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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.
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.
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.
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.