As far as I can tell, the only real "disadvantages" if you can call them that, are:
1. more expensive than throwing the garbage in a big pile somewhere
2. need to clean it from time to time
3. not necessarily a profitable business
Other than that, it can handle just about anything that's not radioactive, can be designed to produce 0 toxic byproducts, and can run at or at least only slightly below energy neutral. Plasma gasifiers can also consume a huge amount of garbage for their size, so much so that the US Navy is starting to put them on the latest generation of aircraft carriers.
Not building out more gasifiers seems to me a failure of the free market. Because it's hard to make it profitable, no one is doing it - when really we should just be building one or two near every major city and funneling all our garbage there.
In theory, we could build out enough to start working through all the landfills too.
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ADDENDUM:
* This is NOT the same as incineration. Plasma gasification does not produce toxic gases vented to atmo, etc. The main byproducts are "syngas", which is mainly H2 and CO and can be reused to power the facility, and slag.
I’m sold. I work with municipalities for solid waste discarding, is there a practical design or reference that we can use ? How about using sterling engine for energy production?
Burning plastic (and all kinds of other trash) for energy, if done well, IS economical/profitable and not much more 'dirty' than burning natural gas.
I think a lot of refuse to energy plants in the US have been shutdown by environmental interest groups and negative sentiment from local residents, etc.
We should first use a lot less plastic in disposable things... but if we can't do that we, should burn it along with a lot of other trash.
There is clearly a problem, but the remedies proposed in this article are absurd and completely ignore the cause of the problem.
Plastics are incredibly useful, fabulously performant, and astoundingly cheap. It is no wonder they are ubiquitous.
If you are poor anywhere in the developed world, you are surely wearing plastic cloths & shoes, eating food packaged in plastic, and drinking water provided via plastic pipes and vessels. What's more, you likely don't have a meaningful choice in the matter. If you are not poor, this probably still holds true.
It is frustrating that there is not a good and clear path forward to resolve this issue... and many other issues of the Anthropocene. We need to do better thinking about how we can help our ecosystems remain viable despite these upheavals.
Its hard to explain how bad this problem is getting to people that don't live near the sea. If you're downcurrent anywhere in the world, your beaches are basically full of trash that gets replenished on a daily basis
I just had my most glaring experience of this ever on a beach that is basically on the open sea - Coco beach in Dar Es Salaam on the Indian Ocean. Incredibly beautiful beach and the warmest ocean water I can remember. And just walking through a foot of water you are basically continually hit with plastic waste. So, sad.
With our current attitude that day's not far away when all our oceans will be dead, just like we killed our rivers, at least in my own country India. At least one country needs to put the biggest offender liable. Like having Plastic tax just like Carbon tax.
How does recycling reduce plastic pollution? It's degrading and destroying the same plastic over and over. You're taking the high-quality plastic that would have sat in a landfill, making it into a lower-quality plastic and then sending it back out in the world. And then eventually... yep, the landfill, in the best-case scenario.
Recycling just increases the chance that it's going to end up as low-quality plastic polluting the environment.
"Recycling" is often a shorthand for any rubbish separation. In various countries now, plastic is separated at the municipality’s order so that it can then be burned utterly in an incinerator (plastic and metal waste are frequently separated together, so the metal can be recovered after burning). Burning prevents even microplastics.
Also, recycling can involve wholly reusing plastic containers several times, not breaking the plastic down to make new stuff. This has been done in e.g. the Nordic countries for decades now: soft-drink bottles are returned to the supermarket at a special machine (so you get a deposit back), then they are washed and refilled by the bottler.
My experience is a few years old and apparently this system has changed, see this Reddit discussion[0]. But 0.5L and 1.5L bottles in Finland used to be made from much thicker and more durable plastic than in most other EU countries so they could be washed. They were then stamped, and once a certain number of uses was reached, they were finally disposed of.
A good point. Where’s the cost-benefit to use _more_ plastic to create more durable products, even at the cost of recyclability?
Right now I’m making a product that should last 10 years outdoors. I wanted to pick PET or HDPE for their high recyclability, but if it leads to a shorter product lifespan (and all the opportunities to drop out of the recycling stream), what’s the point? Our plan is use a more rugged plastic and take back old product ourselves to recycle, only because we have a willing injection molder.
ABS is one of the most commonly used plastics and very unrecyclable, but it might be more acceptable if the electronics in it were supported for more than 3 years.
Your source seems to suggest it's a deposit return scheme, not a bottle reuse scheme?
First sentence in the article:
>Germany has the world’s largest and highest-performing deposit return system (DRS, also known as a deposit return scheme)
later it says
>In a few years, the market share of refillable containers fell below this quota, and so a DRS for single-use containers was established in January 2003.
