Letter to the Editor,
Those Oceans of Plastic?
We are being lambasted for polluting the World with plastic. But in the same breath we learn that 90% of the plastic in the sea comes from 10 rivers in Asia and Africa, the 3rd World.
80% of the petroleum crude that we extract from the earth today is burnt, as LPG, petrol, diesel and JP1, to fly our planes. And where people have cars, nobody, not even Al Gore, will give up on Jumbos and 787s. So, why don’t we also burn the other 20% that goes into plastic and rubber, and let it all add to the greening of the globe? Burnt in high temperature clean combustion boilers in the centre of every city it could generate electricity. That would be very efficient localised electricity that could cut the top off peak loading prices, would not lose 10% in those overly long transmission lines that spoil the view, and doesn’t get to dam up the biology of all our river systems.
We, the developed half of the world. need plastic like never before, and it is us who have the methodology to gather up so much rubbish, and sort it for baby nappies, green waste and food scraps, that could be processed for natural biogas to energy. And, we too can corral all that plastic, all our mixed packaging, our rubber tyres, wood and paper that could be efficiently burnt close to every city.
Doesn’t more CO2 grow more trees? By the time we run out of crude and frack, we may well continue to use coal by Sasol processes to make petroleum fuels and allow us time to fully depreciate our present transport systems as we slowly reinvest in new ones. By the time we have burnt up all the coal, probably long before that, we will be generating all our base load 24/7 energy from oh so safe 4th generation nuclear, with enough surplus electricity to either charge up all those Tesla3s that have yet to be built, without spoiling their emissions with present CO2 carbon based power.
Or else, recycle enough carbon dioxide and water back into hydrocarbons to keep the worlds multi billion dollar auto industry huffing and puffing, at least for long distance heavy haulage, until technology catches up.
We could even go one step further, we are still heaping up equally un-recyclable glass, particularly wine bottles. We buy our cheapest plonk in casks, those plastic bags in boxes. Has anyone complained about the taste? If plastic is able to put cheap glass out of business, why not the expensive as well?
Why don’t we shape and colour it to every producers unique requirement, and so that we don’t see the dregs in the bottom, make it strong enough to hold up on all the fizz in champagne, and do away with those mountains of glass? That would be really saving the planet.
Ken Calvert www.coffee.20m.com
Absolutely. RDF – refuse derived fuel, is already a well established technology fueling power generators in Scandinavia and elsewhere, eg Vancouver BC. The main driver is probably diversion of waste from landfills due to high ‘tipping’ costs. The main impediment seems to be the NIMBY phenomenon.
I’ve been saying the same thing for a long time…..including many posts here at WUWT. Plastic is solid hydrocarbon and, for the most part, is a superb fuel that can be used to generate electricity. Recycling plastic is just plain stupid…….the result is an inferior material that has only limited applications in ALL cases.
The percentage of world hydrocarbon production that goes to to manufacture plastic and other petrochemicals is actually very small (certainly less than 5% and probably even lower) so we have no need to undertake the expensive, inefficient and stupid practice of recycling it. If we promoted it as a fuel to be combusted in proper incinerators to generate electricity, it would be seen as every bit as valuable as oil, gasoline and diesel and could be given a market value. That would foster a culture of collection in the developing world rather than disposal since it would certainly give rise to a market for people to benefit from the collection and sale of disposed plastic.
Let’s get smart instead of fighting a ridiculous war to demonise one of mankind’s best and most useful inventions. Plastics are miraculous materials and we need to recognise that fact ASAP.
Snag is that burning anything is to be in league with the devil to our true believers Grreenies.
Only thing to do with Greenies is to force them to go live on a island with all that nature has to offer them. See how long they last when its back to the basics of life.
mje
I thought that most glass was ground up and used in things like reflective paint and fill for tar.
But the very notion of recycling is fixed into the hearts of the greens, and their supporters, so ridiculously uneconomical schemes will be imposed in various jurisdictions. With the near extinction of hard-copy newspapers, the only item worth recycling is aluminum beverage containers. All the plastics in garbage, or paper products, were used because they were disposable.
This is not to discount junk collection, with large chunks of metal. Or recycling asphalt roadways as aggregate for new asphalt roadways.
Burn it! Burn it ALL!
But seriously… if you make it a fuel, you’re putting a value on it. Once it’s worth something, people will start collecting it for the purpose of making money. Pretty soon after that, we’ll have cleaned up all the plastic pollution.
But the Greenies will never go for it because, it makes too much sense and goes against their “narrative”.
Many years ago soda (pop) and beer bottles were collected and a small return-fee paid. I did so, pulling a small red wagon, and knocking on doors, or retrieving them from the sides of roads. Today, parents would have a visit from child-protective services and the police if a child was seen doing that. There are many other reasons why that would not work now.
Collecting, cleaning, and reusing wine bottles has been tried. It doesn’t pay expenses.
Alternatively, the standard size could be changed from 750 mL to 1.5 L and the number of bottles reduced. If all were the same size, shape, and color, reuse would be easier.
Did I hear someone mention totalitarianism? Anti-capitalism?
The essay started with things that can “be efficiently burnt” and segued (via a non sequitur) to something that doesn’t burn.
It seemed a decent idea until that happened.
I’ve seen projects for scooping up the plastic in the ocean being put up for government funding. It would be so much easier to just use it and not put it in the ocean in the first place.
“un-recyclable glass”
Why so negative about glass recycling ?
In many ways I prefer drinking from glass containers.
“When glass is used for new container manufacturing, it is virtually infinitely recyclable. ”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_recycling
Why don’t we burn plastics? They release complex gases like phosgene, a very dangerous gas.
Hummmm, I remember stocking my father’s restaurant/bar with recycled beer bottles. They were simply reclaimed, cleaned, and re-labled and redistributed after first use, many times. Why did that stop? Milk too…..
An alternative to straight combustion is to convert the plastic feedstock back into methane via the Fischer Tropsch process. It can cope with any organic feedstock.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process
Once you have methane, the cycle can continue either into petrochemistry, to make new plastics, to fertilisers via the Haber process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
or into electricity via gas fired power stations.
“Or else, recycle enough carbon dioxide and water back into hydrocarbons to keep the worlds multi billion dollar auto industry huffing and puffing, at least for long distance heavy haulage, until technology catches up.”
“Or else”…lol, thats funny, but missing a sarc tag.
Decades ago, I interviewed with a company that had (or claimed to have) a process for turning waste into fuel, the, let us say, “Trasholeum Process.” I never heard of it again. A little digging revealed that the process also created tons of organic and inorganic acids that ate the process equipment up faster than it made fuel. I’ve heard of dozens of processes since, but none of them that I know of are actively getting rid of trash profitably.
Considering that the gases that come out of modern incinerators are usually less polluting than the atmosphere it enters, it continues to amaze me how the supporters of a man made global catastrophe speak so vociferously against disposing of hydrocarbon waste this way.
With the added benefit of electricity production, and less landfill, making it even more incomprehensible.
A sound article. Thank you…_
Many years ago I worked at an observatory in the Atacama desert. One day there was an accident on the Panamerica highway involving a Coca Cola truck which had shed its load completely. An ‘eco-aware’ member of staff was very upset about it because, according to him it would take at least 25000 years for the glas to disappear. Had read that somewhere. And indeed there was an impressive pile of glass debris on the side of the road.
Three years later there was hardly anything left. A few hundred day-night cycles and some desert wind was all that was needed to pulverise the glass and return it to the sand it was originally.
Subsidies for plasma furnaces would make a lot more ecological sense than subsidies for windmills. (To the extent any subsidies makes sense, that is.)
I like using multiple techniques to reduce or reuse. Wth plastics like thin film, straws, etc I like pyrolysis (which the EPA is considering incineration) in a reduced oxygen environment like nitrogen. At a certain temperature and particle size and mixture you can produce diesel or jet-a fuel below $2 a gallon. Biggest problem I see is we have fixated on a large or extremely large and costly solutions and not scaling down to where the problem is. So San Francisco cam afford to recycle but if you life in a town of 100,000 or less you options decrease to dig a hole and bury it.
i recycle all the glass jars and bottles incoming to my home easily
i buy, or friends give me mass fruit n veg in season and then I make jams chutneys pickles real tomato sauce, worcestershire etc etc
I share the product with the jars/produce donors, we all benefit and get better food as well
the agee twist top lids are fine for reuse and seal up properlky if theyve not been savaged on initial opening.
recently made 18 jars and one 2kg bottle of mustard pickles cost around $1.50 max per jar inc power and condiments and produce. the turmeric and mustard powder cost the most!
As I understand it, some of the problem “micro plastic” pollution arises from wear from automobile tires, which is washed into the drains and oceans and fibres from man-made clothing which come off during washing and again runs into the drains.
I would like to know what recycling can do about those.
Plastic bottles or other such plastic debris floating down rivers usually drifts by the wind to one bank or the other where it accumulates near obstructions in large piles for a while. Rivers are natural sorters of floating plastic. Someone just needs to scoop it up.
Plastic makes an excellent media for bacterial biological filtration of water.
From the financial point of view, the cost of collecting and transporting recyclables in our town amounted to over a million annually. If, on the other hand, the recyclables were collected and hauled away, unsorted, with the trash collection, the town would have saved over 50 %, less than half of what pays today.
Defenders of recycling say that there are environmental benefits and job creation with recycling that make it worthwhile. As to the former, only 5 % of the recyclable load is truly recycled country-wide for original product. A part gets shredded for land fill and similar purposes and much goes to the dumps or incinerators, sometime simply because the recycler did not find a buyer for some items or run out of storage capacity. All this hauling, sorting and repeated hauling cause harm to the environment, not benefit. There is no evidence that recycling saves energy or lessens pollution to a measurable degree, save with objects returnable for cash such as cans and bottles.
As to job creation, for that purpose we could replace every 200 horsepower trucks with 200 horse-powered wagons with drivers, loaders and unloaders. That would also eliminate burning fossil fuels along with replacing the diesel noise and exhaust pollution with “organic” ones. Not a good prospect considering that this country achieved the highest standard of living in the world by saving labor, that is, by finding ways to achieve more with fewer jobs.
There is a difficulty and a cost to removing the high energy plastics from other waste in the dump. A few years ago before the Natural gas shale revolution, there were several companies developing and building incinerator plants to burn household garbage. Unfortunately it just isn’t cost effective with low cost natural gas.
The other problem is the resulting ash is somewhat toxic and there are disposal issues.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. If it were cheap and easy to take out the plastics, and then there were people willing to pay for the power generated from these plants, they would already exist.
Recycling is generally a scam with the main benefits being a sense of greenness and more government tax payer funded jobs. If no profit can be achieved by recycling, it should not be done. Leftist propaganda has convinced folks it is a good thing. I sit on a tax distribution board and one of our biggest loosers is recycling, ie, a tax èater. But those being paid by the local tax dollars will likely vote left along with family ànd friends. Burn it or bury it.