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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.
If it behooves one consumer to empty all his household trash into one bin, even to the point of saving the poor bastard a mere 27 seconds at the County Landfill, some selfish bastard will ass it up for all humanity.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
My life is HORRIBLE. I have to actually look at the thing Iâ(TM)m throwing away to figure out which bin to put it in! Like, paper goes in one bin and plastic in a *different* one. Can you believe it?? And they want me to RINSE OFF THE FOOD before I chuck it! I canâ(TM)t believe it.
To hell with it, Iâ(TM)m just going to put everything in the trash. Iâ(TM)ve flown across the country and looked out the window, thereâ(TM)s *plenty* of empty space out there we could just dump trash in. Weâ(TM)d never fill it up in a million years!
I just suggested that above. Maybe all the AI computers are busy doing other stuff? Very odd.
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.
Why don't we color code plastics by type? Wouldn't that make automated sorting trivial?
By getting rid of single stream recycling, as well as deposits on beverage containers.
The primary recycling organization in British Columbia, Canada, and still sell this stuff to China. Why? Because the level of contamination is within their standards.
This is achieved through a couple of mechanisms:
First, we do not have single stream recycling. People are forced to sort their plastic containers from their glass from their paper from their organics. It's easy, wherever you are in public that has recycling bins, there's always a bin for each.
Secondly, there are deposits on all non-essential beverage containers. Pretty much everything other than milk has a deposit ranging from $0.05 for a 355ml pop can to $0.20 for 2L pop bottles. There's also an environmental tax that's collected at the time of sale, ranging between $0.01 for the can to $0.16 for a gable-top juice carton. This also extends to the stupidity that is bottled water, and so forth, and represents an enormous portion of the plastic waste.
Thirdly, beer bottles are collected, washed, and refilled. Breweries big and small can all sign up for the program, and get clean Industry Standard Bottles delivered to them. They paste on their labels, fill, and cap with custom twist-off caps, and sell to the consumer. On average, a bottle will make it through the system 10 times before it breaks or is lost.
So yeah, it can be done, people just need to get off their asses and do it.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
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.
Different plastics are often glued together. Just as part of packaging. The RFID fucks things up. etc etc.
So what, just an engineering problem...Now you've got an uneconomical, knife wielding, breath detecting autonomous AI robot that's supposed to split plastic junk by chemistry, until it can't cover it's own maintenance...somebody call Michael Bay.
Recycling plastic is a SOLVED problem. Burn it hot (with gas), for fuel value, generate electricity, use the waste heat. Make new plastic from oil. That solution will work until oil is much more expensive, then we switch to plant based plastic.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Sorting out valuables from trash should take a lot of labors, right?
So we have been blaming the Chinese taking over all of our American jobs. Now, the Chinese don't want these garbage scavenging jobs, then my question is why don't Americans take these jobs if they are so desperately trying to win back jobs from China.
Stop blaming others when you are being picky! Hypocrisy at its most ugly form!
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 fucking solution is to burn it all!? Go back and think that over again.
We also need to put deposits on metal, glass, and plastics. If we did, then ppl would actually recycle the main core.
As to paper, and some of the plastics, bio-waste it. The paper comes from trees so not a big deal if we burn it. Some of the plastics can be burned cleaned, or recycled.
Robotics really is here and it is long past time to put it to work on things like this. Esp. with taking apart TVs, Computers, and all electronics. Hell, we sell MILLIONS of iphones. They are ideal for robotic recycling. At he least, crush, and melt out the good elements.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I used to have curbside recycling service. I'd separate my recyclables and put them in paper bags in a bin, and someone would come haul them off. Then we went 'single stream' and for some reason I can't have curbside service anymore. Annoying, but whatever.
So I bring it to the recycling center myself. I used to put my #1 plastic in one bin, #2 in another, and so on. The number is printed on the item, so it's easy. But then there were opaque rules about certain kinds of #1 in this bin and other kinds in that, the formerly #2 bin now just says 'milk jugs' so I guess they don't take other kinds of #2? And now they've gotten to the point where most of it goes in one big bin which I assume just gets dumped somewhere.
They used to make us separate brown, green, and clear glass, but it turned out that all they do with it is crush it into little bits and bury it in a big pit in the landfill, so why bother sorting by color?
