Plastic Options

Well, currently plastics are very topical and many of us predicted what would happen; yet again several wealthy people invested in plastics in their infancy and as they grew in popularity they made a small fortune and sold these businesses off with no regard for the consequences as only money was their motivator and nothing else, and they used misleading terms such as plastics are safe to use or switching from paper bags to plastic containers will save the trees; and who has already taken their huge profits, and who is left with the bills for their actions, yes the taxpayers around the world. Now we have the typical scenario of the few rich people getting richer and walking away with huge profits and the Government (taxpayers) footing the bill, and this is fairly typical of many industries and not just packaging.

What about the financial and environmental aspects? an important question and the simple answer is around Are there options? of course they're are, but capitalism only focuses on short and medium term investments to make huge profits and when something is at its peak it is sold off to make even bigger profits for those with the huge capital investment sums, in the know. Same old, same old.

There are many options and the obvious is glass, glass was used for decades for many things such as battery cases in early forms of wet batteries known as Le clanche cells but are better known as the lead acid batteries today and most people will see them as car or van batteries and glass was used for good reason as it is impervious to acids and many other things and it was more commonly used for glass bottles for many drinks before plastics were used. How many here are old enough to remember collecting glass bottles such as pop bottles, beer bottles, and any other bottle which had a deposit? yes, you bought a product such as a bottle of pop and you paid 1d or 2d deposit and when you returned the empty bottle you got this deposit back; many of us over a certain age collected all the empties and sorted them into brands as we knew which bottle came from which pop manufacturer and which shops in the area sold that brand of pop in that sixe of bottle. Much the same happened with beer bottles, they were sorted into different brewery and we used to know which of the local pubs sold that breweries products and as every pub has an off sales, we would return lots of empties to each pub and make our pocket money for the week.

Glass is used for medical and scientific equipment as it doesn't leach toxic compounds into its contents, things such as bisphenol which is a known endocrine disrupter, where anything leaching into them could contaminate anything from a series of medical or scientific experiments and skew the results, and even the railways advertised "glass lined containers" for their bulk liquid carrier tanks for products such as milk.

Costs and environmental aspects appear not to add up as the cost of producing a glass bottle is around 4 X that of plastic, and it produces around 4 X the emissions of a plastic bottle, so is this really an issue or is it merely a simple play on words. Milk came in glass bottles and when they were replaced with plastic bottles a survey was done using milk bottles and this found that each milk bottle was used an average 117 times, beer bottles were more robust and used 244 times, and pop bottles for fizzy pop were used an average 447 times before they were replaced, and they all had aluminium screw on, or steel crown, or aluminium screw on caps. Basically 100% recyclable, and this makes both their costs and environmental impacts negliable when their lifecycle costs were factored in, now compare this to a youngster buying a bottle of pop in his plastic one use bottle and throwing it out of his/her car window along with their take away container when they have finished eating.

Glass doesn't stop there as many other things come in glass containers, jam, pickles, and even hot dog sausages; and while many large companies have their own individual designs of containers, many glass jars many companies buy from a range of specific mass produced uniform glass jars so one company may put pickles cabbage or pickled onions in their, another company may use the same standard glass jar and fill theirs with honey, or marmalade. So, there is no reason why a simple deposit could be charged and when you take the empty back you are credit with this amount against your shopping bill. What they actually do is have recycling containers for many items and glass is one and the issue is that once you drop your container into the recycling bin, it smashes and cannot be used again, merely sold off for cullet which is added to glass being made into new containers, so manufacturing unnecessarily and profit are the motives.

Oh yes those were the days , We would be out all day with a packet of crisps a bottle of Tizer
(with that marble type stopper ) & a frozen Jubbly.
I recon the next big recycling rip off will be lithium -iron batteries .Everywhere you look these days
more and more items are being powered by them.Of course as to be expected there is no standard
spec on these ,for example you buy a cordless drill ,over time the batteries start to lose their charge
or just stop working. You cannot then just buy replacement batteries because the manufacturer has
changed the design of the drill along with the design of the battery. So now you have a drill that
has no power source and therefore useless ,only option buy a whole new unit.
But wait until you get to vehicles . Electric vehicles are being pushed as being green and are going
to save the planet. (and thats a whole subject which I think assassin has already covered).
What is the life span of these batteries ,I have heard 6-7 years .After that time added to the cost of
the batteries ,will replacement be financialy viable for a 6-7 year old vehicle? indeed as with the drill
will that model of battery still be available?
As I understand it vehicle batteries are rented ,so be aware once you have bought your vehicle its
far from being free thereafter .
Once there are large numbers of these vehicles ,of course during this time manufacturers will phase
out combustion engines.There will no doubt be imposed a hefty charge for disposal and thats not just
for the batteries .Electric vehicles are progressivley being made of plastic and composite materials and
will have no scrap value unlike vehicles made from steel,so another hefty charge there.

