Recycling and Waste news and discussions

[caltrek]

Advanced Recycling: Plastic Crisis Solution or Distraction?
October 21, 2022

Introduction:

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP via Courthouse News) — The plastics industry says there is a way to help solve the crisis of plastic waste plaguing the planet's oceans, beaches and lands— recycle it, chemically.

Chemical recycling typically uses heat or chemical solvents to break down plastics into liquid and gas to produce an oil-like mixture or basic chemicals. Industry leaders say that mixture can be made back into plastic pellets to make new products.

“What we are trying to do is really create a circular economy for plastics because we think it is the most viable option for keeping plastic out of the environment,” said Joshua Baca, vice president of the plastics division at the American Chemistry Council, the industry trade association for American chemical companies.

ExxonMobil, New Hope Energy, Nexus Circular, Eastman, Encina and other companies are planning to build large plastics recycling plants. Seven smaller facilities across the United States already recycle plastic into new plastic, according to the ACC. A handful of others convert hard-to-recycle used plastics into alternative transportation fuels for aviation, marine and auto uses.

But environmental groups say advanced recycling is a distraction from real solutions like producing and using less plastic. They suspect the idea of recyclable plastics will enable the steep ramp up in plastic production to continue. And while the amount produced globally grows, recycling rates for plastic waste are abysmally low, especially in the United States.

Read more here: https://www.courthousenews.com/advance ... traction/

[caltrek]

The End of a Battery’s Life Matters as Much as Its Beginning
by Rebecca Leber
October 24, 2022

Introduction:

(Vox) Right now, the last stop in the US for many of the giant lithium batteries that power electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles is a plant in a town near Phoenix, Arizona.

There, the Toronto-based company Li-Cycle breaks the batteries down into “black mass” — a dark, shredded mess of copper, cobalt, nickel, and lithium that without further processing is as useful as shiny dirt. That is, until most of it is shipped to factories in other countries to separate it into the valuable raw materials that both auto and electronics manufacturers need to build new batteries.

Soon all this will change as a new industry rises to meet the growing demand for EVs by recycling their parts in the US. Li-Cycle is one of the handful of companies in this space chasing new federal incentives for recycling. And once the company opens a new factory in Rochester, New York, next year, they’ll be capable of processing their black mass back into the raw materials automakers covet.

Recycling is often an overlooked but critical piece of a clean energy future. To address climate change, we’ll need to replace the fuels that run our homes, buildings, and vehicles with electricity powered by clean energy. Nowhere is this more important than in transportation, the US’s most polluting sector. The challenge is that each vehicle needs its own battery, complete with copper, cobalt, nickel, manganese, graphite, and lithium. And because supplies of these materials are limited, it’s not at all clear how auto manufacturers will get their hands on enough for their batteries.

Part of the answer will depend on how countries handle their old EV batteries.

Read more here: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2338 ... ycling-us

[wjfox]

[caltrek]

Novel Waste Treatment Efficiently Converts Sewage to Biogas
November 3, 2022

Introduction:

(EurekAlert) RICHLAND, Wash. – A new method to treat sewage can efficiently convert leftover sludge to biogas, an advance that could help communities lower their waste treatment costs while helping the environment.

Reporting in the journal, Waste Management, a Washington State University research team tested a pretreatment technology, adding an extra step to typical treatments and using oxygen-containing high pressure steam to break down sewage sludge. They found that they were able to convert more than 85% of the organic material to biogas, which can be used to produce electricity or upgraded to renewable natural gas (RNG) for the natural gas grid or for local use.

Adding the new pretreatment step improves the anaerobic conversion of sewage sludge at the wastewater treatment facility from the current less-than-50% conversion rate, and they produced 98% more methane overall compared to current practice.

“It was shown to be extremely efficient, and that’s very exciting,” said Birgitte Ahring, professor in the Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering, who led the work. “This can be applicable and something we could begin to explore in Washington state. Not wasting waste but using its potential instead has major advantages.”

Sewage sludge is not a sought-after product. About half of the wastewater treatment plants in the U.S. use anaerobic digestion to reduce this waste, but the process, in which microbes break down the waste, is inefficient. The leftover sludge, called biosolids, generally ends up in landfills.

Read more of the EurekAlert article here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/970168

For a technical presentation as contained in the journal Waste Management: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ ... rch_email

[caltrek]

Corporate Pledges to Recycle or Reduce Plastics Aren't Translating into Less Plastic Use
November 18, 2022

Introduction:

(EurekAlert) Plastic pollution is overwhelming landfills, littering Earth’s coastlines, and affecting the health of animals, including humans, while also contributing to environmental degradation and climate change. As public expectations for corporate responsibility grow and an increasing number of businesses pledge to reduce plastic use, researchers publishing in the journal One Earth on November 18 detail how the world’s largest and most powerful companies’ focus on recycling rather than virgin plastic reduction makes their commitments less meaningful.

