The U.S. Must Recycle Recycling

Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash

Looking in recycling bins around my neighborhood, I see stuff that shouldn’t be there. It’s single stream recycling, everything in one bin. And I mean everything. Cardboard contaminated with grease or lots of plastic tape, plastic that’s not recyclable, general trash, styrofoam, envelopes with the little plastic windows. it’s a mess. This is a nice neighborhood. Houses are going for $650,000 to $1,400,000. No, I am not wealthy. My house is a teardown. It will be the lot for one of these McMansions. I know it’s profiling, but I assumed people here would know how to recycle, but they don’t. They are, apparently, just like the millions of other people in the U.S. that feel good about recycling, but the Chinese think their recycling stinks because … well, it does. Too much of it was garbage and winding up in Chinese landfills and incinerators instead of being recycled, so the Chinese government put a stop to it with the 2017 passage of the National Sword policy. 

Now, I know that you do recycling correctly. I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about all those other people out there that put plastic grocery bags, shower curtains, or garden hose in the recycling bin. Also, there should be no shredded paper, clothing, scrap metal, needles or medical waste, bubble wrap, aluminum foil, drinking glasses, non-recyclable plastics, hazardous waste, dirty diapers, liquids, frozen food containers (polymer film on the cardboard), and no caps or lids on glass bottles or jars. 

The problem has been going on a long time, and China isn’t the only nation being persnickety about what winds up on their shores, and America isn’t the only perp. Six years ago, Canada sent 103 shipping containers to the Philippines containing recyclable plastic. Inspectors there determined it to be regular household garbage. Philippine President Duterte is livid and threatens to declare war on Canada if they don’t take it back. 

There are great benefits to recycling. It reduces the amount of waste going to landfills and incinerators. It conserves natural resources such as water, metals, minerals, and timber. It saves energy. It helps create jobs. Besides, it just feels right, like you’re doing something to save the world. Don’t get carried away. It’s going to take more than recycling to defeat climate change, like voting for someone that gives a shit. 

I think recycling went wrong with the advent of single stream recycling. Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs) are semi-automatic, sorters using a lot of clever gadgets and software to sort single stream recycling. They are good but not that good. Plus, they cost a lot of money; and they still need people to keep watch and help out when the fans, magnets, eddy currents, and optical sorters miss something. Even with all those gizmos and people to sort trash, what comes out of a MFR is still dirtier than what recycling used to be. Once upon a time, the recycling center could count on the stuff it received to be as advertised. Everything was separated out. A quick glance could determine cleanliness or lack thereof. It was a much cheaper way to recycle but required more thought and time from the recyclables producer.

The first material recovery facility was Resource Recovery Systems in Branford, Connecticut in the 70s. The idea spread, apparently because it was thought to be a positive in selling recycling to the American public. Convenience, convenience, convenience. When China started taking in recyclables thirty years ago, MRFs served us well in getting all that stuff into cargo containers headed somewhere else besides American incinerators and landfills. There were plenty of empty cargo containers from all the consumer goods China was shipping to the U.S. At the same time, however, shipping plastic recycling to China put the quietus on good ole U.S. of A. recycling centers where this stuff could be turned back into usable plastic. 

Sounds like a great opportunity for a young, smart startup team. If China won’t do it, by golly, we will. There’s another problem. The price for recycled plastic as a commodity has gone from a peak of about $300 per ton to “… costing more to collect, process, (and) ultimately produce recycled materials today than they’re worth.” That’s from Peter Keller, a vice president of Republic Services.  

The Chinese won’t take it, and the price for it is in the crapper. Municipalities with recycling programs are really in a pickle. All over the nation, they are pretending to pick up recycling, but it is being diverted to landfills or incinerators. It’s going on right here in Houston. Home owners all over the city have video footage of trucks picking up both trash and recycling. They are very upset that their recycling is going the same place as the garbage. I don’t blame them. Some people spend a lot of time washing out containers, taking tape off of cardboard, etc. The mayor claims the “sanitation engineer” made an error, but I don’t think he’s telling the whole story. The order to send recyclables to the landfill comes from the top. There’s nothing else they can do with it. The recycling centers were just fronts for shipping this stuff to China. They don’t have the facilities to actually turn it back into useful material that domestic industries will buy. 

