• AA5B@lemmy.world
    1·
    11 days ago

    Everything would be a bit more efficient, a bit more interchangeable nine Ted. Landfills would fill a bit more slowly.

    A useful step to reduce the growth of environmental damage, but not enough

  • DagwoodIII@piefed.socialEnglish
    15·
    12 days ago

    [off topic?]

    “The Midas Plague” by Fredrick Pohl.

    A light-hearted science fiction story where 100% recycling, free atomic power, and robot labor have combined to create a glut of consumer goods. So, the higher your status, the less you use. Folks in the ghetto have ten houses and a thousand robot servants, while the Beverly Hills elites live in shacks and play cards for matches.

    Fun read.

      • DagwoodIII@piefed.socialEnglish
        1·
        11 days ago

        If you liked “Idiocracy” read “The Marching Morons” by C.M. Kornbluth, a frequent Pohl collaborator.

        It’s the same basic story, but the original version has a much. much darker ending.

    • spicy pancake@lemmy.zipEnglish
      12·
      12 days ago

      we can already sorta see this in fashion

      in ye olde days, the more bits and baubles and lace and ruffles you had on your clothes/shoes/furniture, the richer you were

      since the advent of industrialized consumer goods, flashy embellished things are marketed to the working class meanwhile the bourgeois drop mega money on plain color or simply patterned gowns and tuxes, absurdly minimalist furniture, and unadorned shoes that showcase whatever exotic material they’re made of

  • Scott 🇨🇦🏴‍☠️@sh.itjust.works
    161·
    11 days ago

    Unless industry is using the raw material produced from recycling, we’ll never get to 100% recycling. People throwing stuff in the blue bag or green bin, whatever it is in your region, that’s only the first step. We are a long way off from 100%. We have countries who have refused to accept shipments of recycled products because there’s no market for that material.

  • 🔰Hurling⚜️Durling🔱@lemmy.world
    6211·
    12 days ago

    Recycling is a fraud. It was invented by the oil and plastic industry to pass the blame to consumers and shield themselves from repercussions. While some plastics CAN be recycled, its only numbers 1-3, every other plastic cannot be recycled or its so expensive that companies had no incentive to do it, and this still doesn’t include paper that also has a limit on what it can be recycled to.

    • snooggums@piefed.worldEnglish
      741·
      12 days ago

      Plastic recycling is a lie, sure.

      Recycling other materials like aluminum, steel, copper, glass, and a ton of other materials is perfectly sound. Oil companies just piggybacked on the success with those materials to sell their lie.

      • hemmes@lemmy.worldEnglish
        124·
        12 days ago

        Not as much as you think. Many of the recyclable materials you mentioned are “contaminated” with the contents they were used to deliver because folks don’t wash them well enough. It’s not their fault; we’re told to “rinse” the materials, but they really have to be fully washed, a tough task for many of those cans with crevices and ridges that are often missed. Other contaminants include throwing in what you think is the correct metal or plastic, but it’s not, and that ruins a whole batch.

        As usual, John Oliver says it best.

        • Nikls94@lemmy.world
          14·
          11 days ago

          Comment from a German specialist in a thread about this from 2017:

          Die nicht recykelbaren Reste wie Lebensmittelreste, Farbauftrag oder irgendwelche Etiketten verbrennen in der Schmelze und treiben oben auf dem flüssigen Metall als Schlacke, die einfach abgeschöpft und entsorgt werden kann.

          Translation:

          The non-recyclable residues, such as food scraps, paint coatings or labels burn off in the melt and float to the top of the molten metal as slags, which can simply be skimmed off and disposed of.

          • hemmes@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            11 days ago

            I’m not saying we shouldn’t recycle, we of course should. But most local recycling plants don’t have that capability.

            And the biggest problem are plastics - glass and metal materials are much more forgiving.

          • frank@sopuli.xyz
            14·
            11 days ago

            I was a process engineer in an aluminum plant. While I didn’t directly work in remelt, this is correct as I understand it.

            20:1 is the net energy usage for new aluminum smelting:recycling.

            Recycle your metals please.

        • UsernameHere@lemy.lolEnglish
          72·
          12 days ago

          Raw materials come from the ground. By your standards of “contamination” aren’t raw materials much more contaminated?

          A lot of work goes into refining glass, aluminum, steel, copper etc. A lot of impurities have to be removed to make those materials for the first time.

          • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
            11·
            12 days ago

            Metallurgy isn’t my field, but here’s an educated guess…

            There are different kinds of contaminants. In raw ore you largely have silicate rock and metals. In recycled material you have relatively pure metal (alloys), and a large variety of volatiles.

            Now with ore you can grind it all into sand, sift it, and smelt all the heavy grains. The rock should mostly just separate from the metal, these are just phase changes. But with recycling, those volatiles are going to burn and some are going to react with the metals, changing the chemical makeup. And with ore, you basically know what minerals you’re working with. With recycled materials, it’s anyone’s guess. Does this can contain some food residue? Or an oil? Perhaps chemical cleaning agents? Is another plastic container stuffed inside?

