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Johnson: Recycling is "red herring"

Glass uses huge amounts of energy to produce, but is relatively easy to re-cycle. It also uses no Carbon based raw materials in manufacture. .Also pretty innocuous in landfill, being non toxic and basically non bioactive. If dumped, even in the sea.. it just sits there.. being glass.
It can be used in many applications, other than containers and windows.

Aluminium is also energy costly to extract from its ores, but pretty simple to re-cycle.

As I understand it, plastics are largely a by product of the petro chemical industry. As we reduce dependence on oil, I'd assume we'd have less plastic available, and treat it with a bit more reverence, in applications where it is truly useful..as opposed to cheap and convenient.
But then. I'm an optimist..
 
droodzilla said:
Boris Johnson is essentially correct.
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Indeed.. but then if you invoke the Infinte Monkey Theorem..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

...Johnson..because of his extremely high waffle quotient, is so voluble that the theorem shifts the probability of him making sense, from theoretically 'not zero'..to "Well..maybe..a bit..on a good day..but extremely rarely..and almost certainly outside of his own understanding"

So just random noise... as ever....
 
Mullardman said:
As I understand it, plastics are largely a by product of the petro chemical industry. As we reduce dependence on oil, I'd assume we'd have less plastic available, and treat it with a bit more reverence, in applications where it is truly useful..as opposed to cheap and convenient.
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That doesn't appear to be the industry view.

Over the past decade, an unprecedented wave of expenditure — at least $200bn, according to the American Chemistry Council — has been pledged by companies including ExxonMobil, Dow and BP for new chemical production facilities like Shell’s to take advantage of the shale rush in North America. These rock formations have gifted not just cheap natural gas, but also the raw materials for petrochemicals: the basic building blocks of products like paints, adhesives, dyes, detergents, fertilisers and, of course, plastics.

At a time when the oil industry is gripped by fears that demand for petrol will collapse in an era of electric vehicles, many hydrocarbon producers are betting on petrochemicals — and in particular, plastics — to fill the gap.

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https://www.ft.com/content/4980ec74-4463-11ea-abea-0c7a29cd66fe

(search 'Surge in plastics production defies environmental backlash' to avoid paywall)
 
I think he is right. Recycling is a red herring. The idea of buying water in a plastic bottle in the UK is just totally absurd.
 
Reduce is the key
Once upon a time I bought pallet loads of A4 paper from Xerox.
Busy times we used up to 2 pallets a day, 200,000 sheets
5 reams all separately wrapped per box. The ream wrappers formed a huge amount of our recycling
Xerox came up with the idea of a sealed box and no ream wrappers.
We became more efficient, much less waste

There are these sorts of answers around
 
mikemusic said:
Reduce is the key
Once upon a time I bought pallet loads of A4 paper from Xerox.
Busy times we used up to 2 pallets a day, 200,000 sheets
5 reams all separately wrapped per box. The ream wrappers formed a huge amount of our recycling
Xerox came up with the idea of a sealed box and no ream wrappers.
We became more efficient, much less waste

There are these sorts of answers around
Click to expand...
You just reminded me of an odious recent phenomenon. Unboxing videos on YouTube where the consumer is ‘spoiled brat’ and films the opening of an extra special present they gave to themselves. Apple and two hifi manufacturers I can think of, spend part of the retail price you pay on over elaborate gift style packaging in order to pander to this.
 
paulfromcamden said:
You can buy wine in 1.5l glass bottles and larger. Though it obviously costs more and there's an environmental impact to transporting fizzy pop in heavier containers.
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A champagne magnum has to handle similar pressures (up to 6 bar) without exploding. The empty bottle weighs about 1.5 kg, so you've essentially doubled the weight of your 1.5 l coke bottle: impact on shipping emissions and costs. In order for recycling to work properly, one should be able to re-use the bottle without breaking it, so a system a bit like the German Pfand arrangement, where you return the bottles in their original plastic crate to a collection point (or the company picks them up). All doable but time consuming.
The little 25cl or 33 cl coke bottles still used in many countries get recycled on average 20-25 times before they are melted down again.
 
Interesting, predictable & depressing information about the petrochemical industry lobbying and their appropriation of the copyright free recycling symbol, to use as a 'resin identification code' on all plastics in order to obfuscate and confuse the ignorant consumer with regard to the recyclability of plastics!
 
Too bad there's no way to just dump all this junk in a subduction zone and let the Earth's core recycle it.
 
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