So, now what do we do? For one thing, we should cut down on the use of throw-away plastic in our lives. It will be difficult. Carry your own utensils? Stainless steel personal straws (telescoping to fit in your pocket)?  

If companies are going to ship their products, they should come up with something better than plastic for shipping padding. Take a lightweight metal screen, shape it around a product, leaving screen around the product the size of the shipping box. Swish that screen through a vat of paper fiber in one direction, let it dry, and pop it out—a custom made paper mache packing insert for the product. It’s effective and recyclable. If companies that rely on shipping did this, it would do away with megatons of plastic that is not ordinarily recyclable. 

We should also consider taking sorting to the next step for plastics. Separate each plastic by number in its own bin and make sure it’s clean. Also, have municipalities pay the consumer for the recycled material. It doesn’t have to be much. Make it a $5 monthly rebate on the trash pickup or water bill for some minimum of material collected.

With clean, presorted plastic as feedstock, the government could then provide low cost loans as an incentive to restart American recycling centers. If we can get plastic recycling to where it’s not losing that much money, it will be in good shape the next time oil prices head skyward. Then we can bask in the glow of non-stinky recyclables and tell the Chinese “no” you can’t have them, even if they ask nicely. 

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Recycling Asteroids For Fun and Profit

Asteroids

You did it! You raised $5 billion dollars to mine an asteroid and did just that. They didn’t think you could, but $10 billion for immediate delivery of iron, platinum, nickel, and water to the orbiting habitat project just cleared your bank with an agreement to supply another $10 billion worth of material over the next 15 years. 

Paper bags take 5 X the water to make and 7 X the fuel to transport than plastic bags 

Now what to do with a mined-out asteroid? 

Asteroid being worked on.

Careful programming of the mining drones left tunnels in concentric circular paths around the axis of the asteroid. It spins around that axis, producing .75 artificial gravity in the tunnel nearest the surface. It still has a lot of equipment on it, including a used coil gun/ mass driver propulsion system with enough iron left to run it for another 300 years. Ice storage systems are intact and some water left entrained in rock, about half a cubic mile. A 200 feet diameter repair bay has been cut a quarter mile deep in one end with a space tug parked in the center on tensioned cables. The bay is connected by airlock to the pressurized habitat portion of the asteroid that all those mining tunnels have been turned in to. Several side caverns are packed with deep space drones of various capability. The crown jewel is the new fusion reactor for those dark, cold times out in the asteroid belt when the Sun gets too weak to make those solar panels work efficiently.

Why so much equipment and careful design for a mined-out asteroid? 

Highly modified asteroid.

The Swiss government has just rented the asteroid for its next two laps around the Sun, about two and a half years, for deep space studies of the asteroid belt and a flyby of Mars to deliver supplies to the Scandinavian colony there. That rent means another $750 million dollars; half Swiss Francs, half Aquacoin (the water based cryptocurrency used in space); into the bank account. And you thought RV rentals were outrageous. Actually, it’s quite cheap for what they’re getting, but you have ulterior motives. While the Swiss are doing their studies, your prospecting drones will be cataloguing more asteroids in the belt with the idea of finding another worth mining. The Swiss know this. All deals are transparent in space.

Astronauts putting net on asteroid.

This scenario presupposes some technological developments that may or may not take place over the next few decades. Practical nuclear fusion is, obviously, the biggest hurdle. The artificial intelligence to run autonomous drones is another. Once those technologies are up and running, recycling mined-out asteroids into Solar System spanning space ships will be no problem. They have a built-in radiation shield. Spun up, they have artificial gravity. Those are two of the big problems in navigating long distances in deep space. 

Asteroid miner drone.

There is one sneaky, ill-perceived technological hurdle to be overcome to make this series of future events likely. The human aging problem must be solved. Humans need to live longer in order to take on the kind of projects needed to become a spacefaring species. Humans need to live in good physical condition for 150 to 200 years after adolescence and before declining into old age. Not only will it make such projects more likely, it will force humanity into a longer view of the future. We will start taking care of the planet, recycling to the max, planning for the far future. Why? Because now it’s personal. You no longer need the kids and grandkids as an excuse to do good things for the future. Do it for yourself! You’re going to be there. 

