I want to say some words to you. Just some words. Are you listening?

May 31, 2022 7:34 AM

Plastic Recycling Doesn't Work and Will Never Work

In The Atlantic, Judith Enck (a former EPA regional administrator) & Jan Dell (a chemical engineer) write:

The first problem is that there are thousands of different plastics, each with its own composition and characteristics.

[...]

Another problem is that the reprocessing of plastic waste—when possible at all—is wasteful. [...T]oxicity risks in recycled plastic prohibit “the vast majority of plastic products and packaging produced” [PDF] from being recycled into food-grade packaging.

[...]

Yet another problem is that plastic recycling is simply not economical. Recycled plastic costs more than new plastic *.

but,

We’re not making a case for despair. Just the opposite. We need the facts so that individuals and policy makers can take concrete action. Proven solutions to the U.S.’s plastic-waste and pollution problems exist and can be quickly replicated across the country. These solutions include enacting bans on single-use plastic bags and unrecyclable single-use plastic food-service products, ensuring widespread access to water-refilling stations, installing dishwashing equipment in schools to allow students to eat food on real dishes rather than single-use plastics, and switching Meals on Wheels and other meal-delivery programs from disposables to reusable dishware.

* In TFA this link went to The Guardian and I have substituted a different link because I do not link to The Guardian.

posted by glonous keming (68 comments total)

An excellent article.

The problem with plastic, is that it's such a brilliant material. Cheap, versatile, water proof, it really is pretty amazing.

Unfortunately the best way to get at least a second use of out it is incineration. Not surprisingly, it's an outstanding fuel.

In the UK we also have a particularly insidious symbol which looks like a recycling one but actually means "this can be recycled but only by taking it back to a store", something that nobody will do with a cheese wrapper.

I think for the most part, after we do everything we can to restrict the use of disposable plastic to only those things it is the very best at, burning it is the most sensible solution and we should be honest and open about that. Don't let people believe that the flagrant use of plastic is ok on the basis that "it will be recycled"


* In TFA this link went to The Guardian and I have substituted a different link because I do not link to The Guardian.

There a range of reasons to do this but not many of them congruent with linking more prominently to The Atlantic.
posted by atrazine at 7:56 AM on May 31, 2022 [33 favorites]

Honest question: since the biggest problem with landfills is methane from organic waste, and since plastic doesn't decay that quickly...why not flip the script and recycle organics (compost) while burying plastic? Plastic in the landfill = carbon sequestration.
posted by TreeRooster at 8:17 AM on May 31, 2022 [7 favorites]

I like to imagine what the world -- and the ocean -- would look like if companies like Coca-Cola were made responsible for every gram of plastic they produce. Problem solved overnight (either by finding a solution or driving the company under, either of which would be fine).
posted by klanawa at 8:25 AM on May 31, 2022 [26 favorites]

Recycled plastic costs more than new plastic *.

I disagree that this is in any way a hindrance or a bad thing.

The original Guardian Article is from over 2 years ago, and says that for the first time in history virgin plastic became cheaper than recycled plastic. Maybe it was true then for certain types of plastic, but it's almost certainly not true now, with the spike in oil prices.

The fact that recycled plastic will reach price parity with virgin plastic is an economic inevitability - as long as something is even 5% cheaper, companies will buy it in ever larger volumes to increase their profit margins, up until the point it reaches price parity. But once it reaches price parity it doesn't mean ALL recycled plastic production stops, it just means that they'll just keep using it at the rate they're already buying it. Then with oil price fluctuations, some months it will be cheaper, or more expensive, that's fine.

Use of recycled plastic in the auto industry - they note that Ford recycles 1.2 billion plastic bottles per year into their vehicles, and all auto manufacturers use a substantial amount of recycled plastic.

The Guardian article also alludes to this - despite recycled plastic costing $72 more per tonne (a whole 7 cents extra per kg, goodness knows we can afford that) than virgin plastic at the time the article was written - companies were still buying it and driving up the price, because there is real value in using recycled plastic beyond the dollars and cents.
posted by xdvesper at 8:26 AM on May 31, 2022 [19 favorites]

In the UK we also have a particularly insidious symbol which looks like a recycling one but actually means "this can be recycled but only by taking it back to a store", something that nobody will do with a cheese wrapper

Ooh, we have that in the US too. Amazon puts it on their bubble mailers.

