Unless industry is using the raw material produced from recycling, we'll never get to 100% recycling. People throwing stuff in the blue bag or green bin, whatever it is in your region, that's only the first step. We are a long way off from 100%. We have countries who have refused to accept shipments of recycled products because there's no market for that material.
this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2025
55 points (95.1% liked)
Ask Lemmy
34368 readers
1250 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Look into the notion of the circular economy if you want to investigate this further, although it goes well beyond just recycling.
Instead of focusing on the efforts of individual persons and households, I think more effort should be focused on industrial symbiosis - identifying industrial waste and side streams that can be useful inputs into the products of other industries, and connecting those industries.
For example, you might have a local electricity-generating station that takes some of the steam that's created as a side effect of their process, and sends that steam to an oil refinery located next door. The oil refinery has a water hook-up and sends regular water to power station for their power generation, but they also send their treated effluent water for the power plant to use in cleaning as well as stabilizing fly ash, and they also send over their flare gas as an extra energy source for generating power.
The oil refinery could send it's excess gas to a gypsum board manufacturer just down the road; the gypsum board manufacturer could also get most of it's gypsum from the power plant's sulfur dioxide scrubbers.
The power station could also send more of it's excess steam to a nearby pharmaceutical manufacturer; the pharmaceutical manufacturer could send some of the bio-sludge waste it produces to local farms as fertilizer, and the rest of the sludge might get processed into biofuel for the power station. Hot water from the pharmaceutical plant could be sent to the local wastewater treatment plant, which generates sludge, which could be sold to a soil remediation firm.
The power station could use it's excess heat to heat a bunch of local homes, some local greenhouses, and then they could also send some more excess heat to a fish farm. The sludge from the fish farm could be used as fertilizer at local farms.
The power station's fly ash and clinker could be sent to roadbuilders and cement manufacturers, and the oil refinery's recovered sulfur could be sold to a sulfuric acid manufacturer.
Such a theoretical symbiosis could prevent 200,000 tons of fly ash and clinker and 80,000 tons of scrubber sludge from going into a local landfill; 130,000 tons of carbon dioxide and 4,300-5,300 tons of sulfur/sulfur dioxide being released into the air; and 1,000,000 cubic meters of sludge headed to either the landfill or the sea.
Oh, wait - that's not fantasy, that's the Kalundborg Eco-industrial Park in Denmark. It's not 100% recycling, but it's fucking glorious.
There's also the Guitang Group in China. They have a massive farm that grows sugar cane, which is processed at their sugar refinery and then sold. But the sugar refining process generates spent molasses, so they built a plant that takes the spent molasses and creates alcohol, which they then also sell.
The alcohol plant also creates alcohol residue, so they built a fertilizer plant that makes the alcohol residue into fertilizer, which they use on their sugar cane farm.
The sugar refinery also has crushed sugar cane as a result of their processing, so they built a plant to turn the crushed sugar cane into pulp, then a paper mill to turn the pulp into paper, which is sold.
The pulp plant creates a black liquid as a side product, so they send that through an alkali recovery process; the recovered alkali is sent back to the pulp plant to create more pulp.
The alkali recovery process also creates a white sludge byproduct so they built a cement mill. They take the white sludge from the alkali recovery process, along with the filter sludge that comes out of the sugar refinery, and make cement.
So they wanted to sell sugar, but they've limited pollution and waste, improved their plantation's output with inexpensive fertilizer, and also get to sell alcohol, paper and cement.
Recycling is a fraud. It was invented by the oil and plastic industry to pass the blame to consumers and shield themselves from repercussions. While some plastics CAN be recycled, its only numbers 1-3, every other plastic cannot be recycled or its so expensive that companies had no incentive to do it, and this still doesn't include paper that also has a limit on what it can be recycled to.
Paper can be recycled 7 times. Every time the quality degrades because the fibers get shorter. The last recycle is purely for toiletpaper or crêpe.
Plastic recycling is a lie, sure.
Recycling other materials like aluminum, steel, copper, glass, and a ton of other materials is perfectly sound. Oil companies just piggybacked on the success with those materials to sell their lie.
Not as much as you think. Many of the recyclable materials you mentioned are “contaminated” with the contents they were used to deliver because folks don’t wash them well enough. It’s not their fault; we’re told to “rinse” the materials, but they really have to be fully washed, a tough task for many of those cans with crevices and ridges that are often missed. Other contaminants include throwing in what you think is the correct metal or plastic, but it’s not, and that ruins a whole batch.
Comment from a German specialist in a thread about this from 2017:
Die nicht recykelbaren Reste wie Lebensmittelreste, Farbauftrag oder irgendwelche Etiketten verbrennen in der Schmelze und treiben oben auf dem flüssigen Metall als Schlacke, die einfach abgeschöpft und entsorgt werden kann.
Translation:
The non-recyclable residues, such as food scraps, paint coatings or labels burn off in the melt and float to the top of the molten metal as slags, which can simply be skimmed off and disposed of.
I was a process engineer in an aluminum plant. While I didn't directly work in remelt, this is correct as I understand it.
20:1 is the net energy usage for new aluminum smelting:recycling.
Recycle your metals please.
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/f5-Ljn7GX_8
This short explains the German mindset about recycling. The only difference is that in Germany, the letter would be laminated.
