we have a plastics problem

the plastics industry has proposed a solution
it is called "advanced recycling"
otherwise known as pyrolysis

“They heat plastics in an absence of oxygen, they keep heating them until they melt, they turn into little gas vapors and are cooled down in a liquid feedstock that becomes the feedstock for new plastics and chemicals again,”

quoted by an industry insider

the problem is many-fold ..

“This two-part process is known to emit pollutants like heavy metals, including lead and mercury, dangerous organic pollutants like dioxin and PCBs, and host of other pollutants like nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, and the climate-damaging pollutants are significant,”

today our state senate is voting on whether or not to allow a facility to be built here
we are hoping this does not pass the gas

beware of similar proposals in your states

https://ecori.org/33739-2/

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Comments

of industries' in trying to sell poison with wishful thinking and half truths
for some reason, rather than speaking of the potential consequences to our health
this type of commercial enterprise does not value the well being of people
go figure Wink

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13 users have voted.

Researchers at Georgia State University produced new rodents without hormone vasopressin in an effort to raise 'social communication' between the rodents.

Oops, seems the experiment went sideways ..

Scientists accidentally create super-vicious HAMSTERS in a lab after gene editing experiment goes wrong and makes aggressive rodents chase, bite and pin each other down

The components of CRISPR-Cas9 – the DNA sequence and the enzymes needed to implant it – are often sent into the body on the back of a harmless virus so scientists can
control where they go.

emphasis mine

Sounds like they are trying figure out how to make us sedate?

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@QMS
and you are being generous to go along with the benign sounding “sociability” aim of these genetic hacks.

The MIC would likely be very interested in aggressive trans-humans that wouldn’t need to be conditioned to kill. No need to draft your soldiers if you can breed (or desensitize regular) humans that are predisposed to violence and aggression.

‘Nuf said.

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9 users have voted.

Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all."
- John Maynard Keynes

lotlizard's picture

@ovals49  
(Beware of spoilers)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan_%282016_film%29

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The Liberal Moonbat's picture

@QMS @QMS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_(2005_film)

From the Plot:

They find its 30 million colonists dead, and a recording that explains an experimental chemical to suppress aggression had been added into Miranda's atmosphere. The population became so docile they stopped performing all activities of daily living and placidly died. A small proportion of them had the opposite reaction and became insanely aggressive and violent. The Alliance had created the Reavers....

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

@The Liberal Moonbat

thanks for posting!

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@QMS wasn’t there a Firefly movie about that kind of experiment?

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Lily O Lady's picture

@mweens

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"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"

Lookout's picture

The first of which should be to reduce the use of plastics, but instead the US is building new plastic factories. (gotta do something with dirty fracked oil). How many of you accept plastic bags at the grocery store? That's an easy step...use your own bags.

Next reuse plastic bags multiple times. I do use some plastic bags... for example, to give away produce.

And finally recycle it into tiles, bricks, blocks, and other products.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J7JZcsoHyA]
https://preciousplastic.com/
This does not require separating into types (number). Basically these machines simply heat and compress into attractive tiles and blocks.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40486883/these-diy-machines-let-anyone-recyc...
Some how in the US we've become incompetent. Recycling plastic machines should exist at every recycling center and dump. The only full melt is needed for 3D printing material, otherwise it is just heat and pressure.

Somewhere along the way we've lost our resourcefulness and creativity.

Edit to add another great project...
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-fI4ahyHNg]

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

enhydra lutris's picture

@Lookout @Lookout

ChicoBag a big line of mostly stuffable re-useable bags, day packs and other gear made from recycled platic: https://chicobag.com/ They also imprint these products with company logos, and I'm pretty sure that REI's stuffable lightweight small duffel bag is their product, for example.

be well and have a good one

edit - removed extraneous "m" from trade name ChicoBag

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

usefewersyllables's picture

but back when we lived in the Bay Area, we were the greenest recycling people you've ever seen. We diligently recycled everything we could, spending hours separating This from That. And we'd happily put our special little bins out on the curb, where the Special Green And Yellow Recycling Truck would come pick them up. Not that nasty smelly white trash truck. Oh no, not us- we were in the very vanguard of Doing It Right. Preach it!

