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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
And crops are planted and harvested and delivered, etc, using… fossil fuel!
Oh, and ethanol is delivered to “Gas” stations using… fossil fuel!
We really shouldn’t trust China with anything.
That is my issue with stuff like recycling or green energy. I am too curious and too experienced. As an IT guy it is not unusual for me to get contracts in many industries and thus get to know them fairly well. In the case of green energy and recycling, especially recycling I just do not see how to make the number add up. About the only recycling that has any use is metal and even there the amount of issue still make going virgin materials much better.
Tissue pulp to make tissue paper was one of the products the company I worked for made. Frankly knowing what went into it and what is still in it I am not sure I want to wipe my butt with it.
True, to some degree. It has to hold shape and form or it becomes less useful. Mostly that is what we made, Pulp for tissue and packing material stuff. Packing material is actually a more advanced product than tissue paper. Has to do with the length of the fibers. Each time through the process the fibers break down and become shorter, weaker and less apt to hold together. Recycled paper for packaging tends to be very dusty and cause issues because of it. Also since it is softer it tends to be a magnet to bugs. So you have to pack and spray to keep the bugs out or they take up home quickly. Causes warehouse issues. Ever open a package and feel like you immediately need to sneeze and wash up. That is recycled packing material.
Only when it your fingers break through during the wipe. You get that with smaller fibers.
Made a bunch of money of that stuff. Then they lost interest and so did the government and most of it either closed down or offshored. Most of the offshore stuff was BS with stuff being sent out at top dollar only to be dumped on the way to wherever.
There is a lot of corruption around the whole waste and recycling process. Think Tony Soprano stuff.
My brother is in South Sudan for a few weeks. He said one of the surprises seeing the Nile was the “millions of plastic bottles floating downstream”.
What changed?
When I was in Boy Scouts in the mid 1970s, SOMEBODY was paying us cash money by the ton for paper we collected in paper drives. It was a significant fundraiser for our troop. And that was a long time before Clinton.
I’ve never hugged a tree, but I have a given a few of them a reassuring pat on the shoulder.
Isn’t the meeting in May?
I doubt any of those came from the US.
But they can always blame Israel.
So does that mean it’s not a problem?
No, but it means it’s not OUR problem, and that the greenies are fighting in the wrong parts of the world.
Did you ever carve your initials in a tree?
No, they have their meeting in January, in downtown Bellevue. They start at 4:00PM so it is easy for me to attend.
100%
One thing I would add to this is, some on the left think that if they dream something up and then force everybody into it, they think that is an actual “public good”. So you can explain to them how this is traditionally thought of, and then they think well if we think it’s good and then we force everybody into it that is also a public good. It’s just endless until the government and society runs out of money.
The keyword that explains most things that go awry.
That is insane. Unbelievable.
I don’t know how it’s working out right now, but they were trying to do this in a college city in eastern Iowa and they had one hell of a time controlling the smells of the truck and the plant. You would think it would be viable in some way because it appears to be kind of simple but it probably isn’t.
This is just perfect. lol
I love this discussion so much.
I am so glad the tide has turned on this nonsense. They are mafia that want to screw their own people and the whole planet.
Dennis Prager had a really good guest about this yesterday. The lack of foresight by the West’s ruling class is a disaster.
Of course.
Oh yeah. For some reason I brain farted and conflated it with Berkshire Hathaway.
The Tierney article cited earlier, on ocean plastics:
2017 study in Nature Communicationsestimated, 86 percent comes from Asia and virtually all the rest from Africa and South America
Trees into paper works the mill I worked at has a history as a straw mill. They made paper from straw / hay / hemp before the world went to trees. There some urban legend about Hearst forcing this because he owned forest land at the time. Any plant with strong long fibers can be used for paper production. Some of those products grow faster and cheaper than trees. Coming from Indiana / Kentucky I always wondered about using corn stalks. But I doubt this can be rethought now since everything is based on existing industries and legal frameworks.
The people that want that have the government create / support the processes through laws and regulations and grants and who knows what else. These programs come and go like all social stuff. Mostly what stops this is political aims.
Government Is How We Steal From Each Other™
Hey FJJG, you seem knowledgeable about this stuff.
Is there a way to recycle plastic, but in a different way, using it’s supposed detriments as a strength?
Since it doesn’t biodegrade, maybe it could be used as a building material. Could you say, dump plastic bottles into compactor, a serious compactor which would crush them into a solid mass? Keep adding bottles and crushing until you had a solid brick of hard, non-biodegradable material.
Now you might be able to cut that stuff up into shapes to maybe build foundations, or maybe even engineered walls or something?
Im not a chemist, just spitballing here.
I think they’re already using them to create park benches and planking for decks, stuff like that.