What's The State Of Plastic Recycling?

Does Plastic Recycling Work?

Does plastic recycling work, will it work, or will it fail? 

My most recent dive into the SofTA (State of The Art) of plastic recycling has been interesting. It needs WAYYYYY more publicity though. If you'd like to help please go to the footnote right now and do something about it.

Doomsayers be like:

There's a faction that says plastic recycling will not work, and they could become the right prediction if we let it slide. They claim that only about 8% of the plastic we throw out gets recycled. And they're right. We simply don't recycle enough of our waste plastic, and it's all down to "their fault" - which in this case we take to mean "the people we'll be in the future" - and that's not only unsustainable, it's a lie.

If we can't be bothered to recycle now because it's too hard, then imagine how much less likely we'll be to recycle in five (yep, I predict a mere five years before some serious feces hit the life-supporting ventilating device) years when the temperatures have gone up everywhere leading to more fires, droughts, powerful weather systems flooding some areas and diverting rain from arid areas, and heat that will kill people no matter how much shade and water they have?

Take the above as my prediction, and please bear in mind that I've been pretty accurate in my predictions all my life.

That's one take on the situation. And unless we do something now, that's the situation that'll prevail. 

For those who say that even if we establish mega-staggeringly-huge recycling facilities right now, we'll have to abandon them anyway when those conditions come along and we have our hands full managing that crisis. 

To those people I say that if that's your attitude then we're lost already. 

Biologists be like:

Can we fix it? Yes we can! and they have developed an enzyme that's short-lived (ideal! no toxic residues) and really fast-acting and doesn't need extreme heat to activate. "The enzyme . . . breaks down polyethylene terephthalate, or PET . . . into its chemical building blocks." 

This is more like it, and could result in a circular plastic that can be pretty much infinitely formed, broken down to basic chemicals, re-made and formed again. By my reckoning that would make it some 400 MILLION plastic bottles a year that could be recycled, and a significant quantity of clear hard plastic food containers. Also by my reckoning that would be between one third and almost one half of plastic waste by volume per year.

I say we should publicise the hell out of this article and put the challenge to our politicians and lawmakers to make this a LAW within the next two months - put pressure on. Start petitions, sign petitions, write emails to MPs and Senators and the heads of corporations that produce foodstuffs and package them in PET. 

Cutting one third of the plastic waste is an easily attainable aim and if those corporations do it now then it'll be a status quo within a year, and nearly 70,000,000 tons of plastic won't end up in landfill. Let's face it, even 50m tons of plastic would be a great result.

For anyone that has caught the next obvious thing, which is that even low levels of heating and machinery are going to consume energy, and energy creates pollution, I've two more things to say: One is that dirty energy is disappearing rapidly, and thanks to the actions of people like you and the other readers of my articles, and the actions of many many more people that have been made aware of the issues, clean solar and wind and tidal energy are becoming a significant part of the energy mix. 

Everyone is becoming more aware of the danger of plastic over-use.

The second thing is that, again down to actions by people like yourself, PET is being seen as the 'forever plastic' that it is, and many of you are bypassing PET in favour of glass or other refillable containers for food and drink. That means that less PET is needing to be produced, and recovered PET will be more than enough to keep pace with demand.

People also know that excess PET can be spun into thread for weaving textiles, in fact a large proportion of clothing and other textile products are made from polyester. As an environmental concession, those food manufacturers can be encouraged to donate their excess PET to the clothing industry to make good basic clothing worldwide and sell it cheaply to ensure adequate clothing. 

Now to beat my own drum, a bit. I write articles like this and have done so for decades. (Not always consistently, I had a day job, a part-time job, and a social life once upon a time so my writing in those times was sporadic...) But now I'm retired, have a great family life, and - more importantly - time (and an understanding spouse) so I can devote my time to publicising all these matters. I hope I'm helping, hope people are enjoying these articles.

You can help even more by sharing this article, generating even more interest and awareness.

There's one more thing.

You may also be thinking "but why? Once recycled, that thing just becomes more waste later on." and I can also answer that:

There's no limit to how often a thing can be made, recycled, and turned into another thing. In theory you can recycle almost anything an infinite number of times. But luckily you don't need to.

One, a recycled thing carries its own little reminder to value it more. It's made from recycled materials to avoid the landfill and that gives the new owner a powerful incentive to use it for longer.

Secondly, we don't have to keep a 'treadmill of recycling' going. We just need to help materials avoid the waste stream for a few more years. Why? Because (as evidenced by the "Biologists be like" section above) there ARE answers to each problem and there are now almost nine billion of us, someone will find each solution and once that's enacted there's one less thing going to landfills.

