Praise to the authors for a very well done project. I always wonder though, what's the ultimate impact of recycling plastic like this? One or two extra cycles is still nothing compared to its 500-year life span. We should start reducing usage in mass produced items altogether - with current purchasing habits you don't even need the durability it offers for most products.
The "packaging" industry, is in fact a nice way of saying the "garbage manufacturing" industry.
At least in Australia, the "recycling industry" is owned by the "packaging industry". Hmmm.. why is that? It put it to you that the garbage manufacturing industry has in fact worked out how to "own" the environmental movement by pushing "recycling" as the "balance" to the spewing forth of garbage from the packaging industry. The packaging industry must be laughing so hard at how easily it has owned the environmental movement.
Have you ever wondered if all that packaging you put in your recycle bin gets recycled? It's a question worth thinking about.
I have come to believe that recycling, which environmentalists embrace deeply as a core value, is in fact just a smokescreen that allows everyone to feel OK about the garbage manufacturing industry creating an unending quantity of plastics that have made their way into every nook and cranny of our ecosystem.
Please, stop believing in recycling.... if you recycle, then you do not question the unbelievable, and unrecyclable, quantity of plastic packaging that you consume.
One you stop believing in recycling, you start to ask the question, "why the heck do we permit the packaging industry to create this unstoppable flow of garbage"
Seems to me that world MUST eventually move to a solution which is a set of standardised containers for all products, which are durable, washable, have a refund value attached, and may have paper corporate brand stuck on them after being washed.
Another strategy worth bringing forward is the idea of "garbage brands"..... showing off all those precious brands but in their true context... as garbage in our creeks, rivers and oceans, drains and footpaths. Once brands start to become associated with garbage, they might rethinkg whether they want their names and logos on the digusting mess destroying our environment.
Please, stop believing in recycling and the smokescreen will clear and you will start to ask questions about the packaging industry and our community/commercial system that supports it.
Asbestos, tobacco, sugary foods, packaging - all industries that have fooled us into believing things that are wrong but served their own ends. The packaging industry has fooled us into thinking that it is OK because recycling exists.
I have had similar thoughts, but it's also worth considering the products that all that garbage protects, whether that's to prevent manufactured goods from being broken in storage and transport, or foodstuffs from spoilage. In either case, not protecting things also wastes huge amounts of resources - which isn't to say that there aren't other options for packaging than plastics.
My post suggests that we need a set of standardised, reusable, washable containers. These containers have a refund value attached to ensure they are returned.
Say for example maybe 150 different sizes and types of containers.
Companies would be legally required to ship their products in these standardised containers, or pay some penalty somehow that is a strong disincentive not to make products that do not fit the standard packages.
I looked into starting a company around this idea about 10 years ago but I don't think the world was ready for it. I think my number was 250 heh. I still don't think the world is ready for it. Manufacturers gain too much from pretty and clean and unique packaging. One solution could be to create a system whereby environmentally friendly dyes could be sprayed onto and washed off the containers to allow for differentiation.
> In either case, not protecting things also wastes huge amounts of resources
Why "also"? It's not about wasting resources, it's about producing poison. When you spill milk, you waste resources, but you do zero lasting damage. When you produce plastic and other things and they, say, end up accumulating somewhere in the food chain, that's an entirely different ballpark.
I wish that were true, but producing that milk and delivering it you required significant use of fossil fuels, which poisoned the environment. My city composts food waste, which offsets some of that, but not all.
Well the big waste is that products are manufactured to be shipped.
Germany prevents local beer from being transportable (as it reduces the flavor and protects local breweries)... has it made German beer less successful?
I have and it makes me a little sick every time I have to throw out or recycle packaging material. I agree 100% with everything you wrote.
Another example of a smokescreen it "biodegradable". It's complete BS. For an experiment I buried a biodegradable tray in the dirt. Years later it still looks like brand new with no visible degradation.
Northern Europe seems a bit better; I understand that in Germany shippers have to accept their shipping material back, which have let them to package with actual popcorn which can be fed to live stock or simply buried in the ground.
I seem to recall that certain types of plastic that are regarded as biodegradable will only biodegrade in particular conditions, such as with heat or UV exposure. I've no citation for this, it's only a vague memory from something I saw years ago. (YMMV, it's worth what you paid for it, all that kind of thing.)
Absolutely. If they were actually doing worthwhile recycling they would be proudly publishing statistics on it.
