Comment by esa@discuss.tchncs.de on The Myth of Plastic Recycling.

The price stuff can change through taxation that makes new plastic more expensive than recycled plastic.

As we all know, taxation is super popular and has never been controversial, ever.

At the very least flaskepant has worked great for like a century here in Norway. Always kind of surprising when other countries don’t have it.

The US still has subsidies going to petrochemical companies, despite being insanely profitable. Basically, just extracting the country’s wealth in addition to natural resources. Ending those or forcing them to be spent on recycling would help here immensely.

Have we considered calling it a tariff instead of a tax? Tariffs on all new plastic. It might work.

Most plastic can’t be recycled into something usable. Plastic degrades quite a bit with each recycling, leaving a bunch of microplastics behind (same thing with “biodegradable” plastic). It would be better to tax it enough (or ban it) to make it not used in certain applications.

Should’ve made the producers responsible for collecting and processing all plastics they produce. It that makes certain products economically non viable, than that’s on them to innovate better processes.

I hope that one day drilling oil has been banned, and CCS becomes mandatory. If you want hydrocarbons in order to manufacture chemicals and plastics, you can pull them from the air. There’s enough for everyone.

Carbon capture (more specifically direct air capture) is not a viable option due to the energy requirements and the low concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Carbon capture is largely promoted by fossil fuel companies for the same reason that recycling is: “let us keep doing what we’re doing because there’s some magical way to undo the damage, we just need a few more years of research”.

However, plants do the same thing and already exist. Trees in particular have shown some promise for being able to be a precursor for many polymers. This would at least mean that any plant matter used for this did pull CO2 out of the atmosphere in the last few years (so relatively neutral compared to the other options), whereas fossil fuels are releasing carbon that was removed from the atmosphere millions of years ago.

EDIT: TLDR, oil drilling should be banned or severely limited, but DAC is not a viable option and is only relevant because oil companies keep pumping money into it. Biomass is potentially an ok feedstock for plastics (but not for fuel).

Well, what if we used renewable energy to run a DAC process? That would require lots of solar and wind power, but we’re going to need a lot of that anyway to get permanently rid of fossil fuels.

As you pointed out, the low concentratiions are a serious issue for any process, but maybe plants will do a better job our current machines can. Either way, once you have that carbon, we would really need put it back where it came from. The way I see it, slowing down global warming is a step in the right direction and becoming carbon neutral is another step. However, what we really need is a complete ban on all fossil fuels and an efficient way to reduce the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere.

Also, I have fairly negative view on CCU, since it doesn’t really solve the problem. CCS on the other hand seems like a better option. If you do it with plants and store the carbon as biochar, I’m all for it. If you want to do it with electricity and chemistry, I’m ok with that too, as long as it gets the job done.

The problem with using wind and solar is that you’d need a lot of it due to the energy requirements. While both should be used extensively, there comes a point where the resources required (these would likely use precious metal catalysts) to build the CCS plants and all the power infrastructure for it and waste produced makes it the obvious choice to just use trees.

If you look at how trees function, it is an incredibly complex process with some rather extreme conditions which are difficult to replicate with machines. If someone does manage to get it done efficiently then that’s great (though I think this is unlikely). But I don’t want it to become like recycling did: an excuse for companies to do whatever they want. The original expression was “reduce, reuse, recycle” with recycling being the last resort, but now we never hear about the first two because they get in the way of obscene profit.

Yes… plastic recycling can work, in theory, but the financial incentives are not naturally inclined to be in a way that recycling is feasible, since externalities encompassing the damage that plastic production has to our world are not accounted for in its price. (Caveat: the products that can be made from recycling are physically unable to be perfectly like the previous products they came from)

Like the cost burden of tobacco use being put on both users and producers, plastic must be dealt with the same way in terms of taxation levies so that plastic alternatives and plastic recycling are competitive compared to new plastic from oil by-products.

We have bottle deposit in some states in the u.s. Some do it better than others though, grew up in Michigan and there any place that sold bottles had to be able to return them and a lot of the grocery stores had the machines. Moved to California and it seems like none of the stores are set up for it and the cashier will often turn you to a recycling center.

Oregon was the same way. You had to go to certain stores that had a deposit and it was slow going.

Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:

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