AM (No. 1312909)
I stopped years ago when the light bulb went off in head as to how much water was wasted having to wash out the plastic containers with laundry detergent as they had to be clean inside before placing in recycling bin. So my local landfill gets all my trash and I am not contributing to the plastic waste sent to China that then gets dumped into the Pacific.
42 people like this.
My municipality accepts 1 and 2 only. So the rest goes in the garbage. We need return to glass or refillable glass for as much as possible IMHO.
26 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
Hermoine 10/24/2022 11:37:20 AM (No. 1312912)
Of course, their solution of "refill and reuse" is just so logical because, hey, that's how the milkman used to do it. What do you suppose led to the change in how the milkman does it? The cheaper and more effective use of plastics to get products to more consumers in every nook and cranny of the country. We have an amazing capacity to create landfills in this country -- where the land can even be used later to build on (example: U.S. Open sits on an old landfill). They don't want real solutions, they want to make modern life more difficult for those in 1st world countries, which keeps progress from happening in 3rd world countries.
25 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
Rich323 10/24/2022 11:38:01 AM (No. 1312913)
Recycling was the first green jobs hoax foisted on the American people. The recycle items collected pay for the truck, the fuel and the driver. In our community we have to pay Waste Management to pickup our recycling and we get no discount from any county service trash sewer etc m. for our efforts. The landfills are full of all kinds of plastic because a lot of people are too lazy to separate their trash anyway.
11 people like this.
I rinse out as much as possible but do not wash with detergent. If the municipality wants perfectly cleaned recycles, I’ll either burn or in the garbage it goes. PERIOD.
11 people like this.
Joe's gonna solve the problem. No oil production, no more plastic.
33 people like this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
Gallo3 10/24/2022 11:58:23 AM (No. 1312929)
Recycling does not pay-it costs.
The only thing that is slightly good to recycle are aluminum cans. But even that does not have much market potential. Glass and plastic are worthless.
The most effective way to accomplish this goal of actual recycling is with a 'Dirty' MRF. MRF stands for Materials Recycling Facility. 'Dirty' means the objects do not have to be cleaned and sorted.
Incinerators running from the outlet stream from a Dirty MRF firing steam boilers creating municipal electricity is the closest thing to cost effective recycling we have. And even that is very expensive, and full of problems. Keeping the fire going in a wet refuse stream only the first and largest problem.
12 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
Mizz Fixxit 10/24/2022 12:26:24 PM (No. 1312951)
More than a few years back, a guy called a Denver KOA Radio talk show. The man said he worked at a landfill, and that semi-trucks dropped off loads of water bottles at the landfill for “storage” until recycling could be arranged. He said the bottles ended up in the landfill.
11 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
jalo1951 10/24/2022 12:40:11 PM (No. 1312965)
I have switched to the laundry detergent sheets. They work fine and weigh nothing and take up zero space and are a decent price. No plastic, just a small cardboard box. We use dryer sheets so there is no difference when it comes to the detergent. I believe that I read somewhere that the only recycling that actually made money and was worth the time and effort was paper.
9 people like this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
DVC 10/24/2022 12:50:28 PM (No. 1312982)
Yep, not worth the effort or energy spent on the recycling. I helped a Russian company try to take plastic waste and recycle it. We bought chippers, shredders, washing equipment and it basically worked. But the only use for the resulting grey-brown mishmash of polymers was to make binder twine for hay bales, a low value product that is helped by the cheapest possible feedstock.
However, normal consumer goods would not be appreciative of the crud colored stuff you get after recycling a lot of random plastic waste. To get nice physical properties and control the colors, you need virgin material. So unless your end product is something kinda cheap and OK for any old grey-brown color, it's not good.
16 people like this.
Reply 11 - Posted by:
DVC 10/24/2022 12:51:50 PM (No. 1312983)
Re #1, and yes, the washing process to clean off the food remnants and especially the damned labels takes a LOT of water and strong chemicals and detergents to get clean plastic chips. Leaves a stinky nasty mess to run to the drains.
