I'd like to step in two and a half years later and state that I'm now very unsure whether incinerating plastic for power is a smart idea unless we can be sure microplastics aren't in the effluent.
The world hungers for sand that makes solid concrete. The shape of the sand grains matters - in making concrete. Making glass melts the sand, so grain shape is irrelevant.
Also, you can just make sand. "Sand" is just an aggregate size, it can be easily manufactured in a crusher, and often times in construction manufactured sand is preferable to natural sand anyway.
I like the idea of switching back to glass. But we should be aware of the increased environmental costs of shipping all that mass. A glass jar is heavier than plastic and requires more energy to move it.
If the economy was all about shipping empty jars this point would be more salient than it is when the weight of a glass jar full of liquid and a plastic jar full of liquid is comparable.
All I know is, as supportive as I am of environmentalism and concerned about climate change, I'd rather watch the world burn than drink out of a paper straw.
Heaven and Hell are real. Our world is an amalgam of heavens, hells, and everything in between. And as Blake said, all divinities reside in our breast.
I have read this many times and sent this to many people. I feel compelled to come back here just to let you know that this piece once and for all changed my views on garbage and plastics recycling. I'd first been exposed to the idea that plastics recycling was BS on an episode of "Penn and Teller's Bullsh!t" that was on in the break room at a crappy retail job I had in college in the early 2000s, and had heard many things about it since then, but this finally put the "what to do about it" clearly in perspective for me. Just wanted to say thanks.
>There is no other reasonable option, mathematically speaking, given the realities on the ground.
Of course you would conclude that. You only looked at like, three countries. Do you see how e.g. Sweden has no river leak and also no landfills? Of course you didn't, because you only care about America. You have looked at and compared two different places - one of which has a GDP around 55 times higher than the other - and found that the richer one handles trash better. Golly, I could never have seen that coming.
It bares mention that the developing world can't even use the "burn trash to make electricity" option the Swedes use even though that option would be nice for them, because they don't have the garbage collection element to be able to make it work. They'd need to filter it out of the rivers and then burn it.
I also doubt that the environmental lobby in the US can be stronger than in Sweden, but backing this point with data would take too long on both sides.
What's the true number? I don't know, but I do know it's a heck of a lot bigger than here. I saw an interesting youtube video recently where they used RFID trackers to track plastic put in recycling bins in the UK, and it ended up being used in incinerators to power concrete manufacturing in eastern Europe.
There are points against the energy conversion of waste, the most convincing I've heard is this: given that the best thing to do with waste is not producing it at all, if a city/county/state invests in building an incinerator, it won't try to educate its citizens in reducing waste or it will lose its money.
I think this can happen in theory but not in practice (but still, no data to bring on future hypothetical scenarios).
"If we build an incinerator then they won't reduce waste" is putting a social manipulation agenda in front of a today-workable solution. We see this all the time with agencies like the CDC and FDA, which will conflate smoking and vaping statistics on purpose to supposedly reduce nicotine use, when in fact they scare vapers back onto cigarettes and kill people. Or when they obscure the fact that the IFR for Covid among teens and younger is orders of magnitude smaller than ordinary influenza, in an attempt to scare people into getting vaccinations they don't need.
I am categorically against policy decisions predicated on social manipulation.
AIUI, one of the major concerns with trash incineration are its "byproducts [which] include bottom ash, which [in Sweden] is sorted for metals and then recycled as fill for road construction or other projects, and fly ash, which is toxic and deposited in a landfill certified to handle hazardous materials."
So having a set of scrubbers and filters capable of capturing nearly all of that material, as well as conscientious handling of those byproducts, might be among key concerns – perhaps more than any "social manipulation" fears?
Also, one big advantage that Sweden apparently has is its widespread "district-scale heating," which improves the economics of trash burning. Something the USA likely lacks in most places?
The low-hanging fruit of the Ocean Plastics problem is the fishing industry. Discarded fishing nets make up at least 40% of ocean plastic. We need to regulate the fishing industry.
The problem with plastic is that it is always-already waste; it doesn't become waste when you throw it away, it comes to you as waste from an oil refinery. You can't reduce consumption because you can't reduce production of precursor chemicals like ethylene and still manufacture fuel oils like gasoline.
A well-designed landfill has a liner at the bottom and is capped at the top. Plastics and other non-desirables (see "leachates") can't leach into the ground if the liner is working properly.
Arguably a fair compromise is to not hand out a straw unless the customer demands it and have a drink lid that can be easily sipped from or can use a straw.
