When You Lose Greenpeace

Climate Cult Green Police 58 Comments

City Journal- Greenpeace Admits Recycling Doesn’t Work

The Greenpeace report offers a wealth of statistics and an admirably succinct diagnosis: “Mechanical and chemical recycling of plastic waste has largely failed and will always fail because plastic waste is: (1) extremely difficult to collect, (2) virtually impossible to sort for recycling, (3) environmentally harmful to reprocess, (4) often made of and contaminated by toxic materials, and (5) not economical to recycle.” Greenpeace could have added a sixth reason: forcing people to sort and rinse their plastic garbage is a waste of everyone’s time. But then, making life more pleasant for humans has never been high on the green agenda.

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58 Replies to “When You Lose Greenpeace”

  1. So finally the world is going to take my advice and start incinerating all but glass and metal? Generating power as well?

    As to the recycled plastic bags, the durable bags you must now buy have inside a label stating “Made from recycled -plastic bags”. What happens when they are banned?

    1. 100% AGREE. China bought out Calgary-based Alter-NRG in 2015 for their waste-to-energy technology. Last time I checked China was planning to build over 200 waste-to-energy facilities. Yet in Canada, including Alter-NRG’s progressive-mayor run hometown of Calgary, not a single one. There are other companies that could provide similar technologies such as Israel’s “Ecogy” that can take plastic and turn it into fuels like diesel & jet fuel while also providing energy. And given the costs I’ve seen, at current energy prices, a pilot project could have a good shot at being economic. It would take the political will to push away from plastic recycling to try what I think could be a much more efficient use of resources to handle plastic waste. That political will won’t come from anyone from the Left.

        1. I’ve been in a few Finnish towns where the local power plant burns garbage, shredded tires, etc to provide power and district heating. Towel rods in the hotel room were heated with hot water. That was cozy.

          Read of a town owned power plant in Wisconsin that used waste heat to melt snow on sidewalks and streets. I don’t know what they did in summer. Kinda need to have condensing units on the turbine exhaust to get efficient power generation. Maybe they had a river…

          1. A little birdy told me that a natural gas to aviation fuel project is being planned for Alberta. Timing is for Q1 2025 (check out ClearSky Global, https://clearskyglobal.ca/ ). They will use Ecogy technology from Germany. This tech can also be used for waste-to-fuel / waste-to-energy. It’s also touted as low cost (i.e. no subsidies needed).

          2. Martin, I’d heard something to that effect, as well. Some of the towns local to Lethbridge are making plans to send their waste to the plant to save on tipping fees at the Lethbridge dump.

  2. The goal of recycling was to make Liberal voters feel good about themselves, nothing more. Same as all other Lib policies.

    1. True. And the creation of thousands and thousands of make-believe jobs; at the expense of the poor bloody taxpayer.

    2. I recycle everything to the big black bin in the alley. What the city does with it after that is up to them.

      1. My elderly parents live with me and i have tried to explain what goes where in the three containers in the kitchen.
        All for nought,and i don’t blame them.
        At work we recycle tons of paper and corrugated paper on a daily basis all the rest goes in the big green bin at the back.
        Paper is the only thing that recycles with any success.

    3. That isn’t quite true, the goal was to make people feel good about themselves while buying more and more disposable plastic. It’s a sales pitch.

    4. I don’t think that’s right. I think it’s so we don’t worry about supermarkets selling everything packaged in single use containers.

    5. Ward
      A friend from a communist country said years ago, when recycling was a new fad, that it was about conditioning people, and turns out he was/is right!

  4. Most of plastic recycling has always been a government subsidized virtue signaling scam. Years ago, I was involved in an attempted “turnaround” of a low density polyethyline (LDPE) recycling plant – plastic film, shopping bags and the like.

    The plant was started with heavy government subsidies and got off to a mildly promising start based on “free” raw material. Organizations were willing to give away scrap plastic to avoid tipping fees at the dump. This stopped as soon as the artificial demand from competing subsidized plants turned scrap into a saleable commodity!

    The processing of scrap into usable product was labour and energy intensive. The film had to be washed, dried and extruded into pellets. There was a very limited market for the end product which was of much lower quality than “virgin” plastic resin.

    There was never viable business case.

    1. PJ
      BULLSHIT!, did you take lessons from Nold?
      I started up and ran a recycling co. NO F’n washing, that is only needed for house hold GARBAGE.

      1. Exactly, the process was manual sorting, washing, shredding, drying and pelletizing.

        There wasn’t enough clean scrap around. Recycling household scrap is not a tidy business. That’s the point of the article.

  5. Who woulda guessed?

    Next they’ll crunch the numbers on bird blenders and solar power in the frozen north and start advocating for gen 4 nuclear power.

    Bizarro world when the greens use math.

  6. There is no end to the recycling idiocy.

    The best use for old tires is as fuel in cement kilns. Ontario banned this because of emissions.

    Subsequently our used tires started to go to Michigan. Their cement manufactures got a competitive edge from the cheap energy and being downwind we still got the air pollution. A lose – lose proposition.

    Speaking of virtue signaling, remember the fuss Ontario made about closing the Nantikoke coal fired plant. They saved the world and cured cancer!

    Few people noticed that there were over one hundred coal fired plants in adjoining states. The impact on pollution and global temperatures was negligible.

  7. The problem is that Trudeau and his environment henchman Hans Gruber will try use the Greenpeace paper as justification for a complete ban of all plastics , as they have now all been classified as essentially un-recyclable .

    2. Yup! This will only make our GD uniformed but overzealous councilors even more driven to ban plastics.
      The Edmonton and Calgary councilors are already so full of themselves that they cannot be reasoned with.
      Hey! They got elected!! They know stuff!!!
      “FU Peons!”

      1. They got “ELECTED”…?? As if, Total BS.
        The most liberal of them (which is a majority), all had IMO, generous Soros money backing them…the NAZI POS works on both sides of the border.

        And who the hell is Gyoti Gondek anyway..?? Ignorant plut declares a freaking “climate emergency” literally before the crooked vote was over (Dominion Voting machines were used), first time ever…but hey Undork will tell ya no election ever was tampered with or stolen…yea, OK.

        And where is said Calgary Mayor..? In freaking Argentina with 40+ global mayor’s creating their version of the great reset.

        Time to sharpen yer knives…

    1. That’s a nice scam! Get paid to pick trash from the ocean, then dump it in the river, where it flows back down. Repeat.

  9. Just checking for data sheets for some memory and I come across this

    https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-details/micron-named-sustainability-lighthouse-world-economic-forum

    What has the WEF to do with electronics? Who suckered the Micron Board into this? Insidious is the word for it; the world needs to be de-WEFFed.

    My letter to Micron:

    Sir, As an electronics engineer who uses your components, I expect Micron to spend its efforts on making profits from chip design, manufacturer and not waste resources on this sort of crap https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-details/micron-named-sustainability-lighthouse-world-economic-forum

  10. we ship vegetables. Use a lot of plastic. Bags, shrink wrap, ect. We also sell bulk. But few want to buy bulk. Who wants to rumage around in a bin of vegetables to put into a foul cloth bag which in most cases hasn’t been cleaned properly. So the cool thing is to say you use less plastic. But in reality, plastic is the most hygenic way to move produce. Watch what people do, not what they say. H

    1. Lots of the construction materials I use are wrapped in cling-plastic. It keeps fragile moldings and other materials safe and damage-free for transport. In the olden days twine would be used … which is far less effective in protecting EXPENSIVE materials.

      1. Used to work at Amazon. We went through a pallet of shrink-wrap on a busy night. A ton of plastic that all gets cut up and thrown away.
        Everything stored on a pallet had to be wrapped with at least two layers.

        Alternatives are plastic or metal bands which cut hands get tangled everywhere and nobody ever wants to pick up and throw away. And don’t keep dust and water off.

  11. No – no – no !!!

    I recycle vigorously. Every little bit and bottle top I can. Pick-up recycling is economic (for me). I only have to make a “dump run” every 3-4 weeks ($17) instead of paying for the weekly garbage pick-up (2-cans maximum).

    Not mentioned is newsprint recycling. It takes a lot of chemicals to bleach out the ink I have no idea what the poisonous paper mache result is used for – certainly not as food bowels (I hope).

    2. I’ve seen ONP (old newspapers) used to make egg cartons, dividers for apple crates, etc. on its own. No chemicals.

      Also, with the addition of some beer cartons and refined wood chips, I’ve seen ONP used for making paper for core of roof shingles. No chemicals that I noticed.

      Went through a market pulp plant that recycled ONP and some magazines to make pulp to sell to newsprint mills to improve their % recycled stats. That process used hydrogen peroxide and some secret sauces to remove inks in flotation cells.

      I didn’t ask what they did with the ink and clays etc waste stream. As a guest one doesn’t want to be rude.

