Biodegradeable vs. Recyclable: What’s Better for the Environment?

Everything is recyclable; it's simply a question of timescale.

Hear, hear, PW. GA.

I recycle many things in my fireplace. A small percentage of the liberated energy helps reduce the amount of natural gas I would need to burn to keep my wife happy. The by-products then are spread on the lawn as a sustainable way to raise the pH to make my lousy grass just a little happier. That way, someone doesn't have to crush some poor, innocent stone into dust, seal it in a bag and ship it across the country. Some of the airborne components condense out of the air and irrigate someone else's garden. Other airborne components are absorbed by leaves and in conjunction with our good friend Sol, create sugars and other nutrients these plants and trees desperately need to survive and grow. Then these trees are cut, and eventually end back up in my fireplace again. Amazing how this recycling program works.

Isn't biodegrading just another way of saying recycle?

I imagine a time in the future when we've expended all our resources and the rich people will be the ones who know where all the ancient landfills are. The mining operations to recover the metals and plastics will be like mining today, dangerous to those in the ground but profitable to the owners.

You are right to bring up time. Over time, the Earth's surface will be subducted, melted, mixed and redeposited for someone to find again. We lose some of the precious metals to space probes, but the Earth continues to gain mass from space dust, so I expect it will all even out in the loooong run.

Yup, I wonder if we're not better off putting all of our spent plastics, food wastes and anything other carbon based trash into the land fills. At least the carbon in them is now sequestered and won't soon find its way into the atmosphere.

We won't run out of iron any time soon. It's far more plentiful than one can imagine. Other metals, not so.

I think recycling is better because it creates jobs, reduces need for raw materials, saves on landfill space, in the end reduces costs to the consumer....

Not sure I agree because of the bio-hazard involved. I wonder if the employer is providing medical insurance?

One instance of some unknown biological agent growing in that garbage could push cost saving ratio the other way. Way beyond the point that we would ever want to do it again.

Notice the one guy his PPE face mask is not where it should be!

If we are going to recycle it needs to be on a consumer level. Cleaned and removed from the garbage at home.

Recycling of course. You have to have some place for the Common Core "graduates" to work to their full potential. That's about all they'll be capable of doing. They won't know history, how to read cursive, they won't know how to problem solve, etc. They will be good little ignorant worker bees who are easily controlled.

The recycling comment is tongue in cheek. There needs to be both.

...reduces need for raw materials...

That's the key to recycling. Aluminum is one metal that's fairly expensive to remove from ore. The cost savings for recycled aluminum is enough to make it economically viable.

Dear Mr.doug Sharpe

Certainly Bio-Degradable is the Best and Long Sustaining ln course of millions of years.

Re-Cyclable in few cases will involve some usage of chemicals whrether harmful chemicals or non-harmful chemicals and in course of time result destruction - perhaps after considerable time.

DHAYANANDAN.S

Producing plastic or anything from virgin raw material consume chemicals too.

At least recycling reduce fossil energy and raw material usage and solid waste compare with new production.

Unless the raw material is cheap and available in large amount, otherwise industries will choose to recycle by cost consideration. One example would be recycling of glass, seldom heard of.

So many great comments! Thank you, all, for reading and sharing your insights (including the humorous ones).

One of the things you've made me think more about is this notion of timescale. Yet I'm not sure I agree with pwslack that "everything is recyclable; it's simply a question of timescale". If we substitute "biodegradeable" for "recyclable", however, then I'm inclined to agree.

Over time, materials such as rubber and plastic degrade - though not necessarily biodegrade, according to the ASTM's "biodegradable" definition. If we wait too long to recycle these materials, then they may be less valuable (or not useful at all) because serious degradation has occurred.

With regard to biodegradability, what is a "reasonable" amount of time to expect a material to break down completely and meet all of the ASTM's requirements? Is it the original user's lifetime? Otherwise, if everything is "biodegradable", then that term no longer tells us much.

There are some hazardous and toxic chemicals and materials that need to be destroyed....In which case plasma torch method works well....

"What Is Solid Waste, and How Much Is Produced?

The United States, with only 4,6% of the world's population, produces about 33% of the world's solid waste: any unwanted or discarded material that is not a liquid or a gas. About 98.5% of this solid waste comes from (1) mining, (2) oil and natural gas production, (3) agriculture (Figure 9-17, p. 203), (4) sewage sludge, and (5) industrial activities used to produce goods and services for consumers (Figure 13-1).

The remaining 1.5% of solid waste produced in the United States is municipal solid waste (MSW) from homes and businesses in or near urban areas. The amount of MSW, often called garbage, currently produced in the United States each year comes to about 200 million metric tons (440 billion pounds )-almost twice as much as in 1970. Each year this is enough waste to fill a bumper-to-bumper convoy of garbage trucks encircling the globe almost eight times.