But, yeah, recycling (especially single-stream) has always been something I find somewhat suspicious. The labor of separation, the potential for contamination... it's hard to imagine recycling of most materials being effective. Metal and glass, definitely. Paper and cardboard, despite TFA's general positivity about, I'm still not sure works either environmentally or economically.
posted by jackbishop at 8:26 AM on May 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

The whole problem is we started treating the adjective plastic as a noun.

You can't recycle an adjective.
posted by groda at 8:27 AM on May 31, 2022 [7 favorites]

Few things make me despair for the planet as much as the giant flats of individual water bottles that take up entire aisles of every grocery store.

I'm aware that there are some cases in which they're needed (eg Detroit, natural disasters, etc). But the completely false commoditization of water -- water! -- make any other conspiracies look sophisticated. And the fact that almost every USian now believes that water is only "safe" if it's been paid for and poured from a fucking plastic bottle.
posted by Dashy at 8:28 AM on May 31, 2022 [66 favorites]

I was just watching a video on molecular/chemistry recycling on plastic materials.

It seemed like the next savior that we will curse its sudden but inevitable betrayal.
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 8:42 AM on May 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

NPR had a piece on this story recently. Mostly about how Maine, Oregon, and Colorado all have laws making plastic producers more responsible for the waste and recycling, and how New York may soon join them.

It seems important to make companies pay for the whole lifecycle of a product, particularly the environmental externalities.
posted by Nelson at 8:54 AM on May 31, 2022 [24 favorites]

What if we used an existing deep coal mine tunnel network and buried out plastic down there allowing heat and humidity to slowly decompose the material back into hydrocarbons that could be mined or pumped out of the ground at some point in the future. Build a pumping system and waste water treatment to prevent contamination of the water table.
posted by interogative mood at 8:56 AM on May 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

A previously-used version of The Atlantic article, that is, upcycled via Archive.org for those behind the paywall
posted by chavenet at 9:08 AM on May 31, 2022 [8 favorites]

Plastic in the landfill = carbon sequestration.

Sort of, depends on what you mean by "sequestration." The vast majority of plastics are produced from petroleum, which means they represent a mass of carbon that was extracted from deep reservoirs, then converted to a stable solid form. In one sense this is "sequestration" in that the carbon was diverted away from its other primary use, being burned for fuel, which would have converted it into greenhouse gases. However, it's not really helping the climate crisis, either, because that carbon was never part of the problem to begin with. "Carbon sequestration" generally refers to taking carbon in the form of greenhouse gases (or possibly in some form that would otherwise decompose into greenhouse gases) and converting it to a stabilized form. Plastics derived from biological sources can represent a good form of carbon sequestration, because the carbon is originally pulled out of the atmosphere by photosynthesis, though at the moment I believe the production of bioplastics still represents a net carbon source due to the energy required.

Regardless, given that petroleum plastics are being produced at such a huge rate, sequestering them still seems like the right thing to do if the energy costs associated with recycling are as high as they are. That sequestration surely needs to be more careful than just dumping it in a landfill, though. The massive problem we have with plastic waste in the oceans, and with microplastics literally everywhere, is testament to that. That form of carbon may not be contributing to climate change directly, but it's still an ecological disaster.
posted by biogeo at 9:13 AM on May 31, 2022 [12 favorites]

Your soundtrack for this thread - Coloured Plastics.

From Doug Randle's 1971 album "Songs for the New Industrial State".

Coloured Plastics - brighter than a thousand suns!
posted by whatevernot at 9:20 AM on May 31, 2022 [3 favorites]

In the UK we also have a particularly insidious symbol which looks like a recycling one

In the US you can find the triangular 'chasing arrows' logo on lots of stuff that isn't acceptable. Its caption says "Please Recycle" but how many understand this as an admonishment, maybe not actually applicable to the item bearing the logo? A new law coming to California makes this particular form of mislabeling illegal.
posted by Rash at 9:35 AM on May 31, 2022 [5 favorites]

We need to end public subsidies for “waste disposal” and implement extended producer responsibility for consumer food packaging.