We're told to put plastic/metal in one bin and paper in the other.
But this includes pizza boxes with bits of food on it; things like pringle cans which are a mixture of paper and metal.
And there is all sorts of plastics.
It's simply not believable that they have an efficient means of separating and recycling this mess.
I believe there's regulatory capture or at least heavy revolving door activity. Politicians retiring and then being put on the board of recycling companies.
From your profile "I'm also fascinated in the psychology of belief."
If the environmental movement can come to understand how its belief in recycling in fact subverts its goals of environmental protection then the world will start to change.
Belief in recycling allows people to avoid the deeply bothering question of why we allow packaging companies to create an infinite flow of garbage. Much of which of course ends up not in ANY recycle bin but throughout the ecosystem.
Aren't we better served by question consumption broadly and our modes of consumption specifically, rather than questioning recycling?
You have both done well to articulate that it doesn't feel right, but do you have any actual proof against the value of recycling? And I don't mean trade-offs, I acknowledge recycling isn't perfect, but there are plenty of statistics that prove it is worthwhile.
Plastic saves lives and reduces waste. Medical devices/healthcare and food packaging are the only proof you need, but it goes far beyond that.
Societal mismanagement has turned plastic in to an environmental disaster/burden. We have only ourselves to blame, not "demon materials".
Recycling is an important tool in material management in a global context. It is not "the solution" and it is not misinformation, or a conspiracy perpetuated by the packaging industry or the plastics industry, or anyone else.
Society was not prepared for the growth or complexities of plastic waste. However, we are perfectly capable of innovating through and out of the current circumstances. This is particularly true as renewable energy becomes more accessible and less expensive. Technologies such as depolymerization, pyrolysis and anaerobic digestion are all viable, scalable and in practice to varying degrees. Waste to energy or incineration has a long way to go, but it may prove to be worthwhile through further innovation. I've previously posted about carbon capture as well, which could work on it's own or with processes mentioned above.
It appears to me that the Precious Plastic people are doing good work. I don't think it's fair to diminish or dismiss that good work because we have collectively created a less than optimal system for resource management.
This point, while maybe valid, completely ignores the point of this post (Precious Plastic).
The Precious Plastic shipping container setup clearly is not out to pad the pockets of Big Packaging. It (albeit on a small scale) takes plastic waste and makes various end products, all while being completely transparent to the end-consumer. I think this is a good thing.
You say "packaging", but more than half of packaging is paper, not plastic. Plastic products are extremely valuable to humanity, the plastic manufacturing industry is merely meeting the demand.
Each moment humanity is without plastic is a moment hundreds of millions of people are suffering beyond contemporary compare. If the waste is unacceptable, we have to find something to do with it, because we won't (and shouldn't) stop producing plastic.
Personally I think more paper could be used, and advancements could certainly be made in paper and metal foil manufacturing to reduce reliance on disposable plastics, but painting plastic manufacturers as simple villains is childish and absurd.
What's your take on the use of plastic pyrolysis as a means of handling plastic waste?
I get the core of your message, I think. We should consider the inputs to the processes and minimize those. Focus on the outputs (recycling) does not greatly improve the situation and in fact a fixation on it is counterproductive as it steals focus away from efforts to 'reduce' and 're-use', which are more beneficial in the long run.
I ask about pyrolysis because, although it still focuses on the third R, it does seem to offer a (potentially) clean means to return plastics to their original crude state. This offers some promise that the environmental impacts of waste plastics could be removed by reprocessing, rather than the current option of reprocessing into other plastic products.
If you believe this that deeply, then I'd expect you to have some evidence of the ineffectiveness of recycling – but all I'm seeing here is really rather a lot of nonsense.
In the UK, for example, around 40% of plastic packaging waste is successfully recovered or recycled [1]
It's obvious that this percentage must become higher, and that packaging waste overall should still be reduced. But by taking steps such as standardising materials, reducing colorants and promoting better treatment of recyclables by consumers, there's no obvious blocker to this percentage increasing further, with recycling remaining a useful tool to reduce the environmental impact of plastic consumption.
Recycling is a smokescreen that distracts us from what the packaging industry is doing, which is filling the earth up with garbage.
Recycling is the excuse mechanism via which we allow ourselves to ignore the packaging industry filling the world with garbage.
