Recycled Lies - more Uncle Al

[handy]

https://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/recycle.htm

RECYCLED LIES

In the summer of 1992, gasoline prices pushed well beyond the $1.50/gallon mark. (In 2008 they tickled $5/gallon, but Bush the Lesser was appointed President by the Supreme Court and he had oil company debts to pay. America was good for a few $trillion tossed to the more deserving). Muslims were being uppity about OPEC, President Bush the Elder having neglected to capitalize on 750,000 troops stationed there from Operation Desert Storm. The Environmental Protection Agency imposed regulations about gasoline composition to control summer smog, and though the smog remained unaffected the inclusion of 20% synthesized oxygenates in our automotive fuel sent its price skyrocketing. Government officially wrung its hands in despair as it collected taxes. Petroleum producers cried rivers via press releases and laughed all the way to the bank. Electricity emptied our wallets as fuel became dear and a hot summer screamed for more kilowatt-hours.
While all this transpired, 20 billion pounds per year of top notch power plant fuel was diverted by social engineering for Enviro-whinerly sound reasons. Pigs fly, too! One and a quarter billion pounds was shoveled into warehouses for an indefinite stay at extreme taxpayer expense. For every dollar of tax monies spent on recycling an average of $0.16 was returned in revenues. Let us sing a song of plastics.

Poly(ethylene terephthalate) is the stuff of two liter soft drink bottles. Of 908 million pounds used in 1991, 36% or 327 million pounds was recycled. Reclaimed PET is used to manufacture insulating fiber for clothing and comforters. If all the bulging warehouses were emptied for this noble cause it would make a bat of fiber one foot square and 62,000 miles long - enough to circle the earth at the equator 2.5 times. If every ounce of it were recycled, we circumscribe the globe 6.9 times. Next year, we could do it again. The importance of recycling PET is obvious.

High density polyethylene is the stuff of milk jugs and detergent bottles. Of the 4,460 million pounds used in 1991, about 6.3% or 281 million pounds was recycled. If garbaged HDPE has a commercial use it has been effectively hidden in the literature. Polyethylene is nothing but high molecular weight paraffin wax. The 1991 output had the energy content of 741 million gallons of gasoline. It is sitting in warehouses across this great nation, and we citizens are paying every second of the rent. Recycle bottles!

Consumer plastic packaging is technical talk for grocery bags and McDonalds' hamburger trays. Of the 14,400 million pounds used in 1991, a mere 4.5% or 651 million pounds was recycled. It also uselessly sits in storage, except for those who collect the rent.

We will not play at being government regulators struggling each December to overspend our budgets to justify an even bigger allocation next year, nor will we be Enviro-whiners crying into our granola about McDonalds foam. Let us be capitalists and wring out every penny of possible profit. We are not going to recycle the trash. We are going to burn it to make electricity!

How much energy can be harvested from plastics? The heat of combustion of PET, HDPE, low density PE (LDPE) and polystyrene (PS) are known. Thermal efficiencies of electrical plants are about 90%, and their product retails for $0.10666/kW-hr in California. How much money can be made by BURNING trash?

PET 5.16 kcal/g 4.12x1011 g 1.41x108 kW-hr $ 15 million
HDPE 11.1 kcal/g 2.02x1012 g 1.49x109 kW-hr $159 million
LDPE 11.1 kcal/g 3.27x1012 g 2.41x109 kW-hr $257 million
PS 10.34 kcal/g 3.27x1012 g 2.24x109 kw-hr $236 million
If we burn our trash instead of recycle it, we make $667,000,000 from the 6.28 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity so generated. We can keep our synthetic down-filled parkas and comforters, and still come away with $650 million. We also save the cost of the coal, oil and natural gas that would have been burned to generate the energy, which pays for the garbage collection.

