Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I am very very pleased to welcome back to the
show Chris d Armitt. And Chris is a PhD chemist
and he's president of Phantom Plastics, which offers consulting services
to companies that need to use plastics. And he's the
founder of a new venture called the Plastics Research Council.
And we had a lot of things to talk about today.
(00:20):
So Hey, Chris, welcome back. It's good to see you.
Good to talk to you again.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Hey Ross, thanks for having me on the show. I
really appreciate it, very.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Very glad to do it. You sent me a piece
that you were quoted in that is something that I
think a lot of people here care about in Colorado
because we keep getting abused by government all the time
with changing rules about shopping bags, and not just here
in Colorado, other places too, like so for a while
we had paper bags. Then they said you can't have
(00:48):
paper because it's bad for the environment, so you have
to have plastic. And then they decided it wasn't so
bad so you could choose, and then they actually got
rid of plastic, and now you can only have paper
bags if they're supplying them there. And now there's other
places that are saying you can't use the single use
plastic bags either, because anyway, and a lot it's just
you can hardly keep up with all the petty tyrannies.
(01:10):
But a lot of the conversation throughout the way has
been about uh plastic bags and their recyclability, and that
was at least the early argument. So what do we
really need to know about recycling plastics? And you could
talk about chopping bags, but other plastics too, because I
(01:30):
feel like I'm wasting my time when I put out
recycling on the curb, which I do now. But what
do we need to know? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Well, I'm a scientist, right, so I'm not into politics.
I don't believe in any political parties. I just say
what this is where the evidence leads us, right, and
then we make sensible choices, hopefully based on things that
are true. So it's as simple as that. When it
comes to bags, there are thirty studies. Every study ever
in the world says that the polyethleene bag causes less
harm than paper or cotton.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
So if you want to cause less harm, take the
plastic bag. That's absolutely clear.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
When it comes to recycling, A lot of people say
that they can't be recycled, and that's not the case.
I mean, there's a company in Germany called Happier Metler
and they recycle one hundred thousand tons of polyethylene bags
a year profitably, and they've done that for years. So
anyone telling you that they're unrecyclable is just not telling
the truth. And there's an interesting trick that these green
(02:22):
groups do, right, they tell you it's unrecyclable because it's
not being recycled where you are, right, But think about
that's just not the way the language works. If you
look up in the dictionary, what does recyclable mean. It
means able to be recycled. It doesn't promise you that
it will actually be recycled in your street or what
your local government decided to do. It's still recyclable whether
(02:44):
or not people choose to recycle it.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
And the way I illustrate that is a ball. Right.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
Let's say you've got a soccer ball. It's kickable. Whether
or not you choose to kick it, it's still kickable.
So what these green groups have done is they've taken
the world recyclable, created their own definition and then said hey, hey,
it's not recyclable according to the definition we made up.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
So it's kind of a trickery with words that they've
done on us.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
There is that particular thing in your understanding. The main
reason that these plastic bags have been banned from supermarkets
and other places in many states in America is that.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
The reason, yeah, well, they've been banned because nobody bothered
to check the studies. Right, there are thirty studies that
you can find with Google in three seconds, but nobody
bothered to check it. And interestingly enough, they've reversed the
bag bands in some places because what they did was
they did a band, waited a couple of years, then
they added up to see, hey, did it work, And
the answer is no, it actually resulted in vastly more
(03:42):
sales of plastic ironically, and in their words of the study,
exponentially more greenhouse gas. So the results of these bands
is to do exactly what the studies predicted would happen,
is to make things much worse. More plastic, more waste,
more litter, more greenhouse gas, more fossil fuel.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Used to go back to something you said at the
beginning of your comments, you said that if you want
to do less harm, use the recyclable polyethylene plastic bag
rather than paper or cotton. Could you please define harm?
Speaker 3 (04:17):
Yeah, that's a great point. The only way to know
what causes more or less harm is a thing called
a life cycle analysis. That's a scientific way of adding
up all of the impact of a product. And unless
you do that, you're just green washing and handwaving and
wishful thinking.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
You need to have hard figures that tell.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
You how much greenhouse gas am I creating when I
make a plastic bag versus a cotton bag or a
paper bag, how much fossil fuel am I using? How
much pollution is created in terms of water and stuff
like that. So it adds up all of these different
impacts and tells you what causes more harm and what
causes less harm. Because the only way to do no
harm is to dig a hole in your backgarden and
crawl in it, right, and nobody's doing that. So what
(04:54):
we have to do is, as sensible adults, add up
all the different solutions and pick the things that cause
less impact.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Talk to me for a minute about recycling other kinds
of plastic besides the shopping bags. When I show when
I throw this water bottle that you can see me
holding here and it's got I've got Chris on zoom
so he can see me, and you can see that
little thing that's got there, those three little arrows in
a circle. Like, So, first of all, what are those
(05:21):
three little arrows in a circle really mean? And then
do these really get recycled? Or am I wasting my
time or what?
