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Plastic Recycling Is a Dead-End Street
Many cities have mandated recycling. Recycling doesn’t save money, it costs money. If it saved money, a mandate wouldn’t be necessary. The recycled material is sold on the market, but certainly income from such sales doesn’t cover expenses. The reason for recycling is about “saving the planet.” Probably most of those cities mandating recycling include plastics.
Remember hearing in the news a few years ago that China, which recycled most of the world’s plastic, wasn’t going to do it anymore? What is happening to all that garbage material collected? It turns out that plastics can’t be recycled, at least in a manner that makes any sense, economic or otherwise. We would be better off landfilling or incinerating it. What earth-hating environment-raping nutjob is spewing this nonsense?
You’ll never guess. Greenpeace.
Published in Environment
Have you never hugged a tree? I’m told it’s very comforting.
Not the same.
Understand it is much more complicated than you think. (most things are until you get into it)
More caustic, in the case of virgin you are going from wood chip and bleaching out. You have more control of the inputs in that you know tree types and ages.
In the case of recycling you are dissolving and breaking down previous coating and inks. Take a box that a case of cokes come in. The coating on this is not just the inks, but coatings to keep from fading, resist being cold and wet, even a roughness to keep it from sliding when on a dolly so that it will not fall off. Some of these coatings may have some plastic or rubber or something else in it. And that is just one type of material as an input. Each of these type of inks and coatings have different chemicals, heats, spins, settling, etc to break out. All to create a product that in almost every way is inferior to virgin created product.
I could see some of the guys I dealt with getting to that level.
Sure.
But I am in GA. Not a pine tree, which is what GA farms
The left is famous for causing more problems in trying to fix problems that may not really be problems at all.
And conservatives have the gall to call themselves pro-life!
;-)
I just read it last month! Super-entertaining overall, and fun that the villain is an evil recycler. 🤣
Probably not, but the company could potentially do it profitably without taking a fee from the city.
I also loved how Bond wasn’t allowed to carry a gun while on UK soil, and also how the author forced Bond to deal with bureaucratic red tape just like any other civil servant. But that’s not really germane to this thread.
This is what is so frustrating. I’d be open to embracing the recycling ethos, even at some additional cost, if the end products were actually useful, or better, or innovative, or whatever.
Hey! Luddites Like Lumber.
Every year, when I attend the Costco annual shareholder meeting, one or more of those allowed to speak is a “green” group demanding that Costco sell only recycled toilet paper in their stores. ONLY recycled, no others. Costco is known for being run by a bunch of Lefties, and a goodly portion of the food they sell is “organic”, but their management has always rejected the demand for recycled toilet paper. They are fully aware that the existing product is much more expensive that what they stock, and of vastly inferior quality. And they also know that their customers would simply not buy recycled toilet paper. Yet the green groups never give up, and give the same spiels every year. Given this year’s inflation rate, I will be looking forward to hearing their demands in January when I attend the meeting.
Only if it’s harvested without the use of labour-saving machinery.
It’s not a hoax, plastic does accumulate there. The plastic just doesn’t accumulate photogenically on the surface. The action of solar radiation and ocean turbulence cause it to break down into tiny particles that float below the surface.
Use it to make packing material, instead of boxes. Packing material doesn’t need to be as durable.
I always felt recycled toilet paper is crappy.
I think the ethanol in gas guys will be keeping them company. Even Al Gore now admits that it costs more in fossil fuel than it saves. It has just become a political payoff.
Yes. And using only voluntarily harvested trees.
If They Wilt, We Won’t Cut.
Now instead of figuring out how to power cars with alcohol instead of fossil fuel, they need to figure out how to make alcohol without using fossil fuel.
Hah!
And I always wondered how all of those plastic water bottles ended up in the sea!! It’s because of all of the evil recyclers who are sending the plastic to China to dump in the sea!
Here’s a thought- What if all the plastic we send to China to be recycled ends up in the large floating plastic islands in the Pacific Ocean for which Greenpeace and other environmental groups are constantly carping about?
I have a vague memory from the late 1970s/early 80s when municipalities were being propositioned to implement recycling that the environmental activists pushing it argued that although it was only cost-effective to recycle metal (and then only certain kinds), that glass, plastics and paper should be too, because if there was enough available then the market would figure out a way to make it cost effective. Are we surprised that never happened?
Early stage magical thinking by greenies.
It is.
And it destroys small engines. Especially ones that are more occasionally used.
I was stunned to see James Tour at the center of this technology. I was only familiar with him giving lectures on the mathematical impossibilities for life to have evolved by chance. He’s one of the most fascinating speakers on the subject of the origins of life that I’ve ever heard.
In Cleveland the city government discontinued its recycling trash program and didn’t tell anybody. Thus, when you sorted through all your garbage and put the recyclables into special blue cans, the garbage men picked them up and threw them into the trucks with all the other garbage headed for the landfills. They managed to get away with this scam for about four or five months before citizens and the local paper caught-on. Mayor Jackson did not apologize for the ruse, instead making some sort of excuse. He then urged Cleveland residents to continue sorting their trash so that they would continue to be “in the habit” in case the city were to ever start recycling again!
But then there are those who wallow in abject misery in the old growth forests………….
A crying in the wilderness…………..
City Journal’s John Tierney has several articles over the years detailing the problems with plastic recycling:
Reason article on Tierney’s work:
https://reason.com/2015/10/05/recycling-is-garbage-redux/
his latest includes Greenpeace’s turn around:
https://www.city-journal.org/greenpeace-admits-recycling-doesnt-work
he covers the stupidity of banning plastic grocery bags:
https://www.city-journal.org/needless-panic-over-disposable-plastic
it does already-but no longer China-they quit accepting it.
At least you can make alcohol from plants via fermentation. I had an on line debate with some green who wanted to go all EV and ban coal mining. I pointed out we would have to increase lithium & cobalt mining by about 500% and it is isn’t clean by anyone’s definition (I will leave out all the other problems with a 100% EV fleet-and I didn’t even bring up graphite requirements)). Additionally, we need metallurgical coal for steel and even the green new deal needs steel. He then tried to claim we could replace met-coal with hydrogen, but we get 96% of our hydrogen from natural gas, oil, & coal.