It is precisely because recycling is half effective that it is such a good excuse for the packaging industry to hide behind. It's not entirely false! How perfectly magnificent for the packaging industry.... a distraction/smokescreen that isn't entirely untrue!
You have made EXACTLY the argument that the packaging industry wants to hear you saying: "what the heck are you talkign about? Recycling is pretty darn good!". Now the focus is back on recycling, and yet again, the focus is AWAY from the industry that is constantly pouring garbage into the world.
YOU want us to stop looking at the packaging industry and instead praise how 40% good recycling is. I won't do that.
Consider not recycling, but all the garbage that doesn't go into recycling.... into the oceans, the drains, the streets etc etc etc.
YOU are permitting them to get away with it by defending recycling, which is EXACTLY what the packaging industry wants and needs... people like you to stick up for recycling loudly so they can hide behind your loud defense, so the focus is now OFF them and back on recycling.
Without these pointless arguments about recycling, people would be asking the question "Hey, why are we letting this industry pour a never ending supply of garbage into the world".
You, sir, have been played like a guitar by the packaging industry. Please stop playing their game and instead hold the packaging industry to account.
The bottom line is that grinding and pelletizing and then extruding even pure PLA post-use for use in the same machine is nigh impossible. It degrades, it gets dust in it, you block your 3d printer nozzle and damage your hot end.
One of the best actions in my life was to avoid packaged food. Now I throw out my garbage once or twice per year.
More importantly, my eating is more
- Delicious
- Convenient
- and Cheap
than ever. Plus more social, in that I met the farmers who grow most of my food, more people come to my place for meals, and get-togethers are friendlier.
It took a while to learn to prepare food from scratch, but worth it.
I would love to hear more about this. Do you buy everything in bulk with reusable packaging? Does that require driving out to the farms? Do you end up eating seasonally and locally? What equipment did you have to buy to achieve this?
To answer your questions: I buy dry legumes, nuts, seeds, and grains in bulk with containers I bring to the store.
Most fruit and vegetables I get from a CSA, which means picking it up weekly from a drop-off point a few blocks away. I get a lot from the local farmers markets, where I also drop off my compost.
Yes, I eat seasonally and locally, not that I decided to. It just worked out that way.
I didn't buy anything to start the change, but buying a pressure cooker enabled cooking lentils and beans in five or ten minutes, which facilitated things a lot. I don't buy a lot, but the pressure cooker is one of the best purchases I've made.
I didn't plan to get into food and cooking. It's just that with every change I made, my food got more delicious, more convenient, cheaper, and created more community.
People occasionally contact us wanting us to waterjet cut the parts for the Precious Plastic shredder. Unfortunately, the designs on the website require metric thickness metals, and that's just hard to obtain in the US.
From what I've been told, it's much more practical to buy a used Chinese made plastic shredder off of eBay.
Precious Plastic is using far too much labor to recycle tiny amounts of plastic. This is an art project, not a solution.
Here's a solution at scale - CarbonLite's plastic recycling plant in LA.[1] Bottles turned in for recycling go in, and food-grade plastic pellets for making new bottles come out.
Separating items in mixed recycling is heavily mechanized, and the advanced systems use computer vision rather than humans to pull out unexpected junk. There are many cool videos on line of big plants where trash goes in at one end and gets separated by machinery.
37 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 24.5 ms ] threadHere's some things to think about:
The "packaging" industry, is in fact a nice way of saying the "garbage manufacturing" industry.
At least in Australia, the "recycling industry" is owned by the "packaging industry". Hmmm.. why is that? It put it to you that the garbage manufacturing industry has in fact worked out how to "own" the environmental movement by pushing "recycling" as the "balance" to the spewing forth of garbage from the packaging industry. The packaging industry must be laughing so hard at how easily it has owned the environmental movement.
Have you ever wondered if all that packaging you put in your recycle bin gets recycled? It's a question worth thinking about.
I have come to believe that recycling, which environmentalists embrace deeply as a core value, is in fact just a smokescreen that allows everyone to feel OK about the garbage manufacturing industry creating an unending quantity of plastics that have made their way into every nook and cranny of our ecosystem.
Please, stop believing in recycling.... if you recycle, then you do not question the unbelievable, and unrecyclable, quantity of plastic packaging that you consume.
One you stop believing in recycling, you start to ask the question, "why the heck do we permit the packaging industry to create this unstoppable flow of garbage"
Seems to me that world MUST eventually move to a solution which is a set of standardised containers for all products, which are durable, washable, have a refund value attached, and may have paper corporate brand stuck on them after being washed.
