The Island Problem
The Island Problem
Dealing with trash in remote locations
When I was in middle school I used to dream about traveling and leaving the small part of the world where I grew up in western Maryland. I used to look at maps and imagine far flung places, the more remote the better, and I would imagine what life was like there. I would imagine what people did for fun, what the winters were like (how many snow days did people get in Maine?) and what living on the beach was like when I only got to go there for a week once a year if I was lucky.
As I got older I got more chances to travel. I will always remember traveling to Mexico for the honors group called College Park Scholars. I think this program was considered the lowest prestige group at the University of Maryland, but I didn’t care because I got a very heavily subsidized trip to Puebla with the class and many of my friends (before we were all 21). This meant getting beer from the convenience store and drinking on the rooftop of our hotel that was once a convent. We got to see pyramids and ruins of American civilizations during the day and we ate tacos and did shots of tequila at the bars during the night. I finally got to see a far flung place I had only read about. The further I got in my career the more chances I had to travel including Europe, South East Asia, Canada, and smaller cities all over the United States.
I realized that for the most part people are all more similar than they are different, but the problems on islands and remote places are more pronounced now I think due to our very connected world. I’ve written about how I think a fully connected and integrated city are important to making the world a more equitable, just, and environmentally friendly place. I think that remote places are unique places and we will always want to travel to them as long as we like to be in nature and small towns will always be there to support the travelers looking to do a few days or weeks out in the back country.
The problem that remote places have that is unique is their distance from centralized processing of the stuff we don’t want anymore. I sort of knew that this existed when I was in graduate school, but it became more real for me when a reader left a comment on one of my Sunday posts of the newsletter:
I live in a rural Alaskan town of 2000, hours by boat from the nearest "city" which has no recycling facility anyway. Most of Alaska has a huge trash problem.
Our volunteer recycling group is very active but most plastics cannot be recycled, only, sometimes, depending on prices, PETE and HDPE, which we barge to Seattle.
We always look for something better. One better thing would be a way for a small local business to use trash as feedstock for something usable. So, yes, that's one area of interest. Up the road in Whitehorse (Yukon Territory, Canada), which is a much larger town, they tried a plastic-to-oil pilot project which I'm told was somewhat successful except that they couldn't get a well-sorted feedstock and gave it up. Energy costs are a problem in rural Alaska; oil would be nice. They used a machine from a Japanese manufacturer called Blest.
Problem: it's really hard to get reliable information on this topic. Likewise, incineration/cogeneration might be of interest and has the same issues of scale and of reliable information. Your blog provides an interesting view of the world and is a reminder of the complex industrialization that serves as the backdrop to our lives. Meanwhile, here, day-to-day, there are these mundane concerns - what to do with all those #5 yogurt containers? And OMG, all that styrofoam! And so many old fishnets!I hardly think plastic trash is the focus of your professional life. But the person who comes up with a small scale, local way of dealing with some of this stuff will be a hero. Perhaps if you run across information along those lines you might share it on your blog?
The basic problem is that it costs more to ship out your trash to process it at a recycling facility or composting facility as compared to bringing in new finished goods. Companies like Amazon or Wal-Mart are happy to subsidize the low cost shipment of items to remote places, but once that stuff is there it’s the consumers problem. Thus, the comment from above about #5 yogurt containers (polypropylene) makes a lot of sense. Also, polypropylene is one of the most difficult to recycle plastics due to its common use in food contact applications.
In theory, a remote town or an island could deal with their waste themselves as outlined in the comment through a plastic to oil method. They could also recycle their plastic themselves such as sorting, cleaning, and chopping up their plastic into flake and doing their own extrusion to make pellets. The issue with plastic to oil as outlined above goes back to feedstock purity and this is the same issue with doing melt extrusion. The labor involved right now would be enormous to generate a material that has less value than the form that it arrived in (yogurt containers).
Recycled bottlestock PET might command a hefty price of $0.70/lb and HDPE might be a close second in value behind it, but everything else appears to be worthless even if it can be sorted and processed into a form where someone would buy it to convert it into something of higher value. An additional issue that an island or a remote town has is that there are no economies of scale. There are no massive volumes, but rather the opposite in the form of tiny volumes from a bunch of small municipalities. Even if a town could get an automated plastic sorting robot and could produce their own recycled plastics there is a limit to how much material they could make. How many years would it take a small town to produce enough recycled plastic to fill a container that could be shipped to a company that might buy it?
