Slogging through the day today. What exactly are we saving with the time change? Certainly it's not brain functionality. As a carefully curated site, RSN will save you time today. We hand-select and produce stories about the most important topics of the day. So, turn off all of those news notifications and simplify your life – just bookmark RSN. While you are at it, we really need your donations. Things remain chaotic at RSN HQ after the tree damage. We need your help. Thank you! Angela Watters If you would prefer to send a check: |
15 March 21
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
Robert Reich | Bidenomics Beats Reaganomics and I Should Know - I Saw Clintonomics Fail
Robert Reich, Guardian UK
Reich writes: "When I was labor secretary welfare ended but now it's back and three-quarters of Americans - and many Republicans - approve."
quarter-century ago, I and other members of Bill Clinton’s cabinet urged him to reject the Republican proposal to end welfare. It was too punitive, we said, subjecting poor Americans to deep and abiding poverty. But Clinton’s political advisers warned that unless he went along, he would jeopardize his re-election.
That was the end of welfare as we knew it. As Clinton boasted in his State of the Union address to Congress that year: “The era of big government is over.”
Until Thursday, that is. Joe Biden signed into law the biggest expansion of government assistance since the 1960s – a guaranteed income for most families with children, raising the maximum benefit by up to 80% per child.
As Biden put it in his address to the nation, as if answering Clinton: “The government isn’t some foreign force in a distant capital. No, it’s us, all of us, we the people.”
As a senator, Biden supported Clinton’s 1996 welfare restrictions, as did most Americans. What happened between then and now? Three big things.
First, Covid. The pandemic has been a national wake-up call on the fragility of middle-class incomes. The deep Covid recession has revealed the harsh consequences of most Americans living paycheck to paycheck.
For years, Republicans used welfare to drive a wedge between the white working middle class and the poor. Ronald Reagan portrayed black, inner-city mothers as freeloaders and con artists, repeatedly referring to “a woman in Chicago” as the “welfare queen”.
Starting in the 1970s, women had streamed into paid work in order to prop up family incomes decimated by the decline in male factory jobs. These families were particularly susceptible to the Republican message. Why should “they” get help for not working when “we” get no help, and we work?
By the time Clinton campaigned for president, “ending welfare as we knew it” had become a talisman of so-called New Democrats, even though there was little or no evidence that welfare benefits discouraged the unemployed from taking jobs. (In Britain, enlarged child benefits actually increased employment among single mothers.)
Yet when Covid hit, a new reality became painfully clear: public assistance was no longer just for “them”. It was needed by all of “us”.
The second big thing was Donald Trump. He exploited racism, to be sure, but also replaced economic Reaganism with narcissistic grievances, claims of voter fraud and cultural paranoia stretching from Dr Seuss to Mr Potato Head.
Trump obliterated concerns about government give-aways. The Cares Act, which he signed into law at the end of March 2020, gave most Americans checks of $1,200 (to which he calculatedly attached his name). When this proved enormously popular, he demanded the next round of stimulus checks be $2,000.
But Trump’s biggest giveaway was the GOP’s $1.9tn 2018 tax cut, under which benefits went overwhelmingly to the top 20%. Despite promises of higher wages for everyone else, nothing trickled down. Meanwhile, during the pandemic, America’s 660 billionaires – major beneficiaries of the tax cut – became $1.3tn wealthier, enough to give every American a $3,900 check and still be as rich as they were before the pandemic.
The third big thing is the breadth of Biden’s plan. Under it, more than 93% of the nation’s children – 69 million – receive benefits. Incomes of Americans in the lowest quintile will increase by 20%; those in the second-lowest, 9%; those in the middle, 6%.
Rather than pit the working middle class against the poor, this unites them. Some 76% of Americans supported the bill, including 63% of low-income Republicans (a quarter of all Republican voters). Younger conservatives are particularly supportive, presumably because people under 50 have felt the brunt of the four-decade slowdown in real wage growth.
Given all this, it’s amazing that zero Republican members of Congress voted for it, while 278 voted for Trump’s tax cuts for corporations and the rich.
The political lesson is that today’s Democrats – who enjoy popular vote majorities in presidential elections (having won seven of the past eight) – can gain political majorities by raising the wages of both middle class and poor voters, while fighting Republican efforts to suppress the votes of likely Democrats.
The economic lesson is that Reaganomics is officially dead. For years, conservative economists argued that tax cuts for the rich create job-creating investments, while assistance to the poor creates dependency. Rubbish.
Bidenomics is exactly the reverse: give cash to the bottom two-thirds and their purchasing power will drive growth for everyone. This is far more plausible. We’ll learn how much in coming months.
Stacey Abrams, former Democratic leader in the Georgia House of Representatives and founder and chair of Fair Fight Action. (photo: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)
Stacey Abrams Calls Republican Efforts to Restrict Voting in Georgia 'Jim Crow in a Suit'
Mark Oliver, Guardian UK
Oliver writes:
Bill includes various measures including ending the right to vote by mail without having to provide an excuse
tacey Abrams has described Republican efforts to restrict voting rights in Georgia as “racist” and “a redux of Jim Crow in a suit and tie”.
Abrams, who helped Democrats win two key US Senate runoff elections in her home state in January that gave the party a narrow control of the chamber, is a leading critic of voter suppression efforts by Republicans.
The bill in Georgia, SB241, includes various measures including ending the right to vote by mail without having to provide an excuse, and other new identification requirements. Republicans have held up what they say is a risk of voter fraud as justification for the legislation despite the lack of evidence of wrongdoing.
Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Abrams said the moves by lawmakers in Georgia would significantly curtail voting access after a record number of voters propelled Democratic victories in the 2020 race.
“Well, first of all, I do absolutely agree that it’s racist. It is a redux of Jim Crow in a suit and tie. We know that the only thing that precipitated these changes, it’s not that there was the question of security.
“In fact, the secretary of state and the governor went to great pains to assure America that Georgia’s elections were secure. And so the only connection that we can find is that more people of color voted, and it changed the outcome of elections in a direction that Republicans do not like.
“And so, instead of celebrating better access and more participation, their response is to try to eliminate access to voting for primarily communities of color. And there’s a direct correlation between the usage of drop boxes, the usage of in-person early voting, especially on Sundays, and the use of vote by mail and a direct increase in the number of people of color voting.”
Filibuster reform
Abrams, a former senior state legislator and unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate in Georgia, also called on Sunday for the US Senate to exempt election reform legislation passed by the House of Representatives over Republican opposition from a procedural hurdle called the filibuster.
“Protection of democracy is so fundamental that it should be exempt from the filibuster rules,” Abrams told CNN.
The Democratic-led House on 3 March passed a bill intended to reform voting procedures, increase voter participation and require states to assign independent commissions the task of redrawing congressional districts to guard against partisan manipulation.
There is a debate among Democrats, who narrowly control the Senate thanks to those two Georgia victories, on whether to modify or even eliminate the filibuster, a longstanding fixture that means most legislation cannot advance without 60 votes in the 100-seat Senate rather than a simple majority.
The filibuster already has been scaled back and does not apply to judicial or cabinet appointments and some budgetary measures, Abrams noted, so it should be suspended for the voting rights legislation. Abrams, a former minority leader in the Georgia house of representatives, has emerged as a leading Democratic voice on voting rights.
Joe Biden has said he would sign the election legislation into law if it is passed by Congress, but also has indicated opposition to completely eliminating the filibuster.
The House-passed bill faces long odds in the Senate under current rules, where all 48 Democrats and the two independents who caucus with them would need to be joined by 10 of the 50 Republican senators to overcome a filibuster.
Democrