What would a world look like if recycling reached 100%?
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Comment from a German specialist in a thread about this from 2017:
Die nicht recykelbaren Reste wie Lebensmittelreste, Farbauftrag oder irgendwelche Etiketten verbrennen in der Schmelze und treiben oben auf dem flüssigen Metall als Schlacke, die einfach abgeschöpft und entsorgt werden kann.
Translation:
The non-recyclable residues, such as food scraps, paint coatings or labels burn off in the melt and float to the top of the molten metal as slags, which can simply be skimmed off and disposed of.
Yeah, contaminants aren't a big deal with metal recycling.
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Metallurgy isn't my field, but here's an educated guess...
There are different kinds of contaminants. In raw ore you largely have silicate rock and metals. In recycled material you have relatively pure metal (alloys), and a large variety of volatiles.
Now with ore you can grind it all into sand, sift it, and smelt all the heavy grains. The rock should mostly just separate from the metal, these are just phase changes. But with recycling, those volatiles are going to burn and some are going to react with the metals, changing the chemical makeup. And with ore, you basically know what minerals you're working with. With recycled materials, it's anyone's guess. Does this can contain some food residue? Or an oil? Perhaps chemical cleaning agents? Is another plastic container stuffed inside?
There's a lot of variables with recycled materials, I imagine it's hard to predict how some of those variables react.
For metals, it's pretty trivial to remove slag (contaminants) from the metal. Basically everything floats to the top and you can just scrape it off.
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Where I live it's only 1-2. Also, sorting is a challenge, and we often don't know if it actually gets recycled or ends up on a ship to India.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Ours just goes to the landfill. I happened to be behind one of the recycling trucks when I was on a dump run once, and it pulled into the same trash pile I did.
Stopped paying $25 a month for it when I got home.
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Raw materials is not what we’re talking about here. Local recycling plants are not processing raw materials - that’s a completely different process. They are very limited systems designed to process consumer materials.
Why not make better recycling plants?
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I want the easiest path to have the most pleasant shit in the morning i can possibly have in the future.
The future is now if you just take metamucil.
No really. Try it. Perfect shit every time.
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Recycling doesn’t work unless you have a respectful and intelligent society like Japan or South Korea. Americans would never follow the rules.
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Why not make better recycling plants?
Couldn’t agree more
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Everything would be a bit more efficient, a bit more interchangeable nine Ted. Landfills would fill a bit more slowly.
A useful step to reduce the growth of environmental damage, but not enough
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That would require a world without platic and where we dont make cheap things but quality that can be repaired
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Germany: okayyy here is how you properly recicle a tea bag
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Cleaner, though we'd have to exceed 100% to get everything out of the environment. That's a tall order for microplastics in particular - we're gonna have to live with Vitamin P for a long, long time. Maybe if they finally come up with a way to cheaply eat it with microbes without accidentally obliterating all plastics on earth. That would be inconvenient AF.
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Recycling doesn’t work unless you have a respectful and intelligent society like Japan or South Korea. Americans would never follow the rules.
Who the fuck mentioned america?
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Paper can be recycled 7 times. Every time the quality degrades because the fibers get shorter. The last recycle is purely for toiletpaper or crêpe.
Suri, but everyone uses toilet paper and that will never be recycled so it's still a good idea to recycle paper.
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Recycling doesn’t work unless you have a respectful and intelligent society like Japan or South Korea. Americans would never follow the rules.
Recycling is woke
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Cleaner, though we'd have to exceed 100% to get everything out of the environment. That's a tall order for microplastics in particular - we're gonna have to live with Vitamin P for a long, long time. Maybe if they finally come up with a way to cheaply eat it with microbes without accidentally obliterating all plastics on earth. That would be inconvenient AF.
It would be greater than 100%
At a certain point plastics break apart too much to be remoulded again. At that point they are waste to energy, which in my mind is the final form of recycling.If we want to continue to use plastics, we will need to continue to make virgin plastics. But we also need to environmentally dispose/ use the waste plastics.
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Unless industry is using the raw material produced from recycling, we'll never get to 100% recycling. People throwing stuff in the blue bag or green bin, whatever it is in your region, that's only the first step. We are a long way off from 100%. We have countries who have refused to accept shipments of recycled products because there's no market for that material.
I wish waste to energy was more popular in the US.
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We would all be plagued by a a giant beetle called the chewnifax that would drag children into the acid lake at night at random. The beetle would be so enormous and its armor so sturdy that any and all attempts to kill it fail, and it would remake the world, creating canyons and deep rivers and lakes as it made its way around the world, with the previously mentioned acid like increasing in size as it played with the bones of our children in its depth.
We would live in giant mushrooms and communicate with tin cans on strings, and the world would no long be spherical but instead it would be a perfect cube.
