The pieces of the NYT that you think are “some of the best journalistic context out there” might be in area that you are less well read than you believe yourself to be.
I know this has been true for me many times.
Try reading what someone who disagree with the NYT would consider a high quality alternative.
Excellent point about the multiple components in products. Ppl don’t realize that there’s a plastic liner on their can of Coke (of course, that just gets burned off when the Al gets recycled)
About Germany’s “recycling” I despise it when “experts” talk down at ppl saying “white lies” because we’re too stupid to understand (Dr. Fauci, I’m looking at you buddy).
Burning plastic isn’t recycling and Germany’s neologism is sophistry.
But it is a decent solution short of significantly increasing the price of plastic. That’s assuming you burn it correctly. And correctly burning it requires very high temperatures to get rid of dioxins. It means making sure to reduce as much as possible Chlorine sulphuric and Fluorine in the feedstock. It means having excellent NOx filters. It means having super tough monitoring of the emissions
I like your comment and the honest answer is I don’t know, but I see no problems with dumping plastic on the ground, vs in the ocean.
But some observations on your comment.
Is plastic, that was never in the atmosphere (for millions of years anyway), really a carbon sink? It seems that trough its entire lifecycle it never goes into the atmosphere.
Also, if you burn plastic you’re displacing oil that wouldn’t otherwise be burned. Oil that is never extracted. And don’t forget that it takes a lot of energy to extract oil, so burning plastic reduces CO2 emissions globally somewhat.
Also, I’m skeptical about the practicality of using landfills to create geological treasures for mankind 100k years from now. The problem with it is that I feel that it is wishful thinking that placates our conscience. It’s easy to imagine yourself living “sustainably” in geological time scales. It’s hard to live sustainably in 1000 year timescales.
So I have a PhD in mtls science, and I studied a bit of plastics thermo. However I never worked on the recycling problem.
Plastics, or polymers that aren’t cross linked, are in a sense easy to recycle - Just melt them and recast the part. 3D printing hobbyists even recycle their filament.
The problem is that any melted plastic doesn’t mix with any plastic other than itself. So if you have 99% polyethylene and 1% polypropylene and melt them together they won’t mix. But they won’t separate perfectly either (so you can’t skim the PP put).
Instead you get inter-penetrating phases (a spinodal). These phases have surfaces that don’t stick well together so the end result is that any parts made of this are exceptionally weak.
So this is the dilemma: if you have even 1% of different polymer in your mix, the plastic will suck. But we use at least 4 or 5 different plastics in everyday life all chucked into the same bins, all looking more less the same.
Solutions?
1. One solution is to heat all the plastics so that they break apart and therefore use them for feedstock. But this is very expensive, and the feedstocks aren’t very pure.
2 Make cat fuel. Cheaper then above, since the purity requirements aren’t as strong, but it’s basically the same as number 1. This doesnt increase CO2 emissions since the plastic is displacing oil
3. Burn it for energy. This needs far less strict requirements than 2 and lower CO2 emissions (since you don’t have to waste energy getting oil out). However, you’d have to basically ban public use of perfluorinated polymers or make them very expensive, or make them easy to identify (Teflon, gore-Tex.)
Frankly I’d ban perfluorinates except for use in critical industries. That chemistry is ecologically nasty.
4. Force companies to color their containers according to plastic type. I.e no more clear Pepsi or Coke bottles - all PE products are color, say green. All PP colors are red, etc.
The pieces of the NYT that you think are “some of the best journalistic context out there” might be in area that you are less well read than you believe yourself to be.
I know this has been true for me many times.
Try reading what someone who disagree with the NYT would consider a high quality alternative.