This is true with most plastic. Even bringing recyclable plastic to a recycling center doesn't mean it will be recycled.
Fact is, it's more expensive to recycle than to make new plastic.
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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The sad fact is the best use of used plastic is probably burning it to create electricity.
It likely won't be recycled or reused and even if it is, it's likely that will only happen once (as recycled plastic is low quality).
So the option is bury it so it can outlast humanity underground or burn it to free up the carbon for hopefully regular consumption in the carbon cycle.
The only way plastic makes sense, then, is if we start using Carbon extracted from CO2 to create plastic.
Down cycling to lower quality plastics seems like another good use, but yeah, plastic is fucked lol
.... the best option is not to create more co2 and other toxins, as well as aerosolize the microplastics. Burying it is 1000000% better.
other toxins
The vast majority of plastic is carbon, hydrogen, oxygen chains. You can burn those completely such that the only thing released is CO2 and water vapor (just need a hot enough temperature). A scrubber can easily catch anything that breaks that assumption.
If you do an incinerator and don't harvest the power, you can even turn it into just a carbon block by filling the chamber with nitrogen and pumping the temp up to 500C. That'll leave you with carbon blocks and water vapor.
not to create more co2
Plastic decomposes in weird ways that leaving it in the environment is worse than taking it out all together. The reason microplastic is everywhere isn't because we have been burning plastics, it's because we've been (improperly) burying it. I worry a lot more about a leaky landfill letting it's pollutants seep into local water systems.
Further, part of plastic degradation is into those more toxic carbon chains and methane. It's frankly better to just bite the bullet and turn it into CO2.
1, there's no burning plastic completely. We can't even burn real fuel completely.
2,
Incineration of plastic waste in an open field is a major source of air pollution. Most of the times, the Municipal Solid Waste containing about 12% of plastics is burnt, releasing toxic gases like Dioxins, Furans, Mercury and Polychlorinated Biphenyls into the atmosphere. Further, burning of Poly Vinyl Chloride liberates hazardous halogens and pollutes air, the impact of which is climate change. The toxic substances thus released are posing a threat to vegetation, human and animal health and environment as a whole. Polystyrene is harmful to Central Nervous System. The hazardous brominated compounds act as carcinogens and mutagens. Dioxins settle on the crops and in our waterways where they eventually enter into our food and hence the body system. These Dioxins are the lethal persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and its worst component, 2,3,7,8 tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD), commonly known as agentorange is a toxic compound which causes cancer and neurological damage, disrupts reproductive thyroid and respiratory systems. Thus, burning of plastic wastes increase the risk of heart disease, aggravates respiratory ailments such as asthma and emphysema and cause rashes, nausea or headaches, and damages the nervous system. Hence, a sustainable step towards tomorrow's cleaner and healthier environment needs immediate attention of the environmentalists and scientists. This review presents the hazards of incineration; open burning of plastics and effe
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187802961630158X
Your first point is not a complete thought; disregarding the extreme vagueness of the statement unto non-relevance (seriously, share what you're smoking).
Your second point is about open field incineration, something the other poster never advocated for.
If you're being disingenuous it's done poorly. If not, you read like a loon talking to himself and quoting about clouds when folks are discussing gaseous containment.
If you don't understand my first point, you'll have to explain what you don't understand for me to help you out instead of being snarky
My second point is not "about open field incineration", the first sentence of the abstract of the paper includes that phrase, but it's a whole damn paper. It's about how the plastics are not just simple bonds of carbon and oxygen and have a lot of really quite bad chemicals you don't want to throw out into the atmosphere, which op wad claiming was fine.
The Swiss burn what cannot be easily recycled. ¯\(°_o)/¯
Not just Amazon. So much plastic waste is designated recyclable with caveats, caveats that the average consumer is not aware of and will not follow up on.
I was pleasantly surprised to see Amazon shipping some items in paper envelopes that are padded with paper instead of bubble wrap. I don’t know how they decide which envelope to use though.
Whichever one is closest to the employee who has to use it to pack your stuff in 6 seconds or less otherwise it’s pee-pee in a bottle time again
You update your settings to say that you only accept paper for orders from your account.
Where do you do that?
In the account settings
Been there. Can't find it. Maybe not on mobile?
DDG leaves me empty handed too.