17 people like this.
Reply 12 - Posted by:
SweetPea3 10/24/2022 12:56:13 PM (No. 1312994)
We use laundry detergent sheets also. Not to save the planet, but because we are both handicapped and don't have to lug heavy detergent jugs up to our 2nd floor laundry room.
15 people like this.
Reply 13 - Posted by:
WV.Hillbilly 10/24/2022 1:19:35 PM (No. 1313020)
ALL recycling is a failed concept.
18 people like this.
Reply 14 - Posted by:
Pete Stone 10/24/2022 1:19:47 PM (No. 1313021)
A lot of the plastic containers, probably well over 50%, are made up of carbon, hydrogen, and (in some cases) oxygen. These include polyethylene, polypropylene, polyester (PET), and polystyrene. They are clean-burning in a properly designed furnace and a good source of energy. There's no reason not to use them for power generation in place of petroleum (which they are mostly made from anyway) or coal.
That leaves things like polyvinyl chloride, nitrile, and nylon, which produce emissions like hydrochloric acid and nitrogen oxides; so bury them and burn the rest. It's not rocket science.
15 people like this.
Reply 15 - Posted by:
smaricic 10/24/2022 1:33:24 PM (No. 1313026)
Two dopey ideas from a no-nothing:
1. Would it be possible to make all plastic stuff out of recyclable categories 1 and 2 ?
2. Barring that, would it be possible to put some kind of magnetic code in the plastic bottles and stuff -- a code that could be read by a sorting machine?
I have read about progress in using enzymes and even sea water to break down some plastics. Maybe there is some hope for the future.
4 people like this.
Reply 16 - Posted by:
stablemoney 10/24/2022 1:37:50 PM (No. 1313035)
Another leftist failure. Everything they touch ends in failure.
14 people like this.
Reply 17 - Posted by:
Heil Liberals 10/24/2022 1:51:36 PM (No. 1313046)
For many things, recycling is a fool’s errand. The primary factor against recycling is the energy costs. For years we have heard about how much less in energy it costs to recycle. I still haven’t seen solid data on that. Now, in Joe Biden’s economy, energy costs are skyrocketing. The costs for recycling, if they ever were less, are now on par or higher than “virgin” materials. In our area, if you want to recycle, then it costs a fee to have and haul off. Most plastic that is recycled goes into landfills, so it’s a straw man argument that people aren’t recycling. They are, but no one will do the hard and costly work of processing it. The bottom line is that there’s no money in it.
I always thought it should be incinerated to generate steam. If they can capture all the pollutants they do now, then capturing pollutants from incinerating plastic should be able to be accomplished.
10 people like this.
Reply 18 - Posted by:
NYbob 10/24/2022 2:00:15 PM (No. 1313053)
Garbage is a resource and a toxic danger to you if it isn't processed efficiently. Too bad the status quo is content with each of us eating a credit card size collection of micro plastic every year. The beauty of plastic is it retains it's long chain hydrocarbon form even when reduced to the size of a virus. The only way to correctly deal with it is to melt it in an oxygen free chamber, collect the syngas that it turns into and then burn that or chill that into a blendable diesel fuel. If you just burn it, it burns great but forms dioxin in the process and dioxin causes cancer. IF the flame is hot enough you can avoid dioxins, but has to be carefully controlled and there is the issue of fuel for the whole process. The hard plastic like pvc has chlorine and that needs the right engineering and catalysts, but can be done. Or dump it all into a landfill with a thick tarp liner over clay and hope that a million tons of pressure, decomposition, land movement, and witches brew of every chemical you can think of doesn't leak thru the liner while the rest of it creates tons of off-gassing methane. Bits of microplastic are in every living thing, via the soil, water and air. In the plants, in the animals that eat the plants and in you. We really should look into pyrolysis of plastics, Styrofoam, packaging, medical waste, e-waste, trash tires, really any carbon based materials. The technology has been proven for over a hundred years and with electronic sensors, controls and improved materials, is even better now.
