Social [Plastic Waste] Startup turns trash into construction-grade building blocks

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For the longest time, I believed that ALL the recyclable materials we drops off at the local recycling centers would be taken care of at a recycling plants in our own states, and they magically turns into new products that would make Captain Planet proud.

I was deceived. As were you.

As it turns out, we only cherry-pick the highest-quality stuff that's easiest to recycle with maximum returns. The rest are crushed into giant cubes about the size of your bedroom and sent off on cargo ships to China. What happens to them next is no longer our concern.

For the record, we don't bother dealing with those low-quality recyclables not because we don't have the technology or know-how, but simply because it would cost us WAY less in labor, raw material, and energy to just produce new materials rather than recycling old materials.

Well, that sweet deal is now coming to an end, and the world has just awakened to the new reality: we'll now have to deal with our own plastic waste.







EU proposes ban on plastic straws and other single-use plastic products

By Raf Casert, The Associated Press | May 28, 2018​
image.jpg







Sea Turtles with plastic straws up their noses say "It's about damn time, littering humans!"




America is responsible for 1% of the plastic in the ocean.

The overwhelming majority of plastic in the ocean is from China and Africa. Should we nuke them before they make the Earth uninhabitable??? Now, if nuclear fallout makes some places uninhabitable for a while too then so be it.
SAVE THE EARTH!!!!



Oh fuck science it is not like SCIENCE can fix pollution or someday make lower toxic fuels and shit we need! Science that transphobic offshoot of Christianity!!! From homophobe to transphobe ffs! Oh and now a murdering-baby-inside-mother's-belly-phobe!!!!
 
America is responsible for 1% of the plastic in the ocean.

The overwhelming majority of plastic in the ocean is from China and Africa. Should we nuke them before they make the Earth uninhabitable???

Reading-comprehension at the Above-Average level is a prerequisite for participating in my mega-threads.

Before you feel the needs to hit that Reply button and contribute something else of equally-pointless value as your previous post, go back to the first page and at least finish reading this first.
 
Science has lead me to believe we can simply put it on a rocket ship and send it into space.

This will totally not backfire on us in some unimaginable way that ends up putting a hole in the universe.

Well, let's look at the foreseeable ways why this is unfeasible, shall we?

1) We sent an estimated 15 million tons of scrap paper and plastic on cargo ships to China, per year.

2) Space-X Dragon, NASA's cheapest replacement for the space shuttle, can transport cargo into orbit for as low as $9,100 per pound.

That means your "Universal Garbage Disposal" solution can be started with a bare minimum budget of $273 Trillions per year just to reach orbit.

It would cost trillions more to get each and every space ship to actually break from Earth's orbit, dump their cargo in outer space, and safely return back to the ground.

The best case scenario from that is the Earth's elliptical path around the Sun would soon be a gigantic cosmic landfill, and every satellite and space station we have in orbit will inevitably be destroyed by space debris the very next year, when the Earth has to travel right through the crap we dumped in the previous year.

To avoid that, we could send each and every of these perfectly-good spaceship (each hauling a maximum 7,300 lbs of trash) far away for good, like say, a one-way trip towards the Sun some 92,955,807 miles away. That solution would be nice and clean, all we have to do is spend several hundreds of trillions of dollars more to build a replacement fleet each and every year.

I'm not sure how much in new Universal Garbage Disposal tax you want to charge to cover the solution that you're proposing, but a couple hundred thousand dollars per person should be enough to get the program off the ground, I think.
 
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I saw A Plastic Ocean and it made me really depressed. Human beings are a cancer and our population needs to be culled.
 
'We are going to send this back': Malaysia returning unwanted Canadian plastic
Official hopes Canadians will demand 'better tracking and monitoring' of recycling
David Common · CBC News · Posted: May 28, 2019



Malaysia is denouncing Canada's "irresponsible" export of plastic waste, becoming the second Asian nation to make plans to ship Canadian trash back across the ocean.

On Tuesday, Malaysian officials opened a shipping container filled with plastic bags from major Canadian chains, as well as product packaging stamped with "Made in Canada" labels from recognizable brands.

