Plastic film and bag recyling - is it real?

[Serial_Apologist]

Par for the course sadly. Not a cabinet maker, then! Though using green wood for cabinets probably wouldn't have worked well.

I happen to think MDF is a wonderful product - a friend of my father made him a beautiful "mahogany" wall installation for his reel-to-reel tapes which fooled everyone. How environmentally friendly is its manufacture, though?

[Serial_Apologist]

There is currently no "good" solution to the plastics problem so my own view is that it is necessary to go for the least bad. Any processing to produce material that can be used to make other materials uses resources such as energy and water, and may result in additional pollution problems. The use of plastic bottles to make fabric, for instance, adds to the microplastics problem, and shifts the waste problem along to fast fashion/discarded clothing.
Proper incineration(ie correctly set-up and managed plants) to produce heat for district heating or to produce energy still seems to me to be the least bad solution, but is the one most likely to be rejected, often due to misinformation that mobilises public protest. All the objections(pollution, traffic increases around the plant, not "green"etc) apply to all the other processes, but because they happen elsewhere(largely abroad in countries that can't cope and/or don't have adequate controls) such negatives can be conveniently put in the "out of sight, out of mind" bin.
As I have always argued, so long as attention is focused on throwing away(whether directly through general waste or indirectly through recycling) any solution is a losing battle. The focus needs to be as much(arguably more) on preventing material becoming waste in the first place as dealing with the waste. Government recycling targets imposed on councils may reduce waste to landfill, but the resultant hodgepodge of solutions, depending on how the councils meet those targets( which contracts for taking material for recycling are chosen and how much money a council can justify spending on a solution) makes for confusion and eventually a level of non-compliance with the public, and also just shifts the problem elsewhere. Whether that "elsewhere" is an adequate solution is another matter altogether, and not one that I suspect councils are generally inclined to check out too closely, if at all, especially given the hopeless local government funding situation. Just get rid has to be the priority.

An excellent comprehensive account of the problems. The environmental drawbacks of oil/plastic-based artificial fibre for long seen as a substitute for wool, silk and cotton amount to a considerable blow for environmentalist calls for a complete end to livestock farming. Some backtracking on such hard line position taking is surely necessitated? This is a much wider discussion, admittedly.

[oddoneout]

I happen to think MDF is a wonderful product - a friend of my father made him a beautiful "mahogany" wall installation for his reel-to-reel tapes which fooled everyone. How environmentally friendly is its manufacture, though?

It has its problems. As ever the source of the wood component can be questionable, the compounds used in its manufacture are unpleasant(such as formaldehyde), and the energy required to produce the finished product has to be taken into account.
I can see why it is popular, and there are certainly situations where it may be the best option, but I am not a fan. From my experience it isn't a good material to make shelves unless extra support is used - it sags - and I hated the amount of sanding(and the resulting quantity of very fine dust) and painting it took to get a decent finish on a built in storage unit I had made in a previous house.The chemicals offgassed from unfinished MDF gave me a very unpleasant allergic reaction when I had to sleep in a room containing unpainted cupboards, and I can't see it would be good for anyone, especially children, to be exposed to that.
Its end of life issues are problematic,not least because it doesn't last as long as other woodbased materials,but also deconstructing glued fine woodfibre isn't straightforward. The compounds it contains pose problems for combustion or landfill.

[oddoneout]

Triggered by looking at another link from above, I found this:

https://packagingeurope.com/news/tesco-adopts-paper-packaging-for-pocket-tissues/10820.article

Now is that really better? I don't know. Paper is a lot more energy intensive and environmentally damaging than many people realise, though it can be recycled, or burnt at the point of use - for those of us who still have any form of fireplace or burner.
I suppose some low grade but not too disgusting paper can be kept and used to help burn garden waste - but again that only works for people who have gardens and who use bonfires or incinerators to clear unwanted wood etc.

Paper production can be a pretty dirty and energy demanding process, but unlike plastic it is genuinely biodegradable in its basic state(ie not film coated etc), as well as being suitable for combustion in the likes of energy from waste power plants.
Using proper hankies is of course still an alternative option...

