The only safe way to dispose of plastic is to incinerate it…maybe it can replace some fossil powerplants…idk.
That’s not safe either. The best is to ban it.
Convincing detail here.
The priority is to keep used plastic out of the environment, which generally means out of waterways.
The price stuff can change through taxation that makes new plastic more expensive than recycled plastic.
As we all know, taxation is super popular and has never been controversial, ever.
At the very least flaskepant has worked great for like a century here in Norway. Always kind of surprising when other countries don’t have it.
Most plastic can’t be recycled into something usable. Plastic degrades quite a bit with each recycling, leaving a bunch of microplastics behind (same thing with “biodegradable” plastic). It would be better to tax it enough (or ban it) to make it not used in certain applications.
Should’ve made the producers responsible for collecting and processing all plastics they produce. It that makes certain products economically non viable, than that’s on them to innovate better processes.
I hope that one day drilling oil has been banned, and CCS becomes mandatory. If you want hydrocarbons in order to manufacture chemicals and plastics, you can pull them from the air. There’s enough for everyone.
Carbon capture (more specifically direct air capture) is not a viable option due to the energy requirements and the low concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Carbon capture is largely promoted by fossil fuel companies for the same reason that recycling is: “let us keep doing what we’re doing because there’s some magical way to undo the damage, we just need a few more years of research”.
However, plants do the same thing and already exist. Trees in particular have shown some promise for being able to be a precursor for many polymers. This would at least mean that any plant matter used for this did pull CO2 out of the atmosphere in the last few years (so relatively neutral compared to the other options), whereas fossil fuels are releasing carbon that was removed from the atmosphere millions of years ago.
EDIT: TLDR, oil drilling should be banned or severely limited, but DAC is not a viable option and is only relevant because oil companies keep pumping money into it. Biomass is potentially an ok feedstock for plastics (but not for fuel).
Well, what if we used renewable energy to run a DAC process? That would require lots of solar and wind power, but we’re going to need a lot of that anyway to get permanently rid of fossil fuels.
As you pointed out, the low concentratiions are a serious issue for any process, but maybe plants will do a better job our current machines can. Either way, once you have that carbon, we would really need put it back where it came from. The way I see it, slowing down global warming is a step in the right direction and becoming carbon neutral is another step. However, what we really need is a complete ban on all fossil fuels and an efficient way to reduce the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere.
Also, I have fairly negative view on CCU, since it doesn’t really solve the problem. CCS on the other hand seems like a better option. If you do it with plants and store the carbon as biochar, I’m all for it. If you want to do it with electricity and chemistry, I’m ok with that too, as long as it gets the job done.
The problem with using wind and solar is that you’d need a lot of it due to the energy requirements. While both should be used extensively, there comes a point where the resources required (these would likely use precious metal catalysts) to build the CCS plants and all the power infrastructure for it and waste produced makes it the obvious choice to just use trees.
If you look at how trees function, it is an incredibly complex process with some rather extreme conditions which are difficult to replicate with machines. If someone does manage to get it done efficiently then that’s great (though I think this is unlikely). But I don’t want it to become like recycling did: an excuse for companies to do whatever they want. The original expression was “reduce, reuse, recycle” with recycling being the last resort, but now we never hear about the first two because they get in the way of obscene profit.
Have we considered calling it a tariff instead of a tax? Tariffs on all new plastic. It might work.
Yes… plastic recycling can work, in theory, but the financial incentives are not naturally inclined to be in a way that recycling is feasible, since externalities encompassing the damage that plastic production has to our world are not accounted for in its price. (Caveat: the products that can be made from recycling are physically unable to be perfectly like the previous products they came from)
Like the cost burden of tobacco use being put on both users and producers, plastic must be dealt with the same way in terms of taxation levies so that plastic alternatives and plastic recycling are competitive compared to new plastic from oil by-products.
We have bottle deposit in some states in the u.s. Some do it better than others though, grew up in Michigan and there any place that sold bottles had to be able to return them and a lot of the grocery stores had the machines. Moved to California and it seems like none of the stores are set up for it and the cashier will often turn you to a recycling center.
Oregon was the same way. You had to go to certain stores that had a deposit and it was slow going.
The US still has subsidies going to petrochemical companies, despite being insanely profitable. Basically, just extracting the country’s wealth in addition to natural resources. Ending those or forcing them to be spent on recycling would help here immensely.
These guys are recycling, but I’m not sure it’s the recycling most of us have in mind. Toxic tofu (YouTube)
Right now it looks like paper and metal recycling is still good as far as I can read in two minutes. If someone has a correction let me know.