A lot of bottlers use reusable bottles, thick walled bottles (15ct deposit) that are sold in crates. For a lot of soft drinks and water they tend to be made from PET (because it’s lighter than Glass).
Don’t get me started on the German habit of buying water in crates rather than using perfectly fine tap water
Then you also have thin-walled PET bottles which are 25 ct deposit and one-use. Return rates are rather high because of the high deposit.
The crates are often a PITA to deal with because you need to return them to a shop that sells the same bottles (there are some standards, but some bottlers think a non-standard bottle is a USP). Whereas the 25ct bottles must be taken back from any store that sells 25ct bottles themselves.
If you reuse the same plastic multiple times, doesn't that reduce the total amount of plastic needed to produce the same number of goods, thus reducing plastic pollution?
Recycling is complicated, because only certain polymers can be recycled, then it has to be separated from contaminants, transported, sorted and re-shipped to re-use facilities (often in China). A lot of improvements are needed for this to be both lucrative and effective [0]. Then there's the microplastics that still spread across the globe.
> Recycling just increases the chance that it's going to end up as low-quality plastic polluting the environment.
I don't follow your logic. Say you consume 10 units of plastic per year; if 5 of them are still good to be recycled, and 5 end up in the landfill as degraded "low-quality plastic" (whatever that means), you net landfill contribution is 5/yr.
Why would be sending 10 units/yr of "high-quality plastic" be any better?
In practice, the issue is economic; it's cheaper to produce new plastic than to fix the entire recycling supply-chain.
Until we have a carbon tax over plastic manufacturers that equalizes the recycling costs, it'll be hard to create systemic change just based on consumers' consciousness.
If you're not familiar with different types of social etiquette, then you simply don't know enough to participate in discussions.
In this case, educate. Let's assume that you're correct... you have specific knowledge that could change the way the OP thinks about plastic. What exactly is your goal of participating in this conversation if it isn't to have a back and forth and learn from each other?
Maybe, by actually having a conversation with this person, you could better understand what misconceptions exist and how to combat them?
So the solution is to make more plastic? If we're not reducing the amount of plastic we're using, we can at least make less, by reusing the plastic we've already created. Take plastic conduits, they are mostly made from recycled windows, but still last a heck of a long time, that is going to be the better option than making all new plastic for them. We also reuse plastic bottles all the time, 87% of soft drink bottles are reused and made into new bottles (in Denmark), so we'd need to create a lot more plastic overall to compensate if they where not reused.
On a lower level, having to recycle your plastic at home makes you painfully aware how much plastic you drag into your home. Ideally that would mean that you "buy" more, but mostly you don't have any control over that. Everything is packaged in way more layers than strictly needed. The amount of plastic we have to sort on a daily basis is insane. It has made me look for products that are packaged in less plastic, but it's an uphill battle.
In practice, plastic recycling can be worse than other solutions, like incineration and well managed landfills.
That's when plastic is sent to "recycling" centers overseas, which not only burns fossil fuel getting it there, but may end up in nature instead of being recycled when no one is looking. And by overseas, I mean countries like Indonesia, China used to be one of them but they are now taking the environment a bit more seriously and are starting to refuse to greenwash western trash.
Plastic recycling can make sense in a limited way, but it shouldn't hamper other efforts. The most important being avoiding dumping in in nature.
And remember that plastic is carbon. Burying it where it doesn't degrade is carbon neutral (for oil based plastics) or carbon negative (for bioplastics).
> How does recycling reduce plastic pollution? It's degrading and destroying the same plastic over and over. You're taking the high-quality plastic that would have sat in a landfill, making it into a lower-quality plastic and then sending it back out in the world. And then eventually... yep, the landfill, in the best-case scenario.
> Recycling just increases the chance that it's going to end up as low-quality plastic polluting the environment.
Up to 30% of ocean microplastics appear to be coming from car tires. Yes, buy less shit. But also, shift your life away from cars towards public transit systems, and active transport (bicycle, walk, etc)
At this point whenever I'm on a walk I clean up any plastic litter I spot and dispose of it. I live not too far from some creeks and retention ponds along a local flood plain where I know my neighborhood's storm drains are headed. Seeing so much plastic litter and other pollutants spoil a habitat that once supported a very vibrant ecosystem was sad to watch, and I'm doing whatever small things I can to help. But we need systemic change to deal with plastic pollution.
(The fish died from lawn runoff causing algae blooms as well - please be aware that if you live somewhere where it rains, then over fertilizing pollutes.)
* Take the exhaust from the burnt waste and fractionally distill it to extract the Nitrogen, CO2, water and other safe gasses.
* Take the ash and extract things that are worth money (metals), then vitrify the rest (turn it into glass)
* Take everything else and stick it back into the input, letting it go round again and becoming something safe this time.
1 ton of household waste probably only makes 5kg of vitrified glass - turns out nearly everything in your house is carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.
