No, plastic degrades each time it is recycled. They knew that, every materials scientist knew that, and it is just not possible to fully reclaim recycled plastic.
What really pisses me off is the use of the recycling number as marketing. Which is still ongoing and being modernized. Leave a complaint card any time you see compostable plastic being used in a city that doesn't have specialized industrial composting plants, that stuff is worse than trash because it's also misleading about how to dispose of it and makes the store look green when it's really just making things worse.
In almost all locations, PLA, "compostable plastic" (often labeled number 7 or 0 for marketing) is not only not recyclable but actively contaminates compost and recycling plants. I see all these places using "compostable plastic" because they think it's more environmentally friendly. It's a noble goal, it makes me so sad to see.
The stores that pick those containers do so because they want to project an environmentally conscious image, and the "eco" marketing on this utter trash gets them to pay top dollar for those containers instead of just using paper. I feel so bad for these stores, it takes a PhD to dispose of this misleading and dangerous material properly.
As a normal consumer, if I saw that logo and "compostable plastic" guess where I'd throw it. Compost? Recycling? Probably one or the other right? Wrong, if I put it in the compost I make the compost produced from the food scraps contaminated and unsafe for use. If I put it in the recycling it gets melted in with other polymers and contaminates them, degrading the other plastic even faster if the whole batch doesn't need to be thrown away outright.
Edit: The one saving grace is that I know that where I live trash is incinerated. So at least I feel less bad throwing this stuff in the trash. It was just oil that made a temporary detour as a container before being burned for electricity. Still, I'd rather they just use unadulterated paper (no little plastic spouts glued on), glass, and aluminum which are all easily recycled or burn clean.
It depends if fully reclaiming it as plastic is the goal. That's the current model, but there are other routes available. Two options that don't quite work yet (but have moderately promising potential) are either to break the plastic down to useful precursors with enzymes, or pyrolise it down to biochar.
To my knowledge, the enzyme approach has shown a modicum of promise in labs but is still impractical, while making biochar is really, really easy. We just need a market for it. Unfortunately, the very group of people who could make the biggest use of it (and are most likely to) are blocked by policy: you can't have an Organic label on your farm produce if you put biochar in the soil.
So I am largely complaining about how confusing it is. Intentionally so.
(a) no, most plastics won't get broken down to precursors with enzymes. a few it will work with, like that company recovering resins from carbon fiber. or PLA even theoretically. but most of them are a free radical polymerization that I just don't think you're going to be able to meaningfully reverse.
(b) making biochar sounds fine. better than the landfill. I'd be most worried about chemicals like fluorine and sulfur making it into the soil.
If you want to do anything at meaningful scale, it's unlikely anyone is going to make biochar. If the big oil companies really feel pressured by a need to recycle plastic, they'll just look for a way to stick it into one of their existing facilities, maybe a coker.
Huh, I've always considered organics as biochar inputs. Thanks for pointing out that plastics can be used that way. Have you seen any work done about addressing release of toxins when burning plastic?
> Leave a complaint card any time you see compostable plastic being used in a city that doesn't have specialized industrial composting plants,
A store's refuse is not necessarily going through the municipal waste process. Stores have contracts with speicfic waste management companies, who may have their own facilities.
(Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean the private company can handle the plastic either -- I know of a store that had to start telling their employees and customers to put the "compostable" plastic in the regular garbage because it was causing problems for the composter.)
I agree. I honestly applaud the stores for paying that much attention, I'd say in Boston/Cambridge I think about 20% of stores understand that their containers require special disposal to handle and couldn't just get mixed in with the municipal compost.
Most just use the compostable containers without a second thought, because why should they give it a second thought? Honestly, I don't blame them, there's no reason they would think about this. It's marketed evil to get people to pay extra for a worse product all around, it's supposed to be confusing.
At MIT they use these compostable containers everywhere. From their own information their compost system cannot handle these containers that their own subcontractors use and don't even communicate this information well enough to avoid confusing MIT FACULTY MEMBERS. It confused me for over a year and I have a PhD in materials science!