Publicly-owned landfills need to go. Companies like Waste Management sign 50 year leases to build landfills and then turn the long-term liability over to the municipality. It’s a recipe for poor construction and massive maintenance costs. If you want to start a landfill, you had better bond maintenance of that thing in perpetuity. This would make landfilling expensive, and encourage recyclable and reusable packaging.

Municipal trash pickup is also a large part of the problem, providing industry with a free destination for any single-use material they can dream up. Make the stores take back food packaging.

Fine the food companies for every piece of non-biodegradable litter

These three steps would get us to a system of deposit-based reusable containers pretty quickly.
posted by Headfullofair at 9:36 AM on May 31, 2022 [8 favorites]

To some extent I feel like we should just abandon the pretense of plastic recycling but still separate it and then sequester it in its own part of or own landfill. In the future when there is technology that makes it a viable feedstock for something other than fuel to make tofu it can be dug up again. I would also put a tax on all plastic at some point in its life cycle to pay for its mitigation. It is a pretty expensive externality. (Putting it coldly.)

I also sometimes imagine people in the future wondering "what the hell were they thinking, they had all this amazing long chain hydrocarbon and they just BURNT IT?" Sort of like me now thinking about whaling.
posted by Pembquist at 9:48 AM on May 31, 2022 [12 favorites]

For me, the biggest problem is finding/buying (and affording) food with no plastic packaging. Cheese? Wrapped in plastic. Meats? Wrapped in plastic. Vegetables - at Trader Joe's, often wrapped in plastic.
Adding to that horror, is that these plastics, touching our food, are the ones that outgas toxics into your food the most!
As a household, we've done everything we can to limit this, but the amount of plastic waste in our trash still appalls me.
posted by dbmcd at 9:57 AM on May 31, 2022 [4 favorites]

I came here to say what Pembquist did. If we were careful to actually landfill it all, plastic waste wouldn't be a long-term big deal. Someone will want to recycle it eventually.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 10:03 AM on May 31, 2022 [2 favorites]

I seem to recall that some recyclable plastic is soy-based -- but then more New Guinea rainforests would be cut down to grow a food crop in order to make containers for various sodas, natural artesian waters and other beverages as well as oil palms, so lose-lose-lose.
posted by y2karl at 10:39 AM on May 31, 2022

Plastic is an incredibly useful material and we just burn the raw material (oil). In 10 generations folks will just be disdainful of current practices.
posted by sammyo at 10:40 AM on May 31, 2022 [2 favorites]

(If "folks" are something that exists ten generations from now...)
posted by klanawa at 10:57 AM on May 31, 2022

Organisms are evolving to break down plastic, which points imo to our best hope of digging ourselves out of this plastic avalanche. Here’s an article from 2021 on the topic.
posted by wemayfreeze at 11:19 AM on May 31, 2022 [2 favorites]

The deposit system used in Germany and elsewhere really should be adopted more widely. It's not going to be a total cure, for sure, but it seems like a pretty effective way to get consumers to segregate out at least the most common plastic products.
posted by A Robot Ninja at 11:22 AM on May 31, 2022 [5 favorites]

Organisms are evolving to break down plastic, which points imo to our best hope of digging ourselves out of this plastic avalanche.

Somebody penned a [very poorly written] book about that. Things did not end well for humanity. Be careful what you wish for.
posted by y2karl at 11:35 AM on May 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

The deposit system used in Germany and elsewhere really should be adopted more widely. It's not going to be a total cure, for sure, but it seems like a pretty effective way to get consumers to segregate out at least the most common plastic products.

If we had a deposit system on all products in blue packaging, that wouldn't make them recyclable -- just that they're concentrated into one waste stream via deposit returns.
posted by groda at 11:37 AM on May 31, 2022

One more argument for the space elevator then.
posted by y2karl at 11:38 AM on May 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

If we had a deposit system on all products in blue packaging, that wouldn't make them recyclable -- just that they're concentrated into one waste stream via deposit returns.

