UKH

Not sure if this should be off belay or the pub, either way probably wont be much of use to anyone!

Lateral thinking on what to do with non recyclable plastics (or plastics that are labelled as recyclable but arent actually recycled), Ill start off with a few ideas and see where it goes -

Shred them and mix with a glue to make bricks for building houses etc

Expose to some form of radiation to degrade them, Gamma? UV?

Compact them and send them in to space (Futurama)

Burn them and filter the smoke?

Create an organism that feeds on plastic, and build a facility where they cant escape.

Burn them in your wood burner

For now while we develop biological recycling solutions we should probably burn them for energy, ideally directly capturing and sequestering the CO2. Or bury them where we won't build as a relatively stable re-extractable resource.

Many fossil based polymers and plastic products are here to stay, they are just too useful in engineering and medicine, some like plastic grit in toothpaste we'll look back on like we now view asbestos fake snow, with complete horror and confusion.

Mixed plastic waste used to build homes or make roads where it is exposed to biology, light and weather will erode rapidly into our watercourses and decompose exposing us to god knows what into our living environment.

jk

The net production of plastic is increasing fast as nations urbanise; I've lost count of the number of times I've picked up a trade journal at an African airport or hotel lobby and seen another article praising the minister of whatever for opening yet another factory for blow-moulded packaging and PET bottles. 

People are monumentally stupid - I was cycling along the towpath in Burnley once and a woman came out of her house and lobbed a large black plastic bag stuffed with rubbish into the canal, which was already choked with half a dozen other large rubbish bags and a floating raft of plastic bottles and debris. Just where did she think the plastic was going to go? 

Sweden incinerates it to produce energy.

It even imports some for this purpose.

It beats dumping it and burning natural hydrocarbons for energy, I think.

https://www.ecobricks.org/

Pack them densely away somewhere out of the weather and your descendants can sell them on in 50 years time when people are desperate for feedstocks for petrochemicals?

Not use them?

I burn mine on the coal fire. The reasoning is that it’s better to burn it than have creatures entangled in it.

I'm not knowledgeable enough on this to say whether it's ok to burn them, I don't know what's produced, but I'm sure (as my original suggestions) there's a way of filtering some of the nasties out

In Sheffield all of our waste is incinerated and the power that is generated is used to power the hospitals, seems that we are lucky in that respect and although i am not a wasteful person it certainly makes me feel less guilty if i do have to put stuff in the bin.

Indeed, they appear to be diverting waste from recycling in order to burn it to ensure they don't default on their heating commitments if rumours are to be believed!

Ask an Indonesian.

This seems to be an issue with several recent incinerators (i.e. energy from waste plants). Either operational parameters or contractual issues mean they need a steady supply of stuff to burn, and its often imported from adjacent regions to run the bloody things!

More joined up thinking needed, and a proper integrated energy/waste/recycling strategy at a national level. 

I've started making these, it's actually quite a therapeutic process and it's amazing what you can fit into a bottle, I've so far got 3 weeks worth of waste plastic packaging into a 1.5 litre bottle. I'll stock them up and then probably donate to a community building project, I've no real need for the ecobricks myself.

Our black bin bag is maybe a fifth full each week after filtering out all this plastic (and would be even less if we got around to composting), it's very satisfying.

She did not think, nor care, sadly. 

Yeh we’re on our 4th bottle now. Could probably have our main bin collected monthly now I think. 

Us too. Four bricks in and still going. I've found a metal knife sharpening file the best tool for compacting. 

So the stories about the trees damaging the pavements was just a cover for getting some wood to burn

Just been to the site, the examples it shows of building with the bricks ( similar to using glass bottles previously) seems to show the ends of the bottle exposed? Won't this degrade in sunlight ?

Consensus seems to be that they need to be completely covered by, e.g. cob, to protect them.   Quite a few projects seem to be springing up around the country and, for users of FB, there's an ecobrick site that has details of collection points (which you probably/may have/may not have know, just mentioning in case of interest ), plus it's good for getting your bricks validated (as many projects won't collect them until they've been validated, which seems reasonable).  Temporary solution, of course, but better than plastic floating about in landfill and goodness knows where else...

"a facility where they can't escape". This is the start to a lot of horror films you know 

My local Tesco has just started a scheme to recycle all kinds of plastics that were previously labelled as non-recyclable. 
Not sure of the exact details, but I believe things like crisp packets are included.
Will have to investigate further...

will be interesting to find out what they actually do with it, i might be being pessimistic but they probably ship it off to get dumped

I know, I like writing short horror stories.

Id looked at eco bricks a little while ago, it just seems like a lot of faff and not that effective compared to my suggestion of shredding and packing them together (bit like the device you could get to make fire bricks from newspaper) with a binder resin.

Living in a city which burns domestic refuge to heat the council buildings, anything I'm unsure about the place where it will end up, I put in the main rubbish bin. 

I understand that new forms of genuinely biodegradable and edible plastic are currently being developed.

Some more information about it:

https://recyclingtechnologies.co.uk/2019/04/tesco-trials-technology-that-ma...

Read somewhere that in India locals pile plastic bottles etc into road potholes, set fire to them, melting results in pothole being mended. Not much good for atmosphere of course.

Are these actually a wise use of plastic bottles? Engineering-wise they're a rubbish idea.

We've recently started exporting our black bag waste to there - it's shredded and metal is removed with electromagnets before the resulting mass is baled in plastic film. The Swedish incinerator is massively efficient as the heat produced is sold on an urban heating grid (900mm pipe under the streets) as well as electricity produced by steam turbines. Our black bag waste should be mostly plastic film, thin black plastic food trays & polystyrene if people recycle everything else they can here.

The bottle is just the container for absolutely loads of plastic film that is  not recyclable. We've done 4 bottles so far which is around 3kg of plastic that would otherwise been in landfill.   

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-00593-y

An escape could be very bad news for local bee populations though, so best be secure!

I know a few people who shred milk bottles and mould them into soft hammer heads and similar things.

I think the rough rule of thumb is 1tonne of fuel for 1kg payload into space, so may not be viable!

High temperature incineration is probably the cleanest way of destroying them.

There are a few people attempting to make systems that consume and convert plastics without resorting to biology

https://hackaday.com/2019/06/19/trash-printer-directly-uses-recycled-plasti...

Unless the resin, or glue, is unproblematic in terms of its own production, carbon footprint, and pollution the use of such vast quantities of it might not be the best idea? 

https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-enzyme-to-digest-plas...

The science is still a way off but Japanese scientists discovered a bacteria living in a landfill site in 2016 that can release an enzyme that breaks PET plastics down into their constituent compounds. In future they hope to effectively use the compounds to recycle old plastic into "new" plastics on an industrial scale. Not sure if that's a good thing or not really... It depends on how effectively old plastic is captured and collected and not allowed to clog up landfill and oceans.

Interesting but who is 'we'?

Would be good if they trialed one in Glasgow too!

Do you know if the pastie needs to be pre-cleaned / washed?

I often wonder what happens to the plastic and cardboard & paper recycling that Glasgow council collects from communal recycling bins. Try as I might to ensure I stick to the 'rules', i.e. no plastic bags, items rinsed, etc., my efforts are sunk by the lack of care of my neighbours. Plastic bags, dirty food containers, plastic non-recyclable toys, sandwiches wrapped in cling film (just the once), large mixed material bags (like those dog food comes in or large quanties of rice) etc. 

Can I at least assume the metal can be extracted & re-used from this mess?