"I think you need to take back your rubbish," Malaysian Environment Minister Yeo Bee Yin told a CBC News crew at Port Klang, a sprawling facility outside Kuala Lumpur.

Authorities did not identify which company exported the plastic from Canada. But they said it will be returned to that exporter after it was deemed to be too contaminated and of insufficient value for legitimate recyclers in Malaysia to take it in.

It's not known if the plastic in Malaysia came from a municipal recycling program, but shipping waste halfway around the world and back is not likely what Canadians think of when they drop plastic for recycling into their blue bin.

"I hope this will make Canadians angry as well," the environment minister said. "This is the irresponsible export of plastic, of waste. It's household garbage, it smells bad."

Who pays?

Malaysian officials said Wednesday they will first try to have the importer in Malaysia pay the cost of shipping the container back to Canada. They're still not naming the exporter, citing an ongoing investigation.

If that fails, officials said they would try to demand Ottawa pay to return the waste. Failing that, the next step would be to have Canada pay to have it sent to a landfill or incinerated in Malaysia.

Malaysia, which is cracking down on incoming waste from several countries, said it hopes to have the waste issue resolved within the next few weeks.

Philippines also returning rejected waste

Malaysia's move comes amid an outcry in the Philippines over containers of fetid waste that have been stuck there for years.

Dozens of containers filled with contaminated plastic and other waste are set to leave the Philippines bound for Canada this week after a diplomatic brouhaha over the rubbish, which was sent abroad by a Canadian company in 2013 and 2014.

The years-old issue came to light again recently when President Rodrigo Duterte lashed out over the garbage, saying in late April that the garbage was going back to Canada — with or without help from authorities in Ottawa.

The Philippines issued bombastic complaints about Ottawa delaying the return of the container, and eventually moved to recall its envoys to Canada.

With the departure of the containers now imminent, Filipino Foreign Minister Teodoro Locsin Jr. had some choice words about the issue on Twitter.



The story of Canada's plastic waste — first in the Philippines and now in Malaysia — has travelled across Asia.

More than 100 journalists were present when Malaysian authorities opened the Canadian container, along with containers from the U.S., China, Japan and Saudi Arabia.

"We are going to send this back to Canada," Malaysia's environment minister told CBC News. "We really hope the people of Canada will demand better tracking and monitoring of your waste recycling."

What's in the container?

CBC's team in Malaysia found plastic bags and packaging from several Canadian grocery giants, including Loblaws, No Frills, Walmart and Costco. The bin also held product packaging from bread and meat companies, like Dempster's and Schneiders.

It's not known how these items ended up with the waste sent to Malaysia, which has just 50 licensed plastic recyclers. Those licensed operators are allowed to import containers full of plastic from countries like Canada, and are required to adhere to specific environmental regulations.

malaysia-garbage.jpg


But the government estimates there are likely hundreds of other operators — some remote and illegal, others existing under the cover of a legitimate licence holder — that are potentially operating outside the rules.

While some plastic is broken down into pellets for re-use, local authorities have said those "under the radar" operators are known to dump, bury and burn less valuable plastics.

Enormous piles of dust-like plastic residue is left to contaminate groundwater, and often leaves a haze over certain regions of the country.

It's a long way from what many consumers in Canada likely expect when they take their blue box to the curb.

malaysia.jpg


Plastic recycling is a multi-billion dollar global business. Only certain higher-value plastics are in demand in North America for recycling, and the United States has much of the capacity.

For years, China was the destination of choice for plastic waste, taking in virtually any consumer or industrial product for recycling. But contaminated imports, worsening air pollution and a shifting economy prompted Chinese authorities to abruptly ban imports of plastic for recycling in 2017.

Brokers in the developed world, including in Canada, struggled to find new markets to send the plastic from millions of blue boxes. For many months, it was piled high in Canadian warehouses or incinerated.

Then Chinese operators shifted their businesses to neighbouring countries, including Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand. They joined existing recyclers in once again welcoming the developed world's plastic.

Canadians recycle just 11 per cent of all the plastics we use — much of it sent far away to be recycled, or otherwise.

That has prompted some groups in Canada to call for a reduction in the use of plastics, rather than a reliance on recycling. Especially as the nations where the developed world sends some of its plastic to be recycled are increasingly closing the door.


https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/take-...returning-unwanted-canadian-plastic-1.5152274
 
Malaysia to return 3,000 tonnes of plastic waste to UK and US



Malaysia will send as much as 3,000 tonnes of plastic waste back to the countries it came from, the environment minister said on Tuesday.

Malaysia last year became the world's main destination for plastic waste after China banned its import, disrupting the flow of more than 7 million tonnes of the trash a year.

Dozens of recycling factories have cropped up in Malaysia, many without operating licences, and communities have complained of environmental problems.

Yeo Bee Yin, minister of energy, technology, science, environment and climate change, said 60 containers of trash that had been imported illegally would be sent back
 
Lets see:

A) ship it to space/Sun: too expensive to even be remotely feasible with near future tech
B)Recycle/Reuse: turns out its incredibly more expensive and produces an inferior product at a higher cost.
C)Landfill: We do have an extremely large amount of land but at current trash production rates and forecasted near future production rates we are doing irrevocable damage to the environment.
D)Ship to other countries: Now they have caught on and are refusing.


So whats the solution?
The only option i can see is if we make it a priority to push recycling technology. Pour money and resources into finding a solution that gets rid of waste and produces something positive without breaking the economy.

Other than that we are screwed.
 
Why can't Americans, Europeans, etc do locally what the Chinese do with plastics?
 
It seems inevitable that humanity will save or destroy the planet.
 
Lets see:

A) ship it to space/Sun: too expensive to even be remotely feasible with near future tech
B)Recycle/Reuse: turns out its incredibly more expensive and produces an inferior product at a higher cost.
C)Landfill: We do have an extremely large amount of land but at current trash production rates and forecasted near future production rates we are doing irrevocable damage to the environment.
D)Ship to other countries: Now they have caught on and are refusing.


So whats the solution?
The only option i can see is if we make it a priority to push recycling technology. Pour money and resources into finding a solution that gets rid of waste and produces something positive without breaking the economy.

Other than that we are screwed.

Large taxes on goods that are using non degradable packaging. Like an 800% tax.
 
My city banned the use plastic grocery bags recently. Was reading up on it though and apparently it doesn't have the effect you'd think it does.

A lot of plastic bags are re-used as garbage bags and all sorts of things, so once banned the sales of thicker one-use store bought bags shoots up, and cloth bags that are used in place for grocery shopping are far worse for the environment in many ways and require far more re-uses than they'd typically be used for in order to actually turn out better.

So it kinda just moves things around.

One thing it does do though is reduces plastic bags being littered, but that wasn't an issue in my city.
 
My city banned the use plastic grocery bags recently. Was reading up on it though and apparently it doesn't have the effect you'd think it does.

A lot of plastic bags are re-used as garbage bags and all sorts of things, so once banned the sales of thicker one-use store bought bags shoots up, and cloth bags that are used in place for grocery shopping are far worse for the environment in many ways and require far more re-uses than they'd typically be used for in order to actually turn out better.

So it kinda just moves things around.

One thing it does do though is reduces plastic bags being littered, but that wasn't an issue in my city.

Yeah plastic bag bans are a token initiative, they do nothing. What we actually need is legislation that requires companies to package their products in biodegradable or otherwise environmentally-safe materials. Right now businesses don't do that because such packaging is more expensive and makes their product less competitive compared to alternatives packaged using cheaper methods. Legislate it and there's no choice; everyone's on the same playing field, and scaling means such packaging will become much cheaper as well.
 
What we actually need is legislation that requires companies to package their products in biodegradable or otherwise environmentally-safe materials. R

The term "biodegradable" is not yet codified into environmental law, with no standardized specification whatsoever, so it's actually one of the most misleading labels in packaging right now.

If a plastic bag will eventually biodegrade in a thousand years, guess what, it's technically biodegradable!

"Compostable" is another term that's being abused the fuck out right now. What they really means is you can't just bury it in the ground and expect it to turn into dirt in weeks, months, or even years - You actually need an industrial-grade composting machine to break the stuff down in a reasonable time frame.



Are biodegradable bags better than plastic? It’s complicated.
Misleading labels and life cycle studies make for a messy story.

By Ula Chrobak | May 2nd, 2019

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What's better: plastic bags or "biodegradable" ones?​

In college, I drove a little electric truck around campus and picked up bins of fruit and vegetable waste, plant clippings, and coffee grounds, and hauled them to a 50-foot long, 5-foot-tall compost pile at the student farm. Although we asked that our pick-up sites didn’t put any post-consumer waste in the bins, “compostable” plates, cups, and bags inevitably found their way to our pile. And when they did, I’d pull them out and throw them in the trash.

That’s the problem with labels like “biodegradable” or “compostable.” These products—typically made from plant sources, often corn—biodegrade eventually, meaning that microbes and other organisms break the materials down into soil. But the environment the products are disposed in matters. As the banana peels and straw morphed into crumbly compost, the “compostable” bags and “biodegradable” cups hung around, full intact. They would have decayed if they were sent to a large-scale, industrial recycler, where workers manage the conditions and chemistry of materials, ensuring the frenzied action of millions of microbes capable of breaking down these tough materials. But here? Not for years, if at all.

On Sunday, scientists at the University of Plymouth published a study highlighting the problem of confusing labelling. The researchers tested the degradability of several bioplastic bags—with labels like biodegradable and compostable—and conventional high-density polyethylene (read: plastic) bags in soil, outdoor air, and marine water. After three years in water and soil, all but the compostable bag were still able to tote a load of groceries. It was still around after 27 months underground, but easily tore apart.

“In day-to-day living, [these labels are] misleading,” says Imogen Napper, lead author and marine scientist. While the products are intended for an industrial composter, that’s not where most of them are going. Napper argues consumers are misled by the labels into thinking that the products do readily decay in natural environments like the ones she tested, when the reality is that the timeline from product to soil can be many years. “When it says biodegradable or compostable, what’s the time frame that you think of for a product in the natural environment?” she says. “For me, it would be days to months. As soon as you start to say two years to three years, does that have any meaningful advantage to the environment? I'd argue not.”

Headlines about the study have echoed that sentiment, such as Vice’s “Biodegradable Plastic Bags Aren’t Better For The Environment.” Most of the reports focused on the fact that the biodegradable bags could still carry groceries after three years underground. But, as alarming as that finding is, the reality is a bit more complex.

It starts with the difference between labels. In theory, “biodegradable” and “compostable” should mean the same thing—that organisms in the soil can break down a product. But the truth is that “biodegradable” gives you the same amount of information as the label “natural” on a food item does, says Kate Bailey, policy and research director at Eco-Cycle, a nonprofit recycling organization. Biodegradable simply means that at some unspecified time in the future—months, years, decades, who knows!—the product will break down.

To continue the food analogy, the term “compostable” is more like “organic,” in that regulators are trying to ensure it meets certain standards, though what exactly those standards are is still a work-in-progress. When a product carries the label of “certified compostable,” that means when you send it to an industrial facility, it becomes compost in about the same amount of time as other things in the pile like food waste and yard clippings—usually between 90 and 180 days. There are a few third-party verifications of this, including one by the ASTM International, an organization that develops standards for thousands of products and services. “We are definitely seeing some movement toward ‘this [label] needs to mean something,’ and it can’t just be getting thrown out there and confusing consumers,” says Bailey.

But biodegradable remains a stress-inducing word for composters, Bailey adds. “There’s a lot of concern about the labelling,” she adds. “Composters want it to be certified compostable—biodegradable doesn’t work for them.” Really, biodegradable is just another greenwashed phrase, one companies use to make us feel good about a pricey purchase, even though its environmental benefit isn’t actually clear.

Some agencies are taking action. The Federal Trade Commision in its most recent “Green Guides” says that “degradable claims” need to backed up by “competent and reliable scientific evidence that the entire item will completely... decompose into elements found in nature within a reasonably short period of time after customary disposal.” California is also cracking down on decomposition deception. The state has banned sales of products marketed as “biodegradable”, “compostable,” etc. unless they have evidence to prove it. The Golden State has a $1.5 million settlement coming its way after district attorneys sued Amazon for selling products with misleading labels, including “biodegradable.”

By now, you might be questioning the little green bags you use to line the compost bin on your kitchen counter or the eco-friendly foodware at your office, wondering if it’s all a waste of money. If your city does partner with a composter, like San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland do, great! There’s a dedicated place where these products can go to become soil. Just double check the label. “Look for the certified compostable label,” says Bailey.

But what if you’re among the roughly 95 percent of households that don’t have such a service available? Even if a product is “certified compostable,” it might not be preferable to plastic. Right now, a lot of compostable bags, cups, and foodware are made from corn, and that process has all sorts of environmental impacts, from the pesticides that leach into rivers to the greenhouse gases emitted from plants manufacturing the products. “There’s a lot of hope that we can make compostable plastic out of things like mushrooms, algae, or hemp—things that could be much more beneficial than plastic,” says Bailey, “But right now … with most things coming from corn, it’s not clear that there really is much of a benefit [compared to plastic].”

Research from the Oregon Department of Environment Quality underscores this point. Scientists reviewed previous life cycle assessments of different “packing attributes”—labels like “recycled content,” “biobased,” and our friend “compostable.” Each study analyzed the product’s environmental impacts across its “life,” from manufacture to disposal. The analysis concluded that compostable products aren’t an easy answer to plastics. “Many compostable packages are made of biobased materials and inherit the significant environmental burdens from their production,” the authors wrote. “These burdens are often much greater that the offset benefits that composting provides.”

Much of the environment impacts of these greenwashed products arise from their production. As a factsheet for the study states, “39 percent of our domestic greenhouse gas emissions take place before a product even reaches a consumer, and only 2 percent of GHG emissions occurs from disposal (landfill, compost and incineration).”

Still, these life cycle assessments largely ignore what happens when an item doesn’t stick to its ideal disposal route, whether that’s a landfill, recycler, or compost pile. But plenty of plastic veers off course each year. In 2010, one study found that 4.8 to 12.7 million metric tons of plastic debris wound up in the ocean. And plastic in the environment doesn’t decompose—it just breaks into smaller and smaller pieces with the same chemical structure. These microplastics are a problem because they’re near-impossible to clean up and are eaten by marine life, even ending up in the fish we eat—and, as a result, inside our own bodies.

Compostable products could have an edge when it comes to curbing this ocean plastic disaster. In the study from University of Plymouth, compostable bags dissolved in marine water within three months. So, while they might not be beneficial from a life cycle perspective, they’re perhaps less harmful to marine organisms.

While there are many ways to weigh the impacts of conventional plastic versus biodegradable alternatives, there is one clear route to win on all environmental fronts. It’s the one you’ve heard before: cut back on plastic, especially single-use items, and you’ll create less litter and use fewer resources. But for those situations when you can’t avoid disposable bags, cups, or plates, “more clear labelling standards [for compostable products] are a great first step,” says Bailey.

https://www.popsci.com/biodegradable-compostable-bags
 
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The term "biodegradable" is not yet codified into environmental law, with no standardized specification whatsoever, so it's actually one of the most misleading labels in packaging right now.

If a plastic bag will eventually biodegrade in a thousand years, guess what, it's technically biodegradable!

"Compostable" is another term that's being abused the fuck out right now. What they really means is you can't just bury it in the ground and expect it to turn into dirt in weeks, months, or even years - You actually need an industrial-grade composting machine to break the stuff down in a reasonable time frame.



Are biodegradable bags better than plastic? It’s complicated.
Misleading labels and life cycle studies make for a messy story.

By Ula Chrobak | May 2nd, 2019

$

What's better: plastic bags or "biodegradable" ones?​



https://www.popsci.com/biodegradable-compostable-bags

That's not really an issue. If it's not defined properly yet, let's define it. Get expert consultants on board to help with writing the guidelines on what the legislation deems to be appropriate packaging.
 
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