Which is why the criteria for the different deposit schemes are more complicated than "is it blue?"

I'm not suggesting that it's a solution for all forms of disposable plastic. But from seeing the plastic recycling the households in my neighbourhood put out each week, categories like "clear plastic drinks bottles" are arguably a significant enough proportion of overall household plastic waste to justify building some infrastructure like deposit schemes to collect them separately. That way they're not contaminated with other forms of plastic and therefore aren't immediately doomed to incineration or landfill.
posted by A Robot Ninja at 11:53 AM on May 31, 2022 [4 favorites]

So, hey, let's talk about PLA! It's billed as compostable, but when it breaks down you're still dumping CO₂ back into the atmosphere. It's basically fermented starch, so you are genuinely sequestering carbon when you grow the feedstock. The "it's compostable!" label did a fair amount of damage, since folks would try to just toss PLA bags into their backyard compost heaps (where it would just sit; backyard heaps aren't nearly hot enough) and declare the whole thing a sham. But frankly, landfilling with PLA is a pretty good idea; you're removing carbon from the atmosphere and generating non-toxic waste.
posted by phooky at 11:59 AM on May 31, 2022 [7 favorites]

A story floated past me a couplefew months ago and yeah, it's kind of changed my stringency on recycling.

The fact that recycled plastic will reach price parity with virgin plastic is an economic inevitability - as long as something is even 5% cheaper, companies will buy it in ever larger volumes to increase their profit margins, up until the point it reaches price parity.

Isn't the big problem that only 5% of the plastic people throw away is physically, chemically recyclable? Not in remanufacturing capacity, but the type of plastic itself.

I seem to recall that some recyclable plastic is soy-based

There are corn plastics, but structurally they're pretty weak. My local Chinese takeout uses them for containers, which can sag dangerously if you hold them wrong, and the forks break if you scoop too much rice.
posted by rhizome at 12:58 PM on May 31, 2022

some cases in which [plastic bottles of water are] needed (eg Detroit, natural disasters, etc)

Anheuser-Busch often change their production lines to produce aluminum cans of water during natural disasters. Link is just to one press release I found in a quick google. This says they've produced 90 million cans of water to date, and here's a 2017 Beverage Daily article about AB and MillerCoors canning water during Hurricane Harvey, that says AB started the practice in 1988 (or at least it looks like that's about when their 90 million can count started).
posted by msbrauer at 1:46 PM on May 31, 2022 [3 favorites]

oh yeah i remember getting Anheuser-Busch cans of water after Hurricane Isabel in Eastern NC in 2003. def a thing, wasn't especially tasty but kept the whistle wet.
posted by glonous keming at 2:15 PM on May 31, 2022

I got a funny feeling /
They've got plastic in the afterlife
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 2:36 PM on May 31, 2022 [3 favorites]

So what's the takeaway here, on the household level? Should I be throwing my supposedly recyclable plastic waste into the trash instead?
posted by slappy_pinchbottom at 2:44 PM on May 31, 2022 [2 favorites]

Anheuser-Busch often change their production lines to produce aluminum cans of water during natural disasters.

Cans which have a plastic liner that's a few microns thick. It's far less plastic than a plastic bottle and the aluminum content is easy to recycle, but it's still plastic.
posted by nathan_teske at 2:44 PM on May 31, 2022 [2 favorites]

The production of plastics is not clean, either. The cost of stuff should include the cost of disposal. This should be true of nuclear power, clothing (esp. synthetic/ plastic), tires, cars, vinyl, and so on. Manufacturing is pretty much invisible, but that's the effective place to make changes. It seems stupid to produce so much un-recycleable plastic.