      The Fraser River was handy mind you. As was a city sewer system.

      1. Thought of a couple of other uses of ONP. Not first hand knowledge from seeing the plant.

        Met someone on a course whose company made ceiling tile for suspended ceiling from ONP. Not much chemical addition other than a fire retardant (boracic acid maybe) and a coat of primer on the down side.

        Have used cellulose loose fill insulation. Basically just shredded ONP plus a fire retardant and maybe something to repel crawlies.

  13. It only makes sense if you look at the modern environmental movement as a religion. Recycling is a ritual. Carbon taxes are tithes. Carbon offsets are buying indulgences. COP, Davos and WEF conferences are religious conclaves. It is Fundamentalism, wrapped in Puritanism, inside of Armageddon prophecies.

    Like any religion, there is gross hypocrisy. The people at the top get rich and the rest of us are expected to sacrifice.

      1. I’m not sure why more garbage incinerators aren’t being built. More electricity, less landfill. We have the technology to control stack emissions.

  14. Recycling did its job. It helped in the march through the institutions. Money was siphoned off to reward activists. It normalized informants and snitch lines. Now, it is no longer useful.

  15. Recycling of plastic makes sense at the source, after all, the waste stream for a plastics plant is likely to be a single kind of plastic, and thus easily recyclable.

    Same thing with paper, if you are running a printing plant, your plant can recycle all it’s paper waste with little difficulty.

    Unfortunately, the powers that be saw that industry was getting money for their waste, and assumed that they could get the same money by picking up randomly mixed plastics and paper products from consumers, which also had the added effect of destroying the market for source waste recyclables.

    metals are still easily recyclable, which is why there is a side industry of random trucks driving around collecting your cans and metal waste before the municipality can get their grubby hands on it.

  16. How will the government explain to the public that when we sheep go through the ritual of sorting our garbage most of it ends up in the same land fill?

    The cage training has been intensive, effective and long-term.

  17. Never take public transit and always use the recycle / garbage bins like you know you’re being scammed.

  18. There’s another reason that I didn’t see mentioned. It’s the kiss of death that comes with government involvement. None of these recycling programs could have ever got off the ground on their own merits so the government gets involved and somehow poisons it. The government loves to get their virtue signalling quota and this is easy pickings for them. In the end, they walk away scot free and somebody is left holding the bag. The taxpayers, investors, and creditors.

  19. I’ve always put my plastic in the waste slot and my waste in the recycle slot because I use logic and the CCP hates it.

  20. Recycling can actually work, but you mostly need to keep the bureaucracy out of the loop. Recycling works pretty well when “scavengers” are allowed free access to the collected trash. Once they are done gleaning through the mess, anything that might be of value is gone and the rest is ready for its “final solution”… burial or incineration.

    Government-run recycling offers far too many opportunities for corruption and graft, so it’s unlikely to ever be reformed once it has been initiated.

  21. My father in law is a 90 yr old retired chemical process engineer that has done oil refinery startups all over the world. To this day he dutifully washes and sorts his plastics and checks the plastic type # on everything to ensure it’s recyclable. He rails against the unwashed masses that won’t follow the rules because even a tiny bit of contamination will “ruin the batch”.

    I asked him a long time ago – would you ever design a process that relied on millions of individual humans to wash and sort the inputs to your refinery, and if they didn’t the refining process would be spoiled? His answer – engineers were smarter back in the day, this is what we get in modern times.

  22. A decade or so ago I queried a Green Party candidate about the number of gas and oil wells there were in Ontario…..his answer was zero…..wrong…..ever heard of Petrolia?
    I also asked about garbage incineration in the province…..again none….wrong
    https://emeraldefw.com/our-history/
    I guess the black plumes of smoke were only released at night when no-one was watching
    How do we keep loosing elections to mindless twits?

  23. Have you been asleep?.. Liberals don’t care if it works or not.. The process is the punishment, not the payoff.. The self loathing cult of environmentalism.. Our government, our society suffers from Munchausen syndrome..

  24. What I want to know is: since I don’t want to reuse or recycle politicians, can they be composted?

  25. Space/volume. Plastic takes up space in trash dumps and “never” degrades. Shredded plastics pack down nicely even if they are not used for fuel.

    Many plastics are multi-layered which makes “recycling” impossible. They all shred and burn. The groceries take care of the bags, everything else is good fuel. .

  27. sorting and washing plastic waste? are you f’in kidding me? is that what you guys are supposed to do?

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