Some Biodegradable Plastics Don't Live Up To Their Claims 98
ckwu writes From bread bags to beverage bottles, many plastics now contain additives designed to make the materials biodegradable. But a new study shows that plastics made with such additives do not biodegrade in the environment significantly faster than those without the compounds. Researchers prepared films of commercial plastics with three different types of additives supplied by their manufacturers. The researchers then treated the film samples to mimic disposal of such plastics in a compost pile, a landfill, and soil. After about six months of composting, a year and a half of landfill-like conditions, and three years of soil burial, the plastics with additives did not show any more evidence of biodegradation than plastics without them.
Recycle and bioplastics (Score:2)
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The problem is that the companies selling crap products like this don't care if they really work or if they're helping reduce plastic in landfills. They simply want a buzzword which makes their product appear more desirable, and possibly allows them to charge a premium price.
They're terrified of the competition which makes actual, biodegradable plastic-replacement out of cellulose.
Re:Recycle and bioplastics (Score:5, Interesting)
don't care if they really work or if they're helping reduce plastic in landfills.
Biodegradable does NOT mean they degrade in landfills. Landfills tend to have very dry conditions, so almost nothing will rot. It is common for them to contain century old newspapers, and dessicated food. Biodegradability is important for plastic discarded along roadsides, or adrift in the ocean, not for landfills. It is arguable whether it is even desirable to have landfill material decompose. Decomposing releases CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gases. If the material remains intact, we can dig up and recover materials as recycling techniques improve. We are already doing this with some landfills. It is called Landfill Mining [wikipedia.org]. The only rationale for decomposing landfill material is the myth that we are "running out of space", but that is nonsense. We have enough landfill space to last for centuries, even with our current wasteful practices.
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but they also tried a compost pile? Food decomposes in compost piles.
How many people have a compost pile? You don't solve the world's problems by focusing on micro-niches. Of the people that compost, how many are willing to put plastic and other trash into compost that will be going into their vegetable garden, and then into their food?
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What makes more sense is to switch to hemp fibre rather than plastic. With so many pot heads and potential pot heads floating around, this is going to be a whole bunch of waste cannabis fibre floating about, so it would make sense to use it before just adding it to a landfills.
PS if your landfills are dry, then you have shit head greedy cheap ass local government. You have to water them to keep the dust down (prevent infectious agents from spreading with that dust) and to aid compaction (you can not comp
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Also, let's not delude people: no (petrochemical) plastic biodegrades. Nothing will eat the shit. It will chemically breakdown (albeit VERY slowly.) And it will photo-degrade, assuming sunlight can get to it and wasn't mixed with lots of UV stabilizer.
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> A real recycle program, not one where you have to pay to get the stuff taken away
Or worse, a recycle program where you have to drive somewhere to drop it off. For instance, currently in my area, although we have curbside recycling for glass and some plastics and cardboard, there's currently no way to recycle CFLs that doesn't involve driving to a recycling center. Besides wasted fuel and emissions, the collateral damage of this is that most people just throw CFLs away and the mercury ends up in landf
Re:Recycle and bioplastics (Score:5, Interesting)
We had to separate glass, plastics, and paper. The a truck comes around and dumps all three bins and the garbage cans in to the same trash truck without any form of separator.
And to induce more rage- they won't pick it up if it is not sorted properly.
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Usually they don't actually recycle it. They have a fancy facility for giving tours, but most of the trash just winds up in an landfill (or in the ocean) like all the other trash.
Recycling is still expensive enough that they only do it when someone is looking.
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And to induce more rage- they won't pick it up if it is not sorted properly.
Or you get a guy who suddenly decided not to pick up half the bins because they have something in it he does not like.
My neighborhood went from an 90% recycle rate to sub teens in 2 weeks. Instead of leaving behind what he didnt like. He just left the whole bin and let us work it out and try to guess what is in or out. We just started dumping it in the other bin that they never looked into.
He was gone pretty quickly after that an
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Second this, the only place to return CFLs for us is the Home Depot. The municipal transfer station doesn't accept hazardous waste, which they consider CFLs. They do a free county-wide recycling day ONCE A YEAR that you have to drive to in another town, but even still they don't accept CFLs.