But this still doesn't address the issue that if the straw is not disposed of properly when the person is finished using it, then it can risk ending up in a waterway.
Such an effort would provide an improvement, albeit miniscule, because it would only apply to the subset of straws that are thrown out as litter. A ban on plastics exportation and the construction of plastic incinerating power plants to handle the plastics we can't affordably recycle here would be a tremendous improvement.
It is true that a very large amount of plastic pollution comes from the Pacific Rim. It is also true that a noticeable amount of that pollution originates here, and is transported there via the recycle bin.
When we do beach and creek trash cleanups, and I presume it’s similar for highway litter cleanup schemes, the primary plastics we find are light weight items that also catch easily in the wind. Before the plastic bag “ban” (which hilariously were replaced with thicker plastic bags because virtue signaling politicians ignore downstream effects) that’s what we’d primarily find. But we also find straws, food wrappers, and now masks.
Turns out in these public areas the waste disposal containers are open at the top and fill up quickly. There’s always a small breeze at a minimum anywhere near the coast. All these items catch in the wind and can move easily from the intended place of disposal to the beach, creek, and eventually ocean.
Also in residential areas, recyclables are required to be loosely placed in the recycling containers. No bagged items allowed, and for that matter no empty plastic bags either. This is because they cause problems at the materials recycling facility. But what happens when they’re dumped into the garbage/recycling collection vehicle on a slightly breezy day?
Some dog owners apparently think their plastic poop filled bag belongs in the recyclables too.
Great article. i live in Bulgaria since five years and plastic is not bad. It only looks ugly. Everything, in the end, is disposable. Plastic is just made to last longer and so it decomposes... much slower. it nature will destroy any plastic with years of time. On the land (better) but in our oceans is not a real issue either. Algae and small animals love plastic as well nd make even islands from them where they multiply much faster and produce extra oxygen for our world. +je
This is nonsense. You act like it's fertilizer, no consequences. You don't mention that animals, water, land, air are consuming plastics and it's killing them. Such as when an animal goes to eat something they should and plastic is next to it, or they mistake plastic for food and accidentally ingest it. the plastic pieces sit in their stomach blocking space for food to go, reduce the digestion capability of their small bodies and with enough plastic ingested, especially at times when it's harder to constantly find food they starve and die. Or they breathe in the plastic, turtles and straws, fish and they cannot get oxygen. Or they get bottle rings, 6 pack holders etc caught around their heads, their necks such as when young and can't get it off and it slowly strangles them...among many other ways. Plastics, litter is not a positive, we need to stop it. It sounds slike VBJM is an oil/plastics industry person.
Impugning motives to someone, based purely on their perspectives on an issue (even if it's "Pollyanna regarding the environmental impact of plastics"), is often a tricky thing.
But yes, you're absolutely correct that plastic waste all too often directly harms wildlife in the many ghastly and tangible ways you've mentioned.
As well, some plastics decompose very, very, very slowly. Often taking decades or even centuries.
And AIUI, in that process, some first become microplastics, with potentially harmful impacts – at least for BPA and phthalates – as endocrine disruptors?
After much thinking, the domestic solution to the problem is obviously this:
1) Build a power plant here that runs off of incinerating plastic,
2) Ship all plastic that would ordinarily be shipped overseas to this power plant
3) Burn it all for energy to displace coal and similar
and then later
4) dig up inert landfills, mining them for plastic to burn
If only there were places that were already doing this so that you could study them?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/climate/sweden-garbage-used-for-fuel.html
I'd like to step in two and a half years later and state that I'm now very unsure whether incinerating plastic for power is a smart idea unless we can be sure microplastics aren't in the effluent.
Delaware County, PA, trash to steam plant.
I'm sold on landfilling plastic instead of "recycling" it, but why dismiss efforts to reduce plastic consumption in the first place?
I'd love to switch back to glass. There's plenty of sand in the world and glass is inert. It's also not at all damaging to the oceans.
"There's plenty of sand in the world"
You'd think that, but... https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is-running-out-of-sand
The world hungers for sand that makes solid concrete. The shape of the sand grains matters - in making concrete. Making glass melts the sand, so grain shape is irrelevant.
Also, you can just make sand. "Sand" is just an aggregate size, it can be easily manufactured in a crusher, and often times in construction manufactured sand is preferable to natural sand anyway.