Maine is having a crisis because waste sewage sludge was used as fertilizer. Whoops, it turns out to be full of PFAS. PFAS are generated by stuff we use daily, and the cost comes later.
posted by theora55 at 2:46 PM on May 31, 2022 [7 favorites]

Dashy nailed it regarding bottled water. Triumph of marketing. My tap water is fantastic, but some people in my water district buy bottled. I think some people have to use more expensive options because appearing cheap is too much to handle.
posted by theora55 at 2:50 PM on May 31, 2022 [2 favorites]

My wife bought jeans last year that claim to have 12.5 plastic bottles in them. She loves the jeans and says comfort wise they are indistinguishable from 100% cotton. I have two pairs of swim trunks that also are made partially from recycled plastic bottles. But I don't know if it's an economically sensible reuse of plastic or a marketing gimmick to make us feel better about the price of the clothes.
posted by COD at 3:00 PM on May 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

Should I be throwing my supposedly recyclable plastic waste into the trash instead?

I think many of us have asked ourselves this question, and the answer seems to be to change nothing, probably. I don't think any of us know enough to be confident that it's *entirely* futile, so you might as well keep going?

But use less plastic, for sure.
posted by anhedonic at 3:27 PM on May 31, 2022 [2 favorites]

I seem to recall that some recyclable plastic is soy-based


We use soy and corn waste to make plastics in the automotive industry as well, mainly for stuff in the engine bay, not the cabin. Only downside is a new failure mode... Rats might come and chew / eat your wiring harness....
posted by xdvesper at 3:31 PM on May 31, 2022 [3 favorites]

Triumph of marketing. My tap water is fantastic, but some people in my water district buy bottled.

There is a building I used to visit regularly for work (at least pre-pandemic): built in the early thirties, suffered through years of decline and neglect in the seventies and eighties, abandoned and boarded up by the nineties, reopened and fully renovated before the turn of the century.

Just off the lobby is a small vestibule giving onto a pair of washrooms. The vestibule, at the time of renovation, had two water fountains installed at differing heights (to account for children/wheelchair users/those of shorter stature).

Maybe five years ago I noticed the water fountains had been removed.

A few steps away is a newsstand/variety store sort of kiosk, which sells bottled water. Nestlé bottled water. For $2.79 for a one-litre bottle.

Nestlé had a longstanding contract with the provincial government wherein it removed water from our water table and paid the province $503.71 per million litres.

Nestlé sold off the water-draining business and its North American water brands last year for $4.3 billion. I don’t know what the new arrangements are, but I am certain the private equity firms that have taken over the business are much more environmentally friendly. Because that usually happens.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 3:45 PM on May 31, 2022 [9 favorites]

There are several brands that I stopped buying because they switched from glass containers to plastic. It’s not the only factor that guides my purchasing decisions, but it’s definitely something I consider.

I’d like to see more food products packaged in waxed cardboard. We collectively decided this was acceptable for milk and occasionally juice, but for some reason nothing else managed to clear this cultural hurdle. Plastic makes sense for some products, but many others could be switched to cardboard, glass, or aluminum with only minor adjustments to logistics, price, and consumer expectations.
posted by dephlogisticated at 4:14 PM on May 31, 2022 [8 favorites]

And the fact that almost every USian now believes that water is only "safe" if it's been paid for and poured from a fucking plastic bottle.

I mean...a few Americans have legit reasons for this, sadly, such as the Flint water crisis. We're abandoned at every turn by the 1%.
posted by tiny frying pan at 4:25 PM on May 31, 2022 [4 favorites]

There are several brands that I stopped buying because they switched from glass containers to plastic. It’s not the only factor that guides my purchasing decisions, but it’s definitely something I consider.

While glass is technically "greener" there has been lots of debate about the impact of increased fossil fuels incurred around transport, since glass is significantly heavier - considering the insane supply chains we have today where fruits might travel 2000 miles to get canned and another 2000 miles to make it to the supermarket. That's why you see mostly plastic or aluminium packaging nowadays, with glass reserved for "premium" products as a marketing ploy but incurring increased fossil fuel costs associated with it.
posted by xdvesper at 5:09 PM on May 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm old enough to remember this, but I can't find any corroborating evidence; the history of the origins of recycling are shrouded in enough public relations to make any researcher blanch. But if I recall correctly, the ecological movement that resulted in recycling being implemented wasn't pushing for recycling; they were trying to get the government to regulate the production of plastic waste.