The study focused on the top 300 Fortune 500 companies and found that 72% had made a commitment to reducing plastic pollution. “Most of the commitments emphasize plastic recycling and commonly target general plastics,” write the authors, led by Zoie Taylor Diana, an environmental researcher at the Duke University Marine Laboratory. “They are important, but partial, solutions if we are to comprehensively address the plastic pollution problem.”

“Between 1950 and 2017, plastics production increased 174-fold and is forecast to double again by 2040,” the authors write. “As of 2015, an estimated 79% of global plastic waste was in landfills or ended up in the natural environment, 12% was incinerated, and 9% was recycled. Plastics in the environment have negative repercussions at all levels of biological organization.”

The paper highlights the companies’ overwhelming focus on changing their consumption and production patterns, often by including more recycled content in their products and “lightweighting”—the practice of marginally reducing the volume of plastic used to package a particular product.
“From our literature review, we found that multiple companies, such as the Coca-Cola Company and Walmart, are producing lighter and smaller plastic products (e.g., bottles and bags),” write the authors. “This ‘lightweighting’ of plastic is considered an insufficient response because companies may reinvest this savings into markets that involve new plastic products and/or increase the total mass of plastic produced.” Because the number of plastic products increases each year, the use of this practice does not result in a net reduction of plastic.

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/970860

[caltrek]

Magnetic Solution to Microplastics Crisis Works in Hours Not Days
by Stephen Luntz
December 2, 2022

Introduction:

(Stephen Luntz) Rather than trying to filter microplastics from wastewater, a team at Australia’s RMIT University are hoping to capture them using an absorbent powder. On its own this might leave us with nothing more than slightly larger particles to filter out. However, the authors have changed the game by making the powder magnetic.

Just how damaging microplastics are to animals or people who ingest them remains debated, but it’s unlikely the flecks of plastic we are consuming with our diet are doing us any good. Some of these microplastics form when larger items such as dumped bottles or fishing nets break down in saltwater. However, a lot of it currently escapes through wastewater, for example from washing clothes.

Unfortunately, the 'micro' part of microplastics means they currently slip through filters. Making the holes in the filters smaller can catch more microplastics, but at the cost of slowing throughput to an unfeasible extent. In the new study, PhD student Muhammed Haris, Professor Nicky Eshtiaghi and co-authors describe their alternative.

When the high surface area powder is added to microplastic-laced water, it captures even tiny pieces of plastic with close to 100 percent success. On passage through a magnetic field the powder is attracted to the magnet, bringing the plastic along for easy removal.

“Our powder additive can remove microplastics that are 1,000 times smaller than those that are currently detectable by existing wastewater treatment plants,” Eshtiaghi said in a statement.

Read more here: https://www.iflscience.com/magnetic-so ... ays-66495

caltrek's comments: Maybe not "the solution" but at least part of a solution.

[caltrek]

'Turn Off the Tap on Plastic,' UN Chief Declares Amid Debate Over New Global Treaty
by Kenny Stancil
December 3 , 2022

Introduction:

(Common Dreams) Hours before the first round of negotiations to advance a global plastics treaty concluded Friday in Punta Del Este, Uruguay, the leader of the United Nations implored countries "to look beyond waste and turn off the tap on plastic."

"Plastics are fossil fuels in another form," U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres tweeted, "and pose a serious threat to human rights, the climate, and biodiversity."

Guterres' comments elevated the demands of civil society organizations, scientists, and other advocates fighting for robust, legally binding rules to confront the full lifecycle impacts of the plastic pollution crisis. A coalition of more than 100 groups has called for limiting the ever-growing production and consumption of plastic and holding corporations accountable for the ecological and public health harms caused by manufacturing an endless stream of toxic single-use items.

Petrochemical industry representatives who attended the first intergovernmental negotiating committee meeting (INC-1) for a global plastics treaty, by contrast, attempted to bolster fossil fuel-friendly governments' efforts to slow the pace of talks—convened by the U.N. Environment Program and set to continue off-and-on through 2024—and weaken proposals for action.

In the wake of this week's opening round of debate, the Break Free From Plastic (BFFP) alliance launched a petition outlining what it calls the "essential elements" of a multilateral environmental agreement capable of "reversing the tide of plastic pollution and contributing to the end of the triple planetary crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution."