The thing that's really discouraging to me is that I'm perfectly willing to participate in a recycling system by putting forth some effort to rinse, sort, and even transport my trash, but why should I even bother with all of this if the 'recycling center' is just an unnecessarily elaborate front-end for the dump?
It's not that hard to do. You simply use a multi- or hyper-spectral camera that targets the frequency bands of the materials in which you're interested in sorting. You then build up a profile of spectral responses for the various plastics, segment out the different objects coming down a conveyor belt, classify the objects using those profiles, and then have some mechanical system that does sorting based on the classification response.
I did something similar, albeit for excavated material. That was a much harder problem, since the boundaries of the minerals and other debris were not often well defined.
For starters, apply a tax to items packaged with non-biodegradable plastic. Exceptions for certain types of products as required. This will encourage packaging to be redesigned to utilize plastics that can be processed along with compost. Gradually increase the tax until biodegradable packaging becomes the norm. For those non-biodegradable plastics that are still required, a tax / refund-upon-return should be applied to assist paying for post-consumer recycling. Adding design elements to make such plastics easy to identify, such as a specific color, would also be a good idea.
Some packaging would no longer be available. Oh well, it is just packaging and does not represent much of a loss. For example, consider plastic retainers for 6-packs of canned beer. We would just have to revert back to a cardboard box - only a small sacrifice.
Note that I am referring to packaging - not final products. Such requirements on final products would unnecessarily restrict innovation. Packaging represents the majority of waste and is where we should start.
Its the workers at the Waste Areas who throw everything in together...need to get better Managers there
Americans really, really don't like being told what to do. It's a cultural thing with us. It's pounded into our skulls by media from the time we grow up. This isn't to say we aren't constantly told what to do or that we don't listen. We do what our bosses say and overwhelmingly identify with hierarchical religions. But that's sort of the problem. In all the major aspects of our lives we have to do what we're told. That means when it comes to stuff like recycling where we're given leeway (since it hasn't really mattered to the ones in charge) we're hyper sensitive to being told what to do.
I think maybe if we had a little more say in the big stuff (Politics, Religion, Economics) you could get us on board for the small stuff like recycling. But good luck getting our ruling class to give any ground on that...
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plastics are hydrocarbons, and hydrocarbons are fuel.
In the future we should design products to be more easily recycled. New plastics and coatings are possible that make contaminates less likely to adhere to it, those may be useful for food containers and possibly medical products.
And I would agree that letting everything fall into the "burn it" category is a stupid idea. But that's not really how this works.
Some steps are not economical, but are environmentally sound. This is a problem if you let the free market make ecological decisions for you.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I'm for that. Every single thing we make should have a deposit on it that assumes it will end up in the ocean. the amount should be the cost to remove it from the ocean. If you manage to recycle your shit properly, then a refund may be possible. If the cost of cleaning up the ocean goes down, then the deposits should go down.
But you know how nobody likes paying what amounts to a tax. It'll be a bunch of money that some government entity collects and keeps and doesn't go to any useful purpose. And that organization will grow and depend on that money until it claims it can't survive without increasing the tax further.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Burying plastic seems reasonable. Just let it bake down there in the sun for a few billion years, pull it back out and use it again. Solved.
Make the recycle information MACHINE READABLE and put(print) it everywhere!
This would not solve human laziness, but it would prevent unnecessary information loss after disassembly with minimal cost increase.
And this would change 'Not recyclable unless I put this fscking mess into gas chromatography - practically not recyclable' into 'Just need more labor, I would adjust the price accordingly' recyclable material.
This would even help 'willing to recycle but confused(I'm not sure if this jell-o top film is vinyl or plastic?)' consumer, because practically everyone now have universal barcode reading device - smartphone.
Raw sorted recycled plastic is worth, maybe, a penny a pound. Is that ore?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Nobody could do the reducto et absurdum like Penn & Teller, and here's their episode on Recycling.
https://vimeo.com/216389085
Haven't heard a better suggestion. Burning plastic is better than burying it. You get most of the fuel value of the feedstock back.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
What about using a combination of AI and spectrum analysis?
What about not not using "simplified recycling"? They introduced that braindamage over here a year or so back despite there being exactly zero evidence that people had problems distinguishing the three categories of plastic, paper, and everything else (glass, metal, etc). As a result, the unified recycling bins are now used as general trash bins because there's no need for people to think about what's recyclable and what isn't.
So the solution to a problem created by going with a really dumb idea isn't to throw tech at it, it's to undo the dumb idea.
I live in Howard County, MD. Originally the recycle stuff was to be sorted by us in separate bags and picked up that way from the blue recycle containers by the county. A few years ago they went to "All Together Now" which meant all the stuff was mixed up together in the recycle containers. This devalued the recycle stream to the point where the recovery companies that were supposed to be able to sell the recycled items as a product couldn't. Most went out of business. It probably sounded great to the politicians that thought this crap up but it made most recycle streams unusable for most recycle processing. Now the county is drowning in the stuff, most of the processors are out of business and there are repeated stories in the local news about recycle material being diverted to incineration and such just to get rid of it.
This is what happens when political people become "creative". God help us.
bob@Osprey:~>
I was never a religious recycler, but I did take the time to sort my garbage into the appropriate bins - at the time, there were three categories.
As a Unitarian, I'm a religious recycler. My town (rural northern AZ) has multiple-stream recycling, but all plastic and metals go into one bin, so an AI would have to classify plastics and separate metallics.
Down in the desert, the city of Phoenix has single-stream recycling, which is currently sorted manually. An AI would have a tougher time doing this classification, but that would save a huge amount of labor and make the operation truly economic.
Phoenix has had several instances over the years of murderers literally throwing away their victims, in the municipal collection. So far as I know, no body sent to the landfill has ever been successfully found. One small advantage of Phoenix' manual-classification recycling system is that when a stupid albeit socially conscious thug throws a victim into a recycling bin, the body has always been found the next day.
Phoenix has had several instances over the years of murderers literally throwing away their victims, in the municipal collection.
Those could be sorted into a general "compostable" bin.
Not really, game theory and visual recognition are two different things. The first has a specific solution that takes a ton of processing and machine learning can simplify this processing, the second is hard enough that humans can't even figure it out some times, much less train a machine learning program to a high degree of accuracy. Machine learning should reach this level but we have a lot of work (and $s) before it is there.
Go and Chess are good because we spent time and effort to make it easy. The computer doesn't have to figure out which pieces are on which spaces, because specially built boards or pieces are used - machine vision portion is off the table. Then they have massive databases that are optimally indexed with positions and patterns - search tree is radically pruned. We wouldn't be where we are today in machine learning with gaming AIs unless we spent time figuring out clever ways to simplify the problem. Why not use the same tricks for recycling?
Want to make it simple to sort EVERYTHING in a recycle bin? Pass a law that says you have to pay an extra 5% in taxes unless you put a QR code on all your packaging indicating its material composition. If you don't want to change your packaging, no problem, you are contributing money to have people hand sort recycling. If you put a QR code on packaging, machines will be able to scan and instantly identify what it is they are holding, and you get to avoid paying an extra tax.
A lot of effort has already been spent writing image recognition software that can read QR codes. Slap them on everything and let the robot sort em out.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Actually there is evidence to show it works - the single stream method increases diversions of recyclables from the landfill to actual recycling. And not only that, but they went away from the old "plastic number" method of determining if you could recycle it and simply name the items - instead of saying "plastics 1, 2, 4, 5 only", you say "plastic food and juice containers that are not styrofoam".
Granted, it does increase the contamination a bit, but plastic contamination is easily cleaned - a little soap and water gets rid of most of it. And that is important because plastic lasts a long time. Plastic doesn't break down, it breaks up - turning into microplastics. It's what the scary part of the great pacific plastic patch is about.
Contaminated paper you send to the compost stream - paper bioderades within days, so even though you didn't recycle it, it still doesn't pollute the environment as badly.
And yes, current systems ARE automated. They use a vision camera and air jets to divert recycling into various streams. (There's also a manual component). This is a field where everyone is throwing everything at automation - enhanced sensors, multi spectral cameras, etc.
If China won't take contaminated paper, it doesn't really matter. Heck, if it ends up in the water it'll break down quickly as well.
It turns out it's far better to chop down easily renewable trees than to toss fossils away - trees for paper are easily farmed and most replanting efforts have regenerated forests all the time. Even in forest-heavy places, you rarely hear much about tree huggers and saving the forests - industry has already developed and practice conservation to the point where it's renewable.