They also both have the advantage of being things that will naturally degrade over time if left outside instead of just sticking around forever
Yeah same and I hate when people just say well might as “well not recycle at all then” :/ that kind of defeatism doesn’t help either
That is the point at which you remind them they are focusing on the worst R and remind them of the other two which are much more ppwerful
Yup! Those things are easy (comparatively) to recycle because they’re single material items, so the process is:
- clean
- break down / melt
- rebuild
“Plastic” is thought of as a single material, but even vegetable packaging will be made of around 5-10 different polymers, so for it to be valuable, you need to break it down back to those original polymers.
It’s not a issue with recycling as a whole, its specific to plastic as a material.
That’s just not true. I make flexible packaging and we use thousands of pounds of post industrial resin (made from scrap material produced in house) and post consumer resin (made from used packaging.) They’re all coextruded; frequently made up of 10+ different types of polyethylenes, polyamides, and ethylene-vinyl alcohol.
I don’t think “not true” is fair- I have a soure if you’d like to hear it from someone more authorative than some random internet person (unfortunately I think it might be behind a paywall)[0]
Either way, that’s cool! I’m surprised you can build flexible packaging from that, but I’d be really, really surprised if you can use something that crude to fit the other niches of plastic like building technology, clothing, etc.
[0] https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2025/04/23/are-microplastics-harming-your-health
Correct. Paper, glass and alu will always be great candidates for recycling.
Aluminum is the poster child for recycling, really. It takes more energy to extract it from the ore than it is to recycle it.
Former aluminum process engineer: This^
I was under the impression that the chemicals involved in recycling paper products, combined with the fact that virgin paper is almost entirely sourced from managed, quick-growing tree farms, make paper recycling also undesirable?
Have heard similar things. And it’s also true that timber farming is a (very marginal) form of carbon drawdown, assuming the wood products are not burned. But then in theory recycling could allow some of that land to return to nature, which better in all ways. It’s a systems problem.
The chemical issue is presumably bleaching for white paper. But thick brown cardboard is basically just degraded wood fiber so that at least must be pretty efficient to downcycle into toilet paper.
Update: there’s also another chemical issue in de-inking, maybe that’s what you were referring to. Personally I don’t bother recycling my tiny amounts of paper waste, for these reasons. Thick cardboard must be a win though.
Hahahaha! … oh
If only some government somewhere on Earth had sponsored research on this. We could have known.
Or we did and no one cared.
Remember, if one depends on the media for information, you only get information dumb people can understand.
Being an old man this really gets me. I love the internet and the way computers today but there is a whole lot that worked fine before plastics were so common. Almost nothing in the grocery store had plastic and everything was pretty much as convenient as nowadays. Sure you had to pay a deposit on the glass bottles but you got it back when you returned them.
If I had to choose glass or plastic, I am always choosing glass. Glass is such a good material. It is infinitely recyclable, the bottles can be reused for several years, and if they are buried they don’t release microplastics.
It depends on which aspects of the environmental impact you’re looking at, as melting glass to recycle it can be much more damaging than landfilling several plastic bottles if the glass furnace is heated by fossil fuels. If glass bottles are washed and reused, they’re much better than plastic, but that’s rarely what happens.
Gas is used to heat up glass furnaces most of the time. But it is possible to use elctricity aswell, which is more and more sources from either solar or nuclear.
Not saying it is greener than plastic when it comes to electricity and shipping.
The cleaning was common back then. Every store took back the tall glass bottles of soda and in modern times oberweiss brought that back with milk. The glass melting is nice just as a final option really.
That’s reuse, not recycling. Glass is much more suitable for reuse than plastics as it’s longer-lasting and can withstand temperatures hot enough and cleaning agents strong enough to ensure it’s food-safe after being collected, but you need quite a bit of infrastructure to get the bottles back to the company whose products they’re for. At least for the parts of a bottle’s life that the manufacturer’s responsible for, it can be much cheaper to make fresh plastic, and if they can externalise the environmental cost of disposing of a plastic bottle (i.e. blame the consumer), it can look better for their carbon footprint etc., too.
yeah I was not limiting my comment to recycling just about how we don’t really need to be using plastic everywhere and how things were pretty fine in the 70’s where you only saw plastic in a few use cases.
I jump for situations where the glass is taken back for wash and reuse. Its the most sensible thing. I swear I had heard about restaurants doing this with containers but I never actually encountered one. So they had perm togo containers they took back and washed.
That’s still the way it works in Denmark, but with plastic bottles too. Something like 98% of all bottles are recycled.
