Posted on 11/02/2022 5:27:39 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Even Greenpeace has finally acknowledged the truth: Recycling plastic makes no sense.
This has been obvious for decades to anyone who crunched the numbers, but the fantasy of recycling plastic proved irresistible to generations of environmentalists and politicians. They preached it to children, mandated it for adults and bludgeoned municipalities and virtue-signaling corporations into wasting vast sums — probably hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide — on an enterprise that has been harmful to the environment as well as to humanity.
Now Greenpeace has seen the light or at least a glimmer of rationality. The group has issued a report accompanied by a press release headlined “Plastic Recycling Is A Dead-End Street — Year After Year, Plastic Recycling Declines Even as Plastic Waste Increases.” The group’s overall policy remains delusional — the report proposes a far more harmful alternative to recycling — but it’s nonetheless encouraging to see environmentalists put aside their obsessions long enough to contemplate reality.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Buy everyone a Brita (or similar) water bottle. Can’t stand seeing those nasty bottles everywhere.
If there is too much plastic waste, stop making disposable plastic objects. People buy what is available.
What’s wrong with tap water?
Tastes bad. Smells bad. And has carcinogens in it.
Yeah, screw food safety - that's the ticket.
I contribute my #2 plastics at a bin near my supermarket. What kills me is that the bins are often overflowing with plastics which are not recyclable. Polyethylene is almost infinitely recyclable, but the economics go to hell if it has to be sorted out from the waste.
So it goes.
Were you at Camp Lejeune? /s
Well, from the perspective of a packaging engineer (look at my username), it is more viable to heat the trash until it becomes a gas. With this you can create synthesis gas.
With synthesis gas you can make all sorts of plastics, chemicals, etc.
In the old days the British steel industry would heat up coal for coking. During the process the coal would outgas. Then the gas would be sold off as “town gas” to power lights (think the old Charles Dickens days). Same principle.
Metals and glass would remain and could be separated out because they have a higher melting point than coking temperatures (600 degrees Celsius or so).
I didn’t think of this myself, it was part of one of my packaging classes and is an active area of research. That’s about all I know of it because my area is healthcare packaging, not recycling.
Mine is well water at 720’ deep.
Sorting the plastics by the users wastes their time without compensation.
Why should the average person donate their time so that recyclers can make a profit?
I tried in a challenge from my daughter to have a “no plastic month”. It was almost impossible. I did learn quite a bit though. I’ve compromised with repurposing as much as I can. I use glass canning jars for everything now. Just try to buy mayonnaise, ketchup, pancake syrup, milk, coffee beans, etc... without plastic or plastic lined packaging.? I found if you make everything from scratch yourself it’s almost doable.
Well DUH!
Only took how many decades for this to come around again?
There is an answer that works, but it does not make much of a profit despite being so effective in reducing landfill mass.
It turns plastic and other trash into a light oil, and we all know that anything which produces oil is evil. /s
The secondary products are nearly elementary pure minerals.
It is proven tech which may or may not emit a “Burning hair” odor.
It is called Thermal Depolymerization.
If the Eco-Nuts really wanted to clean up the planet they would be pushing to subsidize this instead of landfills.
But, OIL! = EWWWWW!
“Polyethylene is almost infinitely recyclable, but the economics go to hell if it has to be sorted out from the waste.”
Perhaps some of the able bodied people on the dole could be put to work processing plastic in return for their Section 8 housing, SNAP, and other benefits.
If it is water supplied by a city it is likely full of stuff not fit for human consumption-starting with fluoride and enough chlorine to smell like a pool. I live in a rural area and share a small water system with 15 other people-it is actually a deep communal well and the water is sweet and clean-I still put my drinking water through a purifier, but that is just a habit of mine...
Now that was funny!! Lololol 😂
LOL!
Nope, camp Biden !!
That deep well water would be fine. My parents farm had a deep well and that water was actually good tasting.
Some day, centuries from now we'll be mining old garbage dumps, unless we've gotten off this rock, and are mining asteroids.
At the small farm my Dad helped develop & managed for a while, there was not usable well water (without heavy treatment) at any reasonable depth. He and the owner gave up and depended on large (10 gal?) containers for drinking water, washing dishes, etc. They constructed a pond for light irrigation, and separately collected & stored rain water for water to the toilet & shower.
OTOH, my family has a shallow well and our water is quite good except after very heavy rains. So, we store some too.
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