Why It’s So Hard To Recycle Styrofoam and Polystyrene | World Wide Waste | Business Insider 

That’s really sad

@@ebubeawachie its sad you believe it

The cost of dumping it was lower than sending it to a recycling facility. That's a failure of public policy.

@@ryerye9019 We were even paying the freight to have it delivered to our facility. They saw it as an unexpected revenue stream.

@@ryerye9019 Go and donate to a fund to buy this stuff... I love how you want to just make everything most costly and everyone more poor... must be nice to be rich like you.

4:45 even if he dosnt provides masks for his people ..?

Its very inefficiant like it is now.

You belief that recycle is the answer too all? Any idea of the energy that is spend on it and in how many cases its even worse for the environment?

@@fckprc8149 quite confused on what you're saying here, where in my original message or my reply did i imply that recycling is the answer to all? please don't twist my words. what i'm saying is that as these waste have already been created, it'd be better that someone is working on recycling these materials than people dumping it to wasteland and polluting the planet. reusing them and recycling them is better dumping them after one don't you agree? of course it's best that we find a sustainable and environmental and, from point of view of most businesses, cheaper substitute material, but before that would happen, and god knows when that could happen, somebody somewhere have to somehow find a way to better utilize these materials

@@etszyeung I’m on your side there, it’s not gonna fix everything. It’s a start. It’ll take time for humanity to figure this stuff out. This is beautiful to me.

It means they don’t believe them

@@iamanidiotbut5523 No, it means that they can't verify or disprove that claim due to lack of data.

@@iamanidiotbut5523 they got the numbers for how much material goes through the facility, but how easy do you think it is to get the "total polystyrene use in a day" number? it doesn't mean they're lying, it's just the data to say that the statement is true isn't (yet) available.

You heard already about PLASMA TORCH for all wast !! No more recycling ! Go to utube !

@No Touchy how's the search for a brain going, McCarthy

If people grew their own food instead of buying packaged garbage it would help

Dupont - if you make styrofoam- make a payment to support businesses like this.

Would you start a Business that didn't make money ?

@@spiderbrandt4066 you'd need to be backed by someone with deep pockets who does it in order to get a tax break

It should be illegal for Dupont to make it, then we wouldn't have the problem in the first place.

Agreed! 👏

It’s interesting AF too.

You can make Napalm out of it.

Same.

Napalm would sell faster...lol

Aaahhh... Classic American...either you shoot it or turn it into fuel for cars

@@pratiknazareth3217 Merica 🇺🇸

@@pratiknazareth3217 better than nothing

Agylix have refined their process to recreate the styrene monomer raw material which for them recovers more value than just producing fuel and takes the material even further around the arc of thecircular economy. In Wellington, New Zealand Poly Palace take it a step further and create the same products 100% recycled from waste EPS and XPS as other virgin manufacturers make from the raw expandable granule material, for application in the local construction market as Geofoam. Fun fact. Grind up Polystyrene with a cheese grater, put it in your espresso machine where the coffee goes and run steamy water through it like you are making a short black and that is the polystyrene manufacturing process on a small scale, similar temperatures and pressure. Our process is basically a very very large espresso machine at the local Resource Recovery Center. The 'cheese grater' is an end of life flail mill that used to crush the shite out of dirty sheep's wool. Now it processes waste polystyrene at the rate of 1m3 every 1-2 minutes.

@@richardmoore7367 I didn't know that. Thanks for the info.

It’s not worth the gasoline to go recycle.

some things yes , many things no , its just that with many things its cheaper to keep cutting it down and digging it up or the mining companies don't want the competition it will drop their bottom line Profits ! and that's all they care about and they are too powerful to stop Governments world wide cower to them

And economics

Agreed. we need to stop the need to recycle in the first place. reuse vs recycle

and people bothering to deliver it at the stations instead of throwing it out the car window etc

That's the big problem, you have to look at the total net energy usage of the whole process. If you expend more energy collecting, transporting, processing, and then using recycled material to make a new product, using energy and emitting carbon along the way at every step, are we really saving anything other than cutting down waste? We're just trading one type of pollution for another.

Yup, and they never think of the bottom line. There's no economy at all when nobody can survive living in what we created

But when I buy fast food online, they gave me paper cups for my drinks? Where is styrofoam?