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Honestly, the whole concept of “recycling” plastic feels more like a PR strategy than an environmental solution. If it were genuinely effective, we’d see investment, innovation, and accountability—like we do with metals. Instead, we’re handed the guilt while corporations keep pumping out garbage.
Much like the concept of a carbon footprint, it exists solely to make consumers think they can make an individual difference so they won’t push for regulations
Yeah I especially love that one everytime I fly. I get to choose the environmentally friendly option with lower carbon footprint for more money. Who the fuck they think they are kidding? We are all in the same plane burning fuel at 10000 m.
Interesting to compare aluminium recycling with plastic recycling
When the true aim is to recycle material, industry comes to the party and you get a refund scheme, even purpose built deposit facilities that can be set up locally
When the aim is to misdirect public attention toward a non solution you get government mandated plastics recycling bins and penalties or “contamination” plus never ending messaging (gotta keep the lie alive with constant repetition lmaooo). Coercion is just a lowkey admission that the material isn’t worth recycling
The real question isn’t how to get the plastics industry to change, it’s how to make the ruse no longer a tenable position for governments
Recycling rates are low, but I wouldn’t quite call it a myth. There’s a lot of materials that get lumped together as ‘plastic’, that each have to be handled differently.
Some are relatively non-toxic and easily recycled. More can be, but aren’t profitable without incentives. Some are very toxic, and recycling those are difficult. Then there’s a lot of rarer types that make it hard to collect and sort. There’s also mixed materials, where it’s hard to separate the plastic to recycle.
Generally everyone should be minimizing plastics, but check how they’re handled locally so you know what’s recylable.
It seems there’s been a flip. The myth is now that plastic is not recycled and it’s all been a lie which is the actual lie.
The information around what types of plastics are easily recycled has never been a secret.
There is this weird mindset where people, often children are given a simplified explanation of things and then feel they were lied to when they find out their is nuance.
The entire world of information works this way. If the nuance was included from the start no one would learn anything because they would be bogged down in details. Every topic is a Wikipedia like rabbit hole with no bottom. It’s what we have specialization in society.
The issues with plastic are not in its recycling. It’s that is breaks down into what are essentially forever chemicals. This is the dilemma.
Producing less plastic because it’s not recyclable is bad messaging.
Producing less plastic because it creates a substance that will last for eons is the problem. We’ve known about this property for decades but the repercussions of it have become more pronounced.
We need to stop making more plastic and work out how to chemically dissessemble the plastics already created without creating a worse output.
In some places there’s really no recycling. For example, islands where recycling would mean shipping plastics to the mainland. They just burn it instead - if you’re lucky, for producing heating or electricity.
Sure but there is danger is telling people to not bother recycling. Even a location as you described since it could become possible in the future and it’s actually better for it to be shipped off than buried. Keeping plastic out of the environment is not a waste of fuel.
The focus should be a return to glass bottles that are reused. This was still a thing into the 90’s in my area.
Yes, recycling is always better.
Honestly if it was up to me I’d just ban plastic flat out unless you got some kind of “this is actually really important and NEEDS to be made of plastic” cert
There are tons of single-use plastic medical supplies - syringes, wrappers, etc.
Would you say that those things are actually really important and NEED to be made of plastic? I wonder if Aeri would account for that possibility
I’m not the ultimate authority on all things, but I’d question if these things need to be made of plastic.
Syringes are made out of things like Borosilicate glass, Stainless steel, autoclaves and cases exist.
It would also be way less big a deal if we just didn’t have as much plastic in general.
It would be a lot more costly to make syringes out of glass/steel for single-use types.
Counterpoint, how much is cancer treatment for (research sounds, papers rustling)… Seven thousand people†?
Multiply that by… some studies show costs of cancer treatment as high as $173,831 annually. 1,216,817,000? Would it cost more than 1.2 billion dollars a year to stop making everything out of plastic? This is just like, napkin ass math I’m not pretending to be a huge know it all or anything by the way. Personally I think that yes, we should stop making things out of poison, even if it costs more money.
†A recent study estimated that PFAS contamination in drinking water contributes to more than 6,800 cancer cases each year in the United States.
Dont forget the goal of disrupting actual leftist movements into confusion
Really annoyed to have believed in plastic recycling even into my thirties. Being an idiot is such a burden sometimes.
Ignorance is only bliss if you never find out. Rookie mistake.
It hasn’t been my experience tbh… Being this bad at being dumb is basically what I’ve got instead of smarts
I wrote a school report on the plastic garbage patches (pacific, indian, north atlantic, south pacific) when I was still in my twenties. Maybe it was a coincident, but I had a real big depression around that time, so maybe ignorance would’ve been preferable.
