There is no such a thing like "plastic". The article is about PET - polyethylene terephthalate, there are hundreds other "plastics", which different chemical propensities. The problem is not actual act of recycling, but figuring out what a given piece is made of. PET is popular - 70% of all bottles are made of it, but there are those 30%, so the most expensive part - sorting - has to be carried anyway. Plus we target only bottles.
Recycling is a great example of the rule "Privatizing Profits and Socializing Losses". Business is packing their stuff in whatever they want and then citizens, authorities has to deal with the wastes business produced.
Why we can't force to use for bottles/packaging a single type of plastic? Why we can't force easily removable labels on the bottles (the glue that is used to stick half plastic/half paper labels is a deal breaker for simple recycling), I think only in Japan this is mandatory. Why we allow making packages (especially for take-away food from pseudo-paper (which is a paper with plastic coating), which is not recyclable at all and, in fact, is much worst than plastic, but business claims that "now we are eco, see, we use paper for packaging)?
Why we allow to use for packaging whatever business wants? Why the cost and effort of the recycling has to be on people and local governments?
There are actual reasons different plastics are used in different situations… it’s not just companies saying “ha ha this will be extremely difficult on the recyclers!”
Some plastic needs to be heat resistant, some, it doesn’t matter. Some plastic needs to be easy to tear, some needs to resist tearing. Some plastic needs to be flexible, some needs to be stiff.
Easily removable labels often fall off before they are actively removed.
Restaurants probably tried only paper and their customers complained when the food soaked through and/or the container collapsed.
Of course there are always reasons. But as long as the costs of recycling are not borne by businesses doing the packaging, the business will always go with the 1 cent cheaper option, even if it makes recycling 100 times harder.
> Why we allow making packages (especially for take-away food from pseudo-paper (which is a paper with plastic coating), which is not recyclable at all and, in fact,
I agree that plastic is in most cases a better solution, however you are wrong to say the paper+PE board can't be recycled. Currently here in the UK they are not collected in household waste, but many businesses are recycling them and there is a lot of capacity available.
Some of the issues are the collecting and sorting streams, then there are the commercial aspect of how to sell on the recycled material because it needs to be commercially viable.
> "Privatizing Profits and Socializing Losses"
The UK has recently introduced Extended Producer Responsibility for packaging legislation where the theory is the brand owner pays for the entire recycling and collection process of any packaging they put onto the market. Note this isn't just takeaway & food packaging, it's everything. The system though is an unworkable mess, it's so complicated trying to track every item of packaging and who is responsible for paying the tax down the entire supply chain.
This is actually one of the use cases the authors discuss in their paper. Sending mixed plastics through this process to extract the PET/PBT containing bits, and send the rest along their way.
The first few numbered plastics have different physical properties and can be sorted roughly by physical processes such as floating them on water. Past that you need more sophisticated techniques, maybe robots.
Those clear PET bottles for instance are common and worth recycling, but if a brand makes green PET bottles those need to be separated from the clear ones if you want good-quality clear PET which can be used to make clear PET bottles or blending with a colorant to make green bottles.
Many of the big brands are standardizing on clear PET, both Coke and Pepsi are even using 100% post-consumer bottles in some geographies. In gas stations in upstate NY I frequently see Coke products bottled in 100% post-consumer recycled clear PET bottles.
When the team tested the process on real-world materials like plastic bottles, shirts and mixed plastic waste, it proved just as effective. It even broke down colored plastics into pure, colorless TPA.
In Norway I know the ketchup bottles (which is made from PET) changed the labels to be also made from PET, so it could be recycled with automated recycling machines. So I think something like that is what we want. The whole bottle should be recycled as one material.
If you also avoid black colour it should be possible to recycle the plastic with automated sorting machines.
Only in some ways. Mostly it’s due to use case and desired characteristics of the container, one of which can be cost. As another poster noted, different products need different packaging solutions.
That's an important point you're making here...Can you expand on that with an example? A specific use of plastic as a container that gives the desired characteristics...specifically where those characteristics could not be met by another (if expense isn't a consideration) material?
If there are less toxic materials that could "do the job" but are more expensive then it really is about money no?
Prescription canisters (the tamper resistant/child proof ones). You could do without it but you now subject children to accidental ingestion.
Single meal frozen food containers. You need a seal. Some impregnated cardboard can work, but not as well and is full of chemicals to overcome its disadvantages.
