Microplastics are raining down from the sky

Recycling is mostly a feel good myth. We should design plastics so they burn relatively cleanly. Then burn 'em for power.

George H.

Should we make use of the plastics first or are you suggesting a fuel to plastic to fuel pathway like Ethanol?

Use the petroleum as plastic bottles (or whatever) then burn for power. We'd need some way to burn cleanly.

George H.

We can fill the bottles with petroleum before burning. That should do the trick!

I missed something. What's wrong with making new plastic bottles from the old ones??? What is with the obsession with burning stuff? Are you a pyromaniac?

Quite a bit does get recycled.

In Australia about one third gets recycled, and the system could be tweaked to do better - and probably will be, if not all that fast.

It takes quite a lot of work to turn petrochemicals into plastics, and burning the lot after one go around probably isn't optimal.

Quite a bit does get recycled.

In Australia about one third gets recycled, and the system could be tweaked to do better - and probably will be, if not all that fast.

It takes quite a lot of work to turn petrochemicals into plastics, and burning the lot after one go around probably isn't optimal.

At micron radii, the volume is insignificant. Critters will happily eat them. The bacteria outnumber the plastic particles by billions to

Recycling is mostly a feel good myth. We should design plastics so

Recycling some of the higher value thermoplastic ones makes economic sense but ISTR in the current market only clear PET and natural HDPE is really worthwhile. Kerbside collections of other recyclables isn't cost effective unless you include the landfill taxes in the equation.

Mixed waste plastics is almost worthless.

Apart from the halogenated polymers PVC and PTFE most of the rest do burn cleanly provided you give them enough oxygen to go with the fuel. Rubbish grade plastic fuel and old tyres often ends up in lime kilns.

You lose a little bit of quality each time around the cycle so you can only cut a certain percentage of old plastic into new product and still have it behave properly. No point making bottles that will fail in use.

Some plastics - notably the ones with black pigments in are impossible for the automated sorters to separate into reusable waste streams and as such are presently not accepted in many places. Putting them into landfill as happens now is even worse than burning them. Unfortunately supermarkets and their customers seem to like black plastic packaging.

Thanks Martin, I was reading in the local paper that glass recycling doesn't work so well in the US. I'm not sure why. This says it's too expensive to separate (single stream recycling.)

George H.

Maybe you missed the part about these particles being nano scale with a completely different surface chemistry that results in all kinds of hazardous atmospheric pollutants binding to them.

That makes them even tastier. Like that big oil spill in the Gulf: bacteria love this stuff.

That is weird. UK has had kerbside multi-stream recycling for ages. And for even longer if you were prepared to take things along to the tip. Continental schemes are even more sophisticated (at least in Belgium).

Glass is typically sorted for clear, green, brown feeds at such sites. Kerbside collection keeps glass separate from everything else to protect their workforce from any broken glass.

Paper, plastic and metal cans all go in one big bin and get sorted out by a clever waste stream splitter. They are quite fussy about what they will accept. Black plastic is the most obvious no-no.

The wagon that collects recyclables is an odd hybrid that takes the wheelie bins in at the back and has a hopper on one side that takes in glass from the blue box. Every now and then a Rube-Goldberg contraption tips the full hopper into the bowels of the waste truck with much noise.

- which has led to an increase in fly tipping :(

What's the problem? They're inert! My sister over in Canada had a bottle of washing up liquid turn up on your local stretch of shoreline recently. It had been floating around the world's oceans perfectly harmlessly for *at least* 48 years. We were able to date it from the price printed on it, which was in pre-decimal form -

If I were Fred I'd turn off the TV, throw out the radio and never read another newspaper again ever. Can't go wrong! I'm not joking, either.

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The problem is, it floats in water, it floats in air. I'm finding little bits of polytarp in the yard from birds' and squirrels' nests.

Inert it may be, but it goes everywhere, it clogs... everything. Sewers in New Orleans filled with beads, turtles with gut loads of plastic bags, a sea bird coughing up a plastic toothbrush to feed the chicks...

In Indonesia, it clogs rivers.

Some hope: biofilms have been found on pitted remnants, where some kind of bacterial degradation of the plastic is happening. Maybe the bacteria will unravel the long polymer chains eventually.

They get progressively less inert as they get broken up. By the time the get down to micron-sized and below, the surface area is large, and surfaces are a lot more chemically active than the bulk.

Modern plastics are designed to biodegrade.

Cursitor Doom's ignorance makes him complacent about a lot of real problems. Culling the dangerously ignorant might be a practical idea - the target population would never see it coming.

Since Cursitor Doom kill-files anybody who tells him stuff he doesn't want to know, he's obviously not joking.

Fred Bloggs wouldn't need to turn off the TV, throw out the radio or avoid all newspapers to get to be as complacently ill-informed as Cursitor Doom - he'd just have to be just as selective about which news sources he paid at tention to.

The Daily Mail and Russian Today are much too busy misleadig their audience s about politics to spend any time informing them about environmental probl ems - which is fair enough. If your basic plan involves starting WW3, any l esser environmental degradation doesn't really matter.

Taste is largely irrelevant. Filter feeders (from baleen whales down to corals) can clog and die at a variety of scale sizes. They aren't picky about flavors.

Bacteria in the Gulf of Mexico have had megayears of oil-seepage to adapt to. Baleen whales aren't so fast to evolve as regards modern polymers.

They have adapted to millions of years of particulates: sand, dust, soot, bits of various living and dead critters. Those things probably outnumber plastic particles by a billion to one.

If we have nutritious amounts of micro-plastics in the sea (which we don't yet) bacteria will quickly adapt to eating them.

Doomsday predictions are always plentiful and popular.