A radical plan to end plastic waste | Andrew Forrest

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Plastic is an incredible substance for the economy — and the worst substance possible for the environment, says entrepreneur Andrew Forrest. In a conversation meant to spark debate, Forrest and head of TED Chris Anderson discuss an ambitious plan to get the world's biggest companies to fund an environmental revolution — and transition industry towards getting all of its plastic from recycled materials, not from fossil fuels.

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27 Comments on A radical plan to end plastic waste | Andrew Forrest

  1. This seems like a reasonable idea. I hope it gets done. This problem is out of hand already, and is impacting life and our bodies in ways we aren’t even aware of yet. It’s time to turn it around.

    • Yes, but not for that reason… it’s mostly the UV light that breaks down plastics, which is why it breaks down floating in the oceans… so, if you know your plastic waste is going to end up in a landfill, that’s basically fine, it doesn’t really break down so much there, and it’s oil, so it came from underground, putting it back underground rather than dispersing it into the food chain or burning it into the atmosphere to form a massive carbon blanket to wrap the planet in is definitely better. But, our governments in the west have been misleading us about recycling plastic, often collecting it from us as “for recycling” but then filling shipping containers with it and shipping it off the the poorest parts of Asia, where much of it is in too bad a state for them to be able to use, so it sits near shipping ports, being blown into the ocean

  2. Isn’t there a hard limit on the number of times one can recycle plastic? Something to do with it being a long chain molecule or something or something.

    • I think you’re right however there are techniques that turn the plastic back into their individual monomers and i believe this can be done over and over. I think it’s still in its infancy but I’ve seen lots of similar research centred around sort of technique. In addition I’m pretty sure there’s a company in the UK that can turn non recyclable plastic back into oil. Which at least requires less to be drilled.

    • There are a few major problems with burning plastics. The first is that most of them have some amount of residual, metal based catalyst that you dont really want spewing into the atmosphere. The second is that you would have to cryo-mill them to get a particle size small enough for complete combustion (which is extremely costly on a relative basis) or you will have a highly soot filled exhaust gas. Think of what a diesel engine spews out using primarly a C12 hydrocarbon. These would be C100k + in terms of chain length. Burning that at a large scale would be messy. Lastly, we do not have a good way to depolymerize the material without a high energy input which nullifies the thought of burning it for energy.

    • No, the last thing you want is all that plastic being added to the blanket of carbon we’re already wrapping our planet it. Best bet is if we can put any plastic waste back into the ground, into depleted oil wells or something. The output of the plant in Ireland can be used to make new plastic as good as from freshly extracted oil (most likely, usually even better) which would also be fine, but oil companies won’t want to give up their monopoly they have by controlling the oil wells, so they will play dirty to stop the alternative from spreading widely enough to make much difference, and the people who come up with the recycling methods that let all plastics be broken back down into hydrocarbon chains are protecting their inventions, so it’s not easy for poorer countries to roll these things out, or even richer countries where the people who have the money are keeping it to themselves and don’t want to spend it on things that will help other people or “the world”.

  3. I’ve watched a lot of ted talks on youtube… this video by far takes the longest to get to the point than I have ever seen. Even when directly asked at the 7 minute point the answer still hasn’t started XD. True host patience!

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