Disposable water bottles. You can use metal vessels, they cost a bit more, but doable.
Packaged frozen meats (they keep longer). Not sure there is a good alternative to plastics other than having people buy meats semi-daily from the butcher.
Some plastics need to be heat resistant, others solvent resistant, others flexible, others stretchy, etc. Different formulations give you what you need at a price point.
Yes we could go back to the 1920s but then life would have to be adjusted to the 1920s. You’d need someone to remain “domestic” at home, etc. as more time is needed to carry out house work without the convenience of modern materials.
Thank you...excellent examples. I think this is a conversation though that must be framed correctly. There's a balance between modern convenience, expense etc. and literally the harm we're possibly doing to our endocrine systems. Right now there seems to be very little real repercussions for companies and we have a bit of a corporate Wild West in play here. Surely that must change.
If you look at it holistically, I might get boxed cereal from the grocery store that’s bagged in a cheap, microbe-blocking, shelf-stable and lightweight plastic bag in a cardboard box.
I could also go to a bulk goods store instead and fill a container.
But one of these options is much more convenient… and that’s fundamentally why society is having hell of a time getting rid of plastic. These plastics are bad for the environment but they bring a lot of material properties that other materials like metal, wood or glass don’t provide.
Obviously bagged cereal is a drop in the bucket but this materials calculus is applied everywhere and at every stage.
What percentage is actually broken down into monomers? How much microplastic waste is left behind. Given the reliance on "ambient air" I imagine it's not 100%.
Regardless, I'm excited to hear about progress on solving the plastic waste crisis. It seems better than the current alternatives the article presents:
> "The U.S. is the number one plastic polluter per capita, and we only recycle 5% of those plastics," said Northwestern's Yosi Kratish, the study's co-corresponding author. "There is a dire need for better technologies that can process different types of plastic waste. Most of the technologies that we have today melt down plastic bottles and downcycle them into lower-quality products.
Wouldn't (fully) burning all single-use plastics effectively make them no more long-lived and problematic than burning crude oil at sea? I know that's a low bar, but it seems like at least you're getting two uses out of them at that point...
This is great but PET (symbol #1) is one of the few plastics that ARE recyclable. I wonder if any of these techniques can be used to solve the non-recyclable plastic problems
Aduro’s tech works with hard to recycle, dirty, mixed plastic. Search for Eric Appelman interview on YouTube for more info. Some of the retail investor coverage is cringeworthy, but my take is the tech is likely as good as described (disclosure: I’m an investor).
Mixed plastic is definitely impressive, but how is it separated? I imagine a lot of it must be done by hand? And then washed with water? Seems both labor intensive and energy intensive
No, they pass it through successively intensive process conditions, each of which selects for a different plastic type. No need to wash, their process is water based and some contamination from organic material actually helps in saturating the output product.
Apparently 95% of the test sample can be recovered. If its dirty and mixed, how much can TPA can be recovered and is the sludge chemically inert and landfillable?
Results will vary a lot with all the parameters (of which there are many). They don’t disclose all the detail but I know they have done thousands of tests across the parameters space. I know they believe they can process sludge produced from other processes.. The industry generally is very opaque, I think for competitive reasons and also because it’s so complex/nuanced.
This is a realm where government regulations can really make a big difference. China banned single-use plastics. A lot of plastic use is really unnecessary.
Always seemed like greenwashing to care about the straw in the drink that’s on a plastic cup with a plastic lid from the beans shipped in a plastic bag and render the experience of trying to drink it as tedious as possible.
I believe the issue with straws is they were hard to recycle because they were lightweight and often mingled with other materials, such as cups, napkins, and food waste.
They were generally made from PP which is widely recycled as a material.
They are also commonly littered and as they don't break down in the environment led the not only being unsightly but also clogging up waterways and direct damage to wildlife. Paper straws can still be littered, but break down so don't cause the same physical problems in the longer term.
The solution is not to unban them, it's to ban those plastic things too. And c'mon, paper straws are fine, people whining about it really just do it to vice signal against ecology.