I remember this because when they announce the recycling program, I knew that we were never going to address any of the issues coming up with the environment. It was the capitulation to capital that I think tipped things over the edge and sent the US spiraling into its current unhinged mental status. It was an announcement that the government would never again take the side of the people against the polluters. And it was a sure sign that the world as we knew it was going to come to an end; we literally chose an unsustainable path.

Because the activists of the time weren't protesting litterbugs; they knew that the introduction of unregulated plastics to the environment was a death knell. They knew it was unsustainable. They knew it was unhealthy. They were warning us about this fifty years ago. And instead of stepping in and doing the only thing that would work, regulating plastic production on the producer's end, they put together a set of rules which only accomplished one thing; put the responsibility for plastic waste on the consumer. "Recycling is the government's way of telling you pollution is your fault," as teenage me used to say.

As a public relations campaign, it was spectacularly effective. If you didn't agree with recycling, you were anti-environment. If you wanted to help the environment, all you had to do was recycle. Speak up against pollution, and you'd be pointed to all the carefully-cultivated instances where people were recycling the waste in question, all funded by the company's PR firm.

And I think they did this because they had no other choice. If they denied plastic to consumers, their party would be out of power in an instant. If they denied it to the producers, they'd find they had some really well-funded opponents in their next elections. The discovery of a substance as incredibly useful and insidiously toxic as plastic is, in my opinion, more than our species can deal with given the current state of our ability to communicate and organize. So, when a government gets stuck with an unanswerable question, what do they do? They punt the problem down the line a couple of generations.

Which is now. The fabled finding out phase.

So... you do have to wonder if there are any other completely intractable problems that the governments of the world can't actually handle, but are putting off by using the power of public relations. Some big, unsolvable problems that people really want to believe are being handled, though the solutions being offered won't realistically have much of an impact. Some big problem headed our way that governments are telling us is our fault, and that we're responsible for mitigating, though it's obviously beyond our scale.

Something about the climate, perhaps.
posted by MrVisible at 5:46 PM on May 31, 2022 [12 favorites]

Should I be throwing my supposedly recyclable plastic waste into the trash instead?

I think that currently depends on your location. I've read of places which now find recycling too expensive (since China doesn't accept it anymore) so all the waste's going into the same stream, yet the trash service's clients haven't been informed, the company's still picking it up separated, too much bother to let them know (and some of them get so upset).
posted by Rash at 7:15 PM on May 31, 2022

Hey, the US is kind of a dead end, but the UN is negotiating a new plastics treaty, that s a good thing.

In the terminally stupid centrally planned economy we have, Plastic is just petroleum waste the oil and gas industry forces us to use, in order to justify more petroleum extraction, and prevent stranded financial assets.

Look up the latest petrochem lecture series on YouTube from University of Houston.

The oil lobby's plan to keep oil profitable involves forcing more plastic consumption, carbon injection wells and the re-construction of hydrogen plants at a larger scale for fuel use.

Destroy AmSty, save the planet.
posted by eustatic at 7:37 PM on May 31, 2022 [2 favorites]

Hey, the US is kind of a dead end, but the UN is negotiating a new plastics treaty, that s a good thing.

Things that the UN does which do not involve its wealthiest member might as well be something uncle Anthony's bridge club dreams up over its Sunday afternoon tea.
posted by atrazine at 9:55 PM on May 31, 2022

atrazine: Things that the UN does which do not involve its wealthiest member might as well be something uncle Anthony's bridge club dreams up over its Sunday afternoon tea.

Did you mean to say that what 192 countries do, does not matter in any meaningful way? That's quite offensive, to be honest. I hope that that is not what you meant to say.
posted by Too-Ticky at 11:41 PM on May 31, 2022 [3 favorites]

Did you mean to say that what 192 countries do, does not matter in any meaningful way? That's quite offensive, to be honest. I hope that that is not what you meant to say.

1) I usually encourage people to read everything I write in whatever way will most offend them as people enjoy being offended and I want to make people happy.

2) "the UN" doesn't negotiate anything, nation states do that, in this case through the UN. I don't think that's a semantic distinction. Multilateral institutions like the EU which have substantial shared interests, internal fiscal transfers, and therefore meaningful enforcement mechanisms can be said to collectively do something separate from just their member states. I do not think the UN is in that category.

