Not too long ago I worked a temporary job in a recycling facility. Plastic was shipped to China, except for clamshell containers. Those got thrown away. I asked my coworkers why, but none of them knew.
So I’m asking here. What’s the problem with recycling clamshell containers?
Perhaps because they’re contaminated from use with food?
not all plastic materials can be recycled in every area, there may be no market or facility near enough.
So farther away than China?
Polystyrene is usually not recycled. It’s low density makes it pretty expensive to deal with, and generally not worth recycling.
Plastics in general are only sort of marginally worth recycling, from an economic point of view. It’s good to do to keep it out of the landfill, but most are pretty cheap to make in the first place. A low density plastic makes it even less worth it to try to reprocess.
If the containers are usually polystyrene then I’d guess that’s the reason. Thank you.
Likewise, those big bulky plastic “styrofoam” blocks that are used to pack larger items are generally not recyclable.
This is sort of shitty. If the idea of recycling is to make some money at it, then it isn’t worth it. But if the idea is to keep these big bulky non-biodegradable trash out of landfills and save the earth, then the economics shouldn’t be the deciding factor. People who are pushing for recycling (and especially governments that are pushing for reducing garbage in the landfills, like California) need to remind themselves now and then what their priorities are.
Similarly, here in California anyway, a lot of things aren’t recyclable or not easily recyclable if they aren’t “clean enough”, as Dewey Finn suggested above. Plastic water bottles are recyclable. Plastic milk jugs or fruit juice bottles or laundry detergent bottles are not, because they are “contaminated”. At least, there is no CRV deposit for these. Some recycling centers will take them and some won’t but you don’t get any CRV refund.
CRV is entirely a political thing. The California legislature, in its wisdom, has decided not to impose a CRV tax on anything but beverage containers. Hence, you can’t get a refund of your CRV tax by returning anything but beverage bottles. In fact the legislature imposes a CRV tax on beer bottles (and cans) but not on wine bottles, because of the political influence of the wine industry. Similarly, vegetable juice in a 16 ounce container is exempt from CRV, but vegetable juice in a 15.9 ounce container is subject to CRV. This has nothing to do with whether a 15.9 ounce container is more recyclable than a 16 ounce container.
I think most municipal recycling programs (even in California) accept milk jugs, fruit juice bottles, and laundry detergent bottles, even though they don’t pay anything from them and they are not accepted by CRV refund centers.
Technical notes: I have called the CRV a “tax,” but California officially calls it a “regulatory fee.” In any case, it’s an amount that gets added to your grocery bill when you buy a beverage. “Wine coolers” are not exempt.
Interesting. Our council takes pretty much all plastic, glass, paper and metal for recycling - they have a government/EU target to achieve. They do expect us to clean the waste cartons but I assume that the recyclers can cope with a reasonable degree of contamination.
There is a lot of pressure at the other end too. Manufacturers are ‘encouraged’ to use (and label) recyclable materials; not only in the packaging but in the product itself.
I order a lot of stuff online, and I’m noticing more and more cardboard shaped fillers and recyclable bubble bags used for packing. Hopefully this a trend that will grow as time goes on. Those big styrofoam blocks are a hassle to get rid of.
I think when you take the Styrofoam products and “squish it” you end up with next to nothing. Hence, you would need such a large volume to recycle to make it worth it.
They should recycle it all, as it’s petroleum based, and find some other use for the recycled product. Or, at least melt it all down to much smaller blocks to make it take up less space and be more inert.
There are Styrofoam condensers available. Here is a video of one in action. It takes blocks of Styrofoam, shreds them, and melts them, producing a stream that looks like soft-serve ice cream.
Unfortunately, they are not very common. Abt Electronics in suburban Chicago (Glenview) had one of the first machines. They recycle the packing from the products they deliver and accept white Styrofoam from the public at their (public) recycling center. They claim that the stuff actually gets recycled into products like plastic decks and picture frames and they can actually make money on it.
But unless you have huge quantities of the stuff or happen to be driving by a recycling center that accepts it anyway, I have doubts that the benefits of recycling outweigh the gasoline burned to make a special trip to a recycling center.
Nit-picky pet peeve: The bulky white foamy stuff we are discussing here is NOT Styrofoam, although the word “styrofoam”, like aspirin et many al has become a common generic term for all similar materials.
The real Styrofoam (either ™ or ® I’m not sure which) is that hard crunchy stuff that we all played with in grade school, along with glitter and white glue, while making Christmas (or Hanukkah) ornaments every November and December.
if those are the same as the containers I have here, they’re labeled with a “7” symbol which means “other” plastic. One which is not normally recycled, so it’s not desirable.
this. recycling plastic isn’t really much cheaper than making it from raw materials. Aluminum recycling is lucrative because it’s far easier and less energy intensive to reclaim metallic aluminum than to refine it from ore.
Styrofoam is a brand name but it is a pretty good one as far as genericized product names go. The vast majority of packing foam is plain old stryene foam, and Styrofoam as a name is not much of a stretch.
Or are you saying most white packing foam is something other than styrene foam?
“Styrofoam” is the brand name for extruded polystyrene foam, and as Senegoid said it’s the rough, brittle-ish stuff used for some craft project bases (among other things.) Extruded PS foam is made as a contiguous large sheet or block of foamed PS. The stuff people typically call “styrofoam” is expanded polystyrene where beads of polystyrene plastic are “blown up” into a mold; kind of like puffed rice cereal 
This is the stuff used for things like packing material and disposable foam drinking cups.
Maybe somebody over there might attempt to reuse the containers?:eek:
BTW, polystyrene dissolves in Biodiesel, making a better fuel, apparently.
https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt=A0LEVir3UOlU4GAACJonnIlQ;_ylc=X1MDMTM1MTE5NTY4NwRfcgMyBGZyA3locy1tb3ppbGxhLTAwMQRncHJpZANsSG1mQTVXRVE0VzJzdURsNmQwMVFBBG5fcnNsdAMwBG5fc3VnZwM0BG9yaWdpbgNzZWFyY2gueWFob28uY29tBHBvcwMwBHBxc3RyAwRwcXN0cmwDBHFzdHJsAzE4BHF1ZXJ5A3BvbHlzdHlyZW5lIGRpZXNlbAR0X3N0bXADMTQyNDU3NjMxMA--?p=polystyrene+diesel&fr2=sb-top-search&hspart=mozilla&hsimp=yhs-001
I worked in polyethylene extrusion (plastic bags) for a short time, where getting a run going produced a fair amount of waste. We ground up, melted down and reprocessed the waste to run back through the system. But anything that might be used for food-related bags could only be from virgin stock, never the reprocessed material.
When you say “recycled plastic”, those used water bottles are not getting melted down and turned into more water bottles. The bag that has the jerky in it probably ends up as part of a piece of fakewood on a deck or park bench. In that sense, “plastic recycling” is kind of disingenuous. Though, failing to put stuff into landfills has to be a good thing.
a bag becoming carpet, a bottle becoming decking are very good recycling. there is a demand for the product and if it wasn’t sourced from recycled material it would be sourced from virgin material.
yeah, until it leaves gummy deposits on the injectors and combustion chamber.
