so much news about how microplastics are interfeting with the natural order, […] he has this segment almost every week.
So see Harry Shearer’s Le Show, the Iowa Herald s.2, or Filth-Eather Quarterly, or Dropped 0X0–Burial Is Not Enough Annual?
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You’re basically reinforcing my point here, which was that I prioritise packaging over contents (sometimes). In otherwords, I’ll accept an inferior product if it doesn’t come in plastic.
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Well that’s a bummer. I kinda felt plastic recycling was a bit of a fiction all along, but which metals are reliably (I guess I mean profitably when I say this) recyclable?
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Steel, iron, and aluminum are all widely recycled. It takes quite a bit of energy, but still less than producing them from raw materials mined out of the ground, I believe. The recommendation from the recycling experts interviewed in the Planet Money piece is to focus on recycling aluminum, because it’s the component of household waste which is most effectively recyclable.
The fact that scrap metal is valuable enough that it’s sometimes the object of theft (e.g. railroad ties occasionally go missing) is a pretty good indication that it can be profitably recycled.
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This.
But then again, we’re talking about capitalism, which right now is the real ruling party worldwide. It would be going too far off thread to go further into why that’s an awful thing, and besides, everyone here has heard it before.
It’s funny, but because of where I live and how I choose to feed myself, I’ve found the products that come in reusable or biodegradable packaging (or no packaging) are seriously superior (and usually more expensive.)
We buy Hartzler Dairy milk, which comes in a bottle that you pay a deposit on. I’m accumulating them and using them for lemonade and iced tea and such, because since COVID the store doesn’t take them back.
I reuse every bottle and jar that comes into the house, pretty much, because I try to put all the foods that could possibly get bugs into glass and then recycle the cardboard and paper.
Because
Last year’s New Year’s Resolution was Zero Waste. I knew I couldn’t ever accomplish that, but I wanted to be thoughtful about my consumption and footprint on this world. Then COVID, and the markets and vendors went back to single use plastic instead of b-y-o bag. It seriously screwed up my attempts.
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I think you mean rails, not ties, which AFAIK are usually concrete.
Meanwhile, one of my grandfathers, a retired railway conductor, spent his golden days hauling a small wagon through suburban alleyways to salvage discarded household metals. He sorted and melted those, in a small furnace in his backyard shop, into ingots he sold to ready dealers.
But that was long ago. I don’t know if artisanal metal recycling is still feasible.
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A few days ago I fell down a YouTube recommendations hole and ended up watching a whole bunch of videos about how to cast metal at home. These folks took all kinds of scrap materials and turned them into ingots, art, jewelry, coins, etc…
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Very good points. However:
While it can take approximately one million years for a glass bottle to break down within a traditional landfill, this material can be recycled indefinitely. Within Australia , most glass products hold between 40-70% recyclable glass .
Drinking glasses, glass objects, and window glass cannot be placed with recyclable glass because they have different chemical properties and melt at different temperatures than the recyclable bottles and containers.
While recycling glass indefinitely is technically possible there are many challenges which interested readers should look into here: The Glass Recycling Problem: What's Behind It, and What to do - Great Forest
According to Recycle Across America, “More than 28 billion glass bottles and jars end up in landfills every year — that is the equivalent of filling up two Empire State Buildings every three weeks.”
Today the freight vessel is the shipping container. In ancient times it was the amphorae. I would like to see vendors adopt some standardised glass recepticles that can be used to vend food and other items. Again there are constraints - glass is thicker than plastic and it does not “nest” as plastic recepticles do - such as takeaway containers. Perhaps offering a discount if you bring your own container would solve this.
I would like to see a system where purchases of TV’s, fridges etc have a built in delivery and installation component - where the vendor removes all packaging for disposal/reuse.
Styrofoam is another big problem but apparently there is a packaging solution using mycellium - foam fungus, which after years in development has not reached the market at all AFAIK.
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It makes complete sense for high value metals that are easily mechanically sorted away from their products. So copper wiring and plumbing, for example. Copper is very expensive to mine, and something like pipe is all copper and not mixed up with anything. Trying to pull the copper back out of e-Waste, on the other hand, is very problematic. It’s currently done in third world countries because it requires nasty chemicals and/or burning circuit boards and releasing super nasty pollution. No economical way to do it safely.
Aluminum, as @nodolra said, makes sure pretty good sense to recycle, because refining it from virgin bauxite is done with electricity, and a lot of it. Aluminum smelters are built very close to hydro electric dams because of the huge amount of power required. Recycling aluminum is best when applied to things like car cylinder heads and lawn furniture. Beverage cans are not casting aluminum and have coatings on both sides, so recycling them is messy and more toxic. They are also expensive to handle because there is so little material in them for their volume. They can be profitable to recycle, but just barely.
Iron recycles easily, and (being ferrous) sorts easily, making it cheap to handle. It’s also very cheap to mine though, so it’s a thin margin to recycle it. Again, most effective when density is high, like engine blocks and brake discs.
The main advantage to metals though is that they recycle perfectly. Everything else degrades and the result is not usable in primary stream production. Recycled rubber and plastic only gets made into park benches and floor mats, pretty much, because the recycled material is degraded so badly that it isn’t good for anything. Products claiming to use recycled plastic mix it heavily with virgin material, and it’s usually just done for greenwash marketing. Recycled paper gets used in low grade applications like packaging and insulation fill. The pulp is too degraded for use as paper or wood without heroic amounts of processing.
Recycling, in general, just doesn’t work that well. This is why it was always intended to be the last resort after reducing and reusing. What happened is, everyone ignored the first two and latched on to recycling as the key to not having to change anything about their lifestyles while soothing liberal guilt. We gave people blue trash cans to put stuff in so they could feel good about themselves, and they bought ridiculous bottled water more than ever.
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Yes, but- big but- profitability in this case is a pretty good proxy for energy efficiency and viability of the recycled material for use in virgin manufacturing streams. I won’t repeat my rant above, but it’s relevant here as well.
Should governments be subsidizing it to bring costs down? Absolutely. That won’t make recycled materials competitive though, because most aren’t very useful due to the degradation. Recycling was never gonna save us from our bad decisions, but we’ve spent the last 30 years pretending it will.
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I would like to add that nowadays scrap metal is an integral part of the steelmaking process. We have a large steel mill in town which has scrap metal delivered every day by open wagons, and to me it seemed that scrap metal is a hodgepodge of stuff when I had the possibility to look down into the wagons from a bridge once.
BTW, thanks for your good comments, @VeronicaConnor!
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