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.
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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.