In summary the problems for remote towns are:
Low value raw materials coming out of the remote place
Labor costs are too high due to lack of volume (no economies of scale) to refine the raw material
The fact that a plastic waste to oil project in a larger town was difficult in the comment above from a reader is an idicator that things might become more difficult in a smaller town. I would propose that there might be a way to utilize scarity as an advantage for small towns and remote islands for dealing with their plastic waste provided that automated sorting of plastic waste can occur (I think it can).
An Idea Driven on Scarity
The problem with ideas is that everyone has them. Ideas are abundant and thus their value is low, much like plastic. There are just a few Jackson Pollacks, a few Rothcos, and a few Beeples in the world and they are valued so highly primarily because people have decided on these valuations and scarcity. We should be able to figure out a way to sell rare limited items made from recycled materials from far flung places. Actually, this is being done to some extent already.
Patagonia is makes beef jerky from buffalo, but then realized that the hides from the buffalo were going to waste so they decided to make Wild Idea Work Boots.
I can’t find these boots on a secondary market seller, but $399 is an on-target price tag if we compared them to a premium pair of RedWing boots will run someone about $320. I think Patagonia underpriced their workboots by about $100-$200 considering their supply chain is dependent on buffalos from South Dakota and when those hides are gone there are no more boots. Patagonia has scarcity here. I am sure that plenty of people out there would consider paying $500+ for a limited number of Patagonia boot produced every year.
Beeple sold his daily digital art work for $69 million dollars.
If a company like Patagonia or North Face made a limited number of jackets from PET recycled exclusively from Alaska and called it their “Alaskan Fleece,” and sold that jacket for $1000 they could afford to pay triple or quadruple the market value of that PET. High value recycled PET from Alaska could command a high enough price to enable its aggregation from across the far flung places of the state.
The same could be done for plastics harvested from islands and surfboards or boardshorts. Adidas did this with their plastic from the ocean for their Parley collection, but I think there is too much volume there for it to be truly scarce and thus command really high prices to the end consumer. Cotopaxi is also doing something similar with waste fabrics from factories. Imagine a tent made from discarded tents and plastic bottles from US National Parks.
If you are thinking, “Tony, this will never work. Why would people pay for things that come from a certain region?” I point you towards the Sancerre region of France and the Russian River Valley in Sonoma County California. Wines from these regions can command very high prices primarily due to their region and quality. Location for wines is part of the reason why someone might pay a few hundred dollars a bottle. Location and story could be enough to command a high price for the recycled plastic and the finished article that the consumer pays for could also come with an non-fungible token to verify the provenance of the supply chain.
Thus, we need people from small towns and remote places to talk to each other and talk to these consumer focused brands on how we can work together to create something unique, scarce, and focused on all stake holders getting a good deal from the raw material producers to the consumers. I think there is a world where someone would feel excited to pay $1000 dollars for a jacket made from recycled plastic coming out of Alaska and that there are only 1000 of these jackets made a year.
Maybe this proposal isn’t that unique now that I’ve written it down and cited a few examples of companies already working on this stuff. If you have a better idea let me know in the comments. University of Buffalo, please work faster on getting an AI solution on waste sorting because we need automation on this problem.
To my readers in remote places I will keep my eyes peeled for things that might enable you to reprocess your own spent plastics. Here is an industrial composter that might work for food scraps and compostable plastic. I’ll try and do an interview with them this year. Any professional chemists or plastics engineers reading this have any ideas on how to deal with plastic waste in remote locations leave a comment below.
Update:
One reader suggested that remote areas look into Renewlogy
They are doing what I would consider to be classic advanced recycling aka turning plastic back into monomers or feedstock that can be converted to monomers. These feedstocks are in theory even cheaper than the plastic.
But if a remote area could get a fuel grade product out without much issue in terms of incoming raw material purity then I see a potential upside. To my remote location readers consider this one.
Another reader suggested that:
There might be a potential for doing recycling of plastic into 3D printing filament and doing printing of objects needed in the community and/or making touristy stuff for the people that come to visit. It would require quite a bit of infrastructure, but if there is a need for hard to source things for older infrastructure it might work. Any readers with 3D printing have any experience in understanding if this model would work?
Talk to you Friday,