Heck, even the quality of the recycled paper has gone way up - it used to be trivially easy to tell the difference because recycled paper had a very nasty gritty feel to it. Now it's hard to tell. About the only paper product still using virgin fiber is... toilet paper, and that's because it's hard to make TP with the right properties of softness and strength using recycled fiber. You can get fully recycled TP, but yeah, it's nasty stuff still.
They could easily. In Germany recycling is something of a national pride thing. Everyone recycles and those who don't are broadly considered low lifes and are sometimes even publicly shamed, whether they look like a bum or wear a tie and suit.
Collecting bottles is a thing for lowest income people and the homeless and it adds a strange sort of social integration. People leave their bottles standing next to the rubbish bins (which are often recycling bins) do that those who need the few cents can pick them up without having to go through the garbage.
Everyone, and I mean everyone serrates paper from organic from plastic waste. Even the kids learn it in school.
Truth is, Germany could go from this to a near zero waste society in a matter of months and not even skip a beat because of this broad spanning awareness.
So recycling is a thing consumers can easily solve, they just need to be aware of it. This is by and large a environmental awareness thing and in Germany lefties/greens and conservatives are pretty much on the same page with this issue.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
In another place in the Nordic countries, the bins are common to the housing unit and a bin lorry comes and empties them. No need to push anything yourself!
And yes, some people sort their rubbish wrong even here.
No the metal can be automatically separated from the plastic using electromagnetism. Firstly remove all the ferrous metal with a large electromagnet. Secondly remove all the none ferrous metal from the plastic using electromagnetic induction which makes the metal magnetic and can then be removed magnetically.
Recycling plastic is a SOLVED problem. Burn it hot (with gas), for fuel value, generate electricity, use the waste heat. Make new plastic from oil. That solution will work until oil is much more expensive, then we switch to plant based plastic.
And all the time we are releasing copious quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere. What you are describing is not recycling, it's polluting. It would be much more effective to ban single use plastics packaging and the likes and then require any replacements to be either recyclable or easily biodegradable.
And you fell into the trap of not knowing what you saw. Modern recycling trucks have separate holding tanks but just one chute which direct the contents of your bins into the correct holding tank.
What you say has been repeated so many times it has become an urban legend by now.
I work at a big call center and we have a cafeteria downstairs. They used to have labels on the various disposal bins: Trash, Recycling, composte.
All the bins were filled with the exact same stuff. No effort was made to sort by anyone (except uselessly I usually did).
Now they literally put big pictures next to all of the bins of what should go into them. They still look exactly the same on the inside though. I see people walk up, looking at the giant pictures the whole way, then just toss everything in whatever bin is closest to them.
Aside from us already having 4 separate bins in the kitchen and one for glass in the garage, I'm all for a bit more separation. However, I'd suggest some legislation to:
- Mandate that all plastic packaging for a single product should be a single type of plastic (so a bottle with a different type of lid is out, for example)
- Mandate that the type of plastic be permanently inscribed on the plastic in some way and should occupy (say) 10% of the total area of the plastic
- Plastic products must have the type of plastic(s) permanently inscribed on them somewhere too so we stand a chance to take 'em to bits and put the pieces in the right bins
That way, us 'normals' stand a chance of actually putting things in the right bins (and gives some hope to sorters for those still using mixed bins). As things stand today, we don't even know which plastics can go in the recycling and which can't - we know the microwavable plastics can't, but what about the 'takeaway' sort of plastics? What about broken tupperware or the kids plastic cups and plates? Honestly, I couldn't tell you - so it all tends to go in, vaguely hoping someone else will sort it out for us. That may not be "right", but realistically, how do we do better?
And what about sorting at the recycling center? Can nobody come up with a process to sort out problematic material at the recycling center?
Recycling is good. But let's face it, if you add to many steps to what would otherwise be just dropping something into a can, people won't do it. If you expect people to wash their trash, remove any labels, check for markings and carefully separate it instead of just throwing it away, you will be disappointed. That's like expecting people to do the entire Thriller dance before taking a leak - making something incredibly fast and easy more complex and time-consuming than people are generally willing to put up with.
Expecting the consumer to do it is pointless. There's no way you can have a system of the consumer carefully sorting and separating materials, without mistakes or laziness. And expect it to work.
I'm not sure what the answer is (Wall-E? Robots maybe?) but this ain't it.
I would imagine plastic waste would make excellent fuel for incinerators. i doubt the incinerator would care if it's number 2 or number 8, it's all hydrocarbons.