3) Anything done collectively by 192 countries is very meaningful. However unless one or more of the very powerful countries or entities in the world i.e. the EU, the US, and/or China put their weight behind such an agreement, it has a way of staying in the negotiating phase forever because nobody wants to unilaterally commit to it. Alternatively, it gets adopted by a subset of countries and then does nothing because e.g. it commits countries which are not major polluters... not to pollute while major polluters don't comply.

4) The original statement wasn't even meaningful because in fact the US was one of the 175 countries that voted for the resolution to negotiate the treaty at UNEA 5.2 earlier in the year. The US, China, and other usual suspects did attempt to substantially water down the original resolution, let's see whether this looks more like Kyoto or Paris once it gets negotiated.

5) I don't really think that the "good" one of those, Paris, is particularly good either.
posted by atrazine at 5:20 AM on June 1, 2022 [2 favorites]

I despair at how much of everything is enclosed in packaging, whether plastic, glass, cardboard, or some kind of metal. There hasn't been nearly enough of a push to get away from the mentality that everything has to come in a package that has no realistic path for reuse. It's only gotten worse with so many online retailers, so now all those carefully packaged items are packaged yet again in a cardboard box.
posted by wondermouse at 5:44 AM on June 1, 2022 [3 favorites]

atrazine: I usually encourage people to read everything I write in whatever way will most offend them as people enjoy being offended

I do not. I honestly hate it.
Also: I have trouble with sarcasm / irony, especially in foreign languages such as this one. In other words, you completely lost me here.
My question was sincere. Now I'm not sure I should have bothered, and it's now that much harder to engage with the rest of your post.
posted by Too-Ticky at 9:07 AM on June 1, 2022

I think for the most part, after we do everything we can to restrict the use of disposable plastic to only those things it is the very best at, burning it is the most sensible solution

The world banned fluorocarbons after noticing that they were fucking up the ozone layer.

I can see no essential impediment to an international ban on disposable plastics, especially disposable soft plastics used for food wrappers and carrier bags, that aren't based on chemistries that lead them them to break down into carbon dioxide and water after a few months' exposure to ultraviolet light. That would pretty much fix the ocean plastics pollution issue, easily the worst of them, without disrupting any of the existing programs that re-use plastics as a fuel or to displace metallurgical coal.
posted by flabdablet at 11:03 AM on June 1, 2022

Apart from the first point about wanting to offend people, I wasn't really being sarcastic. I really do mean that I don't believe multi-lateral negotiations that don't get buy in from the major powers do much good.

That probably isn't a great way to run the world but I do think it's true. It might be worth adding for context, that I'm not an American saying, "if the US isn't involved, it doesn't matter", I'm actually from the same country you are so I'm by no means celebrating the outsize role of US industrial output in the fate of the planet.
posted by atrazine at 12:33 PM on June 1, 2022

When I was your age plastic bottles were called glass bottles and you had to take them back to the store to get 10 cents refund and you’d often drink coke from a super scratched up bottle that had been used 100 times. It was fine. There was a lot of broken glass around though and once my brother jumped off a 4 foot retaining wall onto the upstanding jagged bottom of a broken bottle and went to the emergency room. Just thought this thread could use a vision of a pre-ubiquitous-plastic world and a gross footpiercer story all at once.
posted by freecellwizard at 3:48 PM on June 1, 2022 [8 favorites]

ban on disposable plastics,

This is got to be the biggest disaster I've seen, when disposable plastics were banned where I live we now end up using "non-disposable" plastics which are at least 5 times thicker and more environmentally costly to manufacture, and we still produce a mountain of them and throw them out because you can mandate people buy non-disposable plastics but they still use it as if it was disposable.
posted by xdvesper at 4:04 PM on June 1, 2022 [5 favorites]

Disposable plastics clearly fit many widely accepted use cases and, were it not for their extreme chemical stability after disposal, would on balance do far more good than harm.

The ban I'm suggesting is one that would be put in place after UV-degradable alternative polymers became available as alternatives to the polyethylene, polyester, polycarbonates, PET and polystyrene that currently make up almost all of the disposable-plastics waste stream.