The annual MSW amounts to an average of 680 kilograms (1,500 pounds) per person in the United States, the world's highest per capita solid waste production and many times the rate in developing countries. About 54% of this MSW is dumped in landfills, 30% is recycled or composted, and 16% is burned in incinerators.

What Does It Mean to Live in a High-Waste Society? Here are a few of the solid wastes U.S. consumers throwaway:

. Enough aluminum to rebuild the country's entire commercial airline fleet every 3 months

. Enough tires each year to encircle the planet almost three times

. About 18 billion disposable diapers per year, which if linked end to end would reach to the moon and back seven times

. About 2 billion disposable razors, 30 million cell phones, 18 million computers, and 8 million television sets each year

. Some 8.6 million metric tons (17 billion pounds) of polystyrene peanuts per year used to protect shipped items

Figure 13.1 Sources of the estimated 11 billion metric tons (12 billion tons) of solid waste produced each year in the United States. Mining, agricultural, and industrial activities produce 55 times as much solid waste as household activities. (Data from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Bureau of Mines)

. Used carpet that would cover 7,800 square kilometers (3,000 square miles)-more than enough to carpet the state of Delaware

. About 1.7 billion metric tons (3.7 trillion pounds) of construction waste per year-an average of 6 metric tons (12,800 pounds) per person

. About 2.5 million nonreturnable plastic bottles every hour

. About 670,000 metric tons (1.5 billion pounds) of edible food per year

. Enough office paper to build a 3.5-meter (13-foot) high wall from New York City to San Francisco, California

. Some 186 billion pieces of junk mail (an average of 646 per American) each year, about 45% of which are thrown in the trash unopened

This is only part of the 1.5% of all solid waste labeled "municipal" in Figure 13-1."

http://www.geowords.org/ensci/13/13.htm

"Solid wastes are only raw materials we're too stupid to use." ARTHUR C. CLARKE

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification

http://rebar.ecn.purdue.edu/ect/Links/technologies/other/plasma2.aspx

Apply these figures of percentage of waste, to the percentage of the world's production, then refigure and repoint fingers…Efficiency of production must always be accounted for in these arguments. As one example, the United States burns oil at a far higher efficiency rate than any other country on the Planet. Maybe we shouldn't let China et.al burn it until they achieve our efficiency….

So do CR4 bloggers get to critique their own work? :) In the spirit of this excellent discussion, I'm finding fault with my own definition of "recyclable". Here's what I wrote:

"As commonly understood, 'recyclable' refers to things that can be reused instead of thrown into the trash."

This definition now seems too vague, as Sir Brave Robin's comment shows. Otherwise, burning some scrap wood in the fireplace is just "recycling" the wood into flame, heat, ashes and gas. In order for something to be "recyclable" then, does it have to be manufactured in the first place - and then re-manufactured into something else?

Here another thought based on your comments above. Is my original question, "Biodegradable vs. Recyclable: What's Better for the Environment?", also too vague? Is it impossible to say what's "better" in a universal sense since we must consider the properties of the individual material? For example, if aluminum production is both expensive and resource-intensive, does that make recycling not just the "better" option but also the "best" option when compared to mining for bauxite, refining to alumina, etc.? Paper products and plastics, both collectively and individually, have different properties and costs (both environmental and to a company's bottom line) associated with manufacture and re-use.

If the question is "What's better for the environment?", then constraining the choices to recyclable and biodegradable seems arbitrary, though you may have reasoning I am not privy to. In my opinion, biodegradable materials are those that we can let the environment recycle without further inputs from us humans. Recycling implies some further human use of a previously used material.

I would stress, however, that our concern should be toward environmental impact of obtaining and using the materials. Every action taken to obtain material from the Earth affects the environment in ways we know and ways we don't know. Reusing something helps minimize that environmental impact by delaying the need to obtain more of the raw material from the Earth. A biodegradable object is something that will require replacement of that object, so there is still an affect on the environment. A recycled object is something that will also require replacement, but its use in a different needed object may alleviate the environmental impact of the creation of the new object.

It seems to me the subject of repairable rarely comes up in the discussion of environmental issues. Repairable objects are objects which do not need to be replaced, or perhaps, entirely replaced. In general, replacing an object will have a greater environmental impact than repairing an object.

So, in the discussion of biodegradable and recyclable, I propose adding the subject of repairable. Biodegradable v recyclable v repairable: What's better for the environment?

I like your definitions of "biogradable" and "recyclable", reward54. They identify the actors and define the extent of human involvement.

The point you've made about including the concept of "repairable" is well-taken. I'd like to include it in our discussion.

