Do You. (Doing Recycling.)

I know - easier to say that than do that. And it's only a part of the waste problem. But it's gotta start somewhere.

This is an article with a lot of links. They all open in a new tab so you won't lose this page. They're mostly links to videos because the concepts are best shown in video essay formats, and you'll end up down a rabbit-hole and possibly spend weeks afterwards following up the further rabbit-holes these videos will present. All I can say is "I hope so. I fervently hope this shows you how recycling can help you and your community and your country and your planet. This is the way." 

The Trash Tripod: 

Reduce, Re-use, Recycle. 

Reduce our use of plastic, re-use where we can't avoid it.
Especially one-shot plastic. Ask for your coffee in your own permanent mug/cup. Carry a few pieces of opp shop (thrift shop) cutlery and refuse the plastic kind. Or keep the first plastic (or bamboo *see Note 1) cutlery you get and re-use the heck out of it. Take your own containers to take-away places. Take a refillable long-lasting thermos for drinks. 

You'll find this is less than welcome in some takeaway restaurants/fast food places. My advice is to stop using them, is that superduper vindaloo really worth it? I'd also take a moment to note that they "don't accept re-use practices" on your food review app of choice. Activism is the ONLY way any company or corporation will take notice of you. If you hit their bottom line.

(We often take a small hamper in the car with us that has enamelled plates, bowls & lids, basic cutlery and a couple of car mugs with lids. When I was still in the workforce I'd take leftovers for lunch in similar re-usable containers with lids, and brought my own cutlery and coffee mug every day. This is how you start seeing how much single-use plastic and crap is foisted on us every day. Even at the start of the century I was appalled at this, and I'm still offended at how few alternatives we have to this day.)

For takeaway places I'd recommend even something like a set of old takeaway containers (one of our noodle places has these hard white plastic bowls and lids - they're easy to clean, seal well, and last for months if you look after them) they're still a single-use plastic, but this gives them several dozen more uses before they finally have to go out, in the process saving you from using that many other, new, single-use containers. And any reduction in personal use of plastics is a gain for the environment. 

Similarly, it's hard to find bread that isn't in plastic. Maybe re-use those bags to carry fresh fruit, veg, and other groceries from the market or store a few times, then use them one more time as a bag for collecting together a whole pack of soft plastics for recycling. 

Remember that if you do have to accept a single-use plastic, be aware that it can be re-used several times thus reducing a few subsequent single-use plastics. The more often and for longer, the better. Or you could try recycling things for yourself. Read all the way down, it's far easier than you think. 

So actually the "tripod" should be just two broad categories:

Replace/Reduce/Re-use, or Recycle/Revert/Re-create.

I'll get to the last two terms in a bit. So for now that leaves:

Recycle the rest. 
In my mind I have a special place reserved in Hell for The Fossil Fuel Cartel (The "FFC" to me) who are maligning recycling and making it seem so awkward and clumsy and wasteful and expensive that even our governments are wholesale swallowing the bullshit propaganda. You need to know that this is propaganda and that recycling has become extremely easy and profitable this century.

RECYCLING BECAME A SOLVED AND 
EASY PROCESS LONG  AGO.

Dr Furgatroyd urges you to watch as many videos
as it takes to demonstrate how easy recycling actually is.

 

Recycling is actually easy.

(Also, here come a lot of links...)

I watch Insider Business and a few other channels on Youtube. They may have "Business" in their name but they produced some great videos of stuff being recycled. I featured [ this series |  of three | great videos ] of recycling projects in an article each about a year ago and they already weren't exactly hot news scoops at the time those videos were made. 

Also, watch [ some | of these | videos | about | Precious Plastic ] style of recycling. PreshPlast have been working on open source recycling machines for over a decade and have inspired others like Brothers Make as well. 

And here we come to the reason I say that recycling has been quite deliberately framed as a hard problem. In Australia recently we've had a company called REDcycle go belly-up and leave ten to fifteen thousand of tons of plastic bags stuck in warehouses and buildings in Australia. 

