Yes, it’s a scam. Only aluminum actually gets recycled. It’s time to tax plastic so companies start using paper products (even if they go to landfill, they will at least sequester carbon there) or aluminum.
Also glass and steel. Rare earth materials like batteries are very productively recycled. Paper recycling isn't awful either, but more of a wash than a win.
Really, it's thermoplastic disposables that are the real problem here. Those don't recycle (except some very specific items), and frankly never really did. The straw bans are just the tip of the iceberg here. We need to be talking about banning all plastic disposables.
Paper/cardboard can be quite worthwhile. This article [0] was discussed on HN not so long ago. And some plastics too (I used to work for a firm that sold its waste PVC).
The real discrepancy is between consumers and businesses recycling. Businesses can have a clean, unadulterated stream of waste, likely trivial for them to sort at scale. Most consumer recycling is useful for awareness at best and distraction at worst, like California shaming people into fixing their leaky taps during droughts when a billion times as much water is diverted to almond farming.
All consumer waste streams should be filtered for metals and then shoveled into a plasma gasifier. You’re not going to break even on the energy input (source renewables to cover anything above what you generate from burning the syngas byproduct), but you’re going to break everything down into something that be trivially landfilled or used as aggregate for asphalt repaving (slag) and burn the syngas for power.
Aren't there some waste materials you'd prefer to bury in the ground than oxidise and release into the atmosphere near a city? I don't know much about this but I suspect you're over-simplifying.
Gasification uses a plasma arc to break down the molecular bonds of the waste (molecular dissociation) versus incineration oxidation; it can be used for industrial and hazardous waste you’d want to avoid incinerating, and release of anything toxic is greatly reduced.
The link below has examples of two such facilities that operated successfully in Japan about two decades ago; one shut down because the Japanese improved their waste stream recycling, depriving the facility of the necessary feedstock to continue operations.
In the last day or two the midwestern city I live in (Cincinnati) banned single use plasic bags, and a major manufacturer here (P&G) is very slowly working towards making some products slightly more recyclable/use less plastic. So there is a little bit of hope!
No, they do. The grandparent pointed out that aluminum recycles well. I pointed out that there are other consumer recyclables that already work well. But plastics don't.
That's not true at all. The more valuable something is, the more likely it'll be recycled. Take cars for example. The entire frame is recycled. The motor oil gets recycled. The lead battery gets recycled.
Heck, Tesla's ex-CTO recognized the business potential for EV car batteries and started a company for it. There are plenty of hidden arbitrage opportunities out there for recycling.
For the past 50+ years, frames have been integrated with bodies on all cars and some trucks (unibody). The exterior shell of car bodies is a mix of materials, including plastic. The interior shell of body interiors contain very little that's recyclable without an ambitious amount of disassembly that would be very costly. I don't see car recycling happening until something like another world war makes it worth the effort.
The shells are crushed and shredded after economically separable discrete parts have been removed. Magnetic and eddy current separation is used to break out ferrous and non-ferrous metals from the shredded pieces. The plastic bits are as hard to recycle as any plastic, but most of the metal can be effectively recycled.
In the United States, more than 95% of the 10-15 million scrapped vehicles annually enter a comprehensive recycling infrastructure that includes auto parts recyclers/dismantlers, remanufacturers, and material recyclers (shredders). Today, over 75% of automotive materials, primarily the metals, are profitably recycled via (1) parts reuse and parts and components remanufacturing and (2) ultimately by the scrap processing (shredding) industry. The process by which the scrap processors recover metal scrap from automobiles involves shredding the obsolete automobile hulks, along with other obsolete metal-containing products (such as white goods, industrial scrap, and demolition debris), and recovering the metals from the shredded material. The single largest source of recycled ferrous scrap for the iron and steel industry is obsolete automobiles.
From Argonne National Laboratory report "End-of-Life Vehicle Recycling: State of the Art of Resource Recovery from Shredder Residue"
The plastics are made from carbon directly harvested from the ground (oil). Burying them is carbon neutral with respect to atmospheric carbon. The carbon in the paper comes from the atmosphere and burying it is therefore a carbon sink.
I’d like to see some figures, but my understanding is that while paper production is highly polluting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_liquor) and consumes power in heating, transport and the like, plastic production is still worse on a carbon basis. But it’s @ thought calculation: for example you can truckload of plastic bags for less than it costs to transport a truckload of paper bags (and you can fit more plastic bags in said truck).
There are other externalities, such as the dangerous properties of loose used plastic bags as well.
My comment about sequestering carbon via burying toys was a joke.
I've seen between 2-3x as being papers co2 footprint but that excludes landuse changes. Transportation is a small amount of either's footprint.
Your comment about paper not breaking down in an anaerobic environment is incorrect. Like other organic material such as food scraps it gets broken down by bacteria and if there's no oxygen anaerobic ones which will produce methane.
The figure I've seen most often is between 2-3x. However, that doesn't take into account the huge variance if you consider land use changes, which depending on the land (say clearcutting Indonesian forest), could make it be over 10x.
