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Waldo Jaquith

Before anybody gets all up in my mentions: yes, it is hypothetically possible to recycle some types of plastic and yes, there is a small-scale PET recycling industry, but recycling plastics at scale is infeasible and has no path to feasibility.

I’m muting this thread because it has achieved escape velocity, resulting in a bunch of replies like “here in Kerblekistan we have achieved a 16% PET recycling rate through exploiting the Malaysian immigrant underclass so therefore plastic recycling works great.” 🙄

I leave you with this video on the topic. youtube.com/watch?v=Fiu9GSOmt8E

The Biden administration is cracking down on the petroleum industry’s bullshit claims of plastic recycling. The EPA now requires that “made from X% recycled plastic” claims be calculated based on mass, instead of vibes. Expect those percentages to drop precipitously, to something closer to 0%. propublica.org/article/epa-rej

ProPublicaBiden EPA Rejects Plastics Industry’s Fuzzy Math That Misleads Customers About Recycled Content
More from ProPublica

Kudos to ProPublica who exposed the nonsense of this Potemkin plastic recycling process back in June. It’s green-washing by ExxonMobil, which says they turn plastic back into oil, which can be used to make plastic again. But the process actually works terribly, with a 2–5% yield. Worse, the industry uses mathematical trickery known as “lying” to label that as e.g. 30% recycled, or even 100%.

Plastic recycling: it’s as good as clean coal! propublica.org/article/delusio

ProPublicaThe Delusion of “Advanced” Plastic Recycling
More from ProPublica

One area where post-consumer plastic recycling is actually happening is black plastic, such as for kitchen utensils and takeout containers. They're made from recycled electronics products, flame-retardants and all. A supermajority of tested spatulas and sushi trays children's toys contained cancer-causing levels of flame retardants that are banned in the U.S.

Plastic recycling: On the rare occasion where it’s not a myth, it is bad! cnn.com/2024/10/01/health/flam

CNN · Black-colored plastic used for kitchen utensils and toys linked to banned toxic flame retardantsBy Sandee LaMotte

@waldoj refuse, reduce and reuse come before recycle because of this.

@jt_rebelo I was *just* going to write the same thing. :)

@waldoj more concerned with it feeling like a sponsored post for airtags which have a known stalking problem

@waldoj last week I watched a garbage collector with a split truck throw someone’s trash and plastic bags of recycling (!!!) into the same trash chute and I thought, at least he’s honest.

My wife has been telling me, cynically I thought at first, that recycling plastic is bullshit for 10+ years now.

@waldoj

Well, except for recycling plastics into #microplastics that we (apparently) now store in the water, soil, and bodies...

@waldoj I separate my waste stream into 7 different streams so that when recycling ever becomes not total bullshit, I am ready!

@waldoj This is true today and the plastics industry never expected it to be otherwise even as they pushed the marketing hard, which is reprehensible, just pure evil.

But! I am holding out hope that we will find a way to recycle plastic "soup" anyway, because we have to. And there are some promising developments like this one...
kqed.org/science/1994014/uc-be

www.kqed.orgUC Berkeley Chemists Can Now Vaporize Plastic Waste Into Molecular Building Blocks | KQEDThe researchers’ new process could help recycle single-use bags, yogurt tubs and other challenging plastic materials into new products.

@waldoj the other half of the replies are "yeah I knew this all along thank you reinforcing my smug know-it-allness".

@waldoj people are obsessed with @/ing you and being wrong

@waldoj I might show this to my daughter when I'm more rested and ready to hear her Korea stories.

@waldoj the coverage in WaPo was very very silly, and uncritically published the claim from Exxon's public affairs person regarding the amount of plastic they had put through this process "to date" (i.e. EVER) and I was like, "wait a minute, that's fewer tons than enter into the water stream in just a year... I wonder by how much," and I did the arithmetic and it's on the order of five thousandths of one percent.
This is not a serious entrant into the list of options!

```This is the quiet — and convenient — part of the industry’s revolutionary pyrolysis method: It relies heavily on extracting fossil fuels.```
Oh how lovely.

@waldoj
There is some recycling that really does happen (I work on the edges of the industry), but it doesn't involve fancy pyrolysis. Mainly it's "melt down and re-form as a new thing". So what's useful is whole truckloads of sorted, clean, pure, all-the-same-type plastic. And it mostly happens by shipping the plastic to Asia, where the plastic-goods factories are.
The USA sends Asia meltable plastic, they send the USA finished goods.

@Kathmandu Yeah, recycling manufacturing waste (offcuts etc.) is a Thing! It's the tiniest little portion of plastics, it's better than nothing, though what I'm describing here is the post-consumer process.

@waldoj
Yeah, post-consumer is a LOT harder, partly because so many places are doing mixed-stream with no sorting. When I see post-consumer plastic going to a factory, it's usually something like empty soda bottles, where the process of returning them for deposit generates a SORTED stream of all the same type of plastic.
Or the stretch-wrap around palletized goods - some places set it aside after use (still clean), collect a truckload, then send it to be melted and re-used.

@waldoj
I'm equally concerned that the process of trying to recycle plastic isn't even more toxic, polluting, and energy inefficient than the problem they think they are fixing.

I liken it to using gas-powered flashlights to power solar panels in the dark. 🤦‍♂️

@waldoj
(season 1):
Plastic doesn’t break down in nature. If you turned all of what’s been made into cling wrap, it would cover every inch of the globe. It’s piling up, leaching into our water and poisoning our bodies.

Scientists say the key to fixing this is to make less of it; the world churns out 430 million metric tons each year.

@waldoj HDPE, especially post industrial, gets used in the DMV area at the Trex (deck boards) and Rubbermaid plants in Winchester. But it’s all down cycling, and we would be better off not using all the HDPE films to wrap pallets and goods in the first place.

Huh. I’ve been noticing over the last couple of years that black plastic used in #agriculture lasts longer in sunlight than alternative colors. (Surprised me a little; it gets hotter.)

and now I’m extra worried where it comes from, as well as where it goes.

@waldoj

@waldoj @idzie Well this is depressing. I have about 1/3 all my large utensils in black plastic or vinyl or silicone. And I have re-used the black plastic bottom containers as from Costco. Hmmm. I’ve also been wondering if silicone pans and utensils are ever recyclable.

@cobalt @waldoj @idzie Black silicone should theoretically be fine if it’s genuine silicone (unfortunately sometimes other plastics get marketed as such - one tell is it shouldn’t get paler when flexed.) It is technically recyclable but I don’t know of anywhere doing that municipally yet, you would want to check with local options when the time comes (and some manufacturers want their old pieces back for recycling!)

@waldoj Right now we are getting rid of all black plastic that comes in contact with food. Thanks for sharing this article.

@waldoj I feel like at this point, everything can cause cancer, so I don't really worry about it anymore. I've seen perfectly normal, healthy people with great eating and exercise habits and who are as careful as can be, get cancer anyway. I'm definitely not saying to take up smoking or that it doesn't matter what you eat or drink, just that maybe the obsessing over every thing that turns out could cause cancer is perhaps not productive. Especially considering that so many products contain some measure of harmful chemicals. Hard to avoid most of it.

@waldoj ...looking now at my black plastic keyboard, mouse, and laptop...

@waldoj this literally precipitated a shift from black plastic baskets to red plastic baskets at brazos since staff are touching them all day for years at a time

@waldoj

"The EPA now requires..."

Have you not been following recent SCOTUS decisions? Congress didn't make that regulation therefore it's void.