@@fynkozari9271 It isn't about online sellers but about *street vendors* & local fast food chains

Yup...with the exception of fission power. That's just people being scared for no reason.

If disposal are costly why not just impose tax on the production companies as it's already government responsibility to waste management?

Yeah bc they don’t give a shit they just care about money and production

There are many types of plastic But there are many many many many grades of plastics Hundreds of thousands if not millions It’s practically impossible to have a recycling facility for each of them Not to mention the nightmare of collecting and sorting them (which actually consumes a high amount of energy and will have a higher carbon footprint and a higher impact on the environment rather than just making new plastics and burning the used ones for fuel)

Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. To really do something good for the planet we need to produce less. If not possible then reuse. Last thing we can do in terms of damage control is recycle. However, since the corporate world is build on growth and profit we can only hope for regulations that will force companies to use better materials etc.

@@IamYuto what are some of the “better materials”?

If recycling give profit, people will actually do it.

Usually when you hear about Mexico you hear about cartel -violence and corruption

@@JV-ll1cu To be fair if I had technicals driving down my pueblo firing off at police every other friday I'd probably be most concerned with that too.

The biggest problem with polystyrene is that it isn't really biodegradable. Throw away that paper, and fungus and bacteria will chow down on those plant fibers and it will be gone in 10 years. Chuck out the plastics, and they'll still be around, intact, 200+ years from now.

That sounds like a conspiracy theory to me. In the UK all the dumps have sections where different materials are put and they're very strict about it. Have you ever been to your local dump and seen the recyclables dumped in the general waste yourself? Might be just one of those things people say to justify why they don't spend a few extra seconds sorting their waste.

@@noire1001 yea its true, the local news has been doing a story about it for years and have spoken to the mayor along with the waste management officials.

Poland sounds like paradise

So you don’t do the spirit level bubbles anymore.

Nice

Here in Arizona US we the same thing

the foam densifier appears in this video is our brand called GREENMAX, we are also the end user of recycled EPS and EPE, would you like to recommand us the so we could buy that from them?

Very interesting

Nice you use toxic volatile substance to recycle. What happens with the acetone that is spent. Acetone as dangerous and volatile.

You could dissolve this plastic using lemon juice

@@nealthomson9505 Dissolve styrofoam in lemon juice? I find that hard to believe...

@@joshjosh575 Distill it off. We had almost 100% recovery of the acetone.

I think the point is that you are still using a product, and that product has to be dealt with after you throw it away. Hardly anything we use is recycled. Most of it--whether paper, plastic, wood, rubber, etc.-- is simply thrown into the landfills. There has to be a better way.

yeah this is the future generations’ problem now lolmao

In the uk the eggs are in plastic same thing but worse lol

@@Anmelve In France eggs are in cardboard boxes.

@@milhooz not in england

@@Anmelve Yes but why not? :D Cardboard is enough, no need to use precious and limited oil to protect eggs

@@milhooz i dunno

but we still use them and cant stop cuz on how useful the properties are for storing food and reduced heat loss, we use them everywhere

when mcdonnalds bigmac box has more nutrition than the bigmac!

Cmon man, it’s the land of gluttony and waste…..now THATS america.

@@deplorablelibertarian Also I think by "we" he meant just the US alone, because I doubt we only make that much Styrofoam in the world.

thousands dying of a disease because people are refusing the vax for "freedom"?

@@livewellwitheds6885 damn right brother those vaccines spread the virus

How many twin towers would that fill?

A foot ball field is roughly an acre of land, as well as a round length, on top of being something most people are familiar with in America. It's actually a pretty good reference point for the size of large objects, where someone might have a hard time visualizing raw measurements.

For non-American, no idea how big they are

@Just to suffer let's see... 300 feet should be 90 meters. Yes, 90 meters is very tall

Is it processed locally, or does it go into a container and get shipped to another country where they ‘process’ it? Just because it’s collected doesn’t mean it’s actually recycled properly.

@@matthewlewis5631 Portugal ships plastic to be processed, which means it most likely ends up in land fills in Asian and even Ocean. 🙁

Only 10-20% of plastic that goes in the recycling bin is actually recycled. The vast majority of plastic cannot be recycled.

