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Plastic Recycling Is a Problem Consumers Can't Solve (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: University of Georgia engineering professor Jenna Jambeck said that indeed, part of the reason China is now refusing to process American and European plastic is that so many people tossed waste into the wrong bin, resulting in a contaminated mix difficult or impossible to recycle. In a paper published last week in Science Advances, she and her colleagues calculated that between now and 2030, 111 million metric tons of potentially recyclable plastic will be diverted from Chinese plants into landfills.
Jambeck said that China used to turn a profit by importing the stuff from American and European recycling bins and turning it into useful material. But as other countries attempted to simplify things for consumers with "single stream" recycling -- think of one big blue bin for paper, plastic, metal and glass -- the material reaching China became too contaminated with nonrecyclable items. The instructions to put everything in one bin seemed appealing but made it much easier to do recycling wrong.
Jambeck said that China used to turn a profit by importing the stuff from American and European recycling bins and turning it into useful material. But as other countries attempted to simplify things for consumers with "single stream" recycling -- think of one big blue bin for paper, plastic, metal and glass -- the material reaching China became too contaminated with nonrecyclable items. The instructions to put everything in one bin seemed appealing but made it much easier to do recycling wrong.
Obviously, AI can solve this problem. It can't be hard to switch one of these Go playing AI machines to handle sorting recyclables.
Seriously, now is the time for Robotics to be brought up to speed on separating goods. All metals are easy to take out but then you are still left with plastics, glass, and paper as well as items made from assortments of these (think TV). Robotics can solve a lot of this,with a bit of human labor to act on QA.
BUT, what is important, is to keep the items HERE. We paid for the elements. Keep them here to produce with.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The Chinese Recycling industry was born from the trade imbalance. The shipping container industry needed to offset the cost of return trips to Chinese ports to offset the inbound goods, which depressed the price of outbound trips (like what happens with Uhaul trips out of Florida or into California). At the same time, you had municipal recycling programs with too much trash, so it suddenly became real cheap to âoeoutsourceâ and donâ(TM)t ask questions. The trash ended up in landfills in some other country, but the munis didnâ(TM)t care, they were getting subsidies for their recycling programs. Now that the US imports are in decline, the logistics donâ(TM)t make economic sense anymore, so itâ(TM)s time for the programs to scale back.
The non-obvious solution: stop recycling paper.
Metal and plastics are relatively easy to separate.
Paper = wood = carbon. We keep talking about carbon sequestration. How about burying it in a landfill and planting replacement trees to cycle yet more carbon dioxide in to oxygen?
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Your supposed to wash the trash then find the recycle number stamped on the plastic and put it in a separate bin, by #.
Except, it's not that simple.
There are 8 different types of plastic (stamped with a number 1 through 8). So you need 8 recycle bins for plastics.
But wait, there's more.
Each of those 8 different types of plastic is often custom formulated, mixed with other plastics or other chemicals, that make it incompatible with other plastics of the same number.
And you, the consumer, have absolutely no way of knowing which #7 is, or is not, compatible with other #7s. In fact, nobody knows, except the company that manufactured that particular item.
I *want* to separate my recyclables into metal, glass, paper, and plastic. That's the way I was taught to do it. It takes almost no additional effort for me to throw my recyclables into one of four boxes I used to have set up for these categories, versus a lot of effort for some poor schmuck who has to be paid to sort through a huge mount of mixed recyclables.
My trash hauling service (who has a monopoly service contract with my city) however insists on mixing them all up. If I give them three boxes with the recyclables all sorted, they simply dump them into a single bin on the collection truck. The story they told me is that they pay prisoners to sort it for them, as they found that was cheaper than designing hauling trucks with 3/4 separate bins and making sure the curbside recycling bins were dumped into the correct bin on the truck. (Which if true should make you think twice about recycling old paper bills and such - they go into my shredder now.)
So no, it's not just a matter of people getting off their asses and doing it.