I suspect the energy in all the waste makes this process "free" from an energy standpoint. But obviously the capital cost of a plant big enough for the worlds waste is huge, and unless laws are written to ban landfills and regular incineration, it would never make financial sense.
By having a 'loop' in the process, anything that is incompletely burned and results in dioxins (and anything with a boiling point under ~1500C, which cannot be vitrified) will end up not passing the fractional distillation stage and will be put back into the start of the process to have a 2nd go at breaking down.
New York City had a pilot plasma gasification program in the early 2010s, but I never heard anything about it after 2015 or so and I can't find any updated information about it. I guess the project folded for one reason or another.
Not disagreeing that plastic is a concern, but calling it one of the biggest threats? I recall it is negligible compared to climate change and expanding land use, which can be addressed by reducing meat, flying, consumption, and increasing regulation, carbon tax, and all the other good things that various NGOs have advocated for years.
The good thing about reducing/ eliminating meat consumption is that it would actually help with plastic as well. Mainly because the fishing industry is responsible for over 50% of the plastic pollution in the oceans. And because you reduce the packaging waste of all that meat being sold.
The recommendations at the end of the article to change individual behavior are a distraction but thankfully the author provided links to three organizations that are dedicated to real policy changes. I clicked through all and found 5gyres.org to be the most promising.
> Avoid bringing in all new plastics and single-use plastics into your home and recycle what you have.
He either lives in a buble or didn't do any research.
There is no recycling of plastic. Almost everything is single-use plastic: clothes, bottles, shopping bags. A lot of things are made from plastic which cannot be recycled: TVs, phones, furniture, shoes, clothes, housing insulation, a big part of cars, buses, trains.
Landfills will always leak. Sure, we can try to line them with multiple plastic barriers, but the reality is that these barriers will get holes and tears in them and let contaminated water out. Sure, we can detect that and dig out the whole landfill into a new landfill whenever the liner fails, but at some point into the future there will be no money to do that.
Instead, we should aim to not put contaminated stuff into the landfill in the first place. Which in turn means don't sell toxic stuff to consumers.
I don’t think it’s highly realistic to leakproof something as large as a landfill - we can’t even consistently leakproof house foundations, and those are smaller, easier to inspect, and higher budget. And that’s for new landfills, I don’t think there’s any way to retrofit every existing landfill to prevent leaks.
It’s hard to know what is practically recyclable even ignoring the variation in municipalities. A good resource for product makers from the actual recyclers that’s a little more direct: https://plasticsrecycling.org/apr-design-guide
its not my area of my expertise but i keep thinking about this problem and comes to conclusion some kind of incineration facility in each county/zone is only alternative. Off course u would not release that dirty smoke to air and capturing and filtration technology should get a lot better.
> I don’t know why all the attention is on climate change
Because it's the largest existential threat human civilization has ever faced.
But perhaps two things can be bad at the same time, and we should stop flooding earth with microplastics without taking away any attention from climate change. There's plenty of attention to go around. It's not like humanity is wholly committed to fighting climate change. Quite the contrary.
I think there is more than enough attention on climate change (it’s constant hammering at this point) and that it is predatory to awareness about other environmental risks.
> Well for example I spend 3 full days a year of training at my company being lectured about climate change.
I can perfectly imagine employees of a bank having to do that for the SRI rating. Then head back to their cubicle for the 280 other days and give loans for mining, road constructions, malls, etc. 99% of the time spent on business as usual isn't exactly being too much concerned about an existential threat...
That said, 3 days is better than nothing at all, and your company is likely an exception.
CO2 based tarifs? Nuclear energy? Us plebeians have zero leverage to have those implemented. It requires international coordination. It’s about the chosen few thus the constant hammering on the average joe is pointless.
Regarding plastics and soil pollution there are very actionable daily and local measures we can take the reduce it. Yet nothing is done.
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Why are we still not talking about plasma gasification? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification
As far as I can tell, the only real "disadvantages" if you can call them that, are:
1. more expensive than throwing the garbage in a big pile somewhere
2. need to clean it from time to time
3. not necessarily a profitable business
Other than that, it can handle just about anything that's not radioactive, can be designed to produce 0 toxic byproducts, and can run at or at least only slightly below energy neutral. Plasma gasifiers can also consume a huge amount of garbage for their size, so much so that the US Navy is starting to put them on the latest generation of aircraft carriers.
Not building out more gasifiers seems to me a failure of the free market. Because it's hard to make it profitable, no one is doing it - when really we should just be building one or two near every major city and funneling all our garbage there.
In theory, we could build out enough to start working through all the landfills too.
---
ADDENDUM:
* This is NOT the same as incineration. Plasma gasification does not produce toxic gases vented to atmo, etc. The main byproducts are "syngas", which is mainly H2 and CO and can be reused to power the facility, and slag.