Business PickupIf you’re reading this on a laptop, tablet, or smartphone, I’d like to ask you a favour. Take a close look at your device. Rotate it if you can, and notice all the different materials it contains.
Maybe you have a rubber case with a hard ABS plastic insert, a high-impact PC screen cover, a plastic phone body inlayed with plastic switches or buttons, or a laptop with plastic top, composite plastic screen, and matching off-colour keyboard. It’s all plastic, but notably different at the same time. That’s because it is different types of plastic you’re seeing – all mixed together in one consumer item.
This is a big problem from a recycling perspective for several different reasons, the most significant of which is homogeneity: plastics are hard to distinguish from one another. Not only do they all look relatively similar, they all have a similar weight. And that makes plastics difficult to sort.
Why is this a problem, you ask? It’s all a matter of chemistry.
You see, not only are e-waste plastics difficult to separate, they can’t be recycled together. They melt at different temperatures, contaminate one another, and even turn to ash. In short, we can’t just dump all our waste plastics into one giant melting pot. Especially since many contain carcinogenic flame retardants – the kind of stuff people don’t want around.
Manufacturers like plastic because it’s cheap, and you can build almost anything with it. But this translates into another problem on the recycling front: there’s no real economic incentive to recover plastics. And the environmental catastrophe this is leading toward is moving too slowly for most people to notice.
Plastics pollution is like a slow-motion tidal wave, just now appearing on the horizon. It won’t be long before people are commenting on the size of the wave, and casually discussing how much damage it might do. But it’s our grandchildren who will inherit its first real impact. And I find it ironic that, just like a real tidal wave, the ecological wave caused by plastic contamination is destroying our physical shores first.
A lot of us worry about the desertification of our planet. Personally, I’m more concerned with plastification – the cumulative effect of polymer contamination in our ecosystem.
For the past 25 years, China has imported the lion’s share of our e-waste plastic. They had few concerns about using industrial age tools to recycle 21st century technology – until people started dying, that is. Now that they’ve experienced the effects of intense pollution first-hand, China has banned imports of domestic waste as of 2018 – including the mixed e-waste polymers that represent 51% of the planet’s waste plastic stream. We’re about to become stuck with a mixed bag of potentially toxic materials that have no value at all. And the UN is calling this a planetary crisis.
To make matters worse, China has now started buying virgin polymers from US manufacturers to replace the volume lost from recycled plastics. Some $185 billion dollars has been invested so far. Good news for the US economy, bad news for the environment.
The answer to all this is simple, though the implications are incredibly complicated. We need to start producing fully recyclable products. This may be a monumental task – an epic mission that stands contrary to modern economics – but it has a very straightforward first step: we need to start talking about it.
Interested in pollution solutions? Let’s start a conversation.