Read more here: https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022 ... al-treaty

[wjfox]

[wjfox]

[caltrek]

Is Plastic Recycling a Scam? Here is the Truth About the Common Practice
by Tara Yarlagadda
January 23 , 2023

Extract::

(Inverse) LAST FALL, a Greenpeace report on plastic recycling made headlines around the world when news outlets led with the publication’s striking key finding: Only five percent of plastic household waste generated in the U.S. was recycled.
…
Inverse spoke with experts affiliated with the report, plastic reduction advocates, as well as the recycling industry, to break down the facts behind the report and what its findings really mean for plastic recycling and consumption in the United States.

The Greenpeace report offered two key findings that media outlets reported on.

First, the overall plastic recycling rate declined to 5 to 6 percent in 2021. That’s down from a higher rate of 8.7 percent, as the EPA reported in 2018.

Second, even types of plastic that typically have higher recycling rates aren’t being recycled enough. The report finds that Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) #1 and High-density polyethylene (HDPE) #2 plastic bottles and jugs are being reprocessed at a rate of 20.9 percent, which falls below the 30 percent minimum threshold set by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s New Plastics Economy initiative to determine if materials are recyclable.

Read more here: https://www.inverse.com/science/plasti ... g-report

[caltrek]

Recovery of Lithium from Batteries Using Cost Effective Techniques
March 30, 2023

Introduction:

(EurekAlert) Recovering up to 70 percent of lithium from battery waste without corrosive chemicals, high temperatures, and prior sorting of materials being required: This is achieved by a recycling method developed by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). The method combines mechanical processes with chemical reactions and enables inexpensive, energy-efficient, and environmentally compatible recycling of any type of lithium-ion batteries. The results are reported in Nature Communications Chemistry (DOI: 10.1038/s42004-023-00844-2).

Lithium-ion batteries are omnipresent in our life. They are not only used for wireless power supply of notebooks, smartphones, toys, remote controls, and other small devices, but also are the most important energy storage systems for the rapidly growing electric mobility sector. Increasing use of these batteries eventually results in the need for economically and ecologically sustainable recycling methods. Presently, mainly nickel and cobalt, copper and aluminum, as well as steel are recovered from battery waste for reuse. Lithium recovery still is expensive and hardly profitable. Existing recovery methods mostly are of metallurgical character and consume a lot of energy and/or produce hazardous by-products. In contrast to this, mechanochemical approaches based on mechanical processes to induce chemical reactions promise to reach a higher yield and sustainability with a smaller expenditure.

Suited for Various Cathode Materials

Such a method has now been developed by the Energy Storage Systems Department of KIT’s Institute for Applied Materials (IAM-ESS), the Helmholtz Institute Ulm for Electrochemical Energy Storage (HIU) established by KIT in cooperation with Ulm University, and EnBW Energie Baden-Württemberg AG. It is presented in Nature Communications Chemistry. The method reaches a lithium recovery rate of up to 70 percent without corrosive chemicals, high temperatures, and prior sorting of materials being required. “The method can be applied for recovering lithium from cathode materials of various chemical compositions and, hence, for a large range of commercially available lithium-ion batteries,” says Dr. Oleksandr Dolotko of IAM-ESS and HIU, the first author of the publication. “It enables inexpensive, energy-efficient, and environmentally compatible recycling.”

Read more of the EurekAlert article here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/984494

For a more technical discussion as presented in Nature Communications Chemistry : https://www.nature.com/articles/s42004-023-00844-2

[weatheriscool]

Sound can successfully remove microplastics from water
By Bronwyn Thompson
April 17, 2023
https://newatlas.com/environment/ultras ... rofluidic/

There’s no debate that microplastics present an ever-increasing ecological and health threat, with scientists just starting to understand the extent of these tiny particles and their impact on organisms, from marine life to humans. A 2019 study revealed that we're even ingesting about 5 grams of microplastic, the weight of a credit card, each week.

The challenge now, however, is to find methods to successfully remove microplastics (MPs) from water and the atmosphere – no easy task when these tiny pieces of plastic measure just 1 micrometer to 5 millimeters in size.

A team of scientists out of Shinshu University has turned to sound to make it happen, experimenting with acoustic filtering to push MPs into a central channel, with branched sections filled by MP-free water that can be then released.

