I wonder how many of us have stopped to think and ask "Why is it up to me to look after waste?" There is sleight-of-hand going on here: the producer makes a potentially-polluting object, sells it to another entity to be filled and sold, and we finish up with the wrapping and packaging for us to get rid of. The producer has transferred all guilt and all responsibility for disposal of the product to the end-user. Many end-users don't accept their responsibility for safe disposal

A product should not be approved for sale until there is a recycling or refilling programme in place.

As for burning plastic, why should we consider any option that will increase the already dangerously high levels of Carbon Dioxide in our atmosphere? Unless very high temperatures are used, a witch's brew of toxic decomposition products will be released to further damage the health of the area around the incinerator.

Our motto should be: "You made it - you take responsibility for its safe disposal or re-use".

Plastic can be recycled up to seven times before it needs to be dumped. And even then baled plastic can be used in lieu of coal in the steel making process. Or put through an industrial microwave to convert it to oil and gas? One can buy a modest machine from the Chinese that converts waste tyres and plastic into oil? And advertised here on OLO some months ago.

The problem with recycling anything as a new product is the energy component and cost. Which makes it entirely impractical for third world countries where the daily wage could be 2-3 dollars a day.

Cowpats are an excellent fuel for folk living on savannas and treeless plains. And just hot enough to bake clay pots.

One can mix clay and coffee grounds which are then moulded into cups or bowls that drip filter contaminated water to purify it. Cowpats providing the optimal temperature for this clay bake job.

Even then the water is brought to a minimum 3-minute rolling boil and left covered with a wet cloth/sack overnight before it is put through the baked coffee/clay filter.

May need several if purifying more than a couple of day's supply.

But I digress. Recycling in third world countries is entirely reliant on affordable reliable dispatchable energy!
TBC, Alan B.

In our town the Council only accepts plastic water bottles with the 10 cent refund printed on them. All other plastics get just buried in land fill.
It seems to be about money rather than the environment.

Cont.

As already indicated, recycling anything requires affordable energy as does a healthy robust manufacturing sector. And for mine, that affordable, reliable, dispatchable energy has to be MSR thorium.

As a thermal reaction using molten fluoride salt. Doesn't need to be pressurised, nor does the protective radiation eliminating water jacket surrounding the reactor.

The sweet spot temp for these reactors is around 700C and hot enough to liquify plastic and allow fractional distillation to recover the ethylene and hydrocarbons, and remake either as new products or reusable solutions/fuel.

Only possible and affordable with energy as potentially as cheap as an entirely unpressurised MSR can produce!

Less than a reported 2 cents per KwH?

One can use some recently discovered and perfected industrial processes to turn some of the components of seawater into all manner of hydrocarbons. By combining captured carbon (CO2 vacuumed from the water) and Heat decomposed and released hydrogen.

And because the synthetic product is a compound hydrocarbon can even be turned into endlessly sustainable fuel, plastics and fertilizer.

The problem with some folk, getting older doesn't make them wiser, just self-serving ( Altrave's scumbags) moribund miscreants and completely clueless where it really counts. The third world didn't choose its status, users did and still do!

D for dunce and F for fail!
Alan B.

What a breath of fresh air, shining a light on the stupidity of wasting resources on collecting rubbish that is of no real use to anyone after collection.

Alan is half right as usual. Yes plastics can be remoulded a number of times, but with a great reduction in the quality & physical ability of the material each time. Where any even moderate quality is required, no more than 20% of regrind can be used, & that regrind must be kept scrupulously clean & free from even the slightest contamination with another type of plastic, or even a different grade of the same plastic.

Even the slightest contamination with a different grade of the same plastic will produce faulty products, or burning in the production machinery. Plastics factories produce more than enough reground plastic in the production process, or while changing a machine from one colour to another in the same product.

Few can use all they produce, & most have a couple of plant pot moulds, to try to usefully use their waste. You can perhaps now imagine how useful any plastic is, after going through waste collection process, & being mixed with both other plastics & lots of contaminants.

Like so many things green, recycling sounds great, but is simply a waste of resources in most instances. If it was confined to only materials which were of some real value after collection & sorting, it would be great, but pretending all recycling is great is as true as tits on a bull.

One of the biggest problems with virtually anything you buy is planned obsolescence, item now are made to last a short time then need replacing or you need a newer updated model.

As someone above suggested I agree the manufacturer should be held responsible for doing something about their products, like recycling.

Why should anyone (especially elected politicians) expect householders to waste time (and money - your time has a cost) sorting and disposing of any "recyclable" material to make greater profits for recyclers? And the nett benefit of recycling is minimal after the environmental costs of recycling are taken into account.

If your recycling bin is not big enough for all of the useless recyclables, you can upgrade to a larger bin. At your cost, of course. If recyclables are really worth recycling, why would you not expect the recycler to pay for it out of the profits?