Yea good job sending it somewhere else.

land fills will be the mines of the future ,once we have cut down and dug everything else up sad but true

@@sprintershepherd4359 well there are a lot of materials that can be reused so i would agree.

That, I hope is the main Plan.

José, I really like your idea. If I were going to do it, I'd start small, like just one landfill, maybe even one about to be closed/buried, with local government that is friendly (not prone to burying people in fees, prohibitions, and limits). I'd negotiate a deal, and specifically target what pays most, like steel. Many landfills now have an area set aside for appliances, even if a lot slips past. But older landfills didn't even try, and they've got tons of steel, aluminum and copper (think appliance motors). There are machines that *shred* cars, then sort metal with giant magnets. I hope you take action!

@@John.Flower.Productions who said they were worried about landfill space running out?

Hi Jessie, hte foam densifier appears in this video is our brand called GREENMAX, we are also the end user of hat, would you like to recommand us the recycling center so we could buy that from them?

Whaat

😂

I’m actually a dietician for mealworms and I regularly advise them not to eat plastics as they may be unsafe.

@@slothmarathonpromotions2470 You've got a tough job. They never listen, do they?

That's how they do it. New product that doesn't sell well? Just label the cheap products on the market with that stigma and voila!

You can make Napalm out of it too.

@@printingwithlue4310 use it

@@Rahul-kz5fi I have. Dissolve a bunch of Styrofoam into gasoline. It turns into a goopy sticky mess that is almost impossible to put out with water...

Foam+gas=napalm

@@printingwithlue4310 It's not napalm, its a vaguely napalm like substance.

That's because someone has painstakingly cleaned them out like they were doing with the clamshells full of food at the beginning when they were talking about the collection drives.

Yeh I bought them for my dads baptism but then my cousin said she wanted plates not bowls so I had to throw them all away

@@Bas_Lightyear tell her to bring her own plate 😂

Reuse > recycle, why don't they simply sell them back after cleaning?

It is only the tops of the clamshell, not the part in direct contact with food.

the foam densifier appears in this video is our brand called GREENMAX, we are also the end user of recycled EPS and EPE, would you like to recommand us the so we could buy that from them?

I HATE when restaurants use polystyrene foam and plastic containers for to go items, those containers leach toxic chemicals into hot foods. If customers could bring their own containers in when picking up food items that would be so great! Glass containers or bowls would be best in my opinion... I never thought to ask restaurants if I could do this, it's a good idea for less waste, I wonder if they'd do it if I did ask... 🤔

@@veemartini5374 you sound like a crazy person

@@iair-conditiontheoutsideai3076 - Then, That means, anyone with an idea of doing something different, is "Crazy" to you? Sad!

@@robertweekley5926 you've proved to be just as crazy

But thats how i get styrofoam to make stuff

I agree

Yep, taxes solve every problem anyone has ever had, and definitely aren't just a competition suppressing device that massive corporations buy out politicians to implement, with loopholes intentionally built in so they can avoid paying them anyways.

@@smolpener7430 your username and profile pic are funny

Not even a drop in the bucket though. I work in a _small_ EPS facility and our production is double that.

@@fattymcbastard6536 So you kill the Earth twice as fast as they save. 😩

@@mikloscsuvar6097 Yup. We even have one of those EPS compactors too, so all our scrap material is heated and compacted into ingots all ready for the recyclers. We also accept scrap returns from our customers to be recycled. We have even sent shipments of this crap to that picture frame company, and they don't want it anymore. Our parking lot is filling up with tons upon tons of the material and it's free for anyone who wants to pick it up. The issue is nobody wants it. It's a pretty useless material- good for picture frames, indeed, and not much else.

@@fattymcbastard6536 I have heard that some fungii could be used instead of EPS in packaging and it is biodegradable. Most of my plastic waste are milk bottles. Some years ago milk was sold at the local market, but that business was finished.

@@mikloscsuvar6097 Sure. I'll concede that a box can be made from fungi, but is it a realistic replacement? Even assuming the density of the material is the same as the EPS product to be replaced, we would need 10,000 kg per day at my workplace. How huge of a mushroom farm would we need to grow all the material to make our boxes?

