Despite worldwide food shortage, Iowa converts 40% of the corn grown on Iowa into ethanol.
They produce a product that will be used for packaging once and then last forever in landfills.
The price of producing plastics should include the cost of recycling.
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Lax regulation was the second part of the bargain extracted from Pennsylvania. It is why workers need a strong OSHA and EPA. It is also why the Republicans are fighting like hell to shrink the Federal government.
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Kudos for attending. Good luck. The ages of the attendees? Young? Middle? Older? If Gen Z could get active, then vote, their involvement would be welcome.
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One of the biggest issues with recycling plastics is that recycled product can’t compete on a cost basis with virgin plastic, mostly due to the petrochem industries ability to downstream virtually all of its environmental costs. Add that to the bottom line and recycled starts becoming financially viable.
It’s fixable, but we have to lose the “Low Cost at All Cost” mentality.
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In talking to people in that industry, there are technical issues to consider too. That is, they need to establish the proper chemistry and then build infrastructure around it, not surprising for a whole new industry.
You hit the nail with it is not profitable to do so if you downstream the cost of recycling, because we are looking at building a completely new industry that will compete against an already very well established virgin plastics industry. I do not see anyway that attracts the big investment needed unless the virgin plastic industry absorbs the start up costs.
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Indeed! I never claimed undoing vinyl bonds was a piece of cake, but as long as you keep the myriad societal costs out of the virgin product equation, this is what we get.
Short version: Cheap virgin plastic with the world choking on it’s throwaways, or a bit more expensive plastic product that isn’t sticking in the worlds collective craw.
Lots of things to add to the Societal Cost side of the scale, which is why the Fossil Fuel Industry has been fighting this form of cost analysis tooth and nail, pretty much since it’s inception.
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To all intents and purposes, Shell is overseas investment. The Shell company (smirk) that runs the plant is a subsidiary of Shell PLC, a UK-based transnational corporation…
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I could only hear people, and they sounded middle-aged or older.
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Absolutely true.
To stay on point though, what happens afterward if they should sell the plant? They can do that and sometimes it happens as companies move their investments around. As I said, new owners, new rules.
By the way, we also can be skeptical that Shell actually delivers on any promise too. What would really force to them to do so unless there are government rules and oversight?
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Single use packing material!?!?! Why not invest in creating air filled bubbles that bio degrade. or reusable material?? Less weight to ship, less trash by volume.
mainly be used to make new single-use plastic packaging.
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Once again, Hollywood as The Prophet.
I saw it when it first came out and “got it” even as a high school kid.
But its good proof that, just because we all understood at the time that there was a fossil fuel threat to the environment doesn’t mean we acted on it.
What once were vices have become habits?
Something like that.
It only got much, much worse.
The relucant hero here might have fled that corporate world, no doubt they fled to Woodstock.
But the plastics industry exploded, it’s influence went on in the legislative shadows (Koch, anyone?) and on K-Street, and now plastic is ubiquitous to our very substance.
Knowing a threat usually means acting on it.
But when that denies the greedy rich their profits, they change the very definition of “threat” to protect their mortal increase.
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