We all know at least one story about plastic waste - being stockpiled instead of recycled, filling landfills, piling up in great drifts in alleyways, choking oceans and waterways. But what about some good news stories?
My State of Victoria in Australia is just the tip of an iceberg, with more and more governments taking action on waste. These actions aren't always successful, but let's not always point to the nature of government as being the reason things don't work out as planned. It's not always "isn't it droll how if you want to bring something to a standstill, just get the government to do it?" - often it also needs the populace to pitch in and do something.
Recycling is not "broken."
Don't fall for the story that plastic recycling "is broken." Sadly, our national broadcaster ABC has joined the wailing chorus of voices that claim plastic recycling is broken. It isn't broken per se. It's been quite deliberately broken. It's been belittled, and beset with imaginary problems and pitfalls, by the one cartel that has the most to lose if we stop making so-called "virgin plastics," the cartel of the petrochemical and fossil fuel industries.
Don't forget that as electric vehicles make dents in the consumption of fossil fuels, the Fossil Fuel Cartel will lose all that lovely profit, all that shareholder value. There won't be much else left for them except the dirty process of breaking petroleum into hydrogen and pollutants. Their back is to the wall already and the firing squad is loading their rifles. They are desperate for one more suck at the tiddy, and recycling would wrench that away from them.
You'll notice that the other recycling industries are all steaming along at a great rate - aluminium used in manufacturing is almost all recycled despite the large amount of engineering and energy and effort that has had to be made to get it there. That's because aluminium dug from the ground and then smelted from virgin bauxite ore costs more than recycled aluminium.
Glass is recycled without a quibble, too. While it's easy enough to make new glass basically from sand, there's a little balance here. The building industry needs "sharp" sands, sands that aren't worn smooth by weathering. Round sand grains produce dangerously weak concrete. And guess what? Grinding up glass produces lovely sharp new grains of sand. Glass itself doesn't care if it's made by melting sharp or smooth sands.
Some things such as the repeated claims that mixed plastics are the biggest impediment to recycling plastics are right - and also wrong. Yes, plastics need to be sorted into their respective classes in order to produce the best quality recycled plastic. It's often said that we "can't afford the manpower to sort those mountains of plastics" but that's not true.
If we assigned an actual value to recycling plastics and, you know, saving the bloody planet, then we'd have a metric shit-ton of money to throw at people and the actual jobs at recycling plant would have a lot of prestige and kudos attached to them. (And a commensurate wage, too...)
But that needs us - you, me, the person over there - to realise how important recycling and recovering waste plastics is to us, to our kids, to the other living beings on the planet, and to the planet itself.
The best way we can raise that awareness is to share posts like this. The second best way is to use the links in the image below to support me so I can increase the reach of my blog posts. The absolute best way would be to do both...
There are already machines that can sort 10,000 to 100,000 pieces of plastic automatically, autonomously, without any human intervention needed. They can even sort each type of plastic into colours.
We have machines that can wash, grind, and wash again all the nicely-sorted plastics into factory-ready stocks of pellet plastic. We can similarly find ways to run autonomous loaders and dumpers that can handle that plastic waste from delivery to those machines, and then from the output of those machines to specific containers for shipping to those factories.
You know how plastic is such a problem because it doesn't break down? That's also the reason it can be recycled and reused multiple times over. And the reason we're not recycling it over and over is pure obstruction and opposition.
Please help raise that awareness.
And is mixed plastic really that bad?
Most of the time, you're looking for a particular set of properties in a plastic, I agree. And for those times, well-sorted plastic recycle product is important. But there are also some uses for plastics that are less demanding.
Some uses for mixed plastic have been things like the entrepreneur in Africa who's turning mixed plastic and sand into paving bricks. I agree, there's still going to be wear and tear and more microplastics abrading off those bricks, but nowhere near as much as the bucketful of thin plastic that it's made from abrading - on the one hand you have several square metres of plastic bags and takeaway containers exposed to weathering, on the other, all that plastic is now encased in a shell. Still a bit of surface area to abrade, but reduced by a factor of several hundred. And there's sand and other hard material, prevent shoes and wheels from getting even to the outer layer of plastic to abrade it'
Similarly, some mixed plastic waste is melted and extruded into large beams and sheets for constructing non-structural things like park benches and tables. Again - yes there's a surface area that will abrade slowly, but once again the huge surface area of the plastic waste that went into has been reduced by many hundredfold.
And one reason for mixed plastics is
the manufacturers of those plastics themselves. They need this additive and this plasticiser and that congener, to produce a very specific set of qualities in the resulting plastic. Now that is a danger in plastics, and just by seeing that these additives have been used so irresponsibly and haphazardly you can see that the plastics industry never once had a serious concern that they'd ever have to pay to clean up their own mess.
Such contaminated plastics can also be detected by those sorting machines and directed to a different pile, the one that I like to call the "kill it with fire" pile. At the moment, burning plastic for energy is all the rage - it's still technically fossil fuel after all - but of course it also produces as much pollution ad coal and oil and petroleum fuels. "Clean green incineration" is currently just so much greenwash.
But as other sources of energy take over from fossil fuels, we'll find that energy will become inexpensive, possibly even considered a civic responsibility governments will once again have to step in and provide. And when it does, extreme high temperature incineration will become possible, to really truly burn plastic with fire. There are no more toxic fumes when the incinerating arc is hot enough to also burn all the fumes to a fine dusting of carbon too...
Now I'm going to present
a number of good news stories.
One organisation has done more to change our perception of plastic waste than any other government or organisation in the world. That organisation is of course Precious Plastic. I've just linked their Youtube channel because the links to their website and the websites of the other sub-projects they've spawned are right there for you to follow. And their channel is full of positive examples, education, and technical details for those who want to get a grounding in plastic recycling and then get involved.
Here's a report by PreshPlas detailing how their many small projects and branches around the planet have made a difference in the amount of plastic waste. It's still not enough but it does show how we CAN make a difference, and a very positive one at that.
I cannot stress enough how great a result that is! And it just needs you to share their video. And this post.
I myself have done some small research projects in plastic recycling and re-use, and I'm still recycling when I get time, and developing new uses for the new products from the recycling processes. And I'm only following the leads of groups like Brothers Make and then applying my own inimitable brand of pretzel logic and developing other ways to recycle, ways to re-use the products I recycle, and hopefully also inspire more people to "have a go ya mug" as we say.
My hope is that one day we may find it difficult to find petrochemicals to make virgin plastic from. We may get over our bullshit fixation on "convenience" and realise that things are meant to be made to last not thrown away and that our needs for plastic products will be met by bioplastics and mycelium.
The best way we can raise that awareness is to share posts like this. The second best way is to use the links in the image below to support me so I can increase the reach of my blog posts. The absolute best way would be to do both...
I've deliberately not added any of my eyecandy graphics to this post because I'd like to be focused on the message, and that message is that we ALL need to get involved and we ALL need to have this conversation with other people and we should ALL consider helping me to get my page views on posts like this one up by sharing it.
(And I'm sorry, I know some posts have a "Share" button that does this automatically but I've looked for a way and so far not found one I can implement here. Which is where donations are super helpful because I can pay someone to actually make a Share button for me, among all the other things which need money. You know I'll keep looking for a piece of code to do this that's also simple enough for me to "get it" and implement it but life as a retired pensioner doesn't leave as much free time as you might imagine if you have a spouse and pets and blogs and a hobby and a garden as well as a day to day life. So any and all help is always welcome.)
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