Yes, exactly. Plastics, because they are polymers, do not act like metals when you heat them up. Since they don't return to their chemical precursors in that state, recycled plastic is lower quality, more expensive, and more difficult to work with than virgin material. Even making it cost-competitive does not fix those other problems. This method of heating up and crushing the air out of polystyrene foam is clearly not viable as a general method to deal with the plastic problem if it can't readily be turned into things that we need, like how they're "working" on making plates and utensils. If melting plastics down to recover the materials was an actual possibility, why don't we see it commonly done with almost any of the plastics we use in our day-to-day lives? Nobody's complaining about a "scrap metal crisis", because metal can ACTUALLY be recycled into usable raw materials. It's pretty clear to me that Business Insider has an agenda with making this video. They show a tiny operation running a flawed recycling process as proof that the system is working when it clearly isn't, which we can see by the amount of plastic waste polluting the world. Then, at the end, use this as justification for why we shouldn't ban the use of single-use plastics. Ah yes, why stop a problem at its source when society can spend millions of dollars every year cleaning up the mess? Genius! These are the exact same things the plastics industry has always done in order to pretend that its product is sustainable, which it isn't and never was. Even if our current recycling technology could actually deal with the problem, it's unpreventable that some percentage of what we use will end up in the environment. This is simply reality -- not everything can be collected, and sometimes things get lost. The more we manufacture, the more items will make their way into nature. This is how you get our current predicament of microplastics covering literally all of the earth's surface, ending up in every part of the food chain -- the food chain that WE rely on to sustain us. We have no idea what their effects on our bodies will be, and it's recently been found that they can end up crossing the blood-brain barrier. We could be risking our own health just to enrich the plastics industry. It's reduce, reuse, recycle -- in that order. Single-use plastics have to be completely eliminated wherever possible, and it should be replaced by a recyclable/biodegradable alternative ONLY when there is no feasible alternative. We don't have a sustainable plastic yet, don't let these videos convince you otherwise.

How to use less food container for takaways?

@@mikloscsuvar6097 you should figure it out.

@@syedtahbibshams "We should do a thing." "How." "You do it."' Your opinion is worth less than the fraction of a cent worth of electricity it took for you to type it.

🤣 🍭

That’s a marshmallow bro😂

people already do that for plastic packaging! its awesome!!

Ahh yes, a heated used vegetable oil, probably got it from restaurant that doesn't want to use their oil repeatedly

@@herbertant4096 well, they use their oil until just before the food starts tasting like old, burnt oil but it's still good for biodiesel. It's better than it going into landfills and down the drain into water ways.

I mean, it's still highly carcinogenic, still emits carbon dioxide, and still isn't much better than burning it in a landfill, but it is helping you go further on a tank of vegetable oil!

@@traviskitteh all harmful emissions from a vehicle such as carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, particulates, hydrocarbons are less with the use of biodiesel compared to petroleum diesel. But yes, it's not 100% clean just like any energy wouldn't be (other than photosynthesise of non-farmed/naturally occurring plants). Further to the above, carbon emissions for overall extraction is far, far less with biodiesel when compared to petroleum diesel and sulphur is pretty much zero. It's the only alternative fuel approved against the clean airs act. Edit: And when I say biodiesel, I mean vegetable oil and styrene blend (diesel does contain a certain amount of styrene naturally but now we stunt have to harm ecosystems to get more) It's a small contribution but it's a start. We should all do our best to curb our effects on the environment 😊

recycling is a lure, dangled in front of us, delaying public outcry at the consequences while big business makes its money. This stuff is disseminated everywhere, without hope of even partially collecting it back. Better to cease producing it. The biodisel guys are safe, cooking oil is and will be in use for millenia

But what when I need to protect my 2 inch rubber ball that's shipped in a large box filled with styrofoam peanuts?

@@justinnee1572 Use water soluble starch packing peanuts. A lot of places, including where I work, already do. You can then snack on the flavorless packing peanuts your 2 inch rubber ball came in ✌

Too expensive for the vast majority of people

I work in waste management, in fact today I was just processing data I collected this summer, we recycle polystyrene so I don't have waste data on it but off the top of my head if we put all the styrofoam in the landfill it would probably be 2-4%

In my opinion, we need to make use of the products we have. What we need to do is stop *producing* new plastics and reuse and recycle what we've already made until we can't reuse and recycle them anymore, while also focusing on producing cleaner and more environmentally friendly resources.

