The Plastics problem, unspoken solutions
An area I feel I can speak on relative confidence is plastics. Plastics are an area of studied, I have managed to acquire myself; a diploma in plastic engineering technology, as well as an injection molding certificate and extrusion certificate, also I have had an extensive background in the manufacturing process. Holding every position in a plastic plant from material handler, operator, setup technician, process technician, and owner. As they say, it's skill don't hustle, hustle beats skill. So, over the course of the years, I've learned more, done more, stepping my game up to owner. Only following victim to inter-family greed, ending my company. But if all that nonsense had not occurred, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you, so as Walt Disney once said, “sometimes I kick in the teeth is the best thing in the world for you”. As I see it there are three main problems with the way we deal with plastic nowadays, not our traditional solution has been to say recycle which is great. However, it's always kind of just stopped there, it's not the person whose recycling's fault that it stopped there, it's the companies that took the recycling, Your waste management for example. Up until the ban on plastic West imports in 2018 in China, we would just throw all of our plastic bottles on a ship and send them to China. This is why there's a gigantic pile of plastic garbage in the ocean, along with things being washed out to see from tidal waves and hurricanes you name it. So our first order of business needs to be to rehabilitate our waste management system, there have been recent advances from companies in I believe Australia, They developed a giant tumbling machine that can take mass amounts of ground plastic and sort it to 90 plus percent purity which is good enough to use as a supplements to current plastic processes as a regrind or compound down into new pellets. While plastic recycled down on its own has diminishing returns It can be used as a supplement to decrease the amount of new plastic being introduced into products. The second thing we have to accomplish is making a massive investment and push in our society, political system and manufacturing facilities towards biopolymers, but investing in the recycling program and rehabilitating it We can decrease the amount of new plastics being introduced while simultaneously increasing the amounts we develop in biopolymers, by using this dual approach we can transition off of the olefin plastics everybody hates. While biopolymers have come a long way over the years there is still research to be done so they can surpass other types of plastics. As well with biopolymers we can use them to replace the subsidies farmers now enjoy from ethanol because we also want to transition away from gas and oil entirely, we don't want our farmers to suffer because we want a better world.
Our third problem we have is the types amounts and other additives antioxidants in fillers we put into the plastic to make it more durable and long-lasting, A lot of plastic will just break down on its own if left in the Sun, however the reason some of this doesn't is because we put massive amounts of antioxidants in it, for some components that are structural in nature or need to be stronger will use fiberglass fills, sometimes up to 90%. So, by controlling the number of antioxidants and fill, we can control when and how fast plastic products breakdown.
Regardless of how everybody feels about plastic; I personally love it; some people personally hate it. If we can control these three aspects, we can decrease the negative effect plastic has in the environment and on wildlife, while making it into a greener product.