            There’s a lot of variables with recycled materials, I imagine it’s hard to predict how some of those variables react.

            • onslaught545@lemmy.zip
              2·
              11 days ago

              For metals, it’s pretty trivial to remove slag (contaminants) from the metal. Basically everything floats to the top and you can just scrape it off.

          • hemmes@lemmy.worldEnglish
            22·
            11 days ago

            Raw materials is not what we’re talking about here. Local recycling plants are not processing raw materials - that’s a completely different process. They are very limited systems designed to process consumer materials.

            • UsernameHere@lemy.lolEnglish
              3·
              11 days ago

              We’re talking about whether recycling is feasible.

              Whether or not it is feasible is decided by how hard it is to do compared to just making new materials.

              Your comment seemed to be saying the contaminates in recycling make them harder to recycle back to their raw materials (compared to making new raw materials).

    • abbadon420@sh.itjust.works
      5·
      12 days ago

      Paper can be recycled 7 times. Every time the quality degrades because the fibers get shorter. The last recycle is purely for toiletpaper or crêpe.

      • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
        1·
        11 days ago

        Suri, but everyone uses toilet paper and that will never be recycled so it’s still a good idea to recycle paper.

    • snek_boi@lemmy.ml
      5·
      12 days ago

      Also I remember talking to someone who makes plastic molds and they were saying that recycled plastic loses some of its desirable qualities, so even recyclable plastics have a limited lifespan.

      • Rhaedas@fedia.io
        21·
        12 days ago

        100% is not realistic physically. You should phrase the question as a world where everything that’s possible to be recycled is recycled, and where it isn’t we go back to materials that are naturally recycled or reusable. Basically a world where plastics and other materials that are one-time use are banned. It’s a great topic, as we don’t remotely realize how much we throw away. The scale is huge. The change in what is affordable or possible would be huge too.

        We could do a lot better, and it would be impactful. Some things have to be disposable in our modern world though, at least with current technology. Just medical use alone is a big example.

    • RinseChessBacked@lemmy.ml
      12·
      12 days ago

      Where I live it’s only 1-2. Also, sorting is a challenge, and we often don’t know if it actually gets recycled or ends up on a ship to India.

      • onslaught545@lemmy.zip
        2·
        11 days ago

        Ours just goes to the landfill. I happened to be behind one of the recycling trucks when I was on a dump run once, and it pulled into the same trash pile I did.

        Stopped paying $25 a month for it when I got home.

  • MochiGoesMeow@lemmy.zipEnglish
    53·
    11 days ago

    Recycling doesn’t work unless you have a respectful and intelligent society like Japan or South Korea. Americans would never follow the rules. 🤣

  • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
    6·
    12 days ago

    You technically didn’t ask for them, but presumably this goes hand-in-hand with reduce and reuse as first steps, which would have perhaps a more visible impact.

    Reduce means to cut back on the amount of products we produce in the first place, particularly also the trash being used for packaging.
    This would require:

    • More craftsmanship. Instead of buying a new jeans when your pants have a hole, you’d sew them.
    • More robust, repairable products. Don’t need to throw away the whole phone due to a broken screen when it doesn’t break in the first place or if you can get the screen replaced.
    • More sharing. Not every household needs their own car or toolbox or whatever, if you can share them with your neighbors.
    • There would be more shops that sell products unpackaged, where you bring your own containers to fill.

    Reuse means to sell products in glass jars, metal boxes or similar, which can be washed out and filled anew.
    This would require:

    • Some container-deposit system, so that you can bring your emptied glass jars etc. back to the shops and the shop sends it back to the producer.
    • In that vein, there would need to be a tax on non-reusable packaging to finance the recycling or safe deposition of it.
    • Some products would probably be sold in larger quantities or not anymore, because they just aren’t sustainable, if you make them pay their environmental costs.

    As for recycling, i.e. breaking the thing down and creating a new thing, it’s unlikely that we would ever reach 100% with it alone, at the very least because it’s more effort than reduce and reuse.
    But to improve our rates, there is a whole load of products currently being sold in plastic, which could be sold in paper or wood, if glass jars or metal boxes don’t work there.

    In a hypothetical world, where we could have 100% effective recycling without giving a toss about reduce and reuse, then I guess, we’d have a garbage disposal system which funnels right back into a massive 3D printer.

  • Lyrl@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    5·
    12 days ago

    By what metric? Recycling gives a new use to discarded materials, so the material might be 100% not-discarded, but new energy is still consumed in the recycling process. This is why reducing and re-using are more powerful levers than recycling.

    There is also the detail of whether a material is truly “re” cycled back to the original use, or is “down” cycled to a use with less rigorous technical requirements.