I like the idea of switching back to glass. But we should be aware of the increased environmental costs of shipping all that mass. A glass jar is heavier than plastic and requires more energy to move it.
If the economy was all about shipping empty jars this point would be more salient than it is when the weight of a glass jar full of liquid and a plastic jar full of liquid is comparable.
I must protest: that image clearly depicts more than one straw.
All I know is, as supportive as I am of environmentalism and concerned about climate change, I'd rather watch the world burn than drink out of a paper straw.
Good article. This is why I don't recycle plastics.
> Please compare and contrast California to the Pacific Rim in this map
California is part of the Pacific Rim.
Brilliant. This has been my suspicion for a long time, so thanks for figuring it out so lucidly.
Wow, that river of trash in Manila is a vision of Hell. Take THAT atheists!
What lol
Heaven and Hell are real. Our world is an amalgam of heavens, hells, and everything in between. And as Blake said, all divinities reside in our breast.
Agree, I've been worshiping breasts forever.
I have read this many times and sent this to many people. I feel compelled to come back here just to let you know that this piece once and for all changed my views on garbage and plastics recycling. I'd first been exposed to the idea that plastics recycling was BS on an episode of "Penn and Teller's Bullsh!t" that was on in the break room at a crappy retail job I had in college in the early 2000s, and had heard many things about it since then, but this finally put the "what to do about it" clearly in perspective for me. Just wanted to say thanks.
Those straws are now no longer for sale in Europe, as all "single use plastics" are.
Sierra energy fast ox gasification.
>There is no other reasonable option, mathematically speaking, given the realities on the ground.
Of course you would conclude that. You only looked at like, three countries. Do you see how e.g. Sweden has no river leak and also no landfills? Of course you didn't, because you only care about America. You have looked at and compared two different places - one of which has a GDP around 55 times higher than the other - and found that the richer one handles trash better. Golly, I could never have seen that coming.
Sweden incinerates 86% of their plastic. I'm fine with us taking this option, but I doubt you'll get the buyoff from the environmental lobby.
It bares mention that the developing world can't even use the "burn trash to make electricity" option the Swedes use even though that option would be nice for them, because they don't have the garbage collection element to be able to make it work. They'd need to filter it out of the rivers and then burn it.
Which is your source? I found that Sweden incinerates 60% of their plastic according to this source. https://plasticseurope.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/PlasticsEurope-CircularityReport-2021_28022022.pdf
I also doubt that the environmental lobby in the US can be stronger than in Sweden, but backing this point with data would take too long on both sides.
Source on 86%.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-14/how-would-burning-rubbish-like-sweden-work-in-australia/10115694#:~:text=Sweden%20built%20its%20first%20waste,levels%20than%20most%20renewable%20energies
What's the true number? I don't know, but I do know it's a heck of a lot bigger than here. I saw an interesting youtube video recently where they used RFID trackers to track plastic put in recycling bins in the UK, and it ended up being used in incinerators to power concrete manufacturing in eastern Europe.
There are points against the energy conversion of waste, the most convincing I've heard is this: given that the best thing to do with waste is not producing it at all, if a city/county/state invests in building an incinerator, it won't try to educate its citizens in reducing waste or it will lose its money.
I think this can happen in theory but not in practice (but still, no data to bring on future hypothetical scenarios).
"If we build an incinerator then they won't reduce waste" is putting a social manipulation agenda in front of a today-workable solution. We see this all the time with agencies like the CDC and FDA, which will conflate smoking and vaping statistics on purpose to supposedly reduce nicotine use, when in fact they scare vapers back onto cigarettes and kill people. Or when they obscure the fact that the IFR for Covid among teens and younger is orders of magnitude smaller than ordinary influenza, in an attempt to scare people into getting vaccinations they don't need.
I am categorically against policy decisions predicated on social manipulation.
AIUI, one of the major concerns with trash incineration are its "byproducts [which] include bottom ash, which [in Sweden] is sorted for metals and then recycled as fill for road construction or other projects, and fly ash, which is toxic and deposited in a landfill certified to handle hazardous materials."
So having a set of scrubbers and filters capable of capturing nearly all of that material, as well as conscientious handling of those byproducts, might be among key concerns – perhaps more than any "social manipulation" fears?
https://energynews.us/2013/10/17/is-burning-garbage-green-in-sweden-theres-little-debate/
Also, one big advantage that Sweden apparently has is its widespread "district-scale heating," which improves the economics of trash burning. Something the USA likely lacks in most places?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/climate/sweden-garbage-used-for-fuel.html
The low-hanging fruit of the Ocean Plastics problem is the fishing industry. Discarded fishing nets make up at least 40% of ocean plastic. We need to regulate the fishing industry.