Thirdly, just raising awareness lowers over-use. 

Four: We can recycle more than just PET, and in fact there are enzymes and bacteria being developed that will be able to deal with other plastics, or else mark and attach to specific plastics for easier recovery out of the biosphere. I've seen a post on microbots that can aggregate and tag specific plastics to make it easy to collect microplastics in the environment and they're not that far off either. 

Unusual processes are being found to recover precious rare metals out of waste, and the advent of cheaper cleaner energy will make it possible to apply methods that were once deemed to cost too much energy.

I conclude:

Recycling plastics is easily attainable now and much is already being done, but more needs to be done. In order for it to become accepted, world trade / economics / business organisations should be introducing a tariff on virgin plastic (any plastic with more than 5% new petrochemical stock material added) and raising that tariff steeply every year for at least five years, after which it should remain at that perecentage in perpetuity.

If bioplastics are created that have a life to breakdown greater than fifty years, they too should be included in this tariff. 

Bioplastics that break down within less than fifty years, and plastics consisting of 95% or more recovered and recycled plastic are exempt from the tariff.

And this should start from NOW, regardless if a special meeting has to be convened immediately.

If these measures were to be implemented, plastic waste in the wild would be considered a resource and sought after, and environmental clean-up would become an industry that could potentially employ hundreds of thousand people around the planet leading to a decrease in the number of people living in poverty, and the environment would begin at least some recovery.

Footnote:

In addition to writing these articles I'm also experimenting with ways of recycling waste that can be done at the cottage industry or community hub levels, not so much because it'll magically convert 100% of local waste into recycled useful articles, but because people who are doing these sorts of activities are likely to talk about them to people in their community, and so raise even more awareness of the issues and dangers.

So please - if you can at all spare some time, take a look at my News Stand where you'll see live updated links to everything I publish; And take some time and share the links to the News Stand and this article with your friends and readers. 

Take a subscription to my weekly newsletter where you'll receive the same information; 

Or maybe contact me via the webform; 

You can also donate either directly or at my Ko-Fi page for the price of a coffee, or even make a regular monthly donation there.

All donations are put towards keeping these websites online, and for developing devices, machines, and techniques to easily and safely recycle materials on a tiny scale. I'm working on safely and easily recycling plastics, textiles, fibres, metals, glass & ceramics, and even food waste, mostly to produce something useful from these materials, sometimes to make saleable products, sometimes to make artistic products. 

My Hero Gyro Gearloose

 A Comic Book That Shaped My Life

. . . and I'm not even kidding. My family moved from Vienna, Austria to Bahrain Island, Persian Gulf, Middle East, when I was barely five. We left snowy winter and went to a subtropical desert island not far short of the Tropic of Cancer and my first step off the aircraft we flew in on was almost my last - or so it seemed. The humidity was well into 95% - 100% and to my young mind it seemed that I was surely going to suffocate on this thick, HOT, air I was trying my best to take in.

But of course after a (very) short period of adjustment I was running around like any kid my age and not feeling the slightest bit affected by 34C / 98% weather. And I'd brought with me my favourite things, a pack of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck comics, and my "Mickey Maus Klub" (MMK not MMC, Austria speaks German) pocketbook. 

I believe my parents were a bit of a subversive element in Austria, they encouraged me to read by use of comics, and Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in particular. The subversion comes from the fact that in Germany and Austria, things American were still considered rubbish and not generally encouraged, even though there were German-language versions. So I learned to read German by age four so that I could keep up with the comics, and started to try and write by my 5th birthday. (I was moderately successful - I've always had poor hand/eye coordination to this day.)

Interesting trivia: Carl Barks was the creator of Gyro Gearloose and a whole host of other mainly Donald Duck characters, and one of the more successful Donald Duck creators writers and cartoonists, and was also involved in creating Little Golden Books. (Important!)

And Gyro was my most favouritest character of all in the comics, so much so that I decided that if I couldn't be a vet I'd become an inventor. . .  One of the reasons was that Gyro had "Little Helper" who was made from a lightbulb and various bits. I mention Little Helper in another post and there's a picture of my Little Helper I finally made for myself some ten years back.

I still put him in my pictures occasionally and keep his little metal ass busy (so to speak, he mainly gets in the way) and here he is, assisting. (And foreshadowing . . .)

. . . because - yep - he's standing there in the last two photos showing off what is probably going to become the head of his Big Helper Bro. . . I've decided my LH - who actually calls itself DJ FM Trap - should help me design and build a much bigger (1m  to possibly 1.4m) assistant.

Now to that other important thing to do with Cark Barks: Little Golden Books. 

One of the books published by Little Golden Books was "The Little Golden Book Of Astronomy" which led to my first real philosophical existential crisis, being that I decided to imagine my place in the Universe, and after following that train of thought to the best of my almost-six-year-old abilities, I promptly threw up and got put to bed because my parents thought I'd picked up a stomach bug or something... 

One of the side effects of that was that I made up my mind, and by my first day of school I knew I wanted to be a scientist or technologist or (preferably) a mad scientist inventor. Between them, Gyro and the True Scale Of The Universe made 75% of what I am today...

So Carl Barks has really been influential on me. 

Now - that (mercury or sodium, not sure) vapor lamp was a lucky thrift shop buy as it's brand new and includes a new ceramic base but it wasn't a thrifty buy, so I'm probably going to auction Big Helper once it's finished. Seeing as Little Helper comes from the almost Victorian era style and ethic that was still visible in Carl's times, I think Big Helper will need to include modern era parts but still follow the "scavenged" ethic with only the most necessary parts being 3D printed or made from recycled plastics. 

One of the nice things about a 3D printer is that you can design and make parts at will, and with my RCX-AU project I'm going to make recycled plastic one of the base materials for the conventional 3D printer I have. The bar to recycling plastics is pretty low these days and if a few of the phases of RCX-AU come off, I'll be able to do Big Helper in recycled plastic parts as well. 

A Disclaimer:

I have a pretty full schedule at the moment - I'm trying to keep half a dozen blogs updated with new material with an article per fortnight at least, and generally the process of creating a post takes me between a full day and a week; On top of that I'm writing the programs for machine controllers for the machines; What machines I hear you ask? Well the machines that will allow anyone with the plans and a few tools to recycle plastics, textiles, metals, glass and ceramics, cardboard and paper, and even food - if - IF- I can get on with the R&D process. 

I'm also the carer for my spouse and the main cook and cleaner, and we're pensioners. That's not a hard luck sob story, that's life. You get on with it. But life could be much easier if someone wanted to collaborate with me on researching and possibly writing articles for one or more of the blogs; taking some of my design drafts and working them up into a machine and then making the plans available; or even just donate or sponsor me for some of the work so that instead of having to do R&D only when my limited finances permit.

And I'm not kidding here but one of the ways I currently finance the research is to do surveys online. At which, it turns out my time answering surveys is worth a princely $6 per hour, but only when there are surveys available, which is not all that often. Also, it's time I could more gainfully spend writing or designing or making. Any assistance you give spares me from having to waste time on these surveys. hellllppp! pleeaassee!

So please - if you can at all spare some time, take a look at my News Stand where you'll see live updated links to everything I publish; Or take a subscription to my weekly newsletter where you'll receive the same information; Or contact me via the webform; Or donate either directly; Or at my Ko-Fi page for the price of a coffee; Or even make a regular monthly donation there. 

Fight Household Waste With Home Recycling?

 

Reduce Household Waste By Recycling At Home.

I'm going to talk a bit about how to recycle plastic at home. At your home, at your community, at your town. It's one of the things that I think will be quite effective at a local scale, diverting some of the waste stream and repurposing it. 

And I know that at the sheer scale of waste we generate, it'll just be a drop in the ocean. (Coincidentally, as I'm writing this there's an item on the radio about microplastics in the oceans - and yes, that link is a hint to go donate them because they are still collecting plastic trash at the time I write this, as far as I know . . .)

But it'll do something. Little by little, hub by hub, small local scale recycling projects will spring up and take some of the pressure off the infrastructure. Energy is only going to get cheaper and more plentiful, and recycling will only get higher and higher in public awareness, and before long some clever people will get ideas about using mostly energy-based approaches and suddenly waste will be worth recycling.

The sooner this happens the better - and I've now dedicated all my blogs online to this cause, in one way or another they'll all refer to these sorts of waste / environmental / sustainability issues, if sometimes only tangentially. You can check them out here or just jump in and subscribe to a once weekly newsletter, I promise I'll do my best to provide interesting and amusing content. Meanwhile, back to the article:

We composted our kitchen waste and used that in our vegetable garden. But nowadays quite a lot of it bypasses us and goes straight into our council compost bin. I admit that isn't ideal - but we've recently lost 95% of our gardenable area due to the landlord splitting the block to add a second unit, and so our vegetable raised garden beds now total perhaps 6sqm with a further 2sqm growing in pots and containers, and so there's not a lot of compost needed. 

As it's going to the local Council to be turned into compost anyway so I don't feel bad about it, but I do feel the loss of  150sqm of yard of which 70 or so was garden beds. I miss having the fresh vegetables to cook for us. We made the best of the smaller area (~15sqm but we wanted a livable ornamental garden as well) with the cannibalised raised beds to the tune of five 1sqm raised beds and four strips between them for pots. If we'd had the money I'd have also put some aquaponics along the fence and in the shadow of the house, but we're pensioners so . . . it'll have to wait.

With recycled plastics and 3D printing I'm hoping to (one day when I have some of that precious commodity, "spare time") actually start expanding our grow space with a small aquaponic system around the garden beds. Any and all of which will end up online for others to copy or draw inspiration from. Then some more kitchen waste could be fed to the fish. The thing is, I can also make plant clips, watering spikes, and other small fittings from recycled materials and sell or trade them to complete my setup.

(Important random thought: Don't wonder if there's "a place that does recycling in my area," start one. I've been doing just that and I hope what I'm doing will inspire you to get out there and start a recycle space wherever you are.) 

That's always been one of my go-to things, get talking to workmates and neighbours, find the people that are up for swaps and sharing, and next thing you're trading two bunches of parsley and a kilo of tomatoes for a couple of fresh-caught sand whiting, or a few plant clips printed with recycled HDPE for a left over length of 150mm PVC pipe for making aquaponics setups. And in the process, I raise awareness of recycling and all the issues surrounding it. And I might inspire one other person to either work with me to create our community hub or start recycling their own plastic. 

For that reason I also talk to people about recycling household waste - from offering our kitchen scraps to home composters to collecting plastic bottle caps and nursery plant pots from neighbours and giving them a unique recycled plastic plaque or a heap of plant tie clips in return. The important thing is that we all have to keep doing whatever we can. My blog is one of my ways for me to share.

 

The above are a few sheets of recycled bottle caps (left) and polypropylene plant pots (right) that I melted down in a toasted sandwich maker. (Not used for making food any more of course because plastics residues can be nasty. You have to sacrifice to make recycled art . . .)

Recycling Plastic 101

I've started collecting a few similar plastics from other people, and those flat sheets have made a couple of rather nice and unique looking house numbers. I 3D printed the letters and numerals and bonded them on. Sorry, don't have pictures but I'll remember to do it next time. 

And it's one of the simpler recycle projects you can do, but very showy. If you need to convince people that plastic recycling is useful and attractive, having a few sample sheets like the above is one of your best allies.

I'm planning on starting a hub that does recycling but the hurdles are a bit high, you need to find a very cheap industrial unit with power and running water connected, find workbenches / tables, machines, and of course a group of people to join in and do something too. I need help - your help - with that.

I'm envisaging something like a makerspace, but for recycling. I've spoken to a few local businesses and as soon as I find a place larger than my pocket-sized plastics workshop on the veranda I'll start setting up. For now I'm doing my 'cottage industry scale' research . . .  

There's also the matter of other waste stream materials that could be recycled. With some care, collected plastics can be turned into useful parts with injection molding. Also, some molds can be 3D printed in higher-temperature plastics, making this a completely recycled plastic cycle. I've been researching and designing and all that's holding me back is that I can't get parts and materials fast enough.

Using a home-brewed manual injection molding machine you can churn out several hundred reusable plastic plant support clips per day. Give them away to members - but maybe also sell some at local flea markets and swapmeets to pay the electric bill. You can make keychain carabiners, keytags, a range of fittings and hardware (I've seen one video of making plaster and masonry rawlplugs five to a mold and a mold every few minutes so that by the end of an hour they'd have 60 - 120 rawlplugs that can be differentiated because they're recycled locally and that makes a difference, believe me.)

Make artisan house number plaques - that carry the cachet of being recycled and eco-friendly - and sell those online. If you have no 3D printer for making numerals you can make sheets of a solid contrasting colour and cut the numerals out with a craft knife or a fretsaw then use a suitable glue to attach them to the plaque. 

And another beauty of recycling plastic is that all the scraps and offcuts can go back to be recycled again. There's a free design for carabiner-style key clips on Precious Plastic's Bazar, you can even order the injection mold from them or make it yourself if you're good with a CNC mill.

But. . . 

There is so much more recycling can do. By printing molds in recycled plastic you can not just injection mold more recycled plastic, you can also make molds to process cardboard and paper into useful items. 

