Another great post. A big part of my pessimism for things like the "circular economy", when it comes to plastics, is that while the economy for materials (constituent atoms) can be forced into 'circularity', the energy required to 'circularize' will not itself be 'circular', and the problem will always be far worse than with inorganics (metal, glass).
It's always going to take a lot of energy to recycle plastic, whether by physical or chemical means.
In the end I keep coming back to the "three R's approach" where reduction comes before reuse, which in turn comes before recycling. Recycling should be the last option, and as you mention, if we continue down the path of complex packaging (multi-material, lots of layers, etc.) then it might not even *be* an option.
Reuse is probably my favorite. We reuse all of our chinese delivery containers until they break and then we put them in the recycling bin (mostly they are PP). The coextruded plastics are a real challenge because you cannot re-extrude these plastics without adding in a diblock compatibilizer (BASF and others are betting big on this. I'm sure Frank Bates and Mark Hillmyer are also excited). Even when you do add the diblock compatibilizer the properties of the resulting resin will likely be somewhere between the two different resins and will be less useful in the end.
On the flip side these sorts of advanced packaging technologies enable our modern lives. I bought a fresh farm raised turkey for Thanksgiving this year because my wife and I couldn't travel. It was 100 dollars and it had no packaging aside from the LDPE bag that the farm used to store it in.
There is a push for a new executive order to ban generation of plastics, but I worry this is a bit like republicans wanting to repeal the affordable care act without having anything to take its place. I will probably write about this in a few weeks once I work through the current pipeline. Thank you for reading the back issues Jordan.
Another great post. A big part of my pessimism for things like the "circular economy", when it comes to plastics, is that while the economy for materials (constituent atoms) can be forced into 'circularity', the energy required to 'circularize' will not itself be 'circular', and the problem will always be far worse than with inorganics (metal, glass).
It's always going to take a lot of energy to recycle plastic, whether by physical or chemical means.
In the end I keep coming back to the "three R's approach" where reduction comes before reuse, which in turn comes before recycling. Recycling should be the last option, and as you mention, if we continue down the path of complex packaging (multi-material, lots of layers, etc.) then it might not even *be* an option.
Reuse is probably my favorite. We reuse all of our chinese delivery containers until they break and then we put them in the recycling bin (mostly they are PP). The coextruded plastics are a real challenge because you cannot re-extrude these plastics without adding in a diblock compatibilizer (BASF and others are betting big on this. I'm sure Frank Bates and Mark Hillmyer are also excited). Even when you do add the diblock compatibilizer the properties of the resulting resin will likely be somewhere between the two different resins and will be less useful in the end.
On the flip side these sorts of advanced packaging technologies enable our modern lives. I bought a fresh farm raised turkey for Thanksgiving this year because my wife and I couldn't travel. It was 100 dollars and it had no packaging aside from the LDPE bag that the farm used to store it in.
There is a push for a new executive order to ban generation of plastics, but I worry this is a bit like republicans wanting to repeal the affordable care act without having anything to take its place. I will probably write about this in a few weeks once I work through the current pipeline. Thank you for reading the back issues Jordan.
https://cen.acs.org/environment/persistent-pollutants/Activists-rally-put-lid-plastics/99/i10