Ars Technica: A few years back, it looked like plastic recycling was set to become a key part of a sustainable future. Then, the price of fossil fuels plunged, making it cheaper to manufacture new plastics. Then China essentially stopped importing recycled plastics for use in manufacturing. With that, the bottom dropped out of plastic recycling, and the best thing you could say for most plastics is that they sequestered the carbon they were made of.
6 comments:
Most of this article went over my head to be honest, but I think the core message here is really important. It is weird to think about, but I really do not think recycling in the conventional sense is doing as much for our planet as we might think or hope it is. It might make you feel good to be putting your glass and plastic into the recycling bin on the side of the street, but is it really making a difference? This is not the first article I have read about problems with recycling recently. There are others that say the process of recycling plastic is actually more harmful than producing new plastics. This is why it is so important to be continually finding new ways of improving how we recycle and using new technologies to make it more and more friendly to the earth. There is a lot of potential in recycling, and we should all still be doing it, but it definitely needs a modern overhaul if it is going to continue to be so critical to environmentalism.
This was a very sciency- article for a right- brained person like me. Almost everything came off to me like gibberish but as Cooper said, even with that, one can understand what the article’s overarching idea is, and a very important one at that.
Recycling plastics has been such an engrained principle in the minds of 21st century kids, like they literally have classes dedicated for this. But perhaps something that they forgot to talk about or did not needed to be taught when this idea was still nascent are the potential disadvantages associated with plastic recycling.
Plastic recycling, just like everything else, comes with its own share of problems. And that is what this article is trying to tackle as it proposes to create new types of plastic, some of which can be borderline biodegradable in a way so that they do not have to manually be recycled, reducing the disadvantages.
This was a very sciency- article for a right- brained person like me. Almost everything came off to me like gibberish but as Cooper said, even with that, one can understand what the article’s overarching idea is, and a very important one at that.
Recycling plastics has been such an engrained principle in the minds of 21st century kids, like they literally have classes dedicated for this. But perhaps something that they forgot to talk about or did not needed to be taught when this idea was still nascent are the potential disadvantages associated with plastic recycling.
Plastic recycling, just like everything else, comes with its own share of problems. And that is what this article is trying to tackle as it proposes to create new types of plastic, some of which can be borderline biodegradable in a way so that they do not have to manually be recycled, reducing the disadvantages.
I’m with Cooper, a good amount of this article went way over my head. I really like the idea of “upcycling” but more importantly I like that turning plastics into other products is already occurring. It is by no means a standard right now or a regular practice but at least it is already happening. The other things about this article is that it doesn’t take into account that states and cities have various orders and capabilities. Pittsburgh for example allows you to throw recyclables into the landfill buckets… I don’t know if it actually gets separated out like I have been told but it supposedly does. Los Angeles on the other hand requires you to recycle and has extensive abilities for recycling. Then there are cities like San Francisco where you can get fined for putting things in the wrong bins and have grown on to include compost as separate from recycling and landfill. It is relevant to say that as a city you can do great good but as a nation it feels like we lack in what could be much better than it is.
I must admit that I did have to read this article a couple times and there were some parts that I still struggled to fully grasp. This article was definitely very sciency and went super in depth, which I honestly enjoyed even when it was hard to fully understand. I do think that there needs to be more information out there about how the products they promote us to recycle actually gets used and becomes new products. I think this article gives a lot of hope that the insane amount of plastics that are currently on our earth can eventually be reused and turned into something new without killing our environment in the process. I do wish this article also included either how expensive this process is or how accessible it is. Accessibility is one of the biggest reasons our current recycling efforts are not as effective as it is terrible expensive to recycle and to set up a facility in every city or county. I genuinely don’t know how big of a venture it is for every county within Pennsylvania to be able to take on this venture let alone the entire country. Environmental efforts are also something we need to keep big companies accountable for and other countries need to take a part in or there really is no way to go back from the damage we have already created. I do hope this is a step in the right direction however.
I’m with all the other people on this one, it’s kind of a hard article to digest; especially since I don’t have a background in chemistry. Despite not really grasping everything the article talks about, it was still interesting enough to read. I think it’s cool that they’re upcycling plastics and trying to make use of trash. Turning plastics into liquid fuel is definitely not something I would have imagined is possible. I think for normal readers who don’t have the scientific knowledge to completely understand this article, it would’ve been helpful if they’d included some more basic or general information about the plastic material conversion. Like how much does it cost per unit or round? How long does it take? Are there any health or environmental risks in this process that could be more harmful than helpful? Overall I think the idea is great and I hope more companies start looking into environmental efforts because we’re losing it too quickly.
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