Raw materials come from the ground. By your standards of “contamination” aren’t raw materials much more contaminated?
A lot of work goes into refining glass, aluminum, steel, copper etc. A lot of impurities have to be removed to make those materials for the first time.
Metallurgy isn't my field, but here's an educated guess...
There are different kinds of contaminants. In raw ore you largely have silicate rock and metals. In recycled material you have relatively pure metal (alloys), and a large variety of volatiles.
Now with ore you can grind it all into sand, sift it, and smelt all the heavy grains. The rock should mostly just separate from the metal, these are just phase changes. But with recycling, those volatiles are going to burn and some are going to react with the metals, changing the chemical makeup. And with ore, you basically know what minerals you're working with. With recycled materials, it's anyone's guess. Does this can contain some food residue? Or an oil? Perhaps chemical cleaning agents? Is another plastic container stuffed inside?
There's a lot of variables with recycled materials, I imagine it's hard to predict how some of those variables react.
Where I live it's only 1-2. Also, sorting is a challenge, and we often don't know if it actually gets recycled or ends up on a ship to India.
Also I remember talking to someone who makes plastic molds and they were saying that recycled plastic loses some of its desirable qualities, so even recyclable plastics have a limited lifespan.
I agree but it doesn't have to be that way.
In all honesty plastics should be phased out since its in every guys sperm.
Well in that case I have no problem "phasing out plastics" on the nightly.
I try and do my part.
100% is not realistic physically. You should phrase the question as a world where everything that's possible to be recycled is recycled, and where it isn't we go back to materials that are naturally recycled or reusable. Basically a world where plastics and other materials that are one-time use are banned. It's a great topic, as we don't remotely realize how much we throw away. The scale is huge. The change in what is affordable or possible would be huge too.
We could do a lot better, and it would be impactful. Some things have to be disposable in our modern world though, at least with current technology. Just medical use alone is a big example.
Thats the natural progression no?
Then clearly we're resisting "natural" progression, whatever that means. It's definitely against the direction for economic growth, and that runs the world. Line go up.
You technically didn't ask for them, but presumably this goes hand-in-hand with reduce and reuse as first steps, which would have perhaps a more visible impact.
Reduce means to cut back on the amount of products we produce in the first place, particularly also the trash being used for packaging.
This would require:
- More craftsmanship. Instead of buying a new jeans when your pants have a hole, you'd sew them.
- More robust, repairable products. Don't need to throw away the whole phone due to a broken screen when it doesn't break in the first place or if you can get the screen replaced.
- More sharing. Not every household needs their own car or toolbox or whatever, if you can share them with your neighbors.
- There would be more shops that sell products unpackaged, where you bring your own containers to fill.
Reuse means to sell products in glass jars, metal boxes or similar, which can be washed out and filled anew.
This would require:
- Some container-deposit system, so that you can bring your emptied glass jars etc. back to the shops and the shop sends it back to the producer.
- In that vein, there would need to be a tax on non-reusable packaging to finance the recycling or safe deposition of it.
- Some products would probably be sold in larger quantities or not anymore, because they just aren't sustainable, if you make them pay their environmental costs.
As for recycling, i.e. breaking the thing down and creating a new thing, it's unlikely that we would ever reach 100% with it alone, at the very least because it's more effort than reduce and reuse.
But to improve our rates, there is a whole load of products currently being sold in plastic, which could be sold in paper or wood, if glass jars or metal boxes don't work there.
In a hypothetical world, where we could have 100% effective recycling without giving a toss about reduce and reuse, then I guess, we'd have a garbage disposal system which funnels right back into a massive 3D printer.
[off topic?]
"The Midas Plague" by Fredrick Pohl.
A light-hearted science fiction story where 100% recycling, free atomic power, and robot labor have combined to create a glut of consumer goods. So, the higher your status, the less you use. Folks in the ghetto have ten houses and a thousand robot servants, while the Beverly Hills elites live in shacks and play cards for matches.
Fun read.
we can already sorta see this in fashion
in ye olde days, the more bits and baubles and lace and ruffles you had on your clothes/shoes/furniture, the richer you were
since the advent of industrialized consumer goods, flashy embellished things are marketed to the working class meanwhile the bourgeois drop mega money on plain color or simply patterned gowns and tuxes, absurdly minimalist furniture, and unadorned shoes that showcase whatever exotic material they're made of
Thank you for this
A robot would climb up your bum to steal your poo while you sleep
where do I sign up?
I would like to think it would wait till i'm ready.
I suppose you want lube, too?
I want the easiest path to have the most pleasant shit in the morning i can possibly have in the future.
They already mentioned the slumber shitter 5000 how much easier do you want it than ‘not needed’???
Compost lol.
By what metric? Recycling gives a new use to discarded materials, so the material might be 100% not-discarded, but new energy is still consumed in the recycling process. This is why reducing and re-using are more powerful levers than recycling.
There is also the detail of whether a material is truly "re" cycled back to the original use, or is "down" cycled to a use with less rigorous technical requirements.
I'm assuming energy will be cheap in the future.
As soon as someone dies, they make a new one from the parts. One Orangehead after the other.....
Humans can be recycled.
And are delicious?
you are putting words in your mouth.
No... I believe that's a foot. With BBQ sauce.
Ah, so we’ve reached the ‘fine dining’ stage of recycling.
Well, we'd have Soylent Green food bars...