"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....
The Greenpeace report offers a wealth of statistics and an admirably succinct diagnosis: 'Mechanical and chemical recycling of plastic waste has largely failed and will always fail because plastic waste is: (1) extremely difficult to collect, (2) virtually impossible to sort for recycling, (3) environmentally harmful to reprocess, (4) often made of and contaminated by toxic materials, and (5) not economical to recycle.' Greenpeace could have added a sixth reason: forcing people to sort and rinse their plastic garbage is a waste of everyone’s time. But then, making life more pleasant for humans has never been high on the green agenda...."
Writes John Tierney in "On Second Thought, Just Throw Plastic Away/Even Greenpeace now admits the obvious: recycling doesn’t work" (City Journal).
"While finally admitting the futility of plastic recycling, Greenpeace is making no apologies for the long campaign to foist it on the public, and the group is unashamedly pushing a new strategy that’s even worse. It proposes finally to 'end the age of plastic' by 'phasing out single-use plastics' through a 'Global Plastics Treaty.' This is a preposterous goal—imagine 'phasing out' disposable syringes.... Environmentalists’ zeal to ban plastic is far more destructive than their former passion to recycle it; it’s also harder to explain. Recycling, while impractical, at least offered emotional rewards to hoarders reluctant to put anything in the trash and to the many people who perform garbage-sorting as a ritual of atonement—a sacrament of the green religion. But why demonize plastic?"
Read the whole thing. Tierney answers that last question, but if you haven't read his answer yet, I suspect you already know what it is.
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70 comments:
This is more likely to be treated as a reason to ban plastics altogether--something many communities have been drifting towards for years.
Handling plastic waste is 100% possible, just not the way they do it. They try to reuse the bottles. You just need to be willing to spend a lot more energy, to reduce the plastic to its chemical components, a hydrocarbon sludge. Then treat it as the input to a petroleum factoring plant, like any oil that comes in and needs refining.
It may not be economical, but it works fine. You need money and energy. Don't you care about the planet?
Yeah, I read this the other day. The part you quoted is typical City Journal, where those who wish to recycle are hoarders or ritualists. It's alright that people are uncomfortable with the waste of consumption. Right now our choices are: throw it all in the landfill or do the recycle dance. Can CJ recommend another alternative?
Ok, I will take a stab at guessing before looking:
Greenpeace is looking for donations for a new crusade?
For what it is worth, my local recycling organization stopped accepting glass for recycle almost 5 years ago. I figure plastic will eventually be declined, too.
Well don't expect to retire your blue bin anytime soon. It will take a lot more than Greenpeace's heresy to finally get the Left to abandon this beloved shibboleth of theirs.
I wish we would do without the rigid plastic packaging that lasts 1000 years. Costco and Walmart are awful with this stuff.
But really, it's everywhere.
Shared responsibility or "out-of-sight and out-of-mind" policy through environmental and labor arbitrage that are socially justified through myths and empathetic appeals. Meanwhile, there is not peace, and the Green deal is literally flatlining, with forward-looking collateral damage, after trillions of dollars in redistributive change... investment and a blight on the environment.
There really needs to be a bit of revolutionary engineering done on plastic formulations. Right now they are pretty much purpose and function-driven including the formulations that are designed to degrade quickly in sunlight and compost quickly.
But part of the problem is that different plastics can't be mixed and can't be easily distinguished and sorted, to facilitate recycling. That can be improved I think. They could decide on a single color for a single type of plastic, and thus, by eliminating style choices for utilitarian items (secondary importance at best), facilitate recycling.
Another thing that can be done is to incinerate plastic waste and use the heat to generate electrical power. This can be done on virtually any scale - but urban environments would be the best, for surety of supply and minimization of transport. It's been done for years already.
How do you tell treasure from trash? Somebody will pay you for treasure. - Economist
Oh boy. Local government officials have to enforce laws forcing people to recycle. Many people grumble at this. If Greenpeace's message spreads, which is not a guarantee, it will be an uncomfortable position for local elected officials like me.
This is the answer you expect us to have suspected: “plastic bans are a revival of the sumptuary laws formerly imposed on the lower classes by monarchs, nobles, and clergy.”
