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Plastic Waste

Plastics have been around for about 100 years. That’s not quite correct because natural plastics have already been produced in the past. Cheese is actually a plastic as well. However, the triumphal march of plastic commenced when it could be synthesized from oil.

In early 2018, one press release shocked Germany: “The Chinese are no longer taking our plastic waste!” What nerve! By now it’s probably being incinerated on garbage dumps in Africa or Bulgaria without a toxin filter. Out of sight, out of mind.

With press releases like these, people wonder why the waste is there in the first place and how it got there. In Germany, you have to pay money into the “Dual System” (called the “Green Dot”) in order to recycle any used packaging materials. This system has nothing better to do than ship this stuff, which an environmentally conscious person has already neatly sorted into the “yellow bag”, to China with a lot of effort and energy. No outcry here – not even from the Greens. In circumstances like these, you realize that the psychologist Manfred Lütz intended the title of his book “The New Crazy – Why We’ve Been Treating the Wrong Ones” exactly as he wrote it.

Many press reports chronicle the pollution of the world’s oceans with plastic waste and the wretched way it kills the animals that inhabit these. Of course, without examining the causes, a German immediately feels compelled to come up with ideas on how to reduce this kind of waste. An alternative solution? No idea. Anyone who has ever stepped on a piece of glass in the ocean or by a lake and almost amputated his or her little toe in the process will realize that sometimes glass is not the end-all solution.

Soy Plastics

In the past, plastic was made from plants. Car bodies were made from soy plastic, paints from soy oil. Soy was used as green manure – until the petroleum came. The toxic soy plant was first “fed” to pigs and then to the health-conscious European. You can find out more about this in chapter “Superfoods”. Since then, everything has been made from petroleum: Plastic racing car bodies, synthetic resin paints, plastics themselves and a whole host of other things.

Now plastics are supposed to be recycled. The magic word here is “sort-clean separation”. This may sound great, but it’s technically or physically difficult. Compare it to separating metals: Steel weighs three times as much as aluminum, is magnetic, in contrast to aluminum, and has a different melting point, which makes it easy to sort. All plastics are non-magnetic, have the same weight per volume (called “specific weight”) and sometimes don’t melt at all. So, you have to sort them by hand.

A particularly bad thing is that the specific weight of plastic is similar to that of water. It neither swims on the surface nor sinks to the bottom, but floats in water, harming marine life.

People get absurd ideas when it comes to recycling plastics: For example, some people wanted to add plastics to cement bricks in order to improve their thermal insulation properties. Even then you get the feeling: Just get rid of the stuff! This is even counterproductive since plastic has a property called “creep”. Plastic yields under continuous pressure. These houses will sink 2 inches after twenty years when you put too much plastic into the bricks.

When an engineer has to design something from recycled plastic, his hair will inevitably turn gray because the product’s manufacturer must guarantee its quality. To do this, the designer must be able to rely on its material properties. But if the plastic can’t be properly sorted, then these material properties will be fraught with uncertainties. Therefore, too much material is used so that the component won’t break, thereby destroying the world of the person who admired the thought of how great recycling plastic is.

That’s why recycled plastics are usually used to make kitchen chopping boards or similar products where the strength of the material is virtually irrelevant.

Over 95% of all packaging plastics produced in Germany are recycled, making Germany the world champion of recycling. That’s a good thing. However, why plastic should be banned on the grounds that marine animals are dying from it, the causality, i.e. the causation of this reasoning, isn’t given.

Plastic nanoparticles have been discovered now. This sounds dangerous: Nano. Nobody really knows what to make of it, and it can be used to stir up fear. ”Nano” means 10-9 meters or 10-6 mm, i.e. 1/1,000,000 mm. These small plastic particles are hydrocarbons, which means they’re made up of carbon and hydrogen and maybe a little oxygen. Plastic decomposes at some point to produce particles of this size. Every plastic entirely decomposes in the long run, but nanoparticles decompose particularly rapidly because their surface area is especially large in relation to their volume. In mathematics this is called the “area rule” (Glossary). They’re not toxic. Furthermore, bacteria that feed on plastics have been discovered, and the larger the surface area, the faster these can decompose the plastic.

If it were arsenic, mercury, lead or chlorine compounds, you may understand the concern. Of course, you can find (politically correct) scientific articles ad hoc on the Internet demonstrating that fish are being harmed from nanoparticles deliberately being added to water [42]. However, how much nanoplastic is in seawater couldn’t be found anywhere on the Internet. Normally, you check whether a problem exists in the first place. More about the nature and aim of this kind of an approach later.

Fig. 1 A typical street scene in India (author’s picture)

How does the plastic find its way into the ocean? India, for example, has regions that have not been developed for tourism. Every square meter of land can count one shred of plastic. A photo of a normal street scene in India (2011) is shown above. These plastic shreds are seen flying around everywhere because no garbage has been collected for a long time. The plastic is blown into the ocean and ends up in the stomach of animals. So, before creating a fuss in Germany, you should ask if you can give India a helping hand when it comes to disposing waste.⁹

But when the German “Green Dot” ships its plastic waste to Asia it looks strange when the German government pledges its support in finding the most clever way to dispose of the plastic waste of other countries.