That is, until the day that we were leaving California to move to Colorado. I had some items too big for the nasty smelly white truck, so I drove them over to the trash company's facility in Redwood Shores. And as I was standing there, I watched a long stream of nasty smelly white trucks and Special Green And Yellow Recycling Trucks drive up, dump their loads into the same single pile of nasty smelly white-truck trash, and drive away. Then, the nasty smelly white front-end loaders would mix the pile together as they shoveled all of it into the same single hopper.

*Fuck*. The end of innocence is a painful thing. Anyway, I've never bothered with it again...

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10 users have voted.

Twice bitten, permanently shy.

@usefewersyllables
our town recycles paper only when they can actually sell it, otherwise we pay to have it incinerated along with the stinky stuff. Additionally, I suspect that many ‘pay-as-you-throw’ bags of household trash have plenty of material that should have been recycled.

When the recycling program was first initiated many years ago nothing was being recycled for many months. When people discovered the mix-stir-and incinerate sham, it was explained as a “training period” to teach people how to properly separate materials.

I read recently that something on the order of 5% of plastics in the waste stream end up being recycled. That’s much less than I would have guessed, and a very depressing result. It seems that the only way to slow the avalanche of plastic waste is to stop making it in the first place!

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11 users have voted.

Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all."
- John Maynard Keynes

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2022/04/28/scientists-use-ai-t...

But we probably won't reach out for that brass ring until our backs are against the wall.

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"Without the right to offend, freedom of speech does not exist." Taslima Nasrin

@Fishtroller 02

and the consequence of this AI engineered enzyme is what?
It will take more than fantasy and magic to make these pollutants
disappear. Also, what works in a lab does not necessarily transfer to
conditions in the real world. This is like hurtling waste at the sun.

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usefewersyllables's picture

@QMS

Michael Crichton's "Andromeda Strain" where one of the capabilities of the alien organism was that it ate all plastics, so all of the elastomer gaskets that sealed the biohazard research station got eaten, letting it out into the wild?

We need to be very thoughtful indeed about engineering up organisms to do our dirty work for us. Something that eats plastics might have some downright *gnarly* knock-on effects.

I can see the press conference right now: "Who could have foreseen this?". Playing Gawd usually doesn't work out as expected. Maybe Confucius can do his crosswords with a pen, but the human race as a whole ain't that smart. Do not call up that which you cannot put down!

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Twice bitten, permanently shy.

Jumped me for not recycling, not using clotheslines, not shopping at Aldi's, and on and on.
First: locally, we could recycle glass, aluminum cans,cardboard, newspapers, and certain plastics. That program ceased. So, to recycle required driving a 100 mile round trip and pay a fee with each delivery. No, thanks.
Clotheslines: It is so humid here, at certain times of year, clothes went "sour" on the lines, required a second washing. No, thanks.
Aldi's: 80 mile round trip. No, thanks.
I do not use re-usable cloth or heavy plastic bags for groceries, but use them repeatedly when traveling for all kinds of things. I have some that are damn near 15 years old. They are used today.
My plastic bags from the grocery store: I use them 3, sometimes 4 times, taking food home, then to the office, using as bags to help with the smell of garbage in the trash cans, etc...empty cat food cans go into a bag before they go to the can, and small trash cans are lined with them.
A look in my spice rack, or my medicine cabinet...and food pantry...plastic everywhere.
Oceans? Islands of plastic.
We need to return to glass and paper, but TPTB will not tolerate that.
Nor will they tolerate going off fossil fuels.
I am so glad I am old.

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

Let us know how the vote went.

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

@on the cusp

Very disappointing Sad
Our district rep voted in favor
5 did not vote

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