this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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Mildly Infuriating
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Easy solution: only buy drinks in aluminum cans or glass bottles. World is already drowning in microplastic pollution.
Easy solution: limit yourself to a subset of the market and alter your behavior throughout your life.
Microplastic is mostly tires and fishing nets so tax those first I think.
Um, aren't tires like 99.9% rubber?
https://www.thedrive.com/news/tire-dust-makes-up-the-majority-of-ocean-microplastics-study-finds
Not modern tires.
Sorry but that doesn't work. Just 5% of the community does it and everybody else doesn't care. Laws need to be passed.
I wish there was more water sold in those little milk boxes or aluminum cans.
Cans are great from an energy-consumption point of view when viewing the entire lifecycle of a can.
Confidently incorrect as a motherfucker.
You're saying without hesitation that one of the most recycled and recyclable materials ever created is flat out not recyclable. What the fuck?
But He is right... Most cans have a layer
That doesn't make them non-recyclable does it?
It makes it Hard to recycle... Because splitting aluminium from Plastik isnt easy
Yes, it is actually. You melt the aluminum and skim off any remaining plastic and contaminants from the top of the molten aluminum. It's a standard, millenniums old process for any metal working.
https://ekko.world/plastic-lining-on-beverage-food-cans/226751
TIL
Yeah because reducing the plastic used by 99% should be scoffed at because AlUmInUm Is NoT rEcYcLAbLe
I had only learned of the liner this year, and have been wondering about this ever since, but always forgot what I wanted to look up every time I got to the search bar. You have rescued me from repeating this for the remainder of the year, and have my thanks. All of the thanks.
Surely making aluminum and glass cans isn't good for the environment either is it?
Making brand new ones from raw sand/ore isn't great when you consider the need to mine and refine those into something useable. Lots of energy and effort goes into that part. The difference is that glass and aluminum are essentially infinitely recyclable, while plastic is often not. It takes way less effort and minimal input of new resources to recycle a glass bottle. Hell, with a robust bottle return system you can skip over the recycling part entirely - just send them back to the bottling facility to be cleaned and refilled.
Glass is a bugger to recycle as even little admixtures of the wrong stuff can spoil the whole batch. Crush it up and it's very useful as aggregate in concrete, though. In the case of glass it's much better to reuse than recycle.
Glas is also heavy meaning it costs more energy to transport, overall PET bottles actually have a quite good environmental and climate record provided they actually get recycled.
Stainless steel is also infinitely recyclable and should be able to be used without liners. Shouldn't even be heavier than aluminium cans as steel and aluminium are ballpark equally strong by weight (aluminium is stiffer though, not necessarily an advantage). PET is probably going to need less energy of all when recycling, though.
Problem is the stainless steel you'd need to use in order to get the corrosion resistance and non-reactivity with the contents is prohibitively expensive. Cheap stainless steel alloys offer pretty poor corrosion resistance - see the CyberTruck rusting after being rained on a few times.
Hmm. Random price for 1.4571 (probably complete overkill): 20 Euro/kg. Let's say we use a bit more material than current alu cans, 20g per, that's 50 cans per kg or 40ct per can quite a bit more than the 25ct deposit we currently have on cans. OTOH that was a random price for 50cm of round stock of the right diameter to get to 1kg, if you're actually buying it in bulk from the mill it should be quite a bit cheaper (also while you're at it get sheets). Doubly so if you can feed that mill with very pure recycling material they barely have to touch to get up to spec again.
I'd say it's doable.
If you use approximately the same amount of material as in an aluminum can, you're already at 3x the weight of an aluminum can. Stainless is also far less malleable and much more brittle than aluminum, so the minimum wall thickness is much higher for steel. Aluminum can walls are 0.11m thick, whereas the minimum wall thickness for stainless steel alloys is around 0.50mm thick. Meaning you'd need around 4.5 times as much material, making the stainless steel can weigh at least 10 times as much as the average 15 gram aluminum can. A 12-pack of soda would weigh 4.5 pounds more. Now imagine how much transporting that extra weight costs.
Stainless steel is great for reusable stuff, but it'd be impractical at the same scale as aluminum cans.
Emphasis on "plastic is often not". Only PET (#1 on the symbol) can truly be recycled into new material, and usually it's tossed in with other materials and contaminated enough to make that not possible. There is the reusable path, where plastics are remolded into other purposes, but that's not "really" recycling and likely ends there for that form to eventually degrade and be trashed.
So just make more things with PET and recycle better, right? I'm guessing there's limitations on what PET can be used for given its characteristics vs. other plastics, and it is still cheaper to just get new material for new PET rather than recycle. So of course companies are going to go that route.
The interesting thing that I learned not so long ago from the YT channel Climate Town is that people see the triangle symbol with the plastic type number inside and assume it's recyclable, since that's the recycle symbol. But it's not that symbol, it's just designed similar to give that impression.
Pet can only be remelted and shaped before it starts breaking down..
Well, glass bottles can be washed and reused. The beer industry does this as standard practice.
Glass and aluminum are easier to recycle. Actually recycling these two materials are an order of magnitude easier and cheaper than new material.
Plastic can be recycled, but has a faster degradation rate and the infrastructure isn't present on the scale of glass and aluminum.
Interesting. How do the beer companies get their bottles back to reuse?
In my area, it through the recycling. Beer bottles have always been worth $0.05, so its worth it to return them to a depot. They also get sorted out if you leave them on the curb or takenby someone who wants the bottle deposit.
Returning them through the deposit makes sense, but I never would think that the recycling pickup people would sort them. Ours just take it to the dump
It's not, it's usually retirees or homeless people doing it for cash
So how do they return the bottles to the distributors?
It's just a reverse change of distribution. The bottles go back to a central location (some regions that's a bottle depot, other the point of sale then bottle depot). The bottle depot sorts and returns.
Aluminum and glass are natural and just use heat and presses to renew and transform into desired forms.
Plastic takes a lot more processing and isn't readily recyclable.