Making the easy seem impossible.

REDcycle founder Liz Casell says that a fire in the one factory recycling the soft plastics caused the backup and yet also there's mention that the material the factory was turning soft plastic bags into wasn't selling. You get why there wasn't a flood...

(Okay - that's a reference to a really bad joke that goes like: A businessman arrives at a fairly upmarket resort in the Bahamas to find two other businessmen also there. They get to talking and he asks the other two how come they're here enjoying such a lavish vacation. "Well," says one of them, "I owned a chocolatier company that was barely breaking even, then there was a fire, the insurance paid out, and here I am." The new guy turns to the other one and ask him. "It's a lucky thing," says that guy. "Or unlucky, take your pick. I owned and operated a fireplace shop, but then wood burning fireplaces started to be frowned upon and sales plummeted. Then my fireplace shop - caught fire. Insurance came through though, and here I am." They both looked at the most recent vacationer expectantly, and he decides to share his story with them. "About five years ago," he starts, "I bought a carpet warehouse. It was doing quite well too," he continued, "but then there was a flood."

The other two stare at him blankly and ask "How the heck do you start a flood?")

Please note that there are several varieties and large quantities of bullshit involved in those two articles. Firstly the article claiming that "recycling is a broken system." Note that the word "broken" can be used in a number of ways, and in this case the writer of the article seems to be using it as an adjective, when in fact it should be used as a verb. The system isn't "broken," it's been deliberately broken by those who don't want it to work because it conflicts with their plans. 

"Most single-use plastics produced worldwide since the 1970s have ended up in landfills..." Well of course they bloody well have, because to the FFC there's no profit in recycling because they can't shift hundreds of thousands of tons of petrochemicals that get turned into "virgin" plastic every year. If recycling had been left to produce recycled plastics, there's nothing more certain than that the FFC's profits would suffer a fairly heavy loss. 

"One of the biggest problems with plastics recycling is the massive diversity of plastics that end up in the waste stream — foils, foams, sachets, numerous varieties of flexible plastic, and different additives that further alter plastic properties.
Most plastics can only be recycled in pure and consistent form, and only a limited number of times. What's more, municipal plastic waste streams are very difficult to sort."

I don't know where to start on this mountain of BS. There already exist some really excellent machines now that can sort individual pieces of trash in realtime at the rate of ten thousand pieces per hour using that technology and compressed air jets to knock the identified plastics into their relevant output streams. 

RECYCLING BECAME A SOLVED AND 
EASY PROCESS LONG  AGO.

Don't let the flimflamming deceive you - Recycling
is being systematically demonised and opposed.

Then the total BS about plastics being only able to be recycled in pure and consistent form. That too is crap, and like most of the other errors it's not the journalist's fault for believing the FFC propaganda, but it IS their fault for not researching properly. In fact, as long as you observe the broad plastic types (HDPE, PET, PA, etc) plastics can be quite handily recycled with little loss of functionality. And lastly, the comment about "only a limited number of times" is misleading. Insofar as that this can mean several tens of times. And that would be more than enough times to see the plastics problem eliminated when better decomposition techniques are discovered and developed.

Deconstructing the BS

The problem we have is that on the one hand we can see that plastics are extremely durable - after all we call them a forever pollution - and on the other we have the propaganda machine claim that there's a limit to how many times they can be recycled, the process is extremely finicky and difficult to get the exact composition right, yada yada bloody yada. On the other hand you can see from the PreshPlast and Brothers Make videos that you can recycle plastics with old appliances and car jacks. 

On the one hand some would like us to believe that poor fragile little plastics can be made into complete fiascos by processing, yet on the other hand things like PET plastic bottles are really easily spun into fibres that are made into threads that are used already to make clothing and yarns; and we see the Brothers recycle plastic bags into sheets and also into extremely solid and durable furniture. And that sun-damaged garden furniture can be restored with a wave of a hot-air gun, cracked plastics welded and restored. 

