1002
TIL Only about 9% of plastic ever produced has been recycled.
(en.wikipedia.org)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2024
1002 points (98.9% liked)
Today I Learned
17733 readers
336 users here now
What did you learn today? Share it with us!
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
NGL that's more than I thought, but nevertheless: don't use plastic if you can avoid it. It's not easy to recycle.
For instance, for beverages, prefer cans or your own glass / metal water bottles.
That said, 9% is a huge lot better than 0%. edit or considering the amount of plastics we use, a huge lot better than 8% too.
The older i get the more disgusting i find plastic. I would never buy plastic tupperware ever again, drinking out of plastic bottles just feels wrong.
Plastic bags, styrofoam, and those hard plastics marked types 1 & 2 are the ones most likely to be recycled into new products. They are easy to break down and recycle into new containers.
Hard plastics marked types 3 through 7 are most likely to be filtered out and either incinerated or dumped straight into the landfill, as it costs more to recycle them than to just create new straight from oil.
How is it difficult to recycle? The temperatures requires to do so are less than metal, the 3D printing communities has people that recycle them into filaments all the time. I don't think the problem is the plastic so much as it is how it is still treated as a disposable container and that neither companies nor governments pay for or provide reclamation means like recycling machines that pay for each bottle collected. In other words, the problem is more cultural than material.
Others have pointed out the degradation issue, but you're also assuming that all plastics are thermoplastics. They are not. There's huge variation in chemical composition and material properties between different plastics, and most of them can't be melted and reformed.
But then the problem isn't with all plastics, it's with certain plastics, and around 70% of global plastic production are concentrated around commodity plastics, all of which are thermoplastic. The greatest degradation issue occurs with biodegradable plastics, which is perceived as a good thing for them, though even biodegradable PLA has toxicity concerns.
And how many times do they recycle the filament until it's too degraded to use?
Depends on what you consider degraded, the only reason it would stop being recyclable is if it became too contaminated with foreign substances or exposure, which applies to anything.
Repeating plastics tends to damage them on a chemical level. The polymer chains break and shorten. This ends with the plastic being more brittle. Since 3d printed parts have already been remelted once, they have even more degradation than injection moulded parts.
I believe the recommended amount of recycled plastic is around 30% for PLA. Any more and the parts lose significant strength.
I personally would prefer us to accept that plastics aren't really recyclable. It's better to move towards renewable plastics like PLA, and treat the waste as biomass (either composted or burnt for energy.
Err ... getting mixed signals ..
What you are describing is exposure. There are plenty of build with 100% recycled plastic, so not sure where you are getting that 30%. I think you are perhaps thinking of the marketing material of PLA filaments that sell themselves as particularly ecofriendly because they include recycled materials, while I'm talking about builds made entirely out of things like recycled water bottles, which are made out of PET. PLA is more susceptible to exposure to sunlight, heat, and moisture, so rather than using it to hold beverages at that point you might want to skip plastic entirely. PLA itself is not recycled that much, but it is more biodegradable.
Exposure can cause similar effects. However, the act of heating the plastic to the temperatures needed to melt it and defirming it also damages the structure. It's particularly obvious with pla, but all plastics suffer from it, to an extent.