Optimized sorting method: How Germany recycles 46% of its plastics to make new plastic (US is about 6%), and a further 53% is recycled into energy.
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So is this saying they recycle 99% of their plastic. Or is it 46% of all plastic to make new plastic, and 56% of the leftover becomes energy?
Does the 56% recycled into energy just mean they burn it?
Reading “optimized sorting method”, I was confused when this wasn’t about coding algorithms 😅
One caveat: the vast majority of plastic is being downcycled, not truely recycled.
For instance, reclaimed plastic bottles are not turned into new plastic bottles. One aspect in which glass bottles are still superior as there is no practical limit on how many times you can melt down and recycle glass into new bottles.
Does burning for energy count as recycling.
>53% is recycled into energy – no!
Recycle means the flow of matter forms a circle – thus it has to be turned in the original thing. Like we do with metal and glass. You can make new bottles out of broken glass bottles. New aluminum cans out of old ones.
Plastic is never recycled – only downcycled – losing quality each circle.
But burning it is not even downcycling.
> 46% of it’s plastics into new plastic
Are they using a subset of plastics to fudge that number? What is the exact source for the figure?
My understanding most plastics have pigments, additives, and other properties that make them non-recyclable. I wonder if they’re actually counting all “plastics”. Our clothes are partially made of plastic, made from polyester, which causes microplastics to go into the water cycle from laundry. Yet most people probably don’t think of their shirt when think of plastic pollution. Does it include these plastics and different industrial plastic uses?
‘Recycled into energy’ is a fun way of saying, ‘we don’t know what to do with it do we fucking burn it.’
Leela : We recycle everything. Robots are made out of old beer cans.
Bender : Yeah, and this beer can is made out of old robots.
Leela : And that sandwich your eating is made out of old, discarded sandwiches. Nothing just gets thrown away.
Fry : The future is disgusting!
Sweden is working on a plastic recycling site with a capacity of 200000 tons/yr where 0% of the plastic will be incinerated, so it will be completely climate neutral with zero emissions. Looks interesting.
https://www.svenskplastatervinning.se/en/site-zero/
“Germany exports around one million tons of plastic waste worth around 254 million euros every year. This is more than any other country in the EU.”
Is this the remaining 1%?
There was literally just an article on the front page that noted how useless recycling plastic is…..my magic school bus educated mind is in a blender now.
> Millions of packages in Germany simply feel empty at some point, squeezed out and useless
TIL I am a package in Germany
I lived in germany for a couple of years, now living in england.
the number of 46% is false. it is 16%.
https://www.forschung-und-wissen.de/nachrichten/umwelt/recyclingquote-von-plastikmuell-in-deutschland-nur-bei-16-prozent-13373011
recycled into energy = burned
Seems this is a targeted post in response to the Atlantic article that takes a deep look at why plastic recycling doesn’t work.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/single-use-plastic-chemical-recycling-disposal/661141/
“recycled into energy”
That is definitely some deliberate wording there.
I’m speaking completely from ignorance here but it seems like a majority of the plastic recycling problem comes from sorting.
I’m sure that most products are sold in a specific type of plastic container for a reason, but is it be possible to reduce the total number of different plastic types? Wouldn’t that make the sorting process easier and then bring down the cost of recycling?
‘Recycled into energy’…. i am absolutely going use that one every time i set something on fire. ‘My car recycles fossil fuels into energy’. This is great! Im super environmentally friendly and stuff!
In my country in northern europe a minority of the recycled plastic products are very low quality. Dog waste bags that easily get pierced by fingers for example. Other products that are too brittle for their purpose.
Recycling plastic can go too far. Some plastics are indeed trash and will ruin higher quality recycled plastics if they get mixed.
The problem is using too much disposable plastics in the first case. And consumers can be nudged into using less plastics. Case in point: we got a plastic bag tax a few years ago and I completely stopped buying bags with my groceries without any inconvenience. I just put it in my rucksack or usually bring my own reusable plastic bags.
Pretty sure that doesn’t count as recycling?
All these machines for something that could be done before it even goes into the recycle bin.
We really need to get this garbage situation fixed because we will end up like the earth from Wall-E
In the United States we’ve supposedly been recycling plastic for almost 50 years and the best we can do is 6%????
We need a serious investigation on this shit. That’s insane and frankly criminal.
I actually work as a plastics engineer for an injection molding company. In recent years we have increased our drive to use more regrind from our own processing. Biggest challenges is storing it (we have high throughput, and limited warehouse space), and our machines being limited to what percentage we can add per shot of plastic (each shot is weighed in a blender before being dosed into the material hopper)
Currently utilizing upwards of 20-30% regrind in most of our products, and aiming to use more as we gain equipment and such! It definitely is a finicky business!
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This was a pretty cool breakdown!
It bothers me that there remains one very simple and incredibly effective solution out there that NO ONE talks about.
***Add all plastics that are not commonly recyclable (Type 1, 2, 5) to restricted materials lists.***
All manufacturers have **extensive** restricted materials lists. There’s all sorts of things we don’t use because they have proven harmful or are restricted for other reasons (think lead or asbestos). This is something governments can do with the stroke of a pen, and while I’m sure there will be plenty of moans and groans, manufacturers WILL adjust quickly.
Adding it to restricted materials would allow exemptions for things like medical products that may not be able to adjust, and if something is just so key in a supply chain that could be allowed exemptions to.
This would eliminate a HUGE chunk of the needed sorting and potential contamination of large batch recycling like this. It’s a completely common sense measure, and frankly I think it’s not talked about because certain business with lots of money does not want it discussed.
By “recycled into energy,” what they really mean is that they *burn* it, correct?
One thing that I loved in Germany (not plastic related) was the uniformity of their glass bottles meant that you would return them and they would simply get reused by any company until they eventually got broken down and recycled. In the US, there are so many different bottle shapes by different conpanies that you cannot do anything close to that.
Given the many problems of plastics, would it be possible to legislate for replacing plastics with glass, or only plastics that can be recycled?
So…from my brief time visiting Germany(only 3 days, but stayed with a local family in Cologne) it seems that Germans in general care a LOT more about recycling than any American I’ve met and my brother recycles religiously, but he doesn’t break everything down into different types of stuff like paper plastic etc etc whereas the German family did. It seems Cultural…
I thought plastic recycling was just a way to blame consumers for pollution. I feel like Germany is doing it wrong. /s
I’d be curious to know how much less oil is required to make any particular recycled product if you also factor in the full plant energy costs associated with extensive sorting plus any additional transportation costs, compared to simply dumping it in a landfill.
Wikipedia states German energy production ‘as of 2021… with more than 75% coming from fossil sources, 6.2% from nuclear energy and 16.1% from renewables.’
Just give me a place where I can drive up and fill my own bottles and containers, please. All this waste is fucking unnecessary.
Burning plastic isn’t a great solution to recycling
Without knowing anything specific about the process in Germany, my guess is the large scale manufacturers there have gotten behind this idea
Recycling contains cycle – which in its original form meant a perpetual cycle of use.
Burning Plastic is not recycling – it is burning fossil fuel.
A very common method of combining different plastic types is not recycling as you loose their basic properties and purity – so it is usually called down-cycling – as after this step is the last step in the line and only burning is left.
One part of the problem is that there are too many plastics out there and hard to detect. E.g. one approach could be to limit the use of packing to say 10 types of different plastics that already have certain physical properties in place to be separated in an industrial process (e.g. by density (Air/water) or by light reflection) – so the seperation within the sorting plants is better. Also limiting the ways they can be polluted – or easier be cleaned as the recycling processes need to have good starting materials.
An example could be CD-ROMs and similar. The material is pure – BASF tried for years to recycle CD-ROM´s into starting materials to produce new CD-ROMs. In theory a cycle, but they were unable to get rid of impurities and thus the resulting product did not meet the expectations for an optical plastic.
All-in-all the recycling quote in Germany is a greenwashing statistic by a conservative party. It has little to nothing to do with recycling.
I saw a post about how recycling does not work and now I see this post. Someone is a liar and I don’t know which one
US sucks, amirite guys?
Everything I see about how recycling is done in the US pretty much shows that it isn’t. We separate our stuff in different bins, that are picked up by the same trucks and deposited in the same landfills. About the only time it’s recycled is if you go out of your way to take it to a recycler.
That and nobody even attempts the first two R’s and REDUCE their usage when they can and REUSE what they can.