Making them into cutlery and cups is way better than making them into frames. You want the recycling process to be a loop not a one way ticket. If we can keep recycling the same cups and bowls and make them new we can eliminate most of the environmental impact

@@kellensanna not how it works, plastics are chemically made, we can't recycle them like metals.

To many greedy people in the world that don't care about or environment. This won't stop until we all choke on our plastic water and food.

@@tomislav5689 Unfortunately not everything can be made from metal though. Plastic dose play a useful role some areas where the alternatives don't work for sanitary or safety reasons. Like electrical parts, such as switches. wall outlets. etc. That can't be completely made of something that is conductive to electricity like metal. Some single use plastics do also fall in that category for personal protection. Like disposable gloves. condoms. to name two.

And why is that?

Then stop buying it, I grantee you buy stuff monthy In Plastic containers

It'll be hard for corporation to take this initiative on their own, most effective is to make this into law. Make it a requirement for the entire product lifecycle to be considered. But the administrative work coming from monitoring this would be crazy too..

See this is the type of shit people who don’t understand economics THINK is a good idea. If it made economic sense to recycle we would be doing it more often already. Recycling most products costs more than making new ones.

Ironically hollywood depends on ths material for props, sets, etc.

@@npcimknot958 Then they can set up recycling plants to turn the foam back into new foam for new props

@@npcimknot958 That isn't ironic at all. Also Hollywood using it would be a drop in the ocean compared to its worldwide use as a packaging material.

the foam densifier appears in this video is our brand called GREENMAX, we are also the end user of recycled EPS and EPE, would you like to recommand us the so we could buy that from them?

Throwing it in landfill is better ?

I thought the same but some energy consumption can be mitigated through green energy sources.

Yes but it’s still worth it environmentally, we can generate electricity more environmentally but there’s nothing to make plastic on landfill or environment safer

Who cares

This stuff is disseminated everywhere, collected back mixed with other waste and is too frail and lightweight to sort out industrially. 30% of landfills? We are too eco-poor to use it, are we not?

It might be catched to a filtering system

yes.

Yup

They make pressed paper containers like that which can be composted, unfortunatly landfills are anaerobic environments where nothing composts, so they need to go in a home compost bin or curbside yard waste bin.

@@XVeganDaveGodFreeX i didn't know that about landfills. thank you for the information.

Wait until they come up with micro plastic or micro this and that

Yes, our dumb children and future generations of numb nuts. You really are not making a difference, I am sorry. No one is special. Life is unfair and then we die.

You ain't making no difference. You're just wasting money.

while that sounds cool in a lab, realistically the number of worms required to recycled any reasonable amount of foam would be far to high for practical use.

What do you do with the HBCD

Why

@@brianscalabrine2225 tax issues apparently

@@jxavier3876 The typical fate of a Canadian business!

Crypto HOLDER HERE🚀🚀....BUT WHY EVERY WEEK THEY KEEP SAYING A GAMMA SQUEEZE & IT'S GOING TO SQUEEZE COMING? LOL AT THIS POINT NOBODY KNOWS🤷BUT FOR ME I'M STILL HOLDING

Most time having knowledge or insight about a particular activity can as well be a pleasing exercise. crypto trading is one of the profitable money exchange services that elevates investors and their financial status.

@@wernershantel3317 That's true most people today have been having a lot of failures in forex and crypto sector because of poor orientation and bad expert.

Do anyone know who can help me trade ? I'd really appreciate if you recommend me to any good broker that can help me,you know bots are everywhere.

Trading crypto is very much wise but trading without a professional is very unwise and really bad, you will lose a lot

That would just make gasoline alot more pricy

yep

It's same as in Finland heights are often referred as x times of height of stadium tower (I have no idea it's height). But those reporters usually live near it so they expect that everyone knows it.

The volume of the empire state building is not an iso standard unit of measurement.

@@lightningdemolition1964 There's also "The Wales" here...

@@lightningdemolition1964 Nothing used in the US of A seems to be.