A promising approach—especially if it proves as simple and low-cost at scale. It’s obviously not going to "disrupt" the plastics industry overnight, but it could offer a valuable local alternative, particularly in regions dealing with massive plastic waste imports. The real question is whether this kind of tech can evolve outside of patent lock-in and centralized exploitation models.
there is also the possibility to recycle pet-bottles into food grade bottles again using just mechanical means, I know at least two European companies who provide such machines
I've heard recycled plastic's polymer structure can be compromised, leading to orders of magnitude more micro plastics being released into e.g. your plastic water bottle.
Well, they used a "simple, inexpensive catalyst" and then HEATED the plastic/catalyst mysture. Nowhere in the article it gives you an estimate of the final cost of the process.
> Catalytic amounts of AC/MoO2 selectively convert waste PET into its monomer, terephthalic acid (TPA), within 4 h at 265 °C with yields as high as 94% under 1 atm air.
I'm not a chemist so don't know if you can find a way to calculate the cost, but the authors claim that it's cheaper than current methods.
The bigger deal imo is that it recovers PET monomers from mixed plastics, which means avoiding manufacturing more plastic.
This is contrast to the pyrolysis-based "chemical recycling of plastics" which makes a mix of petrochemicals similar to what you find in the BTX stage of a petrochemical factories [1], especially for condensation polymers like PET. That is, this process produces fairly pure Terephthalic acid [2] and Acetaldehyde [3] and the first of those could be recycled into more PET.
The thing is BTX chemicals and other precursors of mass produced plastics cost about 50 cents a pound which makes it hard for any kind of recycling process to be competitive.
> about 50 cents a pound which makes it hard for any kind of recycling process to be competitive.
We've had almost a century of subsidization of the oil industry. The gov't needs to play a bigger similar role if the recycling industry is ever gonna be able to compete
We need a tax on the full lifecycle cost of plastics so we can stop treating waste as an economic externality
Landfilling plastics on the other costs about 4 cents a pound. The nightmare scenario about plastics is not that they get landfilled but that people chuck them on the ground and they find their way to the ocean and get ground up into microplastics.
Or we could price cleanup and recycling of the constituent materials into the purchase price by requiring manufacturers to pay to recycle all the items they manufacture.
This approach closes the loop in a way which encourages manufacturers to re-engineer their products to be less expensive to recycle.
Cleanup is impossible though. How are you going to clean up a trillion nanoplastic dust particles? What is the effective difference between phasing out fleece clothing vs charging $100M for a jacket?
If $100M is what it would cost to internalize the economic externalities of fleece then that is the true fair price of the item. Anything less than that is a subsidy
We are subsidizing these materials with our health and our environment. And it affects certain people more than others—usually people who have the least say in it
A 100% linen shirt currently costs around $40 and, when cared for properly, can last a lifetime. Rubber bands made out of natural rubber are much stronger and will last at least 10x as long as plastic ones and are about the same price. I could go on, but the alternatives exist and are already often much cheaper in the long run.
$100M is certainly an overestimation and some types of pollution are more solvable than others. In general I think it's important for price tags to communicate the full price of an item
Also no need for the patronizing comment. Economic externalities are a valid criticism of market failures and you haven't provided the more convincing, "advanced economics" jargon-laden analysis you're pretending to harbor
The original comment was talking about cleanup costs. You realistically can not clean up shed microplastics. A fleece jacket sheds millions of them every wash as well as just wearing it. How are you meant to collect all of those microplastics that just blew off in to the air.
So just a blanket "Charge everything based on it's cleanup costs" doesn't work.
Same way you do asbestos remediation. Enclose the area, filter the air, create a clean room around the entire area.
Maybe in the future you laser-atomize every spec that floats past the actor inside an 8ft cube. Who knows?
I don't think it'd be practical to switch overnight - much of our societal infrastructure needs re-engineering for sustainability which will take time - perhaps a gradually increasing percentage of externalized costs can be integrated over time. It'd be real progress toward a Venus Project style resource based economy.
> $100M is certainly an overestimation and some types of pollution are more solvable than others. In general I think it's important for price tags to communicate the full price of an item
In theory, I agree with you, but trying to internalize these cost is itself extremely costly. That's why the criticism about econ-101 level reasoning: it's a convincing idea in theory that isn't tractable at all in practice and can only end up with a bureaucratic nightmare.
The EU has many such rules that are designed around economics first principle like that, in order to build an “efficient market”, and they are all extremely burdensome and at the same time ineffective (see EU-ETS, the single Electricity market, CBAM, etc.)