And HD only accepts small CFL bulbs, not the long ones (2-3ft plus) that they also sell; at least that was the case recently when I had to replace some shop light bulbs and bought the replacements at HD and then tried to return for recycle the old ones.
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Second this, the only place to return CFLs for us is the Home Depot. The municipal transfer station doesn't accept hazardous waste, which they consider CFLs. They do a free county-wide recycling day ONCE A YEAR that you have to drive to in another town, but even still they don't accept CFLs.
And HD only accepts small CFL bulbs, not the long ones (2-3ft plus) that they also sell; at least that was the case recently when I had to replace some shop light bulbs and bought the replacements at HD and then tried to return for recycle the old ones.
I have a stack of long florescent bulbs in an unused corner of my garage, old bulbs from the fixture over my worktable, collecting there since I moved to this house in the early '90s. I never did figure out where to take them or how to safely dispose of them. I guess it'll be my descendants' problem.
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Second this, the only place to return CFLs for us is the Home Depot. The municipal transfer station doesn't accept hazardous waste, which they consider CFLs. They do a free county-wide recycling day ONCE A YEAR that you have to drive to in another town, but even still they don't accept CFLs.
And HD only accepts small CFL bulbs, not the long ones (2-3ft plus) that they also sell; at least that was the case recently when I had to replace some shop light bulbs and bought the replacements at HD and then tried to return for recycle the old ones.
I have a stack of long florescent bulbs in an unused corner of my garage, old bulbs from the fixture over my worktable, collecting there since I moved to this house in the early '90s. I never did figure out where to take them or how to safely dispose of them. I guess it'll be my descendants' problem.
You are doing the same disposal strategy I am.
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Ditto. I've got that same stack of long fluorescents in my garage. And there they'll stay, I expect....
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This seems willfully obtuse. If you live anywhere near a city there is a recycling center near you that will accept these. Even if you live 60 miles from a city you still make several trips a year into that city for other reasons. Not taking those old bulbs with you for the 10 minute detour to drop them off is being purposely stubborn.
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Re:Recycle and bioplastics (Score:4, Insightful)
> A real recycle program, not one where you have to pay to get the stuff taken away
Or worse, a recycle program where you have to drive somewhere to drop it off. For instance, currently in my area, although we have curbside recycling for glass and some plastics and cardboard, there's currently no way to recycle CFLs that doesn't involve driving to a recycling center. Besides wasted fuel and emissions, the collateral damage of this is that most people just throw CFLs away and the mercury ends up in landfill. And groundwater.
Yup. Given the choice of an 80 mile round trip to a location that is only open M-F during normal business hours and tossing them in the trash guess which one gets picked? Ultimately I think one solution would be to require the manufacturer to take back and arrange for recycling or proper disposal. That would add to the upfront cost but eliminate a lot of back end problems. Of course, manufacturers will whine about the cost but I think bottle deposit laws are a good example of what may happen. Bottlers complained but when states tried to take over rte program they resisted because they were taking in more deposit money than they were paying out and spending to run the program.
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Ultimately I think one solution would be to require the manufacturer to take back and arrange for recycling or proper disposal.
Which would tack on how much to the cost of CFLs? And involve how much carbon emission in the pickup and movement of used CFLs?
The better solution is to not push ZOMG! GREEN! products which have a bunch of hazardous waste in them.
I have no idea how many CFLs end up in landfills, but I do sometimes wonder if the environmental cost of that much mercury in the environment is worse th
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Well, I think most hazardous substances that exist in nature usually exist as some kind of stable mineral combination, not as a pure element in concentration.
Mercury is found as cinnabar in nature, not as the liquid refined metal. The problem with the pure metal is that once in nature it combines with other shit or concentrates in the food chain, which is why its kind of a bad idea.
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Mercuric chloride, which oc
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Ultimately I think one solution would be to require the manufacturer to take back and arrange for recycling or proper disposal. That would add to the upfront cost but eliminate a lot of back end problems. Of course, manufacturers will whine about the cost but I think bottle deposit laws are a good example of what may happen.
Yep. Bottled drinks cost a nickel more each, and the effort to return them is hardly offset by the cost, so I wind up throwing them away in the trash. A good solution to a recycling problem, I think.
Re:Recycle and bioplastics (Score:4, Interesting)
Curbside recycling doesn't help much either when it's just for homeowners, as it seems to be most places. The homeowners around here have their recycling bins, but none of the apartments I've lived in have ever had any recycling options for any materials.
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I can one-up you. Our city has a curbside hazardous waste program. They tout it on flyers, bus benches, and everything else. They tell you how wonderfully convenient it is not to have to drive your used motor oil or batteries to a hazardous waste roundup (which only happens twice a year somewhere in the County). The kicker comes when you actually try to use the service: "No, we don't come out to your house unless you have more than 1 ton of waste" they'll tell you on the phone.
Fuckin' pricks.
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Take your used motor oil and batteries (I'm assuming you're speaking of the automotive type) to your local auto-parts store. They will accept both (and, in the case of batteries, quote you a price for the new battery that includes you returning the old one). Oil collections are free, not sure about batteries, though I suspect it'd be free since they'd make cash selling back the lead.
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http://shop.advanceautoparts.c... [advanceautoparts.com]
They'll also take your UPS batteries free but won't give you a gift certificate for them.
Re:Recycle and bioplastics (Score:4, Interesting)
A real recycle program
That would be good. Even better would be to reduce the amount of plastic we use in the first place. When I receive shipments from Amazon, the packaging usually weighs more than the products. This is necessary because of the workers at UPS/USPS/FedEx that drop, throw, and step on the packages. When we replace these idiots with robots, a lot less packaging will be needed.
Re:Recycle and bioplastics (Score:4, Interesting)
A real recycle program
That would be good. Even better would be to reduce the amount of plastic we use in the first place. When I receive shipments from Amazon, the packaging usually weighs more than the products. This is necessary because of the workers at UPS/USPS/FedEx that drop, throw, and step on the packages. When we replace these idiots with robots, a lot less packaging will be needed.
In fairness to FedEx their sorting operation in Memphis already use robots that weigh and measure each package to minimize the forces used during sorting. the drivers, well that's another story. Given Amazon's size and volume manufacturers could package stuff more reasonably. Do I really need a tamper proof sealed plastic case for an item I buy through Amazon? Amazon already packages some of their Amazon labeled stuff more sanely in cardboard and I wish they'd push manufacturers to do something similar for what they sell via Amazon.
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I have this problem with must stuff shipped UPS ground. Not so much with Fedex or USPS. USPS is more likely to lose my package than damage it. I have had Netflix envelopes show up 10 months late (and undamaged!)
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My $0.02 (Score:5, Interesting)
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Because it still works would be my guess. Why buy a replacement when the one you have is perfectly good?
My emergency kit in the car has a plastic poncho from DisneyWorld. It is very bright yellow and highly visible. So what if it happens to have Goofy on it. I have not been to DisneyWorld since 1992.
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The real question is why do you have a plastic poncho from 20 years ago?
The real real question: "Now is that a real poncho or is that a Sears poncho?"
Who you jiving? (Score:2)
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Saw Zappa once in Philly.....the most bras I've ever seen thrown on stage at one show
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...probably during "Titties & Beer".
Re:My $0.02 (Score:5, Insightful)
20 years ago I got a yellow rain jacket ... It is still usable today.
20 years ago, my house was made of biodegradable wood. It is still usable today.
Biodegradable doesn't mean it just magically falls apart after a pre-programmed amount of time. It means it will rot under appropriate conditions. Bury your raincoat in your backyard, water well, and then go back and see if it is still there in 20 years.
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"20 years ago, my house was made of biodegradable wood. It is still usable today."
+1 Funny
Accidentally modded -1 Overrated.
Drat.
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Biodegradable doesn't mean it just magically falls apart after a pre-programmed amount of time.
Let's get the MPAA involved with this. They can invent a plastic with DRM that make it unusable after a pre-determined amount of time.
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I think this is a good example of the problem of bad communication and expectation.
When we are told that something is designed to be biodegradable, we expect it to be gone in a few years at most. But where do we get that expectation from? As a consumer, I've never actually heard a manufacturer say, "My plastic will biodegrade in six months," but somehow even I expected some kind of degradation after a few years.
So maybe we need some better communication from the people who make the plastics, so that we, the
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Biodegradable does not mean that something will be gone in a few years. Biodegradable means that certain fungi or bacteria break it apart. If you keep it away from those things it will never biodegrade.
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Yeah. Because it was coated in plastic or some other non-degradable substance.
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If a word is not subject to specific regulation by the government, you can safely assume it's a lie.
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Biogradable, whether defined by the goverment or not, has a specific meaning. If a substance can be broken down by an organism (fungi or bacteria) it is biodegradable. If a substance can be broken down under 'natural' conditions it is compostable, which is not the same thing.
I don't know how this guy stores his poncho, but chances are it has not been subjected to the bacteria or fungus needed to break it down. That in no way implies 'lying' by the manufacturer, just that the guy doesn't know what biodeg
Sequester them (Score:2, Insightful)
Why would we want our oil produces biodegrading into carbon dioxide when they can be easily sequestered in the ground?
They are spending a great deal of money trying to sequester the carbon dioxide from our other oil produces in the ground.
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At sufficiently high temperatures most plastics don't produce toxic fumes. Only PVC and fluorcarbohydrates produce toxic fumes. However, I am talking about somewhere over 1000C. Not your average stove. Assuming a clean O2 source you'd have only CO2 and H2O in the exhaust. With air you'd also have various NO compounds, due to oxygen and nitrogen in a high temperature environment.
Wood doesn't produce creosote at these temperatures either. Only fall ash, fly ash, CO2 and H2O (and probably NO compounds). Fall a
Sunlight, not darkness (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm sure these idiots know the proper way to biodegrade plastic is expose it to UV. Which makes me wonder what their motivation was for testing in other conditions? Granted, these are "normal" disposal methods, but if you read the products they usually say "biodegradable in sunlight".
So crying that they don't biodegrade when buried is like buying solar panels and then complaining they don't produce power at night.
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BIODEGRADABLE --- in 300pt font across the entire object
only in UV light --- in .0000015 point font on the bottom, on back, half covered by a seam, color matched to the material.
That's why. they are pushing them as biodegradable but not being very forthcoming on the limitations of that ability.
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Solar panels can produce power at night. All you need to do is install them on a rotary axis and move them 90 degrees every 6 hours.
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install them on a rotary axis
That's called a windmill.
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A windmill wouldn't have an axis with a radius of 6371 km.
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So... what happens to the useless fluff?
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We don't need it to degrade when it's buried 50 feet under the current surface of the town dump. It can stay substantially intact for the next 10,000 years, no problem. We need it to quickly biodegrade when, instead of finding its way into the town dump, it wanders into the streams and forests. Where it does stay at or close to the surface, subject to sun and weather.
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I'm sure these idiots know the proper way to biodegrade plastic is expose it to UV. Which makes me wonder what their motivation was for testing in other conditions? Granted, these are "normal" disposal methods, but if you read the products they usually say "biodegradable in sunlight".
So crying that they don't biodegrade when buried is like buying solar panels and then complaining they don't produce power at night.
Well, in fairness, buried in a landfill is probably the most common use case. "Biodegradable if spread out in an even layer across desert sands with not too much wind so they'll stay put" is probably not a practical use case. That the biodegradable-ness provided by the additives isn't really practical in most cases is useful information, I think.
Unless -- I just thought of this -- the intention of the additives is to hasten the degrade of coke bottles left on the side of the road. I guess that might be a
moronic (Score:1)
Sunlight (Score:2)
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I think Slashdot readers are made of plastic, that would explain a few things.
standard fraud (Score:1)
Still plastic (Score:2)
I keep seeing "oxo-biodegradable" on plastic bags but the problem is that it can be either regular plastic with additives [wikipedia.org] (which is the worst idea possible - breaking plastic down into smaller pieces just means easier ground and water contamination) or cellulose.
What we need is biodegradable plastics made from cellulose and we need to be able to know which is which.
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No Surprise (Score:2)
On the other hand we are told about the plastics problem yet in the ocean they are surprised the plastics are breaking down as fast as they are. http://news.nationalgeographic... [nationalgeographic.com]
Bayoudegradeable (Score:2)
Oxo-degradable plastics should be banned, (Score:2)
Still waiting for sanity (Score:2)