“Our proposed microfluidic device, which is designed based on a hydraulic-electric analogy, has three 1.5 mm-wide microchannels connected via four serial 0.7-mm-wide trifurcated junctions,” explained lead researcher Professor Yoshitake Akiyama of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics at the Faculty of Textile Science and Technology at Shinshu University. “The MPs are aligned at the center of the middle microchannel using a bulk acoustic wave of 500-kHz resonance frequency. As a result, a 3.2-fold enrichment of MPs must occur at each junction, resulting in a 105-fold overall enrichment in the device.”
In other words, ultrasonic waves travel through the water and push the MPs to the center of a fluid stream, where they can then be collected, or filtered out, as MP-free water filters into the branches off the main central path of the device. Traditionally, MPs are collected by mesh filters, which can get clogged up easily and are limited in what they collect by the size of the mesh.

This device instead using microfluidic technology, an emerging science that manipulates the behavior of water with channels on a micro level. When conducting separate experiments on grouped MPs, the collection rate for those sized 10 μm, 15 μm , 25 μm, 50 μm and 200 μm was more than 90%. Further tests mixing up particle size (25–200 μm and 10-25 μm) saw a collection rate of around 80%.

[caltrek]

Scientists Discover Backyard Fungi That Can Break Down Tough Plastic in Just 140 Days
by Clare Watson
April 18, 2023

Introduction:

(Science Alert) Almost a third of the world's plastic waste is polypropylene, a hardy plastic used to make bottle caps and food containers that can take hundreds of years to degrade. But now, scientists have harnessed two strains of fungi found in soils to break down lab samples of polypropylene in just 140 days.

The two fungi, Aspergillus terreus and Engyodontium album, made a meal of the plastic in the lab experiments: Between 25 and 27 percent of samples were devoured after 90 days, and the plastic was completely broken down after 140 days, the researchers report.

The team of Australian scientists behind the study, led by graduate student Amira Farzana Samat, have described their work as an "important stepping stone" in designing practical biological ways to treat plastic waste.

"It's the highest degradation rate reported in the literature that we know [of] in the world," University of Sydney chemical engineer Ali Abbas told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's technology reporter Danny Tran.

While it might be a speed record for fungi, plastic-munching bacteria recently discovered in a compost heap have been able to break down 90 percent of PET, or polyethylene terephthalate, in just 16 hours. But a bit of healthy competition is good; that's how evolution works.

Read more here: https://www.sciencealert.com/scientist ... -140-days

[wjfox]

Oh dear lord...

[wjfox]

[caltrek]

Plastics Recycling Is Far Worse Than We Thought
by Matt Simon
May 29, 2023

Introduction:

(Mother Jones) The plastics industry has long hyped recycling, even though it is well aware that it’s been a failure. Worldwide, only 9 percent of plastic waste actually gets recycled. In the United States, the rate is now 5 percent. Most used plastic is landfilled, incinerated, or winds up drifting around the environment.

Now, an alarming new study has found that even when plastic makes it to a recycling center, it can still end up splintering into smaller bits that contaminate the air and water. This pilot study focused on a single new facility where plastics are sorted, shredded, and melted down into pellets. Along the way, the plastic is washed several times, sloughing off microplastic particles—fragments smaller than 5 millimeters—into the plant’s wastewater.

Because there were multiple washes, the researchers could sample the water at four separate points along the production line. (They are not disclosing the identity of the facility’s operator, who cooperated with their project.) This plant was actually in the process of installing filters that could snag particles larger than 50 microns (a micron is a millionth of a meter), so the team was able to calculate the microplastic concentrations in raw versus filtered discharge water—basically a before-and-after snapshot of how effective filtration is.

Their microplastics tally was astronomical. Even with filtering, they calculate that the total discharge from the different washes could produce up to 75 billion particles per cubic meter of wastewater. Depending on the recycling facility, that liquid would ultimately get flushed into city water systems or the environment. In other words, recyclers trying to solve the plastics crisis may in fact be accidentally exacerbating the microplastics crisis, which is coating every corner of the environment with synthetic particles.

“It seems a bit backward, almost, that we do plastic recycling in order to protect the environment, and then end up increasing a different and potentially more harmful problem,” says plastics scientist Erina Brown, who led the research while at the University of Strathclyde.

Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/environmen ... n-study/

[wjfox]

Next time you hear a climate denier citing the "solar panels can't be recycled" argument, show 'em this article.

Of course, it's only one company for now. But many, many others will surely follow. The demand for recycled components will be massive.

Another great example of the circular economy that is critical if we're to survive this century.

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Solar panels - an eco-disaster waiting to happen?

2 days ago

While they are being promoted around the world as a crucial weapon in reducing carbon emissions, solar panels only have a lifespan of up to 25 years.

Experts say billions of panels will eventually all need to be disposed of and replaced.