11 people like this.
Reply 19 - Posted by:
red1066 10/24/2022 3:51:55 PM (No. 1313115)
When it costs more to recycle than it does to produce new product from scratch, then recycling doesn't work. It's happened to paper several times.
10 people like this.
Reply 20 - Posted by:
Jesuslover54 10/24/2022 4:50:07 PM (No. 1313152)
Another inefficient virtue signaling waste of money and precious resources.
The footprint of landfills is miniscule.
14 people like this.
Reply 21 - Posted by:
whyyeseyec 10/24/2022 5:07:03 PM (No. 1313167)
Plastic is our friend.
9 people like this.
Reply 22 - Posted by:
DVC 10/24/2022 7:14:08 PM (No. 1313229)
Actually, #13, that isn't correct. Recycling metals can be a very good thing. Most aluminum cans are made out of ......aluminum cans. And virgin aluminum ore takes a LOT more energy to convert from the ore form to the metallic form than remelting old aluminum.
And the same is true to a large degree with steel, although the smelting from ore isn't quite as dramatically more energy intensive with steel as it is with aluminum.
Both metals in the USA are very widely recycled, with excellent results. Metals can be purified and realloyed in ways that are just not possible or practical, with polymers.
If there is a glass maker nearby, recycling glass can be pretty workable, but it is so heavy relative to it's market value that you can't ship glass any significant distance before the economics falls apart entirely.
14 people like this.
Reply 23 - Posted by:
Pete Stone 10/24/2022 10:53:44 PM (No. 1313362)
#22: Correct. As long as the glass isn't green or intense blue, it can be used as cullet in a glass factory.
There's one other use for recycled glass: making portland cement. The raw materials used in a cement kiln are limestone, silica, clay, gypsum, and iron oxide, more or less in that order. A cement plant is commonly located very close to deposits of limestone, shale (the source of clay), and sand, sandstone, or other quartz-containing rock. Glass is almost pure silica, so it works too. The amounts of gypsum and iron oxide needed are tiny compared to the other ingredients.
I live in Montana. There are two cement plants here. One plant has a sandstone quarry as its silica source, and the other has a flint quarry. Both plants have accepted recycled glass in the past, but the glorious EPA considers a kiln to be an incinerator if recycled glass goes into it. (Talk about bureaucratic stupidity!) One of the cement plants had to pay a stiff fine once for using too much glass. Thereafter they stopped taking any recycled glass, period. Problem solved! The second plant is, naturally, being very cautious about using any recycled glass at all.
8 people like this.
Reply 24 - Posted by:
Strike3 10/25/2022 6:34:47 AM (No. 1313484)
It's all a net loss except for certain glass types and aluminum. The purpose was to create local jobs back when people wanted to work.
4 people like this.
Reply 25 - Posted by:
goodbyedems 10/25/2022 6:53:11 AM (No. 1313496)
While many of the above comments are right, back in the 90s when I was part of the recycling initiative, the recycling issue was driven by politicians to shake down the plastics and end-use industries - think threats of fines or bans. It was also used as an issue for campaign contributions and election. Logic was of little use as packaging is designed to maximize products making it to store shelves and then to the consumer. With plastics, that was basically 100 percent as it's unbreakable. Plastics also has properties to preserve the product for extended periods of time - in short much less food product waste. Liability issues prevented recycled plastics being reconstituted into many products, especially those associated with food. To get the true perspective on value of packaging materials, one needs to employ "life-cycle-analysis". Consider, if you draw the box around aluminum from cradle-to-grave, that is from aluminum mining, refining, etc., eventually into a can, there can be nothing worse as one tears up mountains, uses inordinate amount of energy, an inordinate waste products ...to get a can!! Sadly, this issue doesn't fit with the current political narrative of perversion, bombs & injections
4 people like this.