Most stores in practice maybe have one waste container under such a special contract in their stores, but customers dispose of their to-go containers elsewhere.
If they were really green they wouldn't have throw away containers for in-store use anyway (setting aside the current situation where it makes sense for now).
So how can it make sense? If the customer is in-store they shouldn't be making waste containers. If the customer is using a container that gets thrown away they're probably walking out the door in which case the special waste container is useless.
I think it would be great if this all worked in a way that makes sense, but as it is now it is worse than nothing anywhere that doesn't have municipal compost already capable of handling these materials.
> In almost all locations, PLA, "compostable plastic" (often labeled number 7 or 0 for marketing) is not only not recyclable but actively contaminates compost and recycling plants. I see all these places using "compostable plastic" because they think it's more environmentally friendly.
I don't know the answer to this question -- have you heard of any work using fungi or "eco-vats" to break down plastics like this?
It is entirely possible technically to decompose PLA. It is "poly-lactic acid" and is a fairly straightforward polymer to decompose down to lactic acid which naturally degrades. It is legitimate to describe it as "compostable" in that there are a variety of ways to destroy it, including enzymes but I think just high pressure steam will do it. Modern industrial composting processes will destroy it.
What's broken is that in places where municipal compost isn't both commonly used and capable of handling the modern process this stuff gets chucked in compost that's capable of nothing more than food scraps or thrown in the recycling where it ruins the entire batch. Compost that can't handle more than food scraps is super common, it's much cheaper and easier to set up than an industrial system. I've seen people chuck this compostable plastic into home compost bins -- that's just not how it works.
These containers should not exist anywhere that a city does not have an existing commonly used compost system capable of handling them. Until then this stuff needs to be understood to be trash. It is not recyclable under any circumstances, it's too hard to sort out and throw away.
There's very few places that this does more good than harm.
Does this include plastic bags? I find that barely anyone recycles 7 or flexible plastic, so I'm not sure stores are gaining much from collection in terms of image.
7 is actually a catch-all for anything that's not 1-6 that are actually defined. Often 7 is used for PLA because it's common that way but it's not wrong if it's used for other polymers.
Your plastic bags are probably not 6 or 7, my guess is that they are recyclable material. They are probably just challenging to recycle because they fly all over the place when you collect them. I think this is basically why stores collect the film stuff, it's too physically annoying to handle it otherwise.
I think I see 7 mostly on things like to-go containers, cups, and lids. Of course straws are PET I think but they aren't numbered so they're always trash in practice.
What really pisses me off is the use of the recycling number as marketing. Which is still ongoing and being modernized. Leave a complaint card any time you see compostable plastic being used in a city that doesn't have specialized industrial composting plants, that stuff is worse than trash because it's also misleading about how to dispose of it and makes the store look green when it's really just making things worse.
In almost all locations, PLA, "compostable plastic" (often labeled number 7 or 0 for marketing) is not only not recyclable but actively contaminates compost and recycling plants. I see all these places using "compostable plastic" because they think it's more environmentally friendly. It's a noble goal, it makes me so sad to see.
The stores that pick those containers do so because they want to project an environmentally conscious image, and the "eco" marketing on this utter trash gets them to pay top dollar for those containers instead of just using paper. I feel so bad for these stores, it takes a PhD to dispose of this misleading and dangerous material properly.
As a normal consumer, if I saw that logo and "compostable plastic" guess where I'd throw it. Compost? Recycling? Probably one or the other right? Wrong, if I put it in the compost I make the compost produced from the food scraps contaminated and unsafe for use. If I put it in the recycling it gets melted in with other polymers and contaminates them, degrading the other plastic even faster if the whole batch doesn't need to be thrown away outright.
Edit: The one saving grace is that I know that where I live trash is incinerated. So at least I feel less bad throwing this stuff in the trash. It was just oil that made a temporary detour as a container before being burned for electricity. Still, I'd rather they just use unadulterated paper (no little plastic spouts glued on), glass, and aluminum which are all easily recycled or burn clean.