Waste, and what to do with it

[Ian]

There is a current discussion on food waste, but I feel there is in some ways a worse problem. Humans seem to have a very bad habit of using whatever and discarding it, often quite unnecessarily, including just throwing it wherever. In so doing, they waste all the effort going into making whatever, and they hurt the environment. Apparently all sorts of marine animals are choking on waste plastic bags. There is no reason for plastic bags to be in the sea, but it appears people are just too lazy to dispose of them properly. There is no reason plastics cannot be recycled or sent to alternative uses, except the cost of doing it. In my younger days I devised a processing sequence to obtain polymers that were essentially decoloured (there was a faint olive colour) and as strong as virgin polymer. In the end, a company took up recycling polyethylene, but it eventually gave up after a fire and did not rebuild because it was too difficult to find people who would purchase the product when new stuff was so cheap.

It is not just plastics. Electronics have a lot of valuable metals, but finding people to recover them is difficult. The problem in part is that a good method will involve seriously high technology, and current recyclers are not those sort of people. It needs a significant capital investment, and that is not forthcoming when the major multinationals can win any price war. So, what do you think should happen? Let market forces work until some crisis forces someone to do something, or (horrors -commie alert!) should governments get involved in the long term public interest. If so, to what extent?

[[deleted user]]

Well, governments SHOULD get involved when the long term public interest is at stake. Most people in the public are too greedy or too lazy to take the hard conservationist road, especially when the right solution would cost them something. Caveat: this does not apply to the government of Donald Trump, which is liable to dismantle conservationist projects rather than launch them, in the name of crass political reasons and plain ignorance.

[Ian]

If the government is going to get involved, the next question is to what extent? There are calls for banning plastic bags but this begs the question, replace them with what? Here the supermarkets have produced heavy duty multi-use bags, which I happen to use, but I still like the odd traditional plastic bag to wrap up my plastic recyclables, to stop them from being blown everywhere on collection day. A problem is that the use of plastics by people like me generates no problem other than final reuse, and if plastics were merely buried, at least we would be fixing carbon. It is the small element amongst us that simply behaves irresponsibly, so how do we fix that problem?

A further problem is the smaller plastic bag, Could a supermarket work without them? You buy fruit by choosing your own. The checkout sees what you have purchased because the bag is tough but transparent, Paper bags tear. Can you think of how to run a supermarket without plastics?

On the other hand, lot of packaging could be done without. When I bought my first piece of electronic stuff as a child, a radio valve, it came in a small cardboard package that said what it was. Now everything comes in massive (for the object) blister packs, which are a nuisance to open but are visually better on the supermarket shelf. Would you want to go back to where you had to carefully read what was on a cardboard box to know what you are getting?

[Nik]

Another problem is that thinks ain't produced to last anymore. Everything gets outdated and often out of order, but is cheap enough for frequent replacement.

For recycling the solution is education as a carrot and maybe fines as a stick. I hear Singapore is very clean and probably steep fines contribute to it. I remember in 80-ies recycling was only in Japan. Nowadays it's everywhere. I recycle even a small sticker on the orange -:)

[Ian]

The stick certainly worked in Singapore for wanton discarding. However, I am not sure about te benefits of recycling the sticker on an orange :-(

[Nik]

Just reflects the degree of obsession-:)

[Ian]

The computer is a fine example of that sort of problem. I have a laptop that will soon die because of battery failure. It could also do with a chip upgrade, but everything else works well. But I can't get it fixed or upgraded because it is fiendishly difficult to get into and it was not designed for upgrades. You buy another.

Half the world's supply of indium is tied up in these "wipable" screens in smartphones. This recycling that? And indium is an element - there is no alternative.

[Scout]

I don't understand your last comments about "this recycling that" and that "there is no alternative."

[Ian]

There is no alternative to indium. You cannot make anything else into indium because it is an element - it is not made of anything except indium, and it does thing that are different from any other element.

I suspect my computer correction mode was responsible for the "this/that" piece of ? I am sorry for that. I think it should have been, "Who is recycling that?"