[Serial_Apologist]

Paper production can be a pretty dirty and energy demanding process, but unlike plastic it is genuinely biodegradable in its basic state(ie not film coated etc), as well as being suitable for combustion in the likes of energy from waste power plants.
Using proper hankies is of course still an alternative option...

Or in other words, not something that is a tissue!"

[Serial_Apologist]

It has its problems. As ever the source of the wood component can be questionable, the compounds used in its manufacture are unpleasant(such as formaldehyde), and the energy required to produce the finished product has to be taken into account.
I can see why it is popular, and there are certainly situations where it may be the best option, but I am not a fan. From my experience it isn't a good material to make shelves unless extra support is used - it sags - and I hated the amount of sanding(and the resulting quantity of very fine dust) and painting it took to get a decent finish on a built in storage unit I had made in a previous house.The chemicals offgassed from unfinished MDF gave me a very unpleasant allergic reaction when I had to sleep in a room containing unpainted cupboards, and I can't see it would be good for anyone, especially children, to be exposed to that.
Its end of life issues are problematic,not least because it doesn't last as long as other woodbased materials,but also deconstructing glued fine woodfibre isn't straightforward. The compounds it contains pose problems for combustion or landfill.

I hadn't realised that about MDF, odders. Those shelves now house my 2000-odd audio cassettes and CDs! The answer at the end of the proverbial still has to be wood, then, preferably harvested from fast-growing foreign tree species with sustainable management allowing for natural regeneration at ground level.

I think I feel a thread on sustainable agriculture coming on.

[oddoneout]

I hadn't realised that about MDF, odders. Those shelves now house my 2000-odd audio cassettes and CDs! The answer at the end of the proverbial still has to be wood, then, preferably harvested from fast-growing foreign tree species with sustainable management allowing for natural regeneration at ground level.

I think I feel a thread on sustainable agriculture coming on.

It's a bit of a problem in some respects because the likes of MDF, chipboard and other such particle boards are in theory a way of using "unusable" parts of the original tree, so a good thing. However the two main issues for all such products are the source of the "waste", ie is it genuinely waste or is it virgin wood(see also Drax, and the wood pellet industry), and the adhesives used to stick it all together.

[Dave2002]

The focus needs to be as much(arguably more) on preventing material becoming waste in the first place as dealing with the waste.

Sadly that isn't always so easy. Requires more careful management [by users and others ...] and good storage.
We buy food, which then doesn't keep as well as we'd like, or food which clogs up our fridge, so eventually it has to be thrown away anyway.
A lot of the food we waste goes into our compost bin, but if we didn't screw up the supply/demand issue it wouldn't be there.
OTOH if we only ever bought food items as we need to we'd spend a lot of time doing wasteful travelling, not to mention wasting our time.

We try to be "good", but often fail.

[oddoneout]

Sadly that isn't always so easy. Requires more careful management [by users and others ...] and good storage.
We buy food, which then doesn't keep as well as we'd like, or food which clogs up our fridge, so eventually it has to be thrown away anyway.
A lot of the food we waste goes into our compost bin, but if we didn't screw up the supply/demand issue it wouldn't be there.
OTOH if we only ever bought food items as we need to we'd spend a lot of time doing wasteful travelling, not to mention wasting our time.

We try to be "good", but often fail.

You are right, but my comments were about the problem of plastic, and how much of it is created as waste in packaging and the like.

[Dave2002]

You are right, but my comments were about the problem of plastic, and how much of it is created as waste in packaging and the like.

Indeed, but the observation generalises, so that we should make efforts to avoid creating products which then don't get used, and worse than that, deteriorate and eventually have to be disposesd of.

[alywin]

And then there is the problem of nurdles:

Explained: What are nurdles? | Fauna & Flora (fauna-flora.org)

[oddoneout]

There are a couple of good points in this article, but they are rather lost in the wooliness. It's on topic though so I'll offer it up.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/04/soft-plastic-recycling-burned-con

The podcasts the writer is involved with might be of interest

https://www.talkingrubbishpodcast.com/