Reply 26 - Posted by:
msjena 10/25/2022 7:51:50 AM (No. 1313536)
A lot of plastic stuff is not recyclable, like clamshell containers--at least not where I live. I do recycle a lot of stuff.
2 people like this.
Reply 27 - Posted by:
MickTurn 10/25/2022 8:18:55 AM (No. 1313553)
I used to live in a Leftist Hack run city. Their recycling included (trying to) make citizens sort through their garbage/recycling items and separate out specific items. You know what, I'm putting everything that can be recycled IN MY BIN and YOU can sort it out!
Recycling likely FAILED due to stupid rules! Everything Leftists Touch Turns to Crap, COUNT ON IT!
5 people like this.
Reply 28 - Posted by:
marbles 10/25/2022 8:25:34 AM (No. 1313559)
Like most of the plans of the left, it was never meant to work. It was meant to indoctrinate you...........along the lines of we must do everything to save the planet. The thing is , earth does not need " saving ". On the other hand all this so called recycling produces a steady money stream for friends of friends.
4 people like this.
Reply 29 - Posted by:
TexaTucky 10/25/2022 8:33:47 AM (No. 1313569)
My inner Occam's Razor tells me that if volcanoes churn up, burn, and belch out the same guts of planet earth that are produced by mining and drilling and foresting to manufacture the products and packaging of human life, we're gonna be fine.
4 people like this.
Reply 30 - Posted by:
Zigrid 10/25/2022 11:07:26 AM (No. 1313781)
Never bought into the recycle movement...it's like the greenies of now...they are lead by corporate honchoes.who want YOU doing the work..and they benefiting....like Kerry who flies around in his private jets and cruises on his multi/million dollar yatch...and telling US WE are polluting his planet...he's in charge and will decide what our tax dollars will be spent on....BTW...how's that infrastructure money working out for ya...Johnie who was in Vietnam ...as Rush Limbaugh used to say...until Johnie shot himself in the foot and came home...
6 people like this.
Reply 31 - Posted by:
Pete Stone 10/25/2022 11:50:55 AM (No. 1313822)
#24: And don't forget other scrap metals. Steel mills buy scrap iron all the time. That includes recycled cans. Scrap copper is highly sought after. Certain alloys (brass, bronze, some others) can go straight to a foundry.
2 people like this.
Reply 32 - Posted by:
mc squared 10/25/2022 2:04:54 PM (No. 1314005)
We always knew that. When cities mandated separated recycling, waste companies had to put more trucks on the street.
1 person likes this.
Reply 33 - Posted by:
oldmagnolia 10/25/2022 2:29:47 PM (No. 1314025)
Our trash service no longer accept glass in the recycling bins. Ridiculous.
1 person likes this.
Reply 34 - Posted by:
aripeny 10/25/2022 3:26:43 PM (No. 1314072)
I pay a fortune for private garbage service. A few years ago they started putting everything in 1 truck. I refuse to wash my garbage.
3 people like this.
Reply 35 - Posted by:
Rivetjoint 10/25/2022 7:21:25 PM (No. 1314232)
My dear late father in law remarried after his first wife died. Number two was not the brightest bulb but she absolutely loved following rules and fervently following her local recycling rules was a source of great self satisfaction to the point where she carefully rinsed out her used water bottles. No amount of logic would deter her from her duty.
1 person likes this.
Reply 36 - Posted by:
NYbob 10/25/2022 7:40:48 PM (No. 1314248)
The average tire has over a gallon of oil in long chain hydrocarbons via synthetic rubber, 2.5 lbs of steel and 6.6 lbs. of carbon black. Carbon black is used in many vital industrial processes and products. It is easy to burn, all the oil, just very soot filled smoke, all that carbon black.
0 people like this.
Comments:
It costs more to collect and re-process used plastic than to make brand new packaging.