In the realm of policies, tractability is always preferable to theoretical elegance.
One includes freedom and creates an economic incentive for the development of environmental rehabilitation, recycling, and carbon negative technologies.
If some celebrity wants to single-handedly fund the development of a microplastics recovery technology as part of a red carpet fashion item, I'm OK with that.
The problem with this is it doesn't give any consideration to the feasibility of alternatives or timelines to change things. If you just drop a blanket "every product must include it's cleanup costs", you're telling the public that their current life essentials are now unbelievably expensive.
Vs selectively picking products which have easy alternatives and providing phase out periods which match the difficulty of replacing them. If you tell the public you are going to make car tires cost millions of dollars, you'll be voted out. If you tell them that plastic confetti will be replaced with paper confetti in 12 months you'll make real progress.
This doesn't prevent innovation. Scientists will still do research, develop new recycling tech and processes.
The trouble is that the market allocation of funding is dependent on the valuation of goods and services. Until the externalized costs are accurately represented, the market will under-allocate capital toward solving the problem. To push the transition to happen faster without internalizing costs, you'd have to subsidize development with significantly more cash than the market would be willing to allocate with accurately internalized costs. Which I'm not sure is possible.
There are definitely reasons to subsidize some products - medical devices, for instance - as you say, things without readily available alternatives. I'm not writing a detailed transition plan here, just pointing out observations.
That's within the range of a kitchen oven. The biggest problem is that plastic is so cheap that even that relatively modest energy use may make it uneconomic compared to virgin TPA, especially if you have to clean the inputs thoroughly first.
In fairness, that’s mostly because current plastic production externalizes the cost of everything about the lifecycle before and after manufacturing and use.
The authors' claim is that it is cheaper than other catalytic methods that have been explored/invented to depolymerize PET into TPA monomers. These qualitative cost estimates are based on the reaction conditions (temperature, solvent, other reactants (in this case, humid air)) and the unit operations involved in the downstream separation processes that isolate the TPA product from unreacted PET. The largest hurdle that precludes widespread deployment of technologies for PET recycling, as well as those for most other plastics, occurs (way) upstream of the reaction and separation train. The highest cost is related to collecting and sorting used PET bottles and TPA-derived textiles.
Mechanical recycling or any flavor of chemical recycling (pyrolysis, hydrolysis, etc.) all suffer from the same hurdle. If the target product of the recycling process is a TPA-derived plastic (be it for clothing or soda bottles), then mechanical recycling is usually cheaper, since it produces a product that only needs to be reshaped and remolded to give shirts or jugs. Chemical recycling converts PET into its constitutive monomers, and to (re)produce a TPA-derived plastic from the monomers requires a not inexpensive (re)polymerization step, in addition to reshaping and remolding.
Chemists, even highly regarded ones like Tobin Marks, are less interested in "solving" the PET recycling issue and more interested in the fundamental chemistry involved in chemical recycling. Issues of Green Chemistry (or blurbs in phys.org) are not the appropriate reading materials to get insight into costs, scale-up, etc.. Very few, if any, academic journals are focused on such matters, and rightly so, in my opinion.
Yeah, these are pizza oven temperatures. The temperature appears to be just above the melting point for PET. It is also in the liquid phase for PBT, PEN and PEF.
I think most recycling methods for PET require melting anyway.
Also manufacturing, so importantly this might be more energy efficient and maybe even cheaper than making new plastic. Depending on how the monomer->PET part gets solved.
You've still got Little's Law though. You either need a very giant machine or a very low feed rate in order to have stuff come out one end 4 hours after going in the other. I think steel recycling may be faster than that.
Keep seeing these "possible breakthroughs" in breaking down plastic waste, but no concrete time frames on expanding to scale nor real world costs. Meanwhile, the mountains of plastic continues.
Finding it also odd that biodegradable plastics and safer alternatives are going quiet. As if the new scheme is to keep fossil fuel companies rolling, with the promise that one day a solution to get rid of incalculable mountains of plastic will be found. Don't worry, feel free to plastic pollute, because one day there will be a solution.
> Finding it also odd that biodegradable plastics and safer alternatives are going quiet.
They tend not to be a good solution to anything.
There are a couple of ways of making degradable plastic. One is to add something to their manufacture so they break down into shorter chains which their supporters tell you will then further break down. These are generally referred to as OXO degradable.