The fact that REDcycle apparently lacked the imagination (or the inspriation) to turn plastic bags into an additive to road bitumen speaks volumes to how totally ass-whipped we've been into this fatalistic losing attitude. There's yet another side to this, too. Whereas this company turning soft plastic into paving blocks makes sense, adding plastics to a material that will see heavy highway use is just re-releasing the plastic but this time under ideal conditions for the wear and tear of traffic to turn it directly into microplastics... 

(The paving blocks will only ever see light traffic. The addition of sands and gravels means that there is in effect a layer of sand preventing even that traffic from making contact with the plastic. And the plastic is deliberately burned hard. The asphalt on the other hand will experience hundreds of thousands of times as much traffic, traffic that already wears away large stone aggregates that are included in the material. The tyres of vehicles will make a short snack of the plastic additive and result in more and more re-asphalting to be done while releasing tons of microplastics.) 

All manner of materials can be turned to pavers. There are literally hundreds of small businesses showing that ANY plastics and filler materials can be turned into building materials. Glasss can be recycled back into sharp sand for construction, smooth sand can be turned to glass. One beauitiful thing about using plastics in these ways is that the plastic in pavers and building walls isn't subject to as much abrasion, and with the application of a coat of paint can last for centuries. In the process it sequesters that plastic until some future time when science and technology catch up and fond ways to "un-make" them again, getting (finally) to the "Revert" part of the formula. Revert the plastics back to basic building blocks, atoms and elements. 

That sequestering process is a better aim than recycling - because turning a pile of plastic trash into another pile of single-use-soon-to-be-trash-again-plastic-trash is just rubbish. In every sense of the word. But putting it into buildings and footpaths ensures it stays out of the waste stream for decades, allowing technology to catch up and find ways to permanently disassemble plastic molecules into their constituent parts again. Or completely burn it. 

I honestly could put a clickable link to some recycling success or other on every second word of this article. There are - I don't know exactly - hundreds at any rate - of videos on Youtube alone to unique and profitable recycling projects. There are many more on a web search. (I use DuckDuckGo because it finds more than Google does these days, you might consider switching to it too, to preserve at least *some* privacy online.) 

The only downside to those businesses is that there's more manual labour involved, many are being carried out in "less developed" countries and so lack some basic safety such as air filtering and dust management - but I say both that these drawbacks can be easily fixed for developed nations, and secondly, that the terms "less developed" and "developed" are not clear descriptions to me because it seems that in things that are becoming truly important (environmental stewardship, waste management, and winning the race to change our ways before the planet changes them for us) the "less developed" nations are well and truly leading the way.

The Long Way Round (To You)

With the really terrifying summer of 2023 that the Northern Hemisphere has just been through, there are going to be a few changes, I think. I've said in past articles that it wouldn't be long before a job in recycling will carry some serious clout, and become a valued skill set. I think that 2023 and 2024 will start to see that change happen. 

I listened to a TED talk in which the speaker claimed that the pace of adopting planet-friendly measures is quickening, and I have to agree. While governments might turn a bit of a blind eye to a minor town's water supply being poisoned or a bunch of homeless people perishing in the cold because local businesses have chased them off the last warm spots outside their shops, they can't ignore people perishing in their hundreds due to climate-change-induced storms, floods, fires, and heatwaves now provably beyond a doubt caused by their corporate buddies.

Climate remediation will be the number one topic, if not by the end of this year then by the end of 2024. Just to be clear I'm not suggesting that you stop working at the office and take up work as a recycle truck driver on the basis of my article. Stop panicking. (Although, in a year's time you may find yourself kicking yourself that you didn't...) But I am thinking that we need to accelerate this change.

And if the lure of actually DOING SOMETHING has you in its grip, watch some of the videos - here are the Brothers Make using plastic bags to make a new material for a sling chair using a previous exercise piece, a home-made park bench made from recycled facemasks. Note that this is applicable to any of half a dozen other recyclable plastics too, and that once the molds are made they can be used over and over to make as many park benches and seats as you want.  