"plastic waste is: (1) extremely difficult to collect, (2) virtually impossible to sort for recycling, (3) environmentally harmful to reprocess, (4) often made of and contaminated by toxic materials, and (5) not economical to recycle.'"
Ah, but all of that is trumped by the the fact that recycling allows libs to feel good about themselves and rail against the other.
Most certainly we should be incinerating the plastic waste, or adding them to landfills (which is going on anyway as I write this). We've known for years that recycling centers could not keep up with the tons of recyclables coming at them and have had to find other means of doing away with these goods. Why do we keep playing this game?
On the other hand...we do have an abundance of plastics in our oceans and rivers. So even with other means of disposing of plastic, we still have to account for human behavior which, at best, is not very much to count on. How do you get the peoples of Asia to stop tossing tons of plastic into the ocean?
And then there's the air from incinerators pumping out the exhaust remains from tons of burned plastics. Yeah...you won't want to be near those neighborhoods. So, just stopping recycling is not a full answer.
We need an Elon Musk level person to come up with a method of eliminating plastic once used. Isn't there a bacterium that eats up plastic? (ala "The Andromeda Strain").
Heh. I’m in Oakland today. Last night the local news was obsessing over the local goubmints INSISTING that plastics companies PROVE that their plastic bags are recyclable. If not, there will be CONSEQUENCES.
These people are real smart.
Of all of our problems, this is a simple one. Landfill it locally (not halfway around the world). It is not true that we are "running out" of landfill space.
>Temujin said...
Isn't there a bacterium that eats up plastic?<
Um, probably not a great idea.
Ice Nine has two words for you: Ice Nine
Nice reminder on National Sandwich Day: Subway's sandwich bread no longer contains additives used to make plastic. So maybe the war on plastics has already begun and has an upside.
Want to keep plastics, out of the Oceans? PUT THEM IN LAND FILLS!!
Environmentalists’ zeal to ban plastic is far more destructive than their former passion to recycle it; it’s also harder to explain.
Actually, it's EASY to explain. 'Environmentalists' truly HATE Humans, and WANT to destroy civilization
Kate said...
Yeah, I read this the other day. The part you quoted is typical City Journal, where those who wish to recycle are hoarders or ritualists. It's alright that people are uncomfortable with the waste of consumption. Right now our choices are: throw it all in the landfill or do the recycle dance. Can CJ recommend another alternative?
Yes, the alternative is "grow up"
Your "dance" is more wasteful than just throwing it in a landfill.
"It costs more" mean s"it uses more resources" mean s"it's more wasteful"
It's not "wasteful" to do the most efficient thing.
So grow up, let reality trump your feelings, and just throw it away
I'm going to continue sorting per the recommendations on the city-provided garbage and recycle carts. I'm habituated to it.
For some years my wife and I have been tossing raw vegetable waste under the bushes in the flower bed in front of our front porch. It's not composting, it's just rotting. I haven't turned that soil in years, but it neither smells bad nor attracts critters AFAIK.
I started doing this after realizing how much stuff was going down the disposer when it could nourish new life.
Wait! I thought the science was settled. I mean they said it was.
Kate said...
"Right now our choices are: throw it all in the landfill or do the recycle dance."
Another choice might be: don't buy things that come in plastic bottles.
"... Right now our choices are: throw it all in the landfill or do the recycle dance. Can CJ recommend another alternative?"
No, the choice is 1) throw it in a landfill; or 2) pay millions to have garbage trucks take it to a sorting center where it then gets transported by different trucks to a recycling facility where it gets stored for a time at taxpayer expense, and then gets put on more trucks to be thrown in a landfill. "95% of plastics are not recycled" means that 95% eventually ends up in a landfill. Simply throwing it away is much more efficient and, ironically, better for the environment.
The money taxpayers have paid for bogus recycling efforts is absurd. Think of how that money could have been put to more productive uses but instead paid for pointless, wasteful recycling efforts (it's not just plastics that don't make any sense) for decades simply because the Greens were afraid to admit we should stop because people might sour on other recycling efforts.
gilbar said...'Environmentalists' truly HATE Humans, and WANT to destroy civilization
We need to drive a stake into the black heart of "sustainability," a generally meaningless term whose only reason for existence is to pressure us to choose to make our lives worse than they need to be.