Hemp Makes Great Plastic, So Why Isn’t Hemp Plastic Everywhere?
https://ministryofhemp.com/blog/why-isnt-hemp-plastic-everywhere/

Henry Ford Invented Cars Made Of Hemp Plastic That Ran On Hemp Fuel
https://www.disclose.tv/henry-ford-invented-cars-made-of-hemp-plastic-that-ran-on-hemp-fuel-314640

Sorry Dave, engineering head going back on.

First problem - all batteries are recycled using private companies, private companies have to make profits, there is only a huge loss in recycling batteries and Li-on in particular.

Problem two - in a large Li-on stack such as those on electric cars, everything can be recycled in theory, but in practice only 3 major elements can be economically recycled and they only recycle these three elements, the rest of the battery is shipped abroad and dumped.

Problem three - Government will not pay for, or subsidise the full recycling of these battery stacks and this is a big problem for engineers who have really kicked up about this for a couple of years now, and they can only be processed as waste once the three e,ements have been recycled.

Problem four - processing them is very expensive due to the toxic nature of the remaining elements contained in this waste and this is exacerbated by the fact it cannot be used anywhere for anything aso it is dead and pure waste.

Costs - If we use the popular Renault Zoe as an example we see various restrictions, if you limit its mileage to 4500 or less per year you are charged £49 per month or £588 per year, and you have to have a direct debit before you can even have one, electrical battery experts claim they will last around 4 years at this level of use. This equates to a cost of £2352 over four years or 18,000 miles of use, and it isn't just the charging and discharging cycles which prevail.

Raise your mileage to an average 10,500 per year and your monthly lease cost rises to £99 per month or £1188 per year or £3564 over 3 years, or £4752 over four years.

Renault claim you buy the car and lease the battery to keep costs down "BULLSH*T" as the Zoe costs just over £19,000 to buy and if you add the lease of the battery over 4 years it works out at over £24,000 so you aren't saving anything and are being scammed by a simple play on words. Renault also have some pretty stringent conditions and one is that you are limited to a maximum charger size of 22 KW and if you plug into the fairly standard 80KW charger with 4 outlets you are receiving 20Kw of charging power, but what if a vehicle leaves? suddenly its 27KW and "sorry sir/madam warranty void" and there are many prohibitive conditions designed to catch you out.

Lets put this into financial perspective, we will use the current What Car target prices as they represent what you can actually buy a car for which is under the list price.

Toyota Aygo 1.0 VVT-i X 3door £9495
Peugeot 108 1.0 Active 3 door £11.169
Kia Picanto 1.25 3 £12,534

Volkswagen Golf 1.5TSi Evo 130 Match 5 door £20,803
Skoda Octavia 1.5 TSi 150 SE L £20.888
Seat Leon 1.0 TSi SE Dynamic £14.983

Nissan Qashqai 1.3 DiG-T 140 Visia £19,995
Seat Ateca 1.5 TSi Evo 150 FR £23,165
Dacia Duster 1.5 Blue dCi 115 £13,572

Look at the comparisons on target price alone and we can already see the customer is paying more than 50% more for the Zoe than a comparible sized car so how is leasing the battery saving money? in point of fact sources in the automotive procurement division have already informed me that Renault only pay £2102 for their latest batteries. You do the maths.

What actually happens to the remains of the battery? in point of fact they are packaged for transport and are shipped, first by rail and then aboard a ship and dumped abroad, but the number of countries has dwindled over the last couple of years and fewer countries are accepting them to a growing amount of toxic waste being dumped int an ever decreasing space. Bring electric cars on stream and we will have exactly the same problem as we currently have with plastics where a few people get very rich and take the profits without liability, and several years later the taxpayers pick up the huge costs of the clean ups of these toxic waste battery components.

Now compare someone doing high mileages such as me, I am on for 70,000 miles this year in my company BMW 3 series is changed every 6 months so they can be sold off with much less mileage (6 months old with 35,000 miles on it) as this makes them economically viable and companies buy them and store them for another 6 months and sell them on at 1 year old with 35,000 miles on them and they still fetch a good price. BMW dealers love them as they are mainly motorway miles which means virtually no wear on consumables such as brakes and clutches, and they make excellent secondhand buys for a private owner.

Swap this for the very best battery cars and it would alter my working week to 6X the hours I currently do just to get through the same amount of work I currently do, and as most new cars purchased are company vehicles it is economically unviable for businesses who will see serious rises in costs and huge reductions in productivity.