The problem with plastic is that it is always-already waste; it doesn't become waste when you throw it away, it comes to you as waste from an oil refinery. You can't reduce consumption because you can't reduce production of precursor chemicals like ethylene and still manufacture fuel oils like gasoline.
https://thespouter.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-world-of-the-plastic?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
I'm confused: I thought plastic didn't breakdown for like, hundreds of years? And tiny microplastics leached into the soil from landfills?
A well-designed landfill has a liner at the bottom and is capped at the top. Plastics and other non-desirables (see "leachates") can't leach into the ground if the liner is working properly.
Banning *all* straws is indeed stupid. But banning plastic straws for single use is not that stupid https://sciencevibe.com/2015/08/17/no-to-straws-marine-biologists-pull-a-12-centimeter-straw-out-of-a-turtles-nose/
Arguably a fair compromise is to not hand out a straw unless the customer demands it and have a drink lid that can be easily sipped from or can use a straw.
But this still doesn't address the issue that if the straw is not disposed of properly when the person is finished using it, then it can risk ending up in a waterway.
Such an effort would provide an improvement, albeit miniscule, because it would only apply to the subset of straws that are thrown out as litter. A ban on plastics exportation and the construction of plastic incinerating power plants to handle the plastics we can't affordably recycle here would be a tremendous improvement.
It is true that a very large amount of plastic pollution comes from the Pacific Rim. It is also true that a noticeable amount of that pollution originates here, and is transported there via the recycle bin.
When we do beach and creek trash cleanups, and I presume it’s similar for highway litter cleanup schemes, the primary plastics we find are light weight items that also catch easily in the wind. Before the plastic bag “ban” (which hilariously were replaced with thicker plastic bags because virtue signaling politicians ignore downstream effects) that’s what we’d primarily find. But we also find straws, food wrappers, and now masks.
Turns out in these public areas the waste disposal containers are open at the top and fill up quickly. There’s always a small breeze at a minimum anywhere near the coast. All these items catch in the wind and can move easily from the intended place of disposal to the beach, creek, and eventually ocean.
Also in residential areas, recyclables are required to be loosely placed in the recycling containers. No bagged items allowed, and for that matter no empty plastic bags either. This is because they cause problems at the materials recycling facility. But what happens when they’re dumped into the garbage/recycling collection vehicle on a slightly breezy day?
Some dog owners apparently think their plastic poop filled bag belongs in the recyclables too.
Great article. i live in Bulgaria since five years and plastic is not bad. It only looks ugly. Everything, in the end, is disposable. Plastic is just made to last longer and so it decomposes... much slower. it nature will destroy any plastic with years of time. On the land (better) but in our oceans is not a real issue either. Algae and small animals love plastic as well nd make even islands from them where they multiply much faster and produce extra oxygen for our world. +je
This is nonsense. You act like it's fertilizer, no consequences. You don't mention that animals, water, land, air are consuming plastics and it's killing them. Such as when an animal goes to eat something they should and plastic is next to it, or they mistake plastic for food and accidentally ingest it. the plastic pieces sit in their stomach blocking space for food to go, reduce the digestion capability of their small bodies and with enough plastic ingested, especially at times when it's harder to constantly find food they starve and die. Or they breathe in the plastic, turtles and straws, fish and they cannot get oxygen. Or they get bottle rings, 6 pack holders etc caught around their heads, their necks such as when young and can't get it off and it slowly strangles them...among many other ways. Plastics, litter is not a positive, we need to stop it. It sounds slike VBJM is an oil/plastics industry person.
Impugning motives to someone, based purely on their perspectives on an issue (even if it's "Pollyanna regarding the environmental impact of plastics"), is often a tricky thing.
But yes, you're absolutely correct that plastic waste all too often directly harms wildlife in the many ghastly and tangible ways you've mentioned.
As well, some plastics decompose very, very, very slowly. Often taking decades or even centuries.
And AIUI, in that process, some first become microplastics, with potentially harmful impacts – at least for BPA and phthalates – as endocrine disruptors?
https://www.epa.gov/endocrine-disruption/what-endocrine-disruption
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/8093585/Bisphenol-A-now-linked-to-male-infertility.html
Facts. Ive been saying this for years. It's not the plastic garbage patch it's the plastic recycling patch.