There is actually a bit of sense in there. Paper cups weren’t simply paper - its tetrapak-like material with plastic coating inside. They are notoriously hard to recycle. Plain plastic cups on the other hand are made from single material, most likely PET. Moreover, they are transparent, without colouring additives.
There are two reasons why colour in plastic makes it harder to recycle. First, pigment is a completely different substance, which behaves differently from plastic itself. It makes it harder to “re-melt” into stable material. If you ever 3d printed anything with matte/gloss filament, you’ll know that it is more finicky than plain one.
Second, uncoloured plastic can be coloured into anything, while other needs to be either sorted by colour or mixed with strong dye (black, gray, dark brown, etc) to have consistent colour.
PET itself is pretty easy to turn into something new, actually. A workshop near me had a live demo of the whole process - chipping it into small pieces, feeding to the heated tube, and then injection molded into trinkets. Industrial grade processing usually have “turned into pellets” step in between, but it’s basically the same.
Plastic-covered paper, on the other hand, should be somehow separated first, and then handled with two different approaches - one for paper, another one for plastic film. Doable, but much harder. Paper straw can probably decompose by itself, without any special conditions.
UPD: Be wary that recycling is not a panacea. There’s multiple videos about how recycling plastic isn’t actually a thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68zjxTTl5Ik for example.
this would be a legitimate argument if any of the plastic was actually recycled … last time i checked it all goes into the incinerator to make electricity out of it.
the recycling of plastic is difficult, not because melting and re-shaping the plastic itself is difficult (it is not, it’s trivially easy); the problem is that you basically never get correctly-sorted garbage. when you get “plastic waste”, it has at least 20% things in it that are not plastic, including food waste, aluminum, paper, etc. some even throw toxic batteries in it, chemicals (soap), pharmaceuticals … then there’s the risk of infections on the plastic (viruses, bacteria, fungi). there’s absolutely no chance that you’re just gonna take plastic waste and mold it into a new shape that’s food safe. best you can do is to mix it with concrete and use it as a construction material in road construction.
Even if you perfectly sort the plastic out, it can only be recycled about 1.5 times before the structure changes so much it’s not suitable for the original use. Plastic recycling is a scam.
yeah btw this is because it’s not purely-sorted input. mixing is up with other plastics is what leads to the molecules to not properly align and that’s what makes it brittle.
There is actually a bit of sense in there. Paper cups weren’t simply paper - its tetrapak-like material with plastic coating inside. They are notoriously hard to recycle. Plain plastic cups on the other hand are made from single material, most likely PET. Moreover, they are transparent, without colouring additives.
There are two reasons why colour in plastic makes it harder to recycle. First, pigment is a completely different substance, which behaves differently from plastic itself. It makes it harder to “re-melt” into stable material. If you ever 3d printed anything with matte/gloss filament, you’ll know that it is more finicky than plain one. Second, uncoloured plastic can be coloured into anything, while other needs to be either sorted by colour or mixed with strong dye (black, gray, dark brown, etc) to have consistent colour.
PET itself is pretty easy to turn into something new, actually. A workshop near me had a live demo of the whole process - chipping it into small pieces, feeding to the heated tube, and then injection molded into trinkets. Industrial grade processing usually have “turned into pellets” step in between, but it’s basically the same.
Plastic-covered paper, on the other hand, should be somehow separated first, and then handled with two different approaches - one for paper, another one for plastic film. Doable, but much harder. Paper straw can probably decompose by itself, without any special conditions.
UPD: Be wary that recycling is not a panacea. There’s multiple videos about how recycling plastic isn’t actually a thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68zjxTTl5Ik for example.
this would be a legitimate argument if any of the plastic was actually recycled … last time i checked it all goes into the incinerator to make electricity out of it.
the recycling of plastic is difficult, not because melting and re-shaping the plastic itself is difficult (it is not, it’s trivially easy); the problem is that you basically never get correctly-sorted garbage. when you get “plastic waste”, it has at least 20% things in it that are not plastic, including food waste, aluminum, paper, etc. some even throw toxic batteries in it, chemicals (soap), pharmaceuticals … then there’s the risk of infections on the plastic (viruses, bacteria, fungi). there’s absolutely no chance that you’re just gonna take plastic waste and mold it into a new shape that’s food safe. best you can do is to mix it with concrete and use it as a construction material in road construction.
edit: the video you linked is really watchable.
Even if you perfectly sort the plastic out, it can only be recycled about 1.5 times before the structure changes so much it’s not suitable for the original use. Plastic recycling is a scam.
yeah btw this is because it’s not purely-sorted input. mixing is up with other plastics is what leads to the molecules to not properly align and that’s what makes it brittle.