Speaker 3 (05:30):
That's one of the things that's recycled in the largest amount.
So milk bottles, you know, the gallon jugs that are
easily identifiable. You can easily pull them out recycle them.
So that's very highly recycled. And that pete bottle, like
seven ninety eight percent of those are recycled in some regions,
especially where they have a deposit, because the reason these
things don't get recycled is people drop them on the
(05:51):
floor sometimes and as soon as you add a value
to it, nobody drops it on the floor because it's
the same as dropping money. So there's a recent study
showing the effect of deos and all kinds of different
countries and localities, and adding a deposit to that pet bottle,
you get back ninety seven ninety eight percent, and they're
recycled not just once, but many times.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
So that's really green.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
It starts off being the lowest impact solution, and every
time you recycle it, it gets greener and greener because you're
not having to create the new material, you're just reprocessing
the material you already made.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Are they making more of those bottles out of those
bottles or are they making something else out of those
bottles or are they making lots of different things?
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Wow, you asked the best questions for us. That's why
I love being on your show.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
So they can make new bottles out of them about
ten times in a row because they still have enough
quality in the plastic. And then when the quality is
not there for making bottles, they can still make fleeces,
you know, like Patagonia sweaters that we wear.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
And it always makes me laugh. I just read a
thing this morning.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
Somebody's like, oh, this is downcycling right where we're taking
the pet bottle. Instead of making a new bottle, we're
making a fleece jacket. I'm like, how do you define
taking a disposable bottle, basically a single use bottle and
converting it into one hundred dollars fleece jacket that might
last you twenty years? How can you possibly define that
as downcycling simply because it wasn't the same thing you
started with. That's completely logical, you know, nonsense to think
(07:12):
that way.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
So what about the economics of it. How are the
costs of recycling these things as compared to the cost
of not recycling them and just putting them in a
landfill and making new ones. Right?
Speaker 3 (07:31):
So I actually did a study where I compared the
cost of something to how green it is, and the
answer is the more expensive something is, the worse it
is for the.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Environment on average.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
So you need to create twenty seven thousand kilos of
CO two global warming gas to make one kilogram of gold.
And we also know gold is incredibly expensive, so the
things that are about for the environment are incredibly expensive.
And gold is always recycled, it's always reclaimed. Nobody's throwing
their wedding rings in the garbage or dropping them in
the street, right because it's too expensive. And on the
earther end of that spectrum, we have things which are
(08:01):
incredibly cheap and incredibly green.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Like polyethylene, polypropylene PVC.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
And the trouble is these things are so cheap and
therefore there's not as much money to be made recycling them.
They can be recycled profitably, and it is done, but
it's not easy to do with it. So we see
headlines every week of some company that went out of
business trying to do it.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
So there's not some.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
Giant conspiracy against recycling, as some people claim.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
It just comes down to money.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
If you can make money doing something, it happens, and
if you can't make money doing something, it doesn't happen.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
So that's where the mis understanding lies.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
We're talking with Christy Armitt from Phantom Plastics. Phantomplastics dot
com is the website. I have just about one more
minute left here. Chris, has anything important changed in the
science of recycling plastic? You talked about that place in Germany.
That sounds like maybe you're saying the only place that
does a very good job recycling these things on a
(08:54):
large scale. Is that because it's new science, Like, are
things changing that are making recycling plastic a better idea? Right?
Speaker 2 (09:04):
That's another great question.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
So the thing that people need to understand is that
there's a lot of talk about chemical recycling, advanced recycling,
all these fancy new techniques, and they're largely a giant distraction.
We don't need it. Regular plastics can be recycled using
the regular, cheap mechanical method, where the machines are already
installed in every country in the world. It's the same
equipment that we use to make the plastic in the
(09:27):
first place and to process it. So we need to
focus more on the existing technology that works fine and
has proven to be green, and stop distracting the public
by talking about these fancy new technologies which we don't
even really need right now.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Love it. Christy Armand is PhD chemist. He's president of
Phantom Plastics. He's also founder of the new venture, the
Plastics Research Council.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
All of this is linked on my blog.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
If you forget any of it, just go to Roskominsky
dot com and look at the Friday blog note and
you can find all of that. It's great to talk
to you again, and you know what, can congratulations on
getting so you know, some people really paying attention to
the message rather than following the greenies whose message is
basically religion and not science. And you're finally getting some
(10:12):
people out there to pay attention to the science. And
I'm grateful for that.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
I'm grateful to you because the truth can only do
good if people hear it, and so I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Ross, Thank you so much. Have a great weekend, Chris,
we'll talk soon.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Yes you too. All right, that's
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Christy Armittt from Phantom Plastics.
