My bias

I was very sure the recycling was stupid and dumb, a waste of time and money! It took more money and work to recycle things into less valuable and useful objects. On top of that, anytime that I handle something that brags about being made from recycled material it is noticeably worse quality than I would normally expect.

Plastic recycling

My above bias applies to plastic recycling. That is the most common one that I hear about. And unfortunately it is a terrible example of recycling. Recycled plastic is more expensive, and worse quality than virgin plastic. On top of that it is a HUGE pain to recycle plastic! One of the main reasons is that what we can “plastic” is not a specific material, but rather a whole class of materials. Every type of plastic has different properties, which mean that each type of plastic has to be treated and recycled differently. You can’t recycle all plastic types together! And unfortunately all these different types are mixed! Think about a bottle of soda, the bottle is made of Polyethylene Terephthalate, the cap is made of Polypropylene or sometimes HDPE, which is harder and more heat-resistant, and the label is made of oriented polypropylene. The cap also likely has some soft plastic or rubber in the top to support an airtight seal. Each of these different plastics needs a different process in order to recycle. Some can be melted down, some must be chemically treated first, and they cannot be mixed in this process or they contaminate each other. So before you can recycle the bottle you need to physically separate the bottle from the label, from the cap, from the cap “necklace”, from the cap soft seal. Then you can begin treated each piece in different ways.

Even after all that work, the plastic that we get out the other side is not as valuable or capable as virgin plastic. Plastic is not infinitely recyclable. Or at least we are not able to recycle it well enough to accomplish that. So even after going through that process the plastic that comes out the other side is poorer plastic. Aside from that, there is approximately 30% loss of the material during processing, so even if we did have a perfect recycling process that yielded 100% pure and clean plastic, we would lose 1/3 of our plastic per cycle.

All of that aside, I do think that we should be as careful as we can not to make unnecessary waste. Our world is so beautiful and seeing trash all over is very sad. I don’t know what the best solution is, but I know that just littering is the worst possible solution! Don’t be a degenerate, clean up after yourself.

Other Recycling

Plastic is terrible, and since it’s kind of the poster child for recycling I assumed that we were just terrible at recycling. But then I watched a very cool video about solar. There’re lots of cool things that he says in that video and in general I love solar! I live totally off grid and have for 6 years. My only power source for years was solar 16 solar panels, and I have loved them. Last year I bought a generator so that I can have backup power when necessary, but I almost never need to use it! But the main point for this article that he mentions in that video is that we can recycle greater than 90% of the resources used in a solar system.

Aluminum

Aluminum can be recycled with 95% less energy than it takes to mine and refine unprocessed aluminum, and it also can be recycled with 98% retention. Meaning that it takes 5% of the energy to return 98% of the aluminum. And unlike plastic, this recycled aluminum is not degraded in any way! It is infinitely recyclable.

Unfortunately in the US due to plastic recycling ruining recycling’s good name, according to the EPA less than 20% of the aluminum in US got recycled in 2018, meaning that billions of dollars worth of aluminum ends up in landfills every year!

Glass

The same concepts that apply to aluminum, apply to glass. We can melt it down and remake it for cheaper and easier than making it in the first place, and it is still good glass. Infinitely recyclable and easier to reuse than to create in the first place!

Silicon

This is what makes up the circuit boards for almost all electronics in the world! It is also infinitely recyclable and is used in the actual solar energy generation elements in solar panels. It can be recycled at 93% efficiency and requires MUCH less energy to recycle than to mine and purify in the first place

Solar panels

With glass, aluminum, and silicon, we see that solar panels are greater than 90% recyclable. So after the 25ish year lifespan of a solar panel you can melt 10 of them down into aluminum, glass, and silicon which can be poured back into more than 9 brand new solar panels. While making those new panels you will consume less energy and therefore cost less than making the original 10 cost. This should be a virtuous cycle where we need to mine fewer and fewer resources to produce the power that we need.

Batteries

Batteries are a very troublesome aspect of this recycling chain. Mining lithium is very expensive, and lithium is rare. It is also volatile and relies on chemical and mechanical interactions in order to store electricity, and over time that chemistry and structure breaks down. At that point the battery stops working. I always figured that was the end of the battery but even with lithium ion batteries we can new recycle up to 95% of the resources in the batteries and they are also infinitely recyclable!

Solar vs Oil

So finally, after everything we talked about and specifically how solar systems, including the batteries can be recycled with >90% efficiency. Contrast that with oil, it’s expensive to pull it up from the ground, then we process it into something usable which takes lots of time and money, then we have to ship that product to the consumer (with solar we can use the national power grid to move the electricity around) then the consumer buys it and puts it in their car where it is completely consumed!!! Then to fuel my car tomorrow I have to do the exact same process! FOREVER! There’s no 90% reusability, which means that there’s also no slow in the demand. With recycling we theoretically need to extract less and less material in order to supply what we need, since our existing stockpile is reusable. But with oil, we have to be CONSTANTLY replenishing our supply since it is a one time use resource!

For the record I understand that gas can be great and I love my motorcycle! It’s a great little vehicle and being able to refuel it in 30 seconds and then ride for hundreds of miles is incredible and not something that I plan on giving up! But looking honestly at the economics of the oil industry really surprised me! How is it that we all rely on something that is single use and we are literally one major outage from losing access to?! That would be akin to us all getting our drinking water from the three drinkable wells in the country and just figuring it’s fine!