After almost a decade spent on “bombarding” the population with images of suffering and dying marine animals, publications appeared in 2019 analyzing the composition of this waste.¹⁰ The majority of plastic floating around is fishing equipment, such as nets and the like. The origin of this waste was analyzed as well: Everything, in fact, is Asian. For a long time, Asia didn’t know how to dispose of its waste. Thus there’s little to no sensitivity to this problem among Asia’s human population. German politics is therefore able to solve non-existent problems in a media-effective way because the disposal of packaging materials is regulated very well in Germany.

Pseudo-Solutions

The envelope next to me is advertising donations. It’s filled with various “items” made from plastic – factually plastic waste. The following is written on the envelope: “A nice gift set with ballpoint pen in a practical gift bag is enclosed with this letter.” Above it reads: “I appreciate the extraordinary commitment from the many volunteers of the DLRG. Frank-Walter Steinmeier, President of Germany and patron of the DLRG (German Lifeguard Association)”.

The main point is that the German parliament banned plastic straws and bags by law. This is a classical example of the expediency of German politics. These “pseudo solutions” (electric scooters, plastic straws) do not contribute anything to the real solution of the problem and even hinder this by pretending to be solutions that they’re not.

It seems to be important to act in a media-effective way without the marine animals having anything to gain from it. Officially, however, one is working for the “welfare of animals”, of course.

Burning (Plastic) Materials

Burning plastic is like a red flag to environmentalists, something like blasphemy. Hence, everything has to be recycled – an energy-intensive process because you have to invest energy in order to recycle plastic. When it comes to expensive carbon-reinforced plastics, however, it may make sense to reuse these kinds of fibers. Otherwise, plastic is itself energy because it’s solely made up of hydrocarbons and, hence, solely of petroleum.

Combustion is an issue that we will examine later in terms of “energy” and the “energy supply”. When being “burned”, as we call it in colloquial German, plastics produce carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O) and burn atmospheric oxygen. By-products, such as hydrochloric acid, or other products, such as nitrogen oxides, can be created. Hydrochloric acid can only be created when the plastic contains chlorine, for example in the case of PVC or polyvinyl chloride. Nowadays, a whole host of waste gas filters is placed on top of each chimney of the waste incineration plant. This has been the case for the past thirty years. Of course, pollutants can be detected in exhaust gases. No argument there. Everything can be detected with today’s measuring methods. If you were to examine the exhaust gases that any normal person exhales, you would probably have to shut these all down. It’s harmful to the environment, which is a real problem in cemeteries because corpses are hazardous waste, especially after a cancer therapy or with amalgam fillings.

Plastic has about half the calorific value of coal and petroleum per kilogram weight. About half of the energy can be produced during combustion. The carbon dioxide it emits is probably better since plastic has a higher proportion of hydrogen and thus not produce that much carbon dioxide during combustion. Instead, more water is released per energy produced. In chemistry lessons, the keyword here is the “stoichiometric ratio”. By the way, water vapor is a greenhouse gas as well. This is often glossed over because it doesn’t fit neatly into any pro-green argument.

Naturally, waste incineration plants emit pollutants. Naturally, not everything has to be burned. But recycling everything and shipping it abroad doesn’t seem to make much sense either.

Everything overdone is no good.

Consequences

Waste that can’t be recycled is transported abroad using a lot of energy to be recycled there. That’s how people in Germany live according to the principle: “O Holy St. Florian, please spare my house, set fire to another one.” What’s so abstruse about the entire situation is that Germany has almost perfect control over its waste separation: Used paper and plastic packaging are sorted. Residual waste, such as kitchen waste, vacuum cleaner contents and similar waste combusts poorly. As a result, the last plastic waste is shipped to third world countries in order to be sorted there. Petroleum or other substances must be used in German waste incineration plants to increase waste combustibility. Single-variety plastics not used for packaging, such as old plastic buckets, end up as residual waste.

“Side Effects”

I once witnessed where I used to live how five containers of plastic waste were transported by truck to the Czech Republic. Why was this done?

Plastic packaging material is a relatively good fuel. Yet burning these is prohibited. The enterprising politician gets paid to dispose of the plastic by driving it to the Czech Republic using diesel fuel, thus increasing overall traffic congestion, and then burning it there in order to produce energy. Yet the politician in the Czech Republic gets to enjoy another salary.

Something like this is still relatively simple, contributing at least to a three-digit million Euro deficit for Germany every year, all the while making Germany look ridiculous to its neighbors, who aren’t that stupid either. Yet Germans are convinced that only they know the golden path. Now to something more complex.