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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
Returnable soda and beer bottles, anyone?
That’s why we only use 91 octane in our mowers, chainsaws, weedeaters, and UTV, NO ETHANOL!
So, what did the ‘green’s say to the increase in mining?
The only reason I like my town’s recycling system is that it reinforces my sense of moral superiority. No, recycling does not make me feel morally superior but walking by my neighbor’s bin full of empty vodka bottles does.
I haven’t read all of the Greenpeace article yet, but plan to continue to recycle plastic and push for our county and township to provide better recycling services, such as those in Hubbard County MN. But I never thought it was done to save money. If Greenpeace has other arguments against it, I might find them persuasive. Some people have unrealistic ideas about what recycling can do, and I also am interested in learning more about the economics of it.
The only township committee I’ve ever considered serving on is the recycling committee. But the idea of letting a schedule of evening meetings interfere with my bicycle outings and other travel has kept my mouth shut about it. I guess that shows you how faithful I am to the cause.
Wanting to save certain stands of trees in certain places can have merit. For example, federal safety people provide incentives to local road jurisdictions to cut down trees along rural roads for safety reasons, thus doing away with our picturesque rural scenery. I’m against that kind of use of federal power.
Trees that are made into paper products can have undesirable effects on rivers and streams that are downstream from paper plants (of which we used to have a lot here in SW Michigan) but I’m not up-to-date on the state of that technology. I don’t think the pollution effect is nearly as bad as it used to be.
Mostly they don’t seem to care as long as it happens in other countries, maybe with child and/or slave labor.
I believe some of it is called “deck wood.”
Cricket’s chirping….
Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares (maker of Fiat Chrysler & Peugeot):
“What is clear is that electrification is a technology chosen by politicians, not by industry,…….an electric car needs to drive 70,000 kilometres to compensate for the carbon footprint of manufacturing the battery”
https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/tavares-says-europes-ev-drive-comes-risks
of course during those 70K km the energy to generate the electricity frequently comes from coal & natural gas…..
Maybe your neighbor needs the vodka b/c he actually understands the green new deal-like the old Russian joke:
Q: What is a communist?
A:Someone who read the works of Marx & Engels.
Q: What is a capitalist?
A:Someone who read & understood the works of Marx & Engles.
The vast majority of the plastic in the GPGP is chinese-made commercial fishing equipment.
Even the Ocean Cleanup’s own videos demonstrate this, though they are quick to pontificate that just because the equipment is made in china it doesn’t necessary mean that american fishermen couldn’t have been responsible for dumping it in the ocean, which is such a crock when looking at the size of asian commercial fishing fleets compared to american ones.
https://www.youtube.com/@theoceancleanup/videos
I never had a problem with the cheapest toilet paper, but my beloved forbids it. She is adamant that “it’s different for girls”.
Hydrogen from nuclear-powered electrolysis would be cool with me.
Using something like hydrogen to store energy is like the water-pump-up storage system. Increasing the capacity/duration only means adding more water or hydrogen storage facility. It doesn’t all have to be more battery construction, with all the toxic metals etc.
I am a bit out of it now and was into paper recycling and not plastics. Plastics are a bit tougher in that if I remember correctly there are about 7 major type of plastics . The first thing is labor intensive in that to recycle you need to separate. (They do this with magnets, spins and melting and pouring with metals) This is very labor intensive with plastics and breaks the economic models. Which is why this was sent overseas for labor costs. We never could get it to work well in US. Second is that all this recycling requires lots, and I mean a lot of cheap energy. Which is not on the government play book. Our whole profit matrix would be whiped out by small increases in energy processes. Then it requires some fairly caustic chemicals that most places in the US will not tolerate anymore. (again overseas). After that it can be done at a small level. One of my customers was a group in KY that was working on a method that seemed to work to some degree but they never did get the money part figured out. As I said I am in IT and fairly good at my job. It is unusual to find IT guys at my level that enjoyed working of manufacturing floor and processes so I got lent out a bit so know a bit about their operation. Did I mention the Sopranos aspect? Part of my charm seemed to be skill and a tendency not to ask awkward questions or talk out of school at all.
This is a really interesting discussion.
I didn’t necessarily know much detail about the specific manufacturing processes at the places I worked, most of what I describe in the 7,000 Twitter Employees thread came from just observing how the different departments and people interacted with the computer systems, and making adjustments to suit what they actually did. Rather than following some “guidelines” set by people who had less of a clue than me.