unspeakablehorror | Entries tagged with plastic

In the wake of countries like China and India deciding (for good reason) not to accept the rest of the world's plastic waste anymore, I have to wonder what's been happening to all the previously recycled plastic waste recently. Is it just being landfilled? Dumped in the ocean? Where is it going? I know a lot of countries scaled back their recycling systems immensely after they started shipping that stuff out of country, so they simply don't have the capacity to recycle most of that. So it's definitely not being recycled for the most part, I'd guess. Even before the recent changes a lot of things people thought were being recycled weren't either because they weren't actually suitable to be recycled or because they weren't properly prepared beforehand (I understand that different recycling plants all have different rules on what they'll accept based on how the plant is set up, but the general public is rarely made aware of these rules).

This is one thing that may be useful for plastic recycling:

https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/recyclable-plastic-closed-loop/

One problem with current plastic recycling is that plastic is such a low-value recyclable due to the extremely limited number of times it can be recycled. However, this new plastic polymer can be recycled infinitely. Obviously, I think this is something that bears further analysis to determine the viability of this technology in mass deployment.

This doesn't change my position that plastic recycling needs to be secondary to plastic reduction and reuse, though. As the article itself says,

While PDK doesn’t address the problem of single-use plastics, still involves fossil fuels for production, and depends on municipalities to develop infrastructure to effectively recycle it, the new material could provide a bridge to a more sustainable future.

Firstly, as stated in the quote above, it doesn't address the issue of single use plastics, which as I've discussed previously, account for nearly half of all plastic waste. It's not clear to me exactly why this new plastic is not a good option for replacing single use plastics, but I'm going to take the article at it's word on this for now. At any rate, if this is the case, then there is of course an enormous segment of waste that this new plastic type cannot address.

Additionally, it also depends on local municipalities to develop infrastructure for it, which to be widely usable is going to create a massive one-time monetary and carbon cost plus any additional carbon costs necessary to actually perform the recycling. There's also the question of how much pollution this recycling process requires.

Still, I simply don't think plastics are going to disappear overnight, and if this can address some of the issues with plastics long term I think it needs to be considered as one strategy for tackling the plastic waste problem.

I was browsing this article to try to understand a bit more about the plastic waste issue:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/06/plastic-planet-waste-pollution-trash-crisis/

I thought this part was especially helpful for my understanding of the issue:

The largest market for plastics today is for packaging materials. That trash now accounts for nearly half of all plastic waste generated globally; most of it never gets recycled or incinerated.

One problem: people get focused on legislation for miniscule portions of that problem--like plastic straws, which account for much less than 1% of all plastic waste [citation needed, though, lol] and are literally lifesaving devices for certain disabled people [again citation needed, but I've seen compelling arguments for this as well]. That doesn't mean that people who don't need them shouldn't avoid their use, but it does mean that we need to put their potential benefits and harms into perspective before determining how to address the behavior of other people on this matter.

We will need much more major changes to make a dent in single use plastics (which I suspect are largely synonymous with this packaging category). And legislation, while it may be necessary in some cases, can't help us adjust to the lifestyle changes that will be necessary if we truly address this issue. For a lot of reasons I won't be elaborating on right now to avoid more citations-needed, I don't believe recycle and forget it is the answer here. I do think there is a role for plastic recycling, but I also believe it has to be greatly secondary to the roles of reduction and reuse in order to make a real difference here.

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