With cardboard, paper, and some binder like flour or rice, you can make cardboard papier mache, press that in a pair of mold halves, and create eco-friendly desktop pencil holders, or nursery plant pots that can be buried with the plant when the time for planting comes. (If you have a local nursery you may even come to a great deal with them and have an entire business stamping out thousands of pots per year for them. 

This sort of shape is possible to press from waste cardboard.

With proper support and hard plastic molds you can even stamp thin metals to form parts and fittings and things like keytags. Get that thin metal from tin and aluminium cans, pick an interesting part of the design on the can, and stamp it. 

These are just a few ways to use more and more of the waste stream and stop it before it hits landfills and the water table. And while aluminium and tinplate can be recycled easily at a large facility, there's no reason not to use the resource ourselves, directly, and just send the offcuts on. (Bonus for the upstream recycling facility - they'll receive metals all cleaned and sorted according to type.)

What's needed are machines that can either be cheaply bought and adapted (like the sandwich press I've been using) for purpose, machines that are easy and cheap to manufacture, and techniques and methods for using these materials for all manner of useful and decorative products. 

For instance, you can make a press with iron and wood scraps and a car jack, which will let you press those metals and papier-mache and hot plastics into various shaped molds, and with a bit of tech know-how and some relatively inexpensive and simple parts you can make a manual plastic injection machine. 

An old wheelie bin, some fittings and baskets, and an old pressure washer can make a very efficient and useful plastic washing machine. The only thing that's still difficult to achieve is a grinder to turn large plastic pieces into granule and flake stock suitable for processing, but I have a few ideas ticking over for as soon as I can buy the relevant hardware and do some R&D. 

(Speaking of recycled plastic stock, there's nothing to stop you from sorting, grinding, and washing plastic granules or flakes and selling them to a plastic recycler. It's a legit way to recycle local waste and get it re-used.)

I've also trialled ironing plastics onto material to make prints on fabric, and also used heavier cloth and plastics to make a few light thin sheets of waterproof material to build project cases from. And I bought that sandwich press to make the flat sheets, and as mentioned also attempting to develop a few more purpose-built machines that can be used to recycle other things. 

Just on the topic of cloth/plastic hybrid materials, there are heaps of  design ideas partly scribbled on paper or still locked away in my head that just need me to have a collaborator or two, some extra income to buy machines and modify them, and turn out LARGE sheet materials that could be used as structural and decorative construction materials. Wall and ceiling panels, plates for joining geodesic dome struts, that kind of thing. 

Home Scale Cottage Industry Style Recycling

I have this idea that our waste problems need to be tackled at multiple levels - it's all right to expect corporations to clean up the mess they've left - but you know they won't want to spend money doing it until the very last possible moment. So as usual it's up to us. 

And also, large scale recycling is always going to be more wasteful in the long run because of - well, because if you're dealing with someone else's rubbish and turning it into raw materials for - someone else somewhere else so who cares really? It ends up being "just doing my job" and so it ends up inefficient and wasteful itself. It's one of the reasons corporations are so blase about committing - well, food fraud, for example. 

Someone earning a pittance in a grotty factory in a third world country doesn't really care if the berries that they're packing for someone (that they'll never see nor hope to live even half as well as) have some spots of fungus on them. "Eff  'em, I have a family to provide for" I believe would be the thought foremost in their minds. 

This is one reason I think that 'grass roots recycling' can help. It can take some garbage out of the waste stream, yes. But that's not the primary reason it'll help. It makes the waste problem up close and personal. If there's a local recycling community operating, a lot of people will get up close and personal with waste - and attitudes will change.

It's YOUR community and YOUR region that will benefit, and it won't be done for the money but for the actual results, for the cleaner streets, the cleaner air, the number of things that the waste can be recycled into for making things unique to YOUR area. 

The central concept is a recycle space, an "RCX-AU hub." And even that name is a compromise and a promise, it comes from a Stargate episode you probably know but had to be added to because a) name conflict and B) adding a country code will make it a little bit more local. 

Also, I think being a not for profit is the best way to start because to begin with it'll need volunteers to get going. But there's nothing to stop a group from making their hub a business from the get-go and benefiting from the positive publicity from RCX-xx branding. 

Your work in starting such a space could result in awareness that helps tip the scales and create even wider ripples of waste recycling awareness. Wider awareness could push the zero-emissions date closer by a decade or more. (Let's face it, we should have been divesting ourselves of fossil fuels twenty to forty years ago.) And one of the things I started with - the oceans - are in real trouble right now, don't HAVE ten more years, and could face an almost total extinction event if we don't stop NOW.