"The world has installed more than one terawatt of solar capacity. Ordinary solar panels have a capacity of about 400W, so if you count both rooftops and solar farms, there could be as many as 2.5 billion solar panels.," says Dr Rong Deng, an expert in solar panel recycling at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

[...]

It is hoped a major step will be taken at the end of June, when the world's first factory dedicated to fully recycling solar panels officially opens in France.

ROSI, the specialist solar recycling company which owns the facility, in the Alpine city of Grenoble, hopes eventually to be able to extract and re-use 99% of a unit's components.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-65602519

[caltrek]

EPA Ends Trump-Era Bid to Kill Pollution Rules for Plastics Recycling
by James Bruggers
June 6, 2023

Introduction:

(Mother Jones) Reversing its own Trump-era proposal, the US Environmental Protection Agency has spurned a lobbying effort by the chemical industry to relax clean-air regulations on two types of chemical or “advanced” recycling of plastics.

The decision, announced by the EPA on May 24, covers pyrolysis and gasification, two processes that use chemical methods to break down plastic waste. Both have largely been regulated as incineration for nearly three decades and have therefore had to meet stringent emission requirements for burning solid waste under the federal Clean Air Act.

But in the final months of the Trump administration, the EPA proposed an industry-friendly rule change in August 2020 stating that pyrolysis does not involve enough oxygen to constitute combustion, and that emissions from the process should therefore not be regulated as incineration.

Further Extract:

The EPA’s 2020 proposal to ease its rules, which was related to how the agency regulates municipal waste combustion units, drew sharp criticism from environmentalists and Democrats in Congress. They argued that pyrolysis and gasification were indeed a form of combustion—and that abandoning strict regulation of those processes in chemical recycling would present health risks while failing to address the plastic waste crisis.

“Instead of leading to the recovery of plastic and supporting the transition to a circular economy, pyrolysis and gasification lead to the release of more harmful pollutants and greenhouse gases,” 35 lawmakers wrote the EPA last summer. They urged the agency to fully regulate the emissions from chemical recycling as waste combustion and to cease efforts to promote the technology as a solution to the global plastics crisis.

Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... yrolysis/

[caltrek]

Clean, Sustainable Fuels Made ‘From Thin Air’ and Plastic Waste
June 19, 2023

Introduction:

(Eurekalert) Researchers have demonstrated how carbon dioxide can be captured from industrial processes – or even directly from the air – and transformed into clean, sustainable fuels using just the energy from the Sun.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, developed a solar-powered reactor that converts captured CO2 and plastic waste into sustainable fuels and other valuable chemical products. In tests, CO2 was converted into syngas, a key building block for sustainable liquid fuels, and plastic bottles were converted into glycolic acid, which is widely used in the cosmetics industry.

Unlike earlier tests of their solar fuels technology however, the team took CO2 from real-world sources – such as industrial exhaust or the air itself. The researchers were able to capture and concentrate the CO2 and convert it into sustainable fuel.

Although improvements are needed before this technology can be used at an industrial scale, the results, reported in the journal Joule, represent another important step toward the production of clean fuels to power the economy, without the need for environmentally destructive oil and gas extraction.

For several years, Professor Erwin Reisner’s research group, based in the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, has been developing sustainable, net-zero carbon fuels inspired by photosynthesis – the process by which plants convert sunlight into food – using artificial leaves. These artificial leaves convert CO2 and water into fuels using just the power of the sun.

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/992499

[wjfox]

Chinese scientists create edible food packaging to replace plastic

By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH
Published: JULY 2, 2023 13:45

The world is drowning in plastic, and one can hardly buy anything in the supermarket without encountering wrapping and other packaging made of this oil-based polluter that accounts for a major proportion of waste in landfills.

Now, scientists at the Chinese University of Hong Kong have developed an edible, transparent and biodegradable material with considerable potential for use as food packaging.

The heavy reliance on petrochemicals and inherent non-biodegradability of plastic packaging means it has long been a significant contributor to environmental contamination. The team members have turned their attention to bacterial cellulose (BC) – an organic compound derived from certain types of bacteria that has gained attention as a sustainable, easily available and non-toxic solution to the pervasive use of plastics.

Prof. To Ngai from the chemistry department explained that the impressive tensile strength and high versatility of BC are the keys to its potential.

“Extensive research has been conducted on BC, including its use in intelligent packaging, smart films and functionalized materials created through blending, coating and other techniques. These studies demonstrate the potential of BC as a replacement for single-use plastic packaging materials, making it a logical starting point for our research.”

https://www.jpost.com/business-and-inno ... cle-748532