It costs $4000 to recycle ton of plastic bags worth $500 on open market. 

Back to asteroids. At some point, someone is going to get brave and break that asteroid out of its natural orbit with the propulsion drive, start using planets and moons as gravity slings, and really start exploring our Solar System. It’s a big place. People could be on missions that last decades exploring the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn. I wonder what the science fiction of those times will be like.

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Why It Is a Certainty We Will Become a Space-Based Civilization

Asteroid Mining - How to Pick the Right Asteroid

Taking the 06-03-25 Asteroid Shuttle to Mars - An Alternative to Planned Mars Missions

A Heavy Metal, Cannibalistic Asteroid Propulsion System

Sticking the Landing On Your Billion Dollar Asteroid

Artificial Intelligence and Asteroid Mining Will Be a (Necessary) Match Made In the Heavens

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There's An Asteroid Out There With All of Our Names On It

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How We Will Get Asteroid Material Back To Earth

The Military Values High Ground - Space Is the Highest

Very Large Scale 3D Printing In Space

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We Will Live on the Moon: the How and Why

SOMETIMES SIMPLE TECH CARRIES THE DAY

RECYCLE OR REUSE: THE DEBATE RAGES ON FOR PLASTIC GROCERY BAGS

 © Copyright Graham Horn and licensed
for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

While some may revile the ubiquitous plastic grocery bag as the ultimate example of our throw-away society, others argue they aren't that bad if they are recycled. One problem with recycling is that time and energy are expended returning the bags to a store or recycling center.

Altogether, it costs $4,000 to recycle a ton of plastic bags.1 That ton of plastic is then worth $500-$1200 on the open commodities market.2 That’s before it is turned back into plastic bags which only adds to this unequal cost equation. We are only talking about the estimated 5-20% of bags that make it to the recycler. The rest end up as landfill or litter. In the landfill, however, they take up a fraction of the volume paper bags occupy. The litter problem does remain, and it seems governments are unwilling to impose stiffer fines to reduce it.

In another comparison with paper bags, because the plastic bags are light and take up less room, they require only one seventh the number of trucks to transport them to market. This is a great savings in energy spent per bag.3

A reusable canvas bag is an option, but it also comes with disadvantages. The main one is hygiene. Unless you’re buying only canned or boxed foods, you’re going to have to wash it after a few trips. This uses resources and energy. Plus, if you don’t keep them in your car at all times, you’ll find you need to purchase an extra now and then. Hauling them around in your trunk, as little as those several canvas totes weigh, does entail extra fuel costs.

There is one simple solution that hardly anybody talks about. It is to reuse the bags as trash liners in the home instead of recycling them. This short circuits the expensive route from retailer to home to recycler to manufacturer to retailer. This saves the $4,000 per ton expense of recycling. It also saves a household budget the expense of trash can liners, giving consumers an incentive to save every bag and put it to use. And that takes care of the litter problem because it winds up in the landfill where it belongs. There is a common misconception that this adds to the particulate plastic pollution plaguing the oceans, but that is not true. That kind of breakdown, eventually almost to the molecular level, requires sunlight.

One such reuser talks about his experience, “...use wire frames to keep ‘em open and upright, and I put ‘em everywhere I’d use a waste basket or to clean up messes...litter boxes, food trimmings, recycling bins. If you need it to hold liquid just pop open the bag and hold it up to the light. The smallest pinhole shows up.”

“Baggeroo” Plastic Grocery Bag Holder

Image courtesy General Product Development

The support frames mentioned can be found on the internet. You can also use small plastic waste containers to hold the bags. Simple tech for a big problem. If somebody had come up with this years ago, we probably wouldn't be arguing for or against plastic bags. Just don't tell the companies that make plastic trash bags about this. They'll lobby Congress for a ban on it.

References:

1. Article from the web site reuseit.com - http://bit.ly/LCqUn5
2. Web stie - http://www.theplasticsexchange.com/3. Article from the Aol.news - http://aol.it/MTFigd

Thanks for your time. Comments are welcome.