Even if the degradable polymers initially cost a bit more than the stable chemicals they'd be replacing, it would be far cheaper to retain existing disposable designs based on them than to replace those designs with alternatives designed to be durable enough to support even vaguely plausible claims about re-usability that still use the old, stable resins.

I would expect a Montreal Protocol style approach to the use of UV-stable polymers in diposable applications to have a positive effect roughly comparable to that of the actual Montreal Protocol, especially if it were worded in such a way as to define "disposable" as meaning "evident within field-collected waste streams in appreciable proportions" rather than reflecting declared or alleged or even plausible design intent.
posted by flabdablet at 5:07 AM on June 2, 2022 [2 favorites]

plastic bottles were called glass bottles and you had to take them back to the store to get 10 cents refund

and the fact that you only had to find ten bottles to make a whole dollar meant that an army of enterprising kids regularly did exactly that, with the consequence that the number of empties left lying around in the landscape was much lower than it is today.

Per-item deposits on food packaging, even non-durable, non-reusable food packaging like supermarket carry bags, would go a long way toward helping that packaging not build up in our environment at anything like the rate it's doing now.

Pricing waste plastic solely on the basis of how useful it is as a process ingredient is just madness, because the marginal reward for handling any given piece of it inevitably ends up too low to act as any real incentive for doing so. The people who actually end up paying the economic cost of removing waste from the landscape should be the same folks who choose to toss their Coke bottles out of their car windows instead of returning them for their refunds.
posted by flabdablet at 5:18 AM on June 2, 2022 [3 favorites]

One research review published in June calculated that just by eating, drinking and breathing, Americans ingest at least 74,000 microplastic particles every year. Another recent study commissioned by the World Wildlife Fund and conducted by researchers at the University of Newcastle in Australia estimated that people consume about 5 grams of plastic a week — roughly the equivalent of a credit card. (That work is still under review.)
posted by y2karl at 1:01 PM on June 2, 2022

To paraphrase Michael Jackson,
Just eat it (eat it), eat it (eat it)...
posted by y2karl at 1:12 PM on June 2, 2022

if you don't ingest it, breathe it
posted by flabdablet at 2:10 PM on June 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

Have some more vinyl, have some more PAI
It doesn't matter, we're all going to die

Just eat it
posted by biogeo at 3:49 PM on June 2, 2022 [2 favorites]

I m sorry for bagging on US participation in the UN, atrazine is right that it was kind of a jackass statement. The treaty is a good development, as is all the other actions to end fossil fuels.
posted by eustatic at 7:20 PM on June 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

To paraphrase Michael Jackson,
Just eat it (eat it), eat it (eat it)...

Ummm…
posted by Big Al 8000 at 12:29 PM on June 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

Weird Al wasn't the first to paraphrase Michael Jackson and he won't be the last.
posted by flabdablet at 12:49 PM on June 4, 2022

Plastic bottles were made out of glass, which was the style at the time.
posted by rhizome at 2:15 PM on June 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

Microplastics found in freshly fallen Antarctic snow for the first time
posted by y2karl at 2:34 PM on June 11, 2022

Polystyrene-eating superworms may help develop new ways to dispose of waste
posted by flabdablet at 2:42 PM on June 11, 2022

I like to imagine what the world -- and the ocean -- would look like if companies like Coca-Cola were made responsible for every gram of plastic they produce. Problem solved overnight (either by finding a solution or driving the company under, either of which would be fine).

This is kind of a half baked idea. It's not as if the Coca Cola execs will all get sad faces and cut their pay to make themselves somehow "responsible for every gram of plastic they produce". Any costs would simply be passed on to their consumers. Not a bad thing, you think? Well, not a terribly good one, either. Because what that does is hide the cost of waste from consumers.

Dealing with waste has actual costs. Garbage collection, separation and recycling isn't free, even if it's all going to a landfill. The way you best deal with that waste is to make the actual consumers of these materials feel the cost of disposing of them, rather than trying to fool consumers into thinking they're somehow sticking it to the man and making the fatcats pay for it all.
posted by 2N2222 at 9:02 PM on June 11, 2022