Another strategy worth bringing forward is the idea of "garbage brands"..... showing off all those precious brands but in their true context... as garbage in our creeks, rivers and oceans, drains and footpaths. Once brands start to become associated with garbage, they might rethinkg whether they want their names and logos on the digusting mess destroying our environment.
Please, stop believing in recycling and the smokescreen will clear and you will start to ask questions about the packaging industry and our community/commercial system that supports it.
Asbestos, tobacco, sugary foods, packaging - all industries that have fooled us into believing things that are wrong but served their own ends. The packaging industry has fooled us into thinking that it is OK because recycling exists.
Say for example maybe 150 different sizes and types of containers.
Companies would be legally required to ship their products in these standardised containers, or pay some penalty somehow that is a strong disincentive not to make products that do not fit the standard packages.
Why "also"? It's not about wasting resources, it's about producing poison. When you spill milk, you waste resources, but you do zero lasting damage. When you produce plastic and other things and they, say, end up accumulating somewhere in the food chain, that's an entirely different ballpark.
Germany prevents local beer from being transportable (as it reduces the flavor and protects local breweries)... has it made German beer less successful?
"Reduce, reuse, recycle, in that order". Recycling is a last resort.
It simply doesn't happen except perhaps in the case of aluminum, glass or paper.
The amount of shit we waste, to be processed is crazy.
Another example of a smokescreen it "biodegradable". It's complete BS. For an experiment I buried a biodegradable tray in the dirt. Years later it still looks like brand new with no visible degradation.
Northern Europe seems a bit better; I understand that in Germany shippers have to accept their shipping material back, which have let them to package with actual popcorn which can be fed to live stock or simply buried in the ground.
We're told to put plastic/metal in one bin and paper in the other. But this includes pizza boxes with bits of food on it; things like pringle cans which are a mixture of paper and metal. And there is all sorts of plastics.
It's simply not believable that they have an efficient means of separating and recycling this mess.
They even have trouble recycling glass; surely the easiest to recycle. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-07/recycling-companies-fo...
Also relevant: http://theconversation.com/australian-recycling-plants-have-...
I believe there's regulatory capture or at least heavy revolving door activity. Politicians retiring and then being put on the board of recycling companies.
And we subsidise them: http://www.epa.nsw.gov.au/working-together/grants/business-r...
If the environmental movement can come to understand how its belief in recycling in fact subverts its goals of environmental protection then the world will start to change.
"I feel OK, I recycle, it's the best we can do."
You have both done well to articulate that it doesn't feel right, but do you have any actual proof against the value of recycling? And I don't mean trade-offs, I acknowledge recycling isn't perfect, but there are plenty of statistics that prove it is worthwhile.
If you can't find them ... that would tell you something.
Societal mismanagement has turned plastic in to an environmental disaster/burden. We have only ourselves to blame, not "demon materials".
Recycling is an important tool in material management in a global context. It is not "the solution" and it is not misinformation, or a conspiracy perpetuated by the packaging industry or the plastics industry, or anyone else.
Society was not prepared for the growth or complexities of plastic waste. However, we are perfectly capable of innovating through and out of the current circumstances. This is particularly true as renewable energy becomes more accessible and less expensive. Technologies such as depolymerization, pyrolysis and anaerobic digestion are all viable, scalable and in practice to varying degrees. Waste to energy or incineration has a long way to go, but it may prove to be worthwhile through further innovation. I've previously posted about carbon capture as well, which could work on it's own or with processes mentioned above.
It appears to me that the Precious Plastic people are doing good work. I don't think it's fair to diminish or dismiss that good work because we have collectively created a less than optimal system for resource management.
The Precious Plastic shipping container setup clearly is not out to pad the pockets of Big Packaging. It (albeit on a small scale) takes plastic waste and makes various end products, all while being completely transparent to the end-consumer. I think this is a good thing.
Each moment humanity is without plastic is a moment hundreds of millions of people are suffering beyond contemporary compare. If the waste is unacceptable, we have to find something to do with it, because we won't (and shouldn't) stop producing plastic.
Personally I think more paper could be used, and advancements could certainly be made in paper and metal foil manufacturing to reduce reliance on disposable plastics, but painting plastic manufacturers as simple villains is childish and absurd.