My rural Minnesota county sends our garbage to a nearby power plant to be burned. Our county has a contract with the power plant to supply a minimum amount of garbage each month as "fuel". The county receives a payment from the power plant when it meets its garbage quota.
We are required to separate our recyclable waste. The county quietly sends the plastic items to the power plant to be burned. I've been told the combination of high temperatures and smokestack "scrubbers" render the plastic fumes harmless.
Can CJ recommend another alternative?
Yes. I'll issue a report at the end of the month.
"For what it is worth, my local recycling organization stopped accepting glass for recycle almost 5 years ago. I figure plastic will eventually be declined, too."
They stopped taking either one years ago here in Missoula.
So, just like the solar scam and the wind scam, the recycling mandate (aka scam) has been validated as another method for governments to control citizens and enrich selected green grifters while providing no positive economic or social good.
Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose is a conservative state of mind. Sequester that which is no longer viable by choice or circumstance is progressive. Enjoy the moment with "benefits" is liberal ease.
On the other hand...we do have an abundance of plastics in our oceans and rivers.
That's another environmentalist myth, which I ordinarily would call a lie except I believe Temujin repeated this in good faith. Our rivers are virtually plastic free, as are our beaches. You have to look closer to the polluters to find those trash islands, which typically happen off the coast of countries that border the South China Sea or the south Pacific ocean. Even that patch floating (allegedly) between Hawaii and the mainland came from China. Like air pollution, what was once a homegrown problem has morphed into an everybody but the USA problem, for the most part. We do encourage a strong societal pressure to NOT pollute, NOT toss garbage everywhere, and it shows.
"This is the answer you expect us to have suspected: “plastic bans are a revival of the sumptuary laws formerly imposed on the lower classes by monarchs, nobles, and clergy.”"
No, not that part. That's a bit strained!
If everyone would just buy as little as possible and make do with what we already have and be careful to reduce waste, we could just throw out what we must, and it wouldn't be such a problem.
Whatever happened to frugality, humility, and minimalism?
Part of the answer should be "going forward", as in, "Going forward we can look to phase out certain "items" because they can be replaced by "this" equal exchange". For example, those ginormous plastic behemoths that contain liquid laundry detergent? Guess what, I get a tiny recyclable cardboard box filled with sheets of detergent. Takes up about 5"×7" spot on my laundry room shelf. Going forward, work towards eliminating plastic jugs of laundry detergent because it's possible to provide choice and eliminate an environmental concern. Burying everything just doesn't seem to be acting as a good steward of the planet.
Plus, more petroleum product input into the powering tractors, 18 wheelers, airplanes because you can divert from the "plastic jug creation" input stream to the "grow, deliver, feed" input stream.
Plus, what Althouse said. I think as one gets older, you realize that less can be more and it becomes appealing to simplify.
The same green weenies who imposed recycling on us are now telling us it doesn't work.
But what they are really doing is adding to the Litany of Horribles they recite about petroleum products destroying Planet Earth.
Don't be fooled. If cars, trucks, airplanes and locomotives can by recycled, so can plastics. Or else they can be put in landfills. Those images of vast areas of the Pacific being saturated with plastics are NOT caused by us, but by Asian countries who largely just dump stuff into rivers and harbors.
Here in my suburban Boston town, fancy recycling trucks have dispensed with human trashmen (never wymyn, btw) and robotically pick up and empty specially-designed bins. One for trash, the other for recyclables.
Thing is, over time the things you're allowed to put in those bins has dwindled. No longer is any metal allowed, except for food cans. No electronics. No small appliances largely made of metal and plastic. Etc.
And as of yesterday, you can't put out mattresses for separate collection. What the hell are people supposed to do with them, except----wink wink---call the new Mattress Collection companies owned (wink wink) by the worthless relatives of State House pols.
NEVER MIND that it would be sensible to charge people to put out their mattresses for a fee---as we do for old TV screens and computer monitors. Nope. You gotta call someone.