AI and Robotics take time to make. America has an excess of H1B engineers. Offer them citizenship in exchange for sorting garbage. These are all geniuses, the incentives offered should reduce project turn around time.
> "... 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"
Baloney - it's about their costs based on how they set up their operations. Take plastic bags for example - these CAN be recycled but they have so much trapped air it makes the process less efficient and less profitable. So they throw it in the dump and this is why only something like 10% of all plastic is recycled.
Suggestion: dump it all into a pyrolytic chamber and boil off the plastic to oil. Leftovers are carbon black plus whatever really was not recyclable.
I guess I agree with the OP - consumers can't/won't solve this. Bring on the garbage-sorting robots!
Plastic recycling is a problem that can't be solved by markets. Environmentalists need to put their money where their mouth is and stop trying to convince people recycling can be profitable. Tax your community to pay for it, or stop requiring them to waste their time with bins.
You burn the plastic now, and burn less fossil fuels now.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You're assuming that the plastic burning will be limited only to situations where fossil fuels have to be used, as opposed to situations where the energy could come from a renewable source. I don't think that's a safe assumption.
But even within those limits, you're still using a refined product where a less refined product (e.g. diesel) would do, and giving up all the energy that went into refining it. So if the future recycling process is based on using heat to break down the plastic into shorter chains, then yes, it's probably approximately break-even, but if the future recycling process can take advantage of those longer polymer chains in any way, then you're wasting a considerable amount of energy. Admittedly, the assumption is that when oil becomes that scarce, the power to do the repolymerization would not come from oil, so I guess from an environmental harm perspective, it's still a break-even, but only if there is no environmental harm from that future energy source (either in the energy production itself or in building the equipment needed to produce it).
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One of the reasons to use simplified recycling is that on the front end multiple streams is more expensive. I live in a townhouse and keeping two separate containers is space expensive. I don't know where I would keep two more.
Then there is the municipal cost four containers instead of two, four trucks for pickup or trucks with more complicated pickup mechanisms. I don't know about where your at but where I'm at the refuse truck operator never leaves the truck. They hook the can and dump it using a pick up mechanism.
Plus none of this really gets to the problem. Consumers don't understand what is recyclable and what is not. They don't understand because suppliers are not require to clearly label their product packing to identify recyclable packages from those that are not.
The solution starts with a national or international standard for labeling recyclable plastic packages and items. Next comes a federal regulation (at least in the U.S.) setting a goal to meet the standard and offering incentives of some kind to encourage meeting the standard, such as only paying full diary subsidies to companies that meet recycling standards, etc. Most states already require tire recycling, etc.
If we can make recycling simple enough there's money to be made here. Why let China make it?
So people knew this was happening, sent the trash anyway, and are now whining that they can't keep doing it and have to deal with their own waste like they should have been doing all along?
No one is whining. except perhaps some reporters looking for a catchy headline. - This is a simple case of China declaring they won't take the waste any more, so the rest of the world needs to find a different solution. And they will find a different solution.
as they say iin the old country - No friggin' big deal.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
That's a fault of the county landfill. The fuckers here (TN) are only open 3 days a week from 8-10am and 4-6pm and they charge you money to dump it. No idea where the hell you live that you can dump your trash in 27s (I'm sure that was just hyperbole). Dumping my trash is what my fucking taxes are for, I'm not paying twice. I already have a personal use for my print paper & cardboard stuff (I make fuel logs) so since there's no identifying info in my trash, I ride my 4 wheeler with trailer down there at 1am when I get off work, and pile it all right at the front gate in the middle of the driveway where the trash panda can't even pull his truck in to open it. I usually leave a note taped to the outside telling them exactly why that's being done. If I have just a bag or 2 then I'll driveby fling it over the fence. They ain't said shit, haven't fixed shit, and don't give me any shit. Again, this is all the dump's fault. Just 12 years ago every dump in the county was open all day every day. Many had an attendent during daylight. Changing that was just some arbitrary decision some committee made.
This is completely besides the actual recycling argument of TFA. If these redneck sumbitches can't even run a dump, there is no way adding recycling to it is gonna go any better. The best we have is metal in this bin, cardboard in this bin, everything else over there, and don't even fucking think about leaving wood or wood products.
Thier lack of competency does not demand care on my part.
I see your old mattress on County Rd E, (for everywhere), since the fucking dump can't abide your schedule.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway