AmericanChemistry

A Reflection of the ACC Blog Summit

1. Reflection of the Blog Summit;
I have never blogged before and while I didn’t take this work home at night, but tried to do it at the end of the workday, it does take a lot of time to come up with useful & cogent commentary. Sometimes I think I even succeeded at that. A few responses to some of my posts were gratifying in knowing that they were read. That’s what any ‘writer’ wants – to know s/he’s read and then in this realm that the reader is somehow influenced by the writing to act perhaps. We can never know that.

I did of course, as others, find Recycle Bill’s postings most provocative and therefore read them all; I will not pass judgment on what he had to say, I suspect that all of you read them all, that is one goal of the provocateur, to be heard. I am glad he was not censored while perhaps being somewhat censured by the group. I am not sure when greenwashing = murder, but that’s a little off topic anyway. ;->

I hope to be able to do this again in an organized fashion and I do thank the ACC for putting it on. My most fervent hope is, as our County in particular plans to start taking in big mixed rigid pastics (NOT INCLUDING: polystyrene, or smaller food containers e.g. yogurt tubs), that we get industry support. We did get a $15,000 NC state grant to help w/ container purchase, but no industry funds. We therefore will depend at least indirectly on the industry supporting the market aspect and broadening the technical approach to enable recycling of injection moulded PET products and all #6, #3 and #7s. Sending all to the black hole of China doesn’t count as market support. Technical advances are needed to enable our markets to truly take all these materials!

2. Interest in recycling; I address a key interest above. The market stability element extends to most materials, not just plastics but use of more recycled materials domestically is a biggie. Better products at comparable prices e.g. garbage bags made from recycled film need to cost no more than virgin bags.
I read recently at Jerry Powell of Resource Recycling’s May editorial where paper makers are cutting back on recycled and going back to virgin. I hear radio commercials and, even worse for me, NPR sponsorships of ‘Scott Naturals’ – whatever those are? They don’t state that they contain recycled content paper – so another instance of the kind of greenwashing that I cried out against in my earlier posts.
It seems to be worsening in the national/international rush to go green. The ACC and its other industry equivalents must police themselves and root out the greenwashers. But that is highly unlikely to happen effectively (it didn’t happen w/ the self policing in the food industry — see the peanut crisis –and the industry learned nothing. .They only hurt themselves by this shoddy treatment of the buying public. Any insider who knew of the peanut salmonella problem and didn’t blow the whistle is guilty of poisoning those people. (do I sound like Bill here?) This is serious stuff and many people who get their information in the marketplace deserve better from the manufacturers. Bring back the FDA to the factories I say, end self reports, sorry………….

It is further up to manufacturers to make more use of recycled materials and make them more readily recyclable without toxins. Do we really need brominated fire retardants in our TVs and computer plastics? The research I’ve seen says those don’ t help anything. This is a place for government/industry collaboration and cooperation around good science, not the usual adversarial game.

We also need some national standards to move towards more recycling, reuse, repurposing, etc. Why not create a practice to wash and reuse/repurpose the 5 gallon buckets that must be relatively expensive to produce. Hard to believe they can’t be in some kind of deposit system back to the pickle factory or pickles to paint pots or ?? Reuse should not be off the radar screen no matter if it seems quaint, The new era of scarcity is almost upon us – in case you didn’t notice in may involve significantly less consumption and resource use. What happens when the other five billion (soon to be six or seven) want to live like the top one billion? You know we can’t manage that. Stop saying all the things we can’t do.

3. Thoughts on how we, as a society, need to move forward to ensure that we are making plastics recycling as efficient and effective as possible.

As previously stated, a series of extended producer responsibilities need to come into existence whether in the form of bottle bills, guaranteed recycled content, incentives to reuse and recycle, heavy penalties for wasting (more than the cost of going to landfills), a whole lot more support for consumer recycling efforts in terms of education, programs, hardware, technology from the industry. Helping buy down costs of optical/molecular/other recognition technology at MRFs perhaps? Develolping better sorting technology?

One quick story in closing:

In the early/mid nineties a foam pipe insulation mfr. opened a plant in our County, Their rejected material came by the forty yard rolloff to the landfill a few times a week. The landfill operators were beside themselves. The stuff was super light so little revenue as we charge by weight. It didn’t compact and one compactor operator almost flipped his machine over when he plowed into a sea of it and sunk forward. Pleas to the company to ‘do better’ or ‘recycle their waste’ went unheeded. We were in the midst of a LF search and space was running out.

Our County has a reputation for not being business friendly, but finally we had to create a ban on this particular material. What were they to do?

1. They improved their production process faster than they might have without the ban as we’d plugged the waste pipe in our own county and it was hard for them to go out of County with their waste.

2. After a time they found an outlet for not only the reject insulation but also all the plastic HDPE bags that the insulation precursor came In – that blend of bags & reject foam was backhauled to a maker of carpet backing in the same city where the foam precursor was made. Not for new foam but a third party’s product. I’m not sure how this came to be exactly.

BUT: what is clear is the local government regulatory move to protect our staff’s safety and conserve valuable landfill space played a key role in forcing the innovation, not the marketplace and not the sheer economics of it. Take note and get active.

ACC Thank you for putting on the BLOG. I hope to be invited to the party again.

There’s that ‘quick’ half hour Kristin asked me for. Einstein said, about time, [speaking of quick half hours - as opposed to the long half hours]: “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT’S relativity.”