Preface. Plastics are just one of 500,000 products made out of oil and gas, but very important to just about every aspect of society, from making vehicles lighter so go further using less energy, to clothes, food storage, bags, toothbrushes, buckets, garbage bins, toys, carpets, fleece, plastic lumber, chairs, bottles and more.
The reason fossil fuels are used to make half a million products is that they are mostly just carbon and hydrogen: Natural gas 20% C 80% H, petroleum 84% C 12% H, and coal 84% C 5% H.
If you wanted to make plastics from something “greener” and more sustainable, what on earth is both abundant and chock-a-block with carbon and hydrogen that can replace fossil fuels? Let us start with abundant. The world is mostly made of soil, air, water, and plants. Dirt will not work, it’s 47% oxygen, 28% silicon, 8% aluminum, 5% iron, 3.6% calcium, 3% sodium, 3% potassium, and 2% magnesium. Air is nitrogen and oxygen. Water is hydrogen and oxygen, but no carbon.
That leaves biomass — plants such as trees, crops, and grasses, which has both carbon and hydrogen. But there’s a whole lot of other crap that would have to be removed at great energy and monetary expense since there’s also O, N, Ca, K, Si, Mg, Al, S, Fe, P, Cl, Na, Mn, Ti. Biomass carbon varies quite a bit, from 35–65% of the dry weight, and hydrogen roughly 6%.
But it also takes a lot of energy to use biomass instead of oil and gas, which flows through pipelines cheaply. Biomass has to be cut, transported, cut or mashed into tiny pieces, and conveyed to a plastics factory before it composts or spontaneously combusts. And it’s expensive to remove some or all of the non carbon and hydrogen elements out.
This is why the bioplastics industry is so puny, just 0.2% of the global market. Nor is this industry likely to grow, since biodegradable plastics are often made from more easily degradable with fossil fuels than biomass. Yet, being degradable is the main stated justification for the higher cost of bioplastics, and restricts the range of products made to mostly food-related items.
And as the article from the Atlantic below points out, plastics are not being converted into diesel as claimed. Now that would be truly useful, to turn plastics, the largest oil spill on earth back into oil again.
Worse yet, they catch on fire before recycling can happen! Holland K (2022) Why plastic is building up at recycling centers and catching fire. ABC news. Recycling plants are amassing millions of tons of plastic bottles, the Environmental Protection Agency says, with some becoming part of a growing problem of toxic fires. The majority of the combustible build-up at facilities is polyethylene terephthalate plastic, better known as PET, a clear, strong plastic typically used to make single-use beverage bottles, packaging, clothing and carpets, many made with colorful dyes, such as green lsoda bottles, or use shrink-wrap labels, destroying the recyclability of the plastic. Experts say the number of reported fires has steadily increased over the last five years and they believe this is due to a buildup of a combination of combustible materials like paper and plastic, sparks from discarded lithium-ion batteries and increasing temperatures as the climate warms, with 343 fires at waste and recycling facilities in the United States and Canada in 2019, and 367 in 2021.
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts
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Enck J (2022) Plastic Recycling Doesn’t Work and Will Never Work. Atlantic.
Plastic recycling does not work and will never work. The United States in 2021 had a dismal recycling rate of about 5%. Once upon a time it was claimed to be 9.5%, but that’s because we exported plastic waste to China where much of it was not recycled.
What makes it so impossible is that there are more than the 7 types of plastic you see in the triangle on packaging. In fact, there are thousands of types with unique compositions, due to different chemical additives and colorants that cannot be recycled together. So you simply can’t sort trillions of pieces of plastics into categories to be processed.
For example, polyethylene terephthalate (PET#1) bottles cannot be recycled with PET#1 clamshells, which are a different PET#1 material, and green PET#1 bottles cannot be recycled with clear PET#1 bottles. Just one fast-food meal can involve many different types of single-use plastic, including PET#1, HDPE#2, LDPE#4, PP#5, and PS#6 cups, lids, clamshells, trays, bags, and cutlery, which cannot be recycled together. This is one of several reasons why plastic fast-food service items cannot be legitimately claimed as recyclable in the U.S.
Another problem is that the reprocessing of plastic waste—when possible at all—is wasteful. Plastic is flammable, and the risk of fires at plastic-recycling facilities affects neighboring communities
Unlike metal and glass, plastics are not inert. Plastic products can include toxic additives and absorb chemicals, and are generally collected in curbside bins filled with possibly dangerous materials such as plastic pesticide containers. According to a report published by the Canadian government, toxicity risks in recycled plastic prohibit “the vast majority of plastic products and packaging produced” from being recycled into food-grade packaging.
A huge problem is that it costs more to recycle plastic than making new plastic containers, because recycled plastic needs to be collected, sorted, transported to a recycling center, and reprocessed. Tens of billions of dollars of new plastics factories have moved to the U.S. to take advantage of the cheap fracked gas and oil as well, making new plastic even cheaper (though if you read this blog you know this can’t last: world oil production peaked in 2018 and so supplies will decrease and grow more expensive).
Despite this stark failure, the plastics industry has waged a decades-long campaign to perpetuate the myth that the material is recyclable. This campaign is reminiscent of the tobacco industry’s efforts to convince smokers that filtered cigarettes are healthier than unfiltered cigarettes.
Conventional mechanical recycling, in which plastic waste is ground up and melted, has been around for many decades. Now the plastics industry is touting the benefits of so-called chemical recycling— in which plastic waste is broken down using high heat or more chemicals and turned into a low-quality fossil fuel. In 2018, Dow Chemical claimed that the Renewlogy chemical-recycling plant in Salt Lake City was able to reprocess mixed plastic waste from Boise, Idaho, households through the “Hefty EnergyBag” program and turn it into diesel fuel. As Reuters exposed in a 2021 investigation, however, all the different types of plastic waste contaminated the pyrolysis process. Today, Boise burns its mixed plastic waste in cement kilns, resulting in climate-warming carbon emissions. This well-documented Renewlogy failure has not stopped the plastics industry from continuing to claim that chemical recycling works for “mixed plastics.”