06 Aug 2023 EDIT: As usual, another contender shows up AFTER I publish an article. In this case, and as much as I love Precious Plastic, this is NOT a good recycling idea. These trinkets will get used a few times by the new owner, then thrown out. The park bench wins. Would have been better to make the sheets 2-4times as thick and use them as construction materials for longer-term sequestration of the plastics.

Even I can do it

I used a flat sandwich toaster press to make flat sheets out of bottle caps, which can be used to make very unique house street number plaques or any other wall art. I've ironed plastic bags into cotton cloth to prove that I can make a waterproof sheet but that I haven't yet decided to use. When I do, I'll use a plastic welding pen to weld sheet parts together to make more complex objects, or just heat-laminate several layers of sheets together to make material for project boxes and front panels for projects. I've temporarily stopped this because I realised that I need to experiment with an A3 laminator machine that I can adjust the speed and thickness of, to make larger panels. Ironing is okay but if you wanted to make larger projects then you need a machine, and using a ready-made laminator as the base for it saves a lot of expensive development. 

So - I could do with your help to make that particular project. Use the graphic above to support my recycling work with a few dollars, or even a regular patronage of a few dollars a month. Every bit helps, to pay for servers and domain names, subscriptions to news and information sites that I use for research, and to pay for equipment and materials for developing these kinds of inexpensive ways to recycle and b doing such things locally, raise awareness of the corporate smear job that's been perpetrated on the recycling industry for the sake of petrochemical and FFC profits.

Also - please share the hell out of this and other similar articles I post - the more people get to see it, the better the chance that it'll go widespread and help accelerate the change that I think you'll see sweeping government and public thinking in the next few months as the planet starts reacting to all that corporate greed. 

Strap in for the ride, and
KEEP THE BASTARDS HONEST!

---

Note 1: 
This is one of the oddest things I've ever seen. I saw some hair combs or some such beauty product on the shelf in a discount dollar type store, that claimed to be "bamboo-like" and to all appearances were just plastic made to look like bamboo. 

Bamboo is a prolific grass that can grow several feet a day in the right conditions, it's tough and durable and can be carved, steamed, and molded into a variety of shapes. It's hard enough to be used to cut food, doesn't absorb food juices or flavours, and has been used for centuries for everything from building to food bowls. Due to its growth rate it's inexpensive to produce. 

It's a sustainable, renewable, and compostable alternative to plastic and to use plastic to fake it is just Machiavellian. 

Seeing a manufacturer having to produce imitation bamboo tells me that there's a primary production / supply issue here. The people growing the bamboo aren't letting a crop grow in the field for long enough to be useful for anything else, so there's got to be a lag there. Then too there's the problem that the powerful building industry wants bamboo for the increasing number of construction projects using bamboo, i.e. for flooring or wall panels etc. 

No-one wins in that greedy demand process. Growers are reducing the average age (and thus value) of their crop, the building industry is going to get fobbed off with barely-usable bamboo as the growers sell cutlery grade bamboo as construction grade, and the cutlery/general is going to be made with increasingly more expensive bamboo as demand takes it away to construction.

And the irony is writ large - bamboo was used for its environmentally-friendly nature, the ease with which it can be adapted to places where plastics need to be eliminated - and now, it's become cheaper to replace it with plastic again... 

There IS a way around this. Insist on bamboo where it makes sense, avoid plastics at all cost. That's it, that's the way. Insist on a multi-use reusable item over single-use, every time. It's all very well to package something in a magic pressed cardboard container but if it's had to be treated with a chemical to help it retain its shape or to repel water then it's NOT environmentally friendly to put in landfill. And to supply something like plastic, fake, single-use bamboo cutlery with that pressed cardboard container is a crime against the planet and everything and every being on it.

Many Hands Make Waste Less

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.)