Brian of Buderim misses the point. If you want to buy a product (a) the cost of packaging and recycling is/ought to be in the retail price you pay, yet local councils enter waste collection contracts which add an additional cost (b) how are you going to take home - let's say milk or fly spray - if there's no packaging provided?

The recycling industry is an "industry" after all and they are looking for money. It should the manufacturing industry who would look into ways to solve the problem of waste. This is where all things start. Bashar H. Malkawi

Alan B, baled plastic used to replace coal in steel-making? I had always thought that the reason that coking coal was used was because the coke was strong enough to NOT collapse and by staying up to allow the hot gases to circulate more thoroughly. Mind blowing! Can you give all of us here a reference?

I can imagine the other problem, that of all the toxic combustion products, would be minimised by the heat and the spread of oxygen ensuring complete combustion.

Steelmaking is a chemical process that incorporates heat. Most iron ore is oxidised so the heat just uses up the O2. Plastic is after all just another combustible hydrocarbon and adding it to the crucible simply adds the carbon all steel needs to become steel.

Moreover, I'm not thinking blast furnaces and two-step steel making, but arc furnaces and a single step.

It's said wherever lighting strikes the ground the point hit is turned to glass or molten rock by heat greater than the sun and the reason why ar furnaces are preferred.

Talking of metal and ore. Did you know the richest ton for ton source of precious and semi-precious metal is E-waste! No orebody ever discovered is richer.

Recycling is as simple as grinding E-waste up then using traditional smelting to refine and separate the precious metal all of which melt at different temps.

And mostly different enough to separate the molten metals from the others, separated later and in their turn. Others with close melting points are separated by chemical leaching then precipitated back as the metal.

Yes, there are some contaminants in recycled plastic, none of which are a bother when that plastic is pressed into bales and used in place of coal in steel smelting. And completely cooked out during the melt!

Before plastic, we used glass and refilled them time and again. Part of which included a thorough clean. Biscuits etc were stored in airtight glass and sold by the pound or ounce. And taken home in paper bags

Nobody yet has complained of drinking at the pub from glassware a few dozen strangers used already. We can make almost unbreakable glass and maybe we could go back to the glass of yesteryear for the liquid products?

And make paper from straw or bamboo or some such. Carbon fibre also beckons as a reusable material as does bulletproof graphene. Usable just one atom thick.
Alan B.

I had an iced coffee at a trendy coffee shop and was given a metal straw. Presumably it took plenty of hot water and detergent before it went to the next customer.

We want carbon that came out of the ground as coal, oil or gas to go back there not the atmosphere. If the plastic cannot be re-used then it should go into landfill. If the plastic is made from biomass carbon then it was already above ground. When burned or decayed it is absorbed by plants for the next cycle. No new carbon is then added to the atmosphere. Trouble is I doubt we can ever make enough bioplastic to replace food packaging. Time to bring our old glass jars to the supermarket to fill with groceries.

Hydrogen could be used in lieu of carbon fuel to smelt steel, only 100X more expensive or whatever. All these problems would be easier to solve for 1.5 bn people not 7.5.

Thanks, Alan B. I was, as you pointed out, fixed on blast furnaces and had not considered other ways of making iron.

Sort of on this topic. Why does the driest continent in the world (after Antarctica) permit the storage of mega-litres of water to grow cotton, requiring in the process much in the way of pesticides and herbicides?

Why can't we just grow low-THC hemp as we did in WW2? Much less water needed, much less to almost nil pesticides and herbicides? Much less fussing over to get the fields laser flat!

If we had cheap enough energy we could pump waste water on to the cotton fields and use it as a mop crop. As for hemp, It does a dandy job of decontaminating irradiated ground!

As for fabric, heard some good reports about hemp.

Back to energy. There is an energy component in everything we use, sell, buy or recycle, be they goods, services or reclaimed products.

Moreover, the energy component adds a cost to everything that then cascades up the supply chain. Given the cost of labour averages out as around 16% of the cost component of manufacture. It was arguably the cost of energy (30%+) that killed our car industry and sent around 96% of manufacture offshore.
Alan B.

Hemp is the the one I can smoke, if no one finds out.

I wondered where that smell was coming from Phil? And here I was thinking it was just a result of you using a formerly unused cerebral cortex? And probably explains your difficulties distinguishing hemp from marijuana?
Alan B.

Alan B - Never having taken any drugs I do not know the difference.

"Why can't we just grow low-THC hemp as we did in WW2? Much less water needed, much less to almost nil pesticides and herbicides? Much less fussing over to get the fields laser flat"!

Posted by Brian of Buderim.

Brian let me assure all the farmers will very happily grow any crop for which there is a profitable market. The economics of farming is not what it used to be. A mate of mine is a 4Th generation wheat farmer out near Dolby. In his grand fathers & even his fathers day, one good wheat crop, & a moderate crop every 4 years gave them a reasonable living. They could indulge their property in crop rotation with less profitable crops to help maintain fertility. If hemp has sufficient demand, & offers an adequate return, they will grow it.

With increasing costs, & lower returns he requires 2 good crops every 4 years, or he is going broke. Cotton is such a crop. He gambles on a dry land crop of cotton, when he has favourable conditions. Dry land, so he is not using any of the water the South Australians want down the Darling to fill their artificial fresh water sky lake.

The return from cotton is still good enough so that just one good harvest of a couple of hundred acres of cotton in 4 years offers a better return than 2 good 500 acre wheat crop returns.

Personally I agree with the farmer. His livelihood, & the return to the nation is of much more value than a fresh water sky lake for the people of Adelaide.

Cotton has other advantages. It's roots go very deep, opening up the soil for water penetration, & cracking the hardpan that develops in some black soils, again aiding rain penetration. This is very important in modern no till farming. The wheat crop always does better where it's following a cotton crop, than on the rest of the farm.

Where would be the most suitable place to grow Cotton ? In the Gulf country, in the vicinity of Lake Argyle perhaps ? Would diverting water west of the GDR solve the water problems ?
Suggestions please, not pointless quabbling !

Indy, I have to get in on your question, and the answer is;NOWHERE!
Well to be precise, nowhere in Australia.
The numbers make it a no-go crop.
Australia simply does not have the water to throw away on thirsty crops.
Now maybe you might get a look-in at the Ord up North, but the greedy scumbag politicians and their filthy lobbyists and thieving mates, just went ahead, closed off the Murray for their own selfish end and killing the people and everything else it was supporting.
We need a vigilante group to begin rectifying these criminal acts instigated by these bastards.
I am the kind of guy that believes in 'the end justifies the means'.
Unfortunately, these people do not respond to talking so by doing so they are authorising physical actions to convince them to reverse such bad decisions, even if it costs them their lives.
We used to have the death penalty for acts of serious crimes especially those where people died.
It is only appropriate that it be re-instated, even if by the public.
You will begin to see a shift in govt thinking very quickly, when they realise their scum-baggery will end up costing them their lives.

Researchers Developed a Technique to Turn Nearly a Quarter of Our Plastic Waste into Fuel
The process could help convert millions of tons of plastic we generate every year into an gasoline and diesel-like fuel.

http://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xwbw3k/researchers-developed-a-technique-to-turn-nearly-a-quarter-of-our-plastic-waste-into-fuel

A team of chemists at Purdue may have found a partial solution to our plastic woes. As detailed in a paper published this week in Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering, the chemists discovered a way to convert polypropylene—a type of plastic commonly used in toys, medical devices, and product packaging like potato chip bags—into gasoline and diesel-like fuel. The researchers said that this fuel is pure enough to be used as blendstock, a main component of fuel used in motorized vehicles.

Polypropylene waste accounts for just under a quarter of the estimated 5 billion tons of plastic that have amassed in the world’s landfills in the last 50 years.

To turn polypropylene into fuel, the researchers used supercritical water, a phase of water that demonstrates characteristics of both a liquid and a gas depending on the pressure and temperature conditions. Purdue chemist Linda Wang and her colleagues heated water to between 716 and 932 degrees Fahrenheit at pressures approximately 2300 times greater than the atmospheric pressure at sea level.

When purified polypropylene waste was added to the supercritical water, it was converted into oil within in a few hours, depending on the temperature. At around 850 degrees Fahrenheit, the conversion time was lowered to under an hour.

The byproducts of this process include gasoline and diesel-like oils. According to the researchers, their conversion process could be used to convert roughly 90 percent of the world’s polypropylene waste each year into fuel.

“Plastic waste disposal, whether recycled or thrown away, does not mean the end of the story,” Wang said. “Plastics degrade slowly and release toxic microplastics and chemicals into the land and the water. This is a catastrophe because once these pollutants are in the oceans, they are impossible to retrieve completely.”

Philip, a couple of things I am curious about.
Firstly, from what little I know on the topic of recycling, I am left with the all too familiar feeling that the cost of recycling this plastic will cost more than the value of the resulting oil/fuel.
The other point is that she makes a very serious claim about the contamination of the oceans by the micro-chemicals released from these plastics.
I am confused because plastics in their final state emit nothing toxic that I am aware of.
Now if these toxins are released when crushed and turned to powder, it may be a different story, but even then it would all happen in a controlled environment, so I cannot see any contamination of oceans (or anything for that matter) occurring.

ALTRAV Can't answer the question, I found the article and thought others with more knowledge on the subject may be able to make use of the information.

Philip, OK thanks.