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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
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.
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.
Not really. Consider the fact that most of the plastic in all of the oceans comes from 5 nations, with the worst being China. The other 4, unlike CHina, are undeveloped Asian nations. The 5 account for more than 60% of all plastics in the oceans and about 85% of what is in the pacific ocean.
So obviously NOT a first world nation, except a single second world (china), along with 3rd world (other nations).
And as to CHina no longer accepting plastic and other recyclables, I say GREAT. It is long past time for nations to take responsibility for their own issues.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
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.
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.
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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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:~>
QR doesn't work if you have soft materials or something that could be damaged. Plastic bags of all kinds can fold up onto itself. Paper is the same and it can also tear. Packaging is usually damaged when the user opens it. Water bottles and cans can be crushed. There are simply too many ways for a label to become unreadable after it's gone through the hands of a consumer.
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
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.
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.
Who is doing the whining though? As far as I can tell it's just us first world countries whining and complaining that we can no longer just dump our trash in China anymore. Why was that even a thing in the first place?
Who is doing the whining though? As far as I can tell it's just us first world countries whining and complaining that we can no longer just dump our trash in China anymore. Why was that even a thing in the first place?
Cool story Bro. China kinda took that stuff to recycle in the first place. There were horror stories about computer recycling, With computer reccling being a cottage industry - backyard burning the PVC insulation off wires to get the copper, some horrifying process to get the gold off of the contacts, and in the end the boards were burnt as well. https://www.theguardian.com/li... . There was some money to be made, so they made it. As likely as not, the real reason that China isn't taking plastic any more is because their earlier recycling efforts was so incredibly toxic and unregulated that the Chinese Government, which has been working at cleaning up opllution in the past few years, hasn't found a good way to do it yet, and besides, they have a huge problem with their own plastic waste without adding more waste to it..
But the idea that this is first worlders whining? It makes for a problem when someone in any process stream drops out of it. Just like if a electronic device is all ready to go to build, and one of the component manufacturers stops producing a needed component. It takes a while to find a new solution, and being annnoyed about it is not against the law.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.