What the pols won't tell you is what those private collection companies will do with the mattresses! Burn them? Break them up and toss them into a landfill?
But...by all mean, let's go back to all-glass containers!! They break, they're heavy, having them all over a house of kids will be dangerous...but....they're not made from Evil Oil. That's what counts.
Don't be fooled.
Ann Althouse said...
If everyone would just buy as little as possible and make do with what we already have and be careful to reduce waste, we could just throw out what we must, and it wouldn't be such a problem.
Whatever happened to frugality, humility, and minimalism?
****************
AA, you are counseling perfection.
Aggie is utterly right about incineration.
Not just plastic, but paper, cardboard, particle board, banana peels, coffee grounds and other combustible trash. Don't bother to sort it. The in-combustibles will settle to the bottom and can then be hauled away to landfills, taking up MUCH less acreage and volume than when mixed with other trash.
A well engineered incinerator can offer what's called co-generation. Burners heat boilers to turn steam turbines for generating electricity. The hot, re-condensed, (very clean) water can be circulated to nearby buildings to provide space heating and hot water for washing. Unused hot water can be augmented with a little chlorine (to keep the clean water from growing algae) and pumped to local water towers. There are military bases and college campuses that run "physical plants" of this sort, all over the nation. Clusters of uses and users are one of the (few) advantages of densely populated cities.
"Frugality, humility, and minimalism"?
Heretic!
You don't have to be Robert Cook or J. Farmer to notice that those virtues are discouraged and deprecated by modern American Neoliberalism, which has captured both our "Left" and "Right" parties to one degree or another.
It is MUCH worse of a pivot than you think.
Greenpeace is pushing to sue the fossil fuel companies for THEM pushing the "myth" of recycling. (This takes it to a new level of "Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.")
https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/11/greenpeace-accuses-industry-of-creating-recycling-myth/
There used to be a campaign about Reducing, Reusing, and Recycling. Only the last R seemed to resonate with people. I'm on team burn a lot trash. It's probably a no-go politically now because there are too many devotees to the church of anti-global warming but it is the best solution for a lot of situations, particularly that trash island in the Pacific. Too many people hold out for a perfect option, when they should just opt for the currently best option, which is frequently the least bad option.
"Our destructiveness has not been, and it is not, inevitable. People who use that excuse are morally incompetent; they are cowardly, and they are lazy. Humans don't have to live by destroying the sources of their life. People can change; they can learn to do better. All of us, regardless of party, can be moved by love of our land and to rise above the greed and contempt of our land's exploiters." ~Wendell Berry
“Today, local economies are being destroyed by the ‘pluralistic,’ displaced, global economy, which has no respect for what works in a locality. The global economy is built on the principle that one place can be exploited, even destroyed, for the sake of another place.” ~Wendell Berry
Plastic is great, but not for everything. When environmentalists get locked into hating everything that elevates us above squatting in a mud hut while we finish crafting our furniture from fallen tree limbs, they lose the ability to make practical decisions.
We need cheap and abundant energy, and that means nuclear power. Then we can afford to wash glass bottles and launder our cloth shopping bags.
Why do we always need to follow their stupid, fairy take ideas to the inevitable conclusion?
Whatever happened to frugality, humility, and minimalism?
Redistributive change, DIE doctrine, and the Green blight.
"
Whatever happened to frugality, humility, and minimalism?"
They got lost on our flight to Davos.
Pretty much everything that it was economically feasible to recycle was being recycled before the shit-head hippies latched onto the idea.
"If everyone would just buy as little as possible and make do with what we already have and be careful to reduce waste, we could just throw out what we must, and it wouldn't be such a problem."
How about if you live small, and I'll live large? That work for you? It works for me.
Isn't there a bacterium that eats up plastic
I read a scifi story once that had, as its thesis, a bacteria that developed in landfills full of plastic. And it spread. Bad things happened. Plastic is everywhere.
I will note that anti-plastic advertising is more and more widespread. We have switched from liquid detergent in plastic bottles because of that. Now we use those dissolving sheets, which I'm sure have other problems that we're just not aware of.
