“Hardly any plastics can be truly recycled”
FAKE NEWS - There’s a RECYCLE Bin just a block from me and it says PLASTICS - therefore, plastics CAN be recycled.
I wonder when someone will open their eyes about ROOFING SHINGLES???
They are about 96% of roofing materials now-—What happens when no more fossil fuels???
ALSO-—BLACKTOP ROADS.
I work for a plastic film/bag mfg and polyethylene is used almost exclusively. Every bit of scrap and any grocery bags we bring in are ground up, melted down and molded into the proper size resin pellets to feed into the extruders for making new film.
All they can make from that scrap is film/bags that vary in color. They mostly make thick 55 gallon trash bags that will fit in a 55 gallon drum and wrap over the top edge. There’s one customer that will buy off colored film as long as it’s not red.
To say the process has a small carbon footprint would be a lie. It takes a set of very large machines that use a ton of electricity to recycle that plastic. The ONLY reason it’s viable is because there’s no transportation involved.
Iconic blue Walmart vests get ‘upgrade’ with new fabric made from recycled bottles
It’s time we start using plasma arc gasification to process our solid waste. The fuel derived from the process could be used to power generators to provide the power necessary to gasify the waste plastics and orgainic material into usable fuel. It’s not going to be cheaper than drilling for oil, but it is likely cheaper than recycling by other means, which usually means separating, transporting, sanitizing and then maybe getting some useful material out of the process. Gasify it and extract the fuel and put the slag produced in a landfill. Who knows someone might find a use for the waste slag.
Ping...this one is lots of fun!
The county I live in takes all recyclables, newspaper, cardboard, glass, steel and most plastics, for free. That saves me a bunch of money over paying the trash service to take it away.
And, no, it isn’t paid for by any taxes. The county recycling program is 100% self-funded. I don’t know how they make money to fund it, I don’t know what they do with it all and I don’t care.
Don’t sell the industry short. It IS possible to recycle significant portions. Not all, no. But enough to make a difference.
This writer doesn’t know much about the subject.
We’ve all known for a long time, recycling is a scam for many materials. For things like aluminum, glass, and large volumes of sorted materials, such as cardboard from a big box store, recycling makes sense. Separating out that Amazon cardboard box at your house from the rest of the trash, not so much.