Another is to use bio based plastics such as PLA or cellulose. These both have poor performance compares to oil based plastics.
All of these also require industrial composting where they add no nutrition to the compost, effectively just bulking it out. They [generally] do not break down when littered or even placed in a domestic compost heap.
There is also a problem because these plastics are virtually impossible to sort from recyclable plastics so if they get in each other waste stream the whole batch can be rendered contaminated and useless.
Incalculable mountains aren't a real environmental problem. People just believe that for some reason. We can just leave them there forever. The actual environmental value in recycling is reducing the CO2 emissions from making new plastic by reducing production of new plastic. I don't know if biodegradable plastic actually helps at all or just placates the people worried about the fake problem of incalculable mountains.
I'm not sure why you have the take that plastic pollution is not a problem. If anything, it is a massive catastrophe that threatens the environment and possibly the human race. Plastic pollution is destroying the environment[1], wildlife[2], and damaging humans[3][4]. That includes newborn babies[5].
I'm talking about plastic waste in landfills ("mountains"). For that, recycling does no good because it's just as likely (or more?) to leak into the environment failing to reach a recycling facility as it is failing to reach a landfill.
All industrial processes recycle heat extensively. Heck even distillation based desalination isn't that inefficient because you do in fact recover the heat.
I always thought the real problem with plastic is that the problem itself is a feature. If it were easy to breakdown it would be used much less. A "solution" might actually cause nasty problems we haven't encountered before. Or Gray Goo.
It says "Leveraging the trace amounts of moisture in air, the broken-down PET is converted into monomers—the crucial building blocks for plastics. From there, the researchers envision the monomers could be recycled into new PET products or other, more valuable materials." I don't know if there's some enormous challenge hiding behind the word "envision", but I'm assuming it's a closed system until something useful comes out of the other end. The method just can't be a lot more expensive than to make the same thing/material from scratch or it's never going to gain traction.
Recycling is a great example of the rule "Privatizing Profits and Socializing Losses". Business is packing their stuff in whatever they want and then citizens, authorities has to deal with the wastes business produced.
Why we can't force to use for bottles/packaging a single type of plastic? Why we can't force easily removable labels on the bottles (the glue that is used to stick half plastic/half paper labels is a deal breaker for simple recycling), I think only in Japan this is mandatory. Why we allow making packages (especially for take-away food from pseudo-paper (which is a paper with plastic coating), which is not recyclable at all and, in fact, is much worst than plastic, but business claims that "now we are eco, see, we use paper for packaging)?
Why we allow to use for packaging whatever business wants? Why the cost and effort of the recycling has to be on people and local governments?
Some plastic needs to be heat resistant, some, it doesn’t matter. Some plastic needs to be easy to tear, some needs to resist tearing. Some plastic needs to be flexible, some needs to be stiff.
Easily removable labels often fall off before they are actively removed.
Restaurants probably tried only paper and their customers complained when the food soaked through and/or the container collapsed.
Far easier said than done, I'm sure. But someone has to say it before it can happen.
Manufacturing works very much like software in this regard - i.e. VHS vs BetaMax
I agree that plastic is in most cases a better solution, however you are wrong to say the paper+PE board can't be recycled. Currently here in the UK they are not collected in household waste, but many businesses are recycling them and there is a lot of capacity available.
https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/news/ds-smith-makes-100-uk-coffe...
https://www.thefirstmile.co.uk/online-waste-services/busines...
Some of the issues are the collecting and sorting streams, then there are the commercial aspect of how to sell on the recycled material because it needs to be commercially viable.
> "Privatizing Profits and Socializing Losses"
The UK has recently introduced Extended Producer Responsibility for packaging legislation where the theory is the brand owner pays for the entire recycling and collection process of any packaging they put onto the market. Note this isn't just takeaway & food packaging, it's everything. The system though is an unworkable mess, it's so complicated trying to track every item of packaging and who is responsible for paying the tax down the entire supply chain.
Those clear PET bottles for instance are common and worth recycling, but if a brand makes green PET bottles those need to be separated from the clear ones if you want good-quality clear PET which can be used to make clear PET bottles or blending with a colorant to make green bottles.
Many of the big brands are standardizing on clear PET, both Coke and Pepsi are even using 100% post-consumer bottles in some geographies. In gas stations in upstate NY I frequently see Coke products bottled in 100% post-consumer recycled clear PET bottles.