A fool would spend the money and effort to separate garbage into its components, and then recombine them for burning. A rational environmental and economic scenario for dealing with urban waste is obvious, and will never be implemented:

Collect the garbage. Shred it. Pass it by a magnet to separate out ferrous metals, and sell them. Pass it by a linear induction winding to remove other metals, e.g., aluminum, and sell them. Run it through a flotation tank to separate glass cullet from plastics and floatable cellulostics, e.g., newspaper. Sell the glass and burn the rest for fuel. The ash remaining, about 1% of the total garbage volume, goes into sanitary landfill for long term storage. The potential profits are enormous BUT - government is not in business for profit. It exists to wield authority. What is achieved if the problem is solved?

[Braggi]

...
Collect the garbage. Shred it. Pass it by a magnet to separate out ferrous metals, and sell them. Pass it by a linear induction winding to remove other metals, e.g., aluminum, and sell them. Run it through a flotation tank to separate glass cullet from plastics and floatable cellulostics, e.g., newspaper. Sell the glass and burn the rest for fuel. The ash remaining, about 1% of the total garbage volume, goes into sanitary landfill for long term storage. The potential profits are enormous BUT - government is not in business for profit. It exists to wield authority. What is achieved if the problem is solved?

And what about all the toxic chemicals that go into the air and then into the water as a result of this process? As long as we put these incinerators in poor, politically powerless neighborhoods, no problems, right? Wrong, of course.

You can't poison the air and water continuously without winding up breathing and drinking it eventually, no matter where you live.

I like the idea of recycling plastic back into oil using fast pyrolysis. Here's a company that's doing it now using "wood waste" as feedstock: https://www.dynamotive.com/en/about/index.html

Here's a Wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization

There are problems with the existing plants though the largest problems are the chosen locations and poor PR. The fact is, this technology works and demonstration plants are up and running. Why none are using plastic as a feedstock yet I don't know or understand. One would think it an obvious choice since plastic produces the most oil. Also, what about that vast floating gob of plastic out there in the ocean? This seems like the best way to do away with it and reharvest the resource. Put the processing plant on a huge barge and start making oil. Let's get with it. Why not?

My point is that stockpiling plastic is probably a good policy. No reason we can't fill canyons with it and harvest it in the future. Putting it in warehouses and paying rent doesn't make sense to me, but is that really being done? Got some evidence of that? I'd like to know more. It's pretty difficult to find good information on recycling plastic. There's a lot of redundant info out there about how good recycling is and how little is actually getting recycled, but who knows what's actually being done with all those bottles?

-Jeff

[MsTerry]

Here is some info on the re-usability of plastic.
IMO if it cannot be recycled, it shouldn't be allowed to be made.
Zero Waste



Supervisor takes on plastic drinking bottles

By Brad Breithaupt
IJ reporter
EVEN BEFORE he has won a battle with plastic grocery bags, Supervisor Charles McGlashan has found another environmental target: plastic water bottles.
He’s asking that county departments urge their employees — more than 2,000 workers — to stop drinking water from plastic bottles and instead use re-usable containers.

The plastic bottles — even those sold in the vending machine a few steps from McGlashan’s Civic Center office — are “obnoxious,” he said. They are not being recycled, creating mountains of plastic, or they are incinerated, polluting the air, he said.
In May, McGlashan said he wanted to ban the use of plastic grocery bags in county areas. He has started that push with a public education campaign in which some local stores are participating.
McGlashan’s latest initiative won praise from Patty Garbarino, head of the Marin Recycling Center. She called the recycling of plastic water bottles “sort of a hideous joke.”
Recycled bottles are turned in for deposits, but they can’t be melted down to make more bottles, Garbarino said. While some are used to make plastic products, most are shipped overseas where they are melted down — without environmental safeguards — to make other products.
McGlashan, who sips from a reusable plastic bottle, says local tap water is just as good, if not better, than most bottled brands.
“I want to ask the county to walk its talk,” he said.The truth about plastic bags

<!--subtitle--><!--byline-->Staff Report
<!--date-->Article Launched: 09/18/2007 12:09:12 AM PDT

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I would like to commend all elected officials, especially Fairfax Councilman Lew Tremaine, for having the courage to stand up to large companies that produce plastic bags from an oil base.