I am very very pleased to welcome back to the
show Chris d Armitt. And Chris is a PhD chemist
and he's president of Phantom Plastics, which offers consulting services
to companies that need to use plastics. And he's the
founder of a new venture called the Plastics Research Council.
And we had a lot of things to talk about today.
(00:20):
So Hey, Chris, welcome back. It's good to see you.
Good to talk to you again.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Hey Ross, thanks for having me on the show. I
really appreciate it, very.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Very glad to do it. You sent me a piece
that you were quoted in that is something that I
think a lot of people here care about in Colorado
because we keep getting abused by government all the time
with changing rules about shopping bags, and not just here
in Colorado, other places too, like so for a while
we had paper bags. Then they said you can't have
(00:48):
paper because it's bad for the environment, so you have
to have plastic. And then they decided it wasn't so
bad so you could choose, and then they actually got
rid of plastic, and now you can only have paper
bags if they're supplying them there. And now there's other
places that are saying you can't use the single use
plastic bags either, because anyway, and a lot it's just
you can hardly keep up with all the petty tyrannies.
(01:10):
But a lot of the conversation throughout the way has
been about uh plastic bags and their recyclability, and that
was at least the early argument. So what do we
really need to know about recycling plastics? And you could
talk about chopping bags, but other plastics too, because I
(01:30):
feel like I'm wasting my time when I put out
recycling on the curb, which I do now. But what
do we need to know? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Well, I'm a scientist, right, so I'm not into politics.
I don't believe in any political parties. I just say
what this is where the evidence leads us, right, and
then we make sensible choices, hopefully based on things that
are true. So it's as simple as that. When it
comes to bags, there are thirty studies. Every study ever
in the world says that the polyethleene bag causes less
harm than paper or cotton.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
So if you want to cause less harm, take the
plastic bag. That's absolutely clear.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
When it comes to recycling, A lot of people say
that they can't be recycled, and that's not the case.
I mean, there's a company in Germany called Happier Metler
and they recycle one hundred thousand tons of polyethylene bags
a year profitably, and they've done that for years. So
anyone telling you that they're unrecyclable is just not telling
the truth. And there's an interesting trick that these green
(02:22):
groups do, right, they tell you it's unrecyclable because it's
not being recycled where you are, right, But think about
that's just not the way the language works. If you
look up in the dictionary, what does recyclable mean. It
means able to be recycled. It doesn't promise you that
it will actually be recycled in your street or what
your local government decided to do. It's still recyclable whether
(02:44):
or not people choose to recycle it.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
And the way I illustrate that is a ball. Right.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
Let's say you've got a soccer ball. It's kickable. Whether
or not you choose to kick it, it's still kickable.
So what these green groups have done is they've taken
the world recyclable, created their own definition and then said hey, hey,
it's not recyclable according to the definition we made up.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
So it's kind of a trickery with words that they've
done on us.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
There is that particular thing in your understanding. The main
reason that these plastic bags have been banned from supermarkets
and other places in many states in America is that.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
The reason, yeah, well, they've been banned because nobody bothered
to check the studies. Right, there are thirty studies that
you can find with Google in three seconds, but nobody
bothered to check it. And interestingly enough, they've reversed the
bag bands in some places because what they did was
they did a band, waited a couple of years, then
they added up to see, hey, did it work, And
the answer is no, it actually resulted in vastly more
(03:42):
sales of plastic ironically, and in their words of the study,
exponentially more greenhouse gas. So the results of these bands
is to do exactly what the studies predicted would happen,
is to make things much worse. More plastic, more waste,
more litter, more greenhouse gas, more fossil fuel.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Used to go back to something you said at the
beginning of your comments, you said that if you want
to do less harm, use the recyclable polyethylene plastic bag
rather than paper or cotton. Could you please define harm?
Speaker 3 (04:17):
Yeah, that's a great point. The only way to know
what causes more or less harm is a thing called
a life cycle analysis. That's a scientific way of adding
up all of the impact of a product. And unless
you do that, you're just green washing and handwaving and
wishful thinking.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
You need to have hard figures that tell.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
You how much greenhouse gas am I creating when I
make a plastic bag versus a cotton bag or a
paper bag, how much fossil fuel am I using? How
much pollution is created in terms of water and stuff
like that. So it adds up all of these different
impacts and tells you what causes more harm and what
causes less harm. Because the only way to do no
harm is to dig a hole in your backgarden and
crawl in it, right, and nobody's doing that. So what
(04:54):
we have to do is, as sensible adults, add up
all the different solutions and pick the things that cause
less impact.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Talk to me for a minute about recycling other kinds
of plastic besides the shopping bags. When I show when
I throw this water bottle that you can see me
holding here and it's got I've got Chris on zoom
so he can see me, and you can see that
little thing that's got there, those three little arrows in
a circle. Like, So, first of all, what are those
(05:21):
three little arrows in a circle really mean? And then
do these really get recycled? Or am I wasting my
time or what?