Today it seems that some consumer goods are made cheaply and sold inexpensively. Coffee pots and toasters are two examples. For the consumer then, it's more cost-effective to discard and replace the item than to buy a new one. Why pay $8 to fix a $10 coffee pot? In business, we use the term beyond economical repair (BER) to describe this situation. If a $100,000 machine is going to cost $80,000 to repair, we can make a strong case to Accounting that the time to replace the equipment is now.

Why do you suppose that the concept of "repairable" is seldom used in discussions about the environment? Is it because environmentalists are thinking only of "throwaway" items like paper plates, plastic water bottles, and Styrofoam dishes? Is it because some don't understand how things are made - a function of their education perhaps, but maybe even an intellectual and cultural sense of separation from engineering and manufacturing?

Hi Doug,

Nah, we're just having fun with the semantics.

My take on recycling is taking materials that are usually reprocessed back into the same or similar material to be used again. Aluminium, glass, paper, plastics come to mind. I think of recycling is where the form of the material is lost and has to be re-created.

I think re-use is different from recycling as the material remains in its original form. When I was growing up, the milk jugs were re-used, not recycled. The Honstra Farm folks in Hingham would pick up the empties out of the insulated aluminium cooler on the back porch and take them back to their dairy where they washed them and used them again. In their place, they put the recently cleaned and freshly filled milk jugs from their grass-fed, free-range dairy cows. But we didn't call it that back in the day, nobody considered that 'sexy', the cows were just put out to pasture to graze.

My take on bio-degradable materials are those materials that we can 'quickly' put back into our landscape without having to manage it. I maintain large compost piles (not very well maintained, but the stuff still rots in spite of my neglect, thank Goodness). Bio-degradable products are those that can be composted back into basic elements in a reasonably short time period by biological processes (bacteria, fungi, maggots, raccoons, etc.)

All the other waste products will eventually degrade into basic elements over some non-specified period of time. For instance, leave plastic shopping bags out in the sun, and the UV will start breaking up the polymer chains turning it into dust. We live in the midst of many cycles of various sizes and durations. Some cycles are geologically long, other cycles are days or less.

Cheers !!

Thanks for sharing these definitions, Brave Sir Robin. Happy Thanksgiving, too, as I see that your location is now in the States.

Yes, the distinction you've made between re-use and recycling is an important one. I like the example of the milk jugs. So much of what's manufactured today, at least in terms of consumer products, is designed to be discarded after a single use. Some items may end up in the recycling bin or even in the compost pile, of course, but the product life cycle does not call for using that item "as is" more than once.

With regard to the example of the milk containers, some environmentalists would ask about the fuel that's used to heat the water to clean the jugs. Cows produce more than just milk, however, so perhaps a methane digester for biogas would alleviate their concerns about fossil fuels. Farmers have always made good use out whatever's available, of course, and this "old fashioned" concept is now ahead of its time.

Hi Doug,

I hope you had a good Thanksgiving. We certainly did, and have much to be thankful for.

I seem to recall reading somewhere, in a galaxy far, far away (meaning I'll never find it now), that the cost (in energy and resources) to transport and clean re-usable glass containers exceeded the 'costs' of producing new disposable units.

I'm sure the milk jug falls into that category. Even though we use polyethylene milk jugs made from oil, the amount of oil consumed to produce and transport the plastic jug is less than the oil used to collect up, wash, sterilize and re-use the glass milk jugs.

(But that doesn't make people feel good, like they do if they re-use the glass ones. Never let pesky little facts get in the way of good emotions. )

Besides, for those of us who dutifully recycle our old milk jugs, they come back as deck boards or park benches.

I believe 'bar bottles' is one example that does make cents. Otherwise, the brewers would have abandoned this long ago. I suspect the tightly controlled, closed loop supply cycle makes it worthwhile, i.e. the same truck that delivers, goes back to the brewery with the empties, and the distribution is relatively consolidated, if that makes some semblance of sense.

Cheers !!

(Psst, I've always been a Yank, but with an affinity for the land of my ancestors. Especially their special sense of humor. )

Hello Brave Sir Robin,

We celebrated our Canadian Thanksgiving back in October, but am glad that you enjoyed your day of thanks in the States!

I like your point about people wanting to "feel good" about what they're doing (or, rather, think that they're doing) to help the environment. Their perception creates their reality, even when the facts don't support their feelings.

Then, when some news article explains how recycling sometimes requires more resources (e.g., oil) than other methods, some people may begin to complain: "Oh, so now recycling is bad for the environment? This is like how 'they' told us that eggs were bad for us, and now are good for us. The same with butter and margarine, too."

The ability to avoid oversimplification and to see complexity is so critical - and one of the reasons why I enjoy CR4 so much.

Doug