<hr class="articleAdRule"><hr class="articleAdRule">Tremaine was criticized by Patty Moore, a consultant for the plastic industry (Readers' Forum, Sept. 4, "Recycling background"). She would lead us to believe plastic bags are recyclable.
California generates 19 billion bags per year. They can be seen daily at our transfer station on Jacoby Street or blowing along our creeks, rivers and beaches. These bags are an environmental disaster that can be avoided. We must convert to bags that can be reused again and again. Our planet and the next generation deserve better.
Joe Garbarino, Marin Sanitary Service, San Rafael
Banning bags the solution
Patty Moore urges Fairfax to recycle rather than ban plastic bags.
Unfortunately, recycling does not resolve the plastic crisis. Plastic is the fastest growing part of the waste stream, and never biodegrades. Every piece of plastic ever made still exists. That's why the Texas-sized mass of plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean grows by the second. Plastic outweighs zooplankton in parts of the ocean by six to one, killing wildlife by the millions. The plastics industry uses five of the most hazardous chemicals in use today, and 10 percent of U.S. oil consumption. Toxins in plastic containers leak into the contents - another reason to avoid bottled water.
Some suggest recycling is the answer. Recycling plastic may actually make this problem worse. That's because plastic doesn't get recycled. It gets "downcycled" one time into things like carpet and the lumber Moore promotes, which can't be recycled again, so their inevitable disposal has merely been delayed. And we've done nothing to reduce the use of plastic bags - in fact, a market has been created for them.
We must quickly diminish plastic use. A good place to start is plastic bags - Californians throw away 600 each second. Shoppers need to be encouraged and then required to bring their own bags.
We're out of time for non-solutions to our frightening environmental problems. The solution to the plastic problem is to stop producing it and Fairfax should be applauded for promoting this ban. May many others follow suit. Soon. Let's ban plastic water bottles next.
Carol Misseldine, sustainability consultant, Mill Valley

[PeriodThree]

Every piece of plastic ever made still exists.

Without defending plastic bags or plastic waste, this particular statement is frequently repeated, and isn't really true.

Many plastics (with the emphatic exception of PVC) can be burned to generate energy.

#1 PET bottles have roughly the energy equivalence when burned of soft coal.

About 88% of the crude oil we use goes to transportation and electricity generation. To the extent that burning oil for transportation or electricity generation is safe and sane, burning most plastics in waste to trash facilities is similarly safe and sane.

[MsTerry]

Turning Fruit into Bio-Fuel

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https://a123.g.akamai.net/f/123/33105/5m/wmarimg.dayport.com/img/dp_thumbs/thumb_1218469803598_0p08070197622373176.jpg

Some are banking on oil from the fruit of the jatropha tree as a cure for America's dependence on diesel fuel. And as Susan Candiotti reports, Florida farmers used to growing oranges are now seeing green.

The fruit's the size of golf balls, and grows on trees, some 25 feet tall. But the prize is what's inside the shell ... and you don't want to eat it. "These are chock full of oil." Black seeds --the size of garlic cloves-- contain oil that can run diesel engines.

Without any refining, jatropha can power diesel cars and trucks.... and tractors ....either straight or a 20% blend...stretching regular diesel. University of Florida researcher Roy Beckford is looking for the best strain. On average, a tree yields only a gallon of oil each year.

"Next four or five years, I think we'll increase not only the fruits per jatropha tree, but we'll also increase the amount of oil in each of those seeds."

China and parts of Africa-- all are heavily investing in jatropha as an alternative biodiesel fuel. In the United States, researchers and farmers have only just begun testing it.

In Florida, jatropha stands up to insect attacks, drought, frost, and lousy soil... stand up -- "Scientists stuck this plant right in the middle of a foundation where a house used to stand. You can see the concrete is still here, the roots are growing. It's just dirt and rocks down here. "and yet, the plant appears to be thriving."

Citrus farmer Bryan Beer also wants in. driven by exploding diesel prices, beer's growing 75-thousand plants on 30 acres. the oil could help power his tractors that each inhale 120 gallons a day during peak orange harvest.

"any kind of relief or help we can get from a cheaper source of oil could impact the agriculture industry tremendously throughout the country, throughout the world."

Planes could be next - Air New Zealand is planning a test flight this fall powering one of four 747 engines on jatropha