I get the core of your message, I think. We should consider the inputs to the processes and minimize those. Focus on the outputs (recycling) does not greatly improve the situation and in fact a fixation on it is counterproductive as it steals focus away from efforts to 'reduce' and 're-use', which are more beneficial in the long run.
I ask about pyrolysis because, although it still focuses on the third R, it does seem to offer a (potentially) clean means to return plastics to their original crude state. This offers some promise that the environmental impacts of waste plastics could be removed by reprocessing, rather than the current option of reprocessing into other plastic products.
In the UK, for example, around 40% of plastic packaging waste is successfully recovered or recycled [1]
It's obvious that this percentage must become higher, and that packaging waste overall should still be reduced. But by taking steps such as standardising materials, reducing colorants and promoting better treatment of recyclables by consumers, there's no obvious blocker to this percentage increasing further, with recycling remaining a useful tool to reduce the environmental impact of plastic consumption.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm... – p19
Recycling is a smokescreen that distracts us from what the packaging industry is doing, which is filling the earth up with garbage.
Recycling is the excuse mechanism via which we allow ourselves to ignore the packaging industry filling the world with garbage.
It is precisely because recycling is half effective that it is such a good excuse for the packaging industry to hide behind. It's not entirely false! How perfectly magnificent for the packaging industry.... a distraction/smokescreen that isn't entirely untrue!
You have made EXACTLY the argument that the packaging industry wants to hear you saying: "what the heck are you talkign about? Recycling is pretty darn good!". Now the focus is back on recycling, and yet again, the focus is AWAY from the industry that is constantly pouring garbage into the world.
YOU want us to stop looking at the packaging industry and instead praise how 40% good recycling is. I won't do that.
Consider not recycling, but all the garbage that doesn't go into recycling.... into the oceans, the drains, the streets etc etc etc.
YOU are permitting them to get away with it by defending recycling, which is EXACTLY what the packaging industry wants and needs... people like you to stick up for recycling loudly so they can hide behind your loud defense, so the focus is now OFF them and back on recycling.
Without these pointless arguments about recycling, people would be asking the question "Hey, why are we letting this industry pour a never ending supply of garbage into the world".
You, sir, have been played like a guitar by the packaging industry. Please stop playing their game and instead hold the packaging industry to account.
I won't response to the general ad-hominem, but I will point out that I said the exact opposite of that – that we need to reduce excess packaging.
The bottom line is that grinding and pelletizing and then extruding even pure PLA post-use for use in the same machine is nigh impossible. It degrades, it gets dust in it, you block your 3d printer nozzle and damage your hot end.
edit: the one on the front page doesn't, clicking through to the interactive one has it.
Is there a $1M prize for solving this problem?
More importantly, my eating is more
- Delicious
- Convenient
- and Cheap
than ever. Plus more social, in that I met the farmers who grow most of my food, more people come to my place for meals, and get-togethers are friendlier.
It took a while to learn to prepare food from scratch, but worth it.
http://joshuaspodek.com/?s=farm
http://joshuaspodek.com/?s=fly
http://joshuaspodek.com/?s=packaging
To answer your questions: I buy dry legumes, nuts, seeds, and grains in bulk with containers I bring to the store.
Most fruit and vegetables I get from a CSA, which means picking it up weekly from a drop-off point a few blocks away. I get a lot from the local farmers markets, where I also drop off my compost.
Yes, I eat seasonally and locally, not that I decided to. It just worked out that way.
I didn't buy anything to start the change, but buying a pressure cooker enabled cooking lentils and beans in five or ten minutes, which facilitated things a lot. I don't buy a lot, but the pressure cooker is one of the best purchases I've made.
I didn't plan to get into food and cooking. It's just that with every change I made, my food got more delicious, more convenient, cheaper, and created more community.
The results, in my friends' words: http://joshuaspodek.com/food-world-reviews
From what I've been told, it's much more practical to buy a used Chinese made plastic shredder off of eBay.
Here's a solution at scale - CarbonLite's plastic recycling plant in LA.[1] Bottles turned in for recycling go in, and food-grade plastic pellets for making new bottles come out.
Separating items in mixed recycling is heavily mechanized, and the advanced systems use computer vision rather than humans to pull out unexpected junk. There are many cool videos on line of big plants where trash goes in at one end and gets separated by machinery.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAr4BZM_Tzk