As the article goes on to say: the terrible idea of recycling, rightly criticized but much too late, to be replaced by the worse idea of eliminating all single-use plastics. Reusable grocery bags have many issues, including hygience, and of course no one wants to touch hypodermic needles. Paper straws are a bit too much like Communism: they don't work, but at least everyone suffers.
Temujin said...
....
And then there's the air from incinerators pumping out the exhaust remains from tons of burned plastics. Yeah...you won't want to be near those neighborhoods. So, just stopping recycling is not a full answer.
The burning temperature has to be high enough to break down the fuel completely into component parts. Basically all carbon into CO2, all hydrogen into H2O. Those are the basic structural components of plastics. Everything else that burns can be scrubbed out.
As pointed out by Tommy Duncan said...
My rural Minnesota county sends our garbage to a nearby power plant to be burned. power can be generated by waste. IIf the fuel is free to the power company, it's worth it to them to scrub the exhaust stream.
After burning, anything left is going to have a bunch of metal in it. Which can be refined/recycled. If it's worth it. But in any case, the waste volume has gone way down.
Our local landfills collect methane, dirty methane, that is burned in diesel generators to produce power. How do they get methane? From the breakdown of buried carbon based products, plant and vegetable matter, and paper and cardboard mostly. That breakdown is oxidation of the waste- slow burning.
And then there's what Narr said... For some years my wife and I have been tossing raw vegetable waste under the bushes in the flower bed in front of our front porch. It's not composting, it's just rotting. I haven't turned that soil in years, but it neither smells bad nor attracts critters AFAIK. If you don't overload an area with waste, this is a perfectly good way get rid or organics. I live on 8½ acres. If I'm out working and need to whiz- I don't go back to the house. I fertilize whatever is hit. There's no difference between my waste, and that from the deer, groundhogs, fox, coyotes, rabbits, and rodents of all kinds doing it in my yard. I've said before, in many cases, the solution to polution is dilution. Residents of NYC can't all throw their food waste into the street and watch it enrich the soil. Too concentrated. Any rich suburb with 1 acre minimum size home lots could. And anyone in ruralville can do it.
"If everyone would just buy as little as possible..."
The fact that people might be buying more than you think they should is not proof that they're not buying as little as they think is possible.
"Whatever happened to frugality, humility, and minimalism?"
How does hectoring people for making choices you disagree with factor into "humility"?
"We have switched from liquid detergent in plastic bottles because of that. Now we use those dissolving sheets, which I'm sure have other problems that we're just not aware of."
Thomas Sowell: "There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs."
Ice Nine said...
Well don't expect to retire your blue bin anytime soon. It will take a lot more than Greenpeace's heresy to finally get the Left to abandon this beloved shibboleth of theirs.
The blue bin is for Amazon boxes now.
Ann Althouse said...
If everyone would just buy as little as possible and make do with what we already have and be careful to reduce waste, we could just throw out what we must, and it wouldn't be such a problem.
Whatever happened to frugality, humility, and minimalism?
You first.
When the people that tell me I have to be frugal stop flying to Davos on private jets to talk about how frugal I should be I will start to take you seriously.
I guess I should mention my backyard pissoir, well hidden by vegetation from any neighbors who might be about. Why trudge all the way back inside and use all that energy flushing, and then trudge back outside, wearing out the doors?
Recycling, like abortion, is a sacrament to the left.
"You first."
Don't make assumptions about me. I am doing this. I could do more, but I have been committed to frugality and limiting waste all my life.
"I could do more..."
I bet a lot of people could say the same thing. In fact, I doubt there is a single person who is doing absolutely everything that they can.
It has long been established that plastic recycling was an effort by the plastics industry to make their product more palatable to the public. It is possible to recycle plastics, but it is typically cheaper to make it from scratch. In any case, they successfully managed to dupe the environmentalist movement, so mission accomplished I suppose.
What made this obvious is China refusing to take the stuff anymore, and there was nowhere to ship it.
There are lots of recycling that does make sense, like cardboard and aluminum.