I can't find it at all, I want quickly chat with customer service or even a competent bot (like a proper fucking millenial adult) & resolve it. But this isn't an option. I think I made it work, here's the steps:
Call (🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🤡) Amazon cust service 18882804331
Let bot speak, verify account by text (say yes), Text message: Are you calling Amazon? Yes
Now start saying NO. Bot must finish speaking 🙄🙄🙄 Are you calling about this purchase? NO. Another purchase? NO. Amazon device? NO. You say no 4-5x & bot says "Let me get someone for you."
Tell human customer service representative that you'd like future shipments shipped in paper envelopes, not plastic bags.
With my experience, 'Odie' briefly put me on hold for ~3 mins. He came back on & said there was a note put on my account, and my future purchases should come in paper, not plastic.
You can do that??? (o_O) Fuck yeah
Yes.I wish more people did this, sigh
Pretty much everything I order off Amazon comes in paper packaging these days. Getting a plastic or bubble mailer is pretty rare.
One disappointing thing though: the ink in almost every printing process is some form of polymer which ends up as micro plastics that long outlive the paper they were printed on. Of course, still way better than wholly plastic mailers, just not perfect.
All of this packaging simply needs to be made...easily compostable & biodegradable, with a low-impact manufacturing process. It rots away? Cool. Make more.
It will become garbage. It will often not get recycled.
The world will not be made better by 50,000 people recycling everything perfectly. The world will be made significantly better by hundreds of millions of people recycling imperfectly, by companies making products & packaging better by design.
Most recyclables in general aren't even all that recyclable to begin with. All those campaigns telling you to recycle plastics are just pushing the blame onto consumers when it has always been the fault of manufacturers. Coca Cola even funds some of them, because its easier to fool people than to use different materials.
I assume everything I put into recycling except for glass paper and aluminum is just thrown away. I still do it on the off chance the plastic actually is recycled though.
Steel and copper are the most valuable
It's fucked up, but recycling is an empty thing when it comes to plastics of any kind. Limited times it can be done, economic non viability for most types, and lack of facilities to actually recycle any of them in a given state (for the US, but I doubt that's unique to here).
Pretty much, if it isn't a drink or milk bottle, it's trash that is going to end up as a problem. Even then you still run into how many times you can recycle the same plastic afaik.
Glass is a lot better. It's way cheaper to make new than recycle it, but at least it doesn't cause problems by existing.
What sucks is that plastics are bloody useful; doing away with them entirely would be more expensive, and lead to materials that just aren't as good at a given job being used instead.
Glass is not 100% recyclable. All recycled glass needs virgin material mixed-in.
The reason glass is great is because it can be reused, not because its a good candidate for recycling
Cool beans, thanks for the info
By "recyclable" I just figured they meant you could use it again yourself to pack something else up and ship.
That's called upcycling
It's actually called reusing among the three Rs: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
You're right
That's what I've been doing.
Is this some regional thing? Everything I've ever ordered from Amazon has come in a card box or thick paper bag and even has paper tape.
It seems to be fairly random, but I've certainly seen them use plastic bags for shipping. These are the two most common styles, with one being a bag, and the other being a bubble-wrap envelope.
Random.
I can get 8 items at one time... Two will be in a box, four will be in paper bags, and two will be in plastic bags.
For such an automated company, you'd think that everything would just be in a single box.
Your order(s) don't necessarily ship all of the items from the same warehouse.
But each item from a different warehouse?
I used to get everything in single boxes before. Now it's always multiple packages.
This is speculation, but it's probably a lot faster and cheaper to just pack and ship instead of collecting first, and then packing and shipping.
I can't see it being cheaper, since those packages aren't free. Faster? Not sure about that, either. Amazon automates a lot of their process, and the separate items would still need to gather in one place to be shipped together anyway. Packing a half dozen separate items is surely less efficient than packing everything in one box.
Again, this wasn't a problem a few years ago, when everything would come in a single box. The greenwashing by Amazon about their plastic bags is 10 steps backwards, IMO.
You might have updated your settings to tell them yo only ship you paper st some point. This should be the default, really.
Isn't it a play on words? It CAN be recycled, but it doesn't mean that it WILL be. That's the case for a lot of things, recycling is mostly a scam because of this.
It can be recycled ^in a very specific facility that only exists in a few select locations.^ ^^not near you^^
Get paper. Plastic free is the only way