-- the article
so that's good I guess
If you also avoid black colour it should be possible to recycle the plastic with automated sorting machines.
because money
If there are less toxic materials that could "do the job" but are more expensive then it really is about money no?
Single meal frozen food containers. You need a seal. Some impregnated cardboard can work, but not as well and is full of chemicals to overcome its disadvantages.
Disposable water bottles. You can use metal vessels, they cost a bit more, but doable.
Packaged frozen meats (they keep longer). Not sure there is a good alternative to plastics other than having people buy meats semi-daily from the butcher.
Some plastics need to be heat resistant, others solvent resistant, others flexible, others stretchy, etc. Different formulations give you what you need at a price point.
Yes we could go back to the 1920s but then life would have to be adjusted to the 1920s. You’d need someone to remain “domestic” at home, etc. as more time is needed to carry out house work without the convenience of modern materials.
I could also go to a bulk goods store instead and fill a container.
But one of these options is much more convenient… and that’s fundamentally why society is having hell of a time getting rid of plastic. These plastics are bad for the environment but they bring a lot of material properties that other materials like metal, wood or glass don’t provide.
Obviously bagged cereal is a drop in the bucket but this materials calculus is applied everywhere and at every stage.
It's not about random pieces of paper with numbers.
Regardless, I'm excited to hear about progress on solving the plastic waste crisis. It seems better than the current alternatives the article presents:
> "The U.S. is the number one plastic polluter per capita, and we only recycle 5% of those plastics," said Northwestern's Yosi Kratish, the study's co-corresponding author. "There is a dire need for better technologies that can process different types of plastic waste. Most of the technologies that we have today melt down plastic bottles and downcycle them into lower-quality products.
"In just four hours, 94% of the possible TPA was recovered."
Modern landfill is highly engineered and extremely stable: what goes in there stays there.
Plastic starts as oil in the ground. Replacing it as solids in the ground isn't a problem.
Source: I did a bunch of research on rocket mass heaters (think rocket stove, not missile engine) when I built one.
Put some filters on top of the power plant exhausts and it's clean enough to build a ski slope on top of it.
They were generally made from PP which is widely recycled as a material.
They are also commonly littered and as they don't break down in the environment led the not only being unsightly but also clogging up waterways and direct damage to wildlife. Paper straws can still be littered, but break down so don't cause the same physical problems in the longer term.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/19/food/coca-cola-new-bottles/in...
and Pepsi is selling 100% post-consumer bottles in some EU countries
https://www.pepsico.com/our-stories/press-release/pepsico-co...
Those clear beverage containers are an ideal case for mechanical recycling. This company
https://repreve.com/
makes polyester fiber from recycled PET. I have a few garmets made from it and my impression is that the fabric feel is nicer than average.
> Catalytic amounts of AC/MoO2 selectively convert waste PET into its monomer, terephthalic acid (TPA), within 4 h at 265 °C with yields as high as 94% under 1 atm air.
I'm not a chemist so don't know if you can find a way to calculate the cost, but the authors claim that it's cheaper than current methods.
The bigger deal imo is that it recovers PET monomers from mixed plastics, which means avoiding manufacturing more plastic.
The thing is BTX chemicals and other precursors of mass produced plastics cost about 50 cents a pound which makes it hard for any kind of recycling process to be competitive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTX_(chemistry)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terephthalic_acid
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetaldehyde
We've had almost a century of subsidization of the oil industry. The gov't needs to play a bigger similar role if the recycling industry is ever gonna be able to compete
We need a tax on the full lifecycle cost of plastics so we can stop treating waste as an economic externality
It would be cheaper to just ban stuff like polyester fleece than to try to clean it up after.
This approach closes the loop in a way which encourages manufacturers to re-engineer their products to be less expensive to recycle.
We are subsidizing these materials with our health and our environment. And it affects certain people more than others—usually people who have the least say in it
A 100% linen shirt currently costs around $40 and, when cared for properly, can last a lifetime. Rubber bands made out of natural rubber are much stronger and will last at least 10x as long as plastic ones and are about the same price. I could go on, but the alternatives exist and are already often much cheaper in the long run.
You're just over rationalizing it with 101-level economics ;).
Also no need for the patronizing comment. Economic externalities are a valid criticism of market failures and you haven't provided the more convincing, "advanced economics" jargon-laden analysis you're pretending to harbor
So just a blanket "Charge everything based on it's cleanup costs" doesn't work.
Maybe in the future you laser-atomize every spec that floats past the actor inside an 8ft cube. Who knows?
I don't think it'd be practical to switch overnight - much of our societal infrastructure needs re-engineering for sustainability which will take time - perhaps a gradually increasing percentage of externalized costs can be integrated over time. It'd be real progress toward a Venus Project style resource based economy.
In theory, I agree with you, but trying to internalize these cost is itself extremely costly. That's why the criticism about econ-101 level reasoning: it's a convincing idea in theory that isn't tractable at all in practice and can only end up with a bureaucratic nightmare.
The EU has many such rules that are designed around economics first principle like that, in order to build an “efficient market”, and they are all extremely burdensome and at the same time ineffective (see EU-ETS, the single Electricity market, CBAM, etc.)
In the realm of policies, tractability is always preferable to theoretical elegance.
If some celebrity wants to single-handedly fund the development of a microplastics recovery technology as part of a red carpet fashion item, I'm OK with that.
Vs selectively picking products which have easy alternatives and providing phase out periods which match the difficulty of replacing them. If you tell the public you are going to make car tires cost millions of dollars, you'll be voted out. If you tell them that plastic confetti will be replaced with paper confetti in 12 months you'll make real progress.
This doesn't prevent innovation. Scientists will still do research, develop new recycling tech and processes.
There are definitely reasons to subsidize some products - medical devices, for instance - as you say, things without readily available alternatives. I'm not writing a detailed transition plan here, just pointing out observations.
Mechanical recycling or any flavor of chemical recycling (pyrolysis, hydrolysis, etc.) all suffer from the same hurdle. If the target product of the recycling process is a TPA-derived plastic (be it for clothing or soda bottles), then mechanical recycling is usually cheaper, since it produces a product that only needs to be reshaped and remolded to give shirts or jugs. Chemical recycling converts PET into its constitutive monomers, and to (re)produce a TPA-derived plastic from the monomers requires a not inexpensive (re)polymerization step, in addition to reshaping and remolding.
Chemists, even highly regarded ones like Tobin Marks, are less interested in "solving" the PET recycling issue and more interested in the fundamental chemistry involved in chemical recycling. Issues of Green Chemistry (or blurbs in phys.org) are not the appropriate reading materials to get insight into costs, scale-up, etc.. Very few, if any, academic journals are focused on such matters, and rightly so, in my opinion.
I think most recycling methods for PET require melting anyway.
Finding it also odd that biodegradable plastics and safer alternatives are going quiet. As if the new scheme is to keep fossil fuel companies rolling, with the promise that one day a solution to get rid of incalculable mountains of plastic will be found. Don't worry, feel free to plastic pollute, because one day there will be a solution.
They tend not to be a good solution to anything.
There are a couple of ways of making degradable plastic. One is to add something to their manufacture so they break down into shorter chains which their supporters tell you will then further break down. These are generally referred to as OXO degradable.
Another is to use bio based plastics such as PLA or cellulose. These both have poor performance compares to oil based plastics.
All of these also require industrial composting where they add no nutrition to the compost, effectively just bulking it out. They [generally] do not break down when littered or even placed in a domestic compost heap.
There is also a problem because these plastics are virtually impossible to sort from recyclable plastics so if they get in each other waste stream the whole batch can be rendered contaminated and useless.
[1] https://www.unep.org/plastic-pollution
[2] https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/ocean_plastics...
[3] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/microplas...
[4] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/microplas...
[5] https://scitechdaily.com/startling-discovery-scientists-find...
Kind of like fresh air exchange into a heated house where new air in gets heated exchanging with old air out
All industrial processes recycle heat extensively. Heck even distillation based desalination isn't that inefficient because you do in fact recover the heat.
Actually, the tap water is optional.
And instead of monomers, the end product is carbon - which is even more recyclable!
Pulo ng suso ng dalaga
https://youtu.be/uh4dTLJ9q9o
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perhentian_Islands#:~:text=of%...
Triple point: Myanmar Memento mori 天命靡常
“刑天与帝至此争神，帝断其首，葬之常羊之山，乃以乳为目，以脐为口，操干戚以舞。”