I'm frustrated with the charade of recycling; it's been going on for 50 years now. In Oregon they banned the use of plastic bags by grocers and retailers. I can still get plastic bags for my produce, my bread comes in a plastic bag, oh and, now you can get "reusable" plastic bags for your groceries!
Can anyone comment on glass recycling? My relatives in Western PA tell me that they no longer accept glass for recycling. I'd guess the cost > the benefit.
My one pet peeve in all this is: bottled water. I live in the Pacific Northwest; we have abundant good drinking water. There is no rational reason for most people to consume retail water in a throw away container.
"There are lots of recycling that does make sense, like cardboard and aluminum."
The way to recognize if it makes sense to recycle stuff is if the people doing the recycling are willing to pay for it.
So what do you say to a person one of whose minor religions is recycling plastic, the more involved the better?
Next week it will be revealed that CO2 from burning trees is identical to CO2 from burning coal. Unfortunately, it will be years before we return to the serious business of building enough safe, clean, reliable nuclear reactors to replace all our coal/oil/gas fired generators.
Next week it will be revealed that CO2 from burning trees is identical to CO2 from burning coal. Unfortunately, it will be years before we return to the serious business of building enough safe, clean, reliable nuclear reactors to replace all our coal/oil/gas fired generators.
Ann Althouse said...
If everyone would just buy as little as possible and make do with what we already have and be careful to reduce waste, we could just throw out what we must, and it wouldn't be such a problem.
It's NOT a problem.
The entire garbage output from the US for a year will easily fit into one large open-pit mine
We've got hundred's of those that are mined out.
There is absolutely no problem, other than politicians getting in the way
There is a process that could make recycling of plastics feasible. It is gasification. This is a process that has been around for at least 100 years. Basically, it takes hydrocarbons, whether plastics, coal, oil, natural gas, wood, or yard waste, and converts it to a synthesis gas of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen. And long story short, you can then take that gas and make new monomers such as ethylene. It isn't cheap, but it is doable. Denmark has several gasification plants to convert garbage to energy.
Temujin wrote: We need an Elon Musk level person to come up with a method of eliminating plastic once used. Isn't there a bacterium that eats up plastic? (ala "The Andromeda Strain")
What's needed is a polyethylene depolymerase or at least the flipside of a Ziegler-Natta catalyst. The catalyst would be entropy driven: converting block masses into gasses.*
_________________
The word "gas" derives from the Dutch word for chaos--thus my suggest that the catalyst would be entropy driven. Any other chemnerds want to weigh in?
Consumer Reports, that bastion of communal thinking, tested detergent sheets against liquid detergent. As of this year, they don't work well. That could change. Of course, most people use more liquid detergent than they should, as CR pointed out.
I was sitting with a group of tree-huggers. One man humblebragged about how he found some glass jars in his neighbor's garbage, and the man rinsed them clean and put them in recycling. I asked him why he bothered, since all recyclers just put glass in landfills. It's made from sand, you know, I told him. He looked like I had pissed on his dog.
There is some young couple in Louisiana, I think, that has raised some grant money and is trying different ways to reuse glass. Different kinds have different properties. Some can be ground and used as a substitute for sand. They're not making money, but they're learning what might work, and I'm okay with that.
"One man humblebragged about how he found some glass jars in his neighbor's garbage, and the man rinsed them clean and put them in recycling."
Some time back, there was an article about recycling in one of the California newspapers, including a photo of one of these recycling nuts rinsing out a glass jar in order to put it in the recycle bin.
Washing your trash during a drought seems... silly.
“If everyone would just buy as little as possible and make do with what we already have and be careful to reduce waste, we could just throw out what we must, and it wouldn't be such a problem.
Whatever happened to frugality, humility, and minimalism?”
This might reduce waste by 5 pct at most. Babies still need milk. But it would put most of China out of business.
Burning waste in coal fired power plants is the answer, what is waste? Hydrocarbons, like coal. Why would replacing a ton of mined coal with a ton of waste be anything but good. It’s emotion not engineering, we are going to burn the coal for a while anyway, look at Europe, India and China. Plastic is oil, paper is cellulose. What is the difference. 22 pct of US power is produced by coal in 200 plants.
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