Speaker 3 (05:30):
That's one of the things that's recycled in the largest amount.
So milk bottles, you know, the gallon jugs that are
easily identifiable. You can easily pull them out recycle them.
So that's very highly recycled. And that pete bottle, like
seven ninety eight percent of those are recycled in some regions,
especially where they have a deposit, because the reason these
things don't get recycled is people drop them on the
(05:51):
floor sometimes and as soon as you add a value
to it, nobody drops it on the floor because it's
the same as dropping money. So there's a recent study
showing the effect of deos and all kinds of different
countries and localities, and adding a deposit to that pet bottle,
you get back ninety seven ninety eight percent, and they're
recycled not just once, but many times.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
So that's really green.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
It starts off being the lowest impact solution, and every
time you recycle it, it gets greener and greener because you're
not having to create the new material, you're just reprocessing
the material you already made.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Are they making more of those bottles out of those
bottles or are they making something else out of those
bottles or are they making lots of different things?
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Wow, you asked the best questions for us. That's why
I love being on your show.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
So they can make new bottles out of them about
ten times in a row because they still have enough
quality in the plastic. And then when the quality is
not there for making bottles, they can still make fleeces,
you know, like Patagonia sweaters that we wear.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
And it always makes me laugh. I just read a
thing this morning.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
Somebody's like, oh, this is downcycling right where we're taking
the pet bottle. Instead of making a new bottle, we're
making a fleece jacket. I'm like, how do you define
taking a disposable bottle, basically a single use bottle and
converting it into one hundred dollars fleece jacket that might
last you twenty years? How can you possibly define that
as downcycling simply because it wasn't the same thing you
started with. That's completely logical, you know, nonsense to think
(07:12):
that way.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
So what about the economics of it. How are the
costs of recycling these things as compared to the cost
of not recycling them and just putting them in a
landfill and making new ones. Right?
Speaker 3 (07:31):
So I actually did a study where I compared the
cost of something to how green it is, and the
answer is the more expensive something is, the worse it
is for the.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Environment on average.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
So you need to create twenty seven thousand kilos of
CO two global warming gas to make one kilogram of gold.
And we also know gold is incredibly expensive, so the
things that are about for the environment are incredibly expensive.
And gold is always recycled, it's always reclaimed. Nobody's throwing
their wedding rings in the garbage or dropping them in
the street, right because it's too expensive. And on the
earther end of that spectrum, we have things which are
(08:01):
incredibly cheap and incredibly green.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Like polyethylene, polypropylene PVC.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
And the trouble is these things are so cheap and
therefore there's not as much money to be made recycling them.
They can be recycled profitably, and it is done, but
it's not easy to do with it. So we see
headlines every week of some company that went out of
business trying to do it.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
So there's not some.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
Giant conspiracy against recycling, as some people claim.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
It just comes down to money.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
If you can make money doing something, it happens, and
if you can't make money doing something, it doesn't happen.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
So that's where the mis understanding lies.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
We're talking with Christy Armitt from Phantom Plastics. Phantomplastics dot
com is the website. I have just about one more
minute left here. Chris, has anything important changed in the
science of recycling plastic? You talked about that place in Germany.
That sounds like maybe you're saying the only place that
does a very good job recycling these things on a
(08:54):
large scale. Is that because it's new science, Like, are
things changing that are making recycling plastic a better idea? Right?
Speaker 2 (09:04):
That's another great question.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
So the thing that people need to understand is that
there's a lot of talk about chemical recycling, advanced recycling,
all these fancy new techniques, and they're largely a giant distraction.
We don't need it. Regular plastics can be recycled using
the regular, cheap mechanical method, where the machines are already
installed in every country in the world. It's the same
equipment that we use to make the plastic in the
(09:27):
first place and to process it. So we need to
focus more on the existing technology that works fine and
has proven to be green, and stop distracting the public
by talking about these fancy new technologies which we don't
even really need right now.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Love it. Christy Armand is PhD chemist. He's president of
Phantom Plastics. He's also founder of the new venture, the
Plastics Research Council.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
All of this is linked on my blog.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
If you forget any of it, just go to Roskominsky
dot com and look at the Friday blog note and
you can find all of that. It's great to talk
to you again, and you know what, can congratulations on
getting so you know, some people really paying attention to
the message rather than following the greenies whose message is
basically religion and not science. And you're finally getting some
(10:12):
people out there to pay attention to the science. And
I'm grateful for that.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
I'm grateful to you because the truth can only do
good if people hear it, and so I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Ross, Thank you so much. Have a great weekend, Chris,
we'll talk soon.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Yes you too. All right, that's
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Christy Armittt from Phantom Plastics.
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