So, I'm not really interested in your opinion since almost every comment or post that I've ever read online about trash is based on trash knowledge about trash. I'm actually posting this "question" because it's the biggest community on Lemmy where I can adjust my post to not break the rules and get a lot of people to read it.
This post is meant to inform you that unless you're from one of the top countries when it comes to recycling and handling trash your knowledge is lacking about what's possible and your country's experts, politicians and media don't know shit on this topic. I'm not going to make the environmental case since they already want better handling of trash. I'm going to tell you, with sources, how it's technologically possible and above all profitable to handle trash. Since I'm from Sweden and we're among the best in the world on trash I'm going to give you examples from Sweden.
Anyway, to the point
- By using landfills you're burying money, trash has value. In Sweden only 1% of trash goes to landfills. We recycle about 47% and burn 52%.
I know what your knee-jerk reaction is: "Burning trash, how's that environmental? What about air quality and other stuff?".
Well, we clean the fumes extremely well and take care of the remaining waste by either using it or putting it in very controlled landfills.
Burning 4 tons if trash is equal in energy to burning 1 ton of oil. There's your economical argument. We heat a million homes through district heating and provide electricity to 250,000 homes by burning trash. We're 10 million people in the country.
Alright, I'm getting tiered of writing since I don't know if this post will be removed or downvoted to obscurity I'm feeling my motivation diminishing so I'll just finish on the big topic of plastic.
You're wrong about plastic recycling. At least I've never read a comment that was right about it.
It is possible, and profitable to recycle almost all kinds of plastic. In Sweden we have one company that basically does all of the plastic recycling, "Swedish Plastic Recycling AB". They're currently building the world's largest plastic recycling plant in Sweden, Site Zero.
It's a mostly automated recycling plant that will be able to handle ALL of the plastic from the entire country and sort and recycle the following: PP, HDPE, LDPE, PET tray, PET bottles (colored and transparent), PP film, EPS, PS, PVC, two grades of Polyolefin mix, metal and non-plastic waste.
If this message resonated with you, feel free to take the post and expand upon it and by writing it better, providing more sources and making better arguments than I have. Then just paste it whenever the topic of trash is brought up.
Well this is interesting.
I worked for 7 years at a Swedish company who built granulators, Rapid Granulator AB. I worked stateside though as the only electrical technician.
From what I could glean about the machinery we built and sold, they would say that the only viable way to recycle plastic is as it was being manufactured. So say you're a facotry making hundreds of garbage cans a day. All the rejects (wrong chemical makeup, big bulge from the molding process, etc) would go into a granulator for "recycling". The granulator grinds it down into small pellets which are then used at the beginning of the line.
From what I remember, customers were very very picky about what could be used after granulation. A little bit of the wrong color of dye would ruin a whole batch for instance. I'm curious to see exactly how this site zero plans to recycle waste products coming from the general population, on an engineering / technical level..
This, of course, is also dancing around the fact that it's a bit of an open secret that most places in America do not recycle. And I'm talking systemically, not on an individual level. In my county I know that all recycling goes to the exact same landfill as all the trash. It's a bit hard to feel hopeful when the USA sends 242 million pounds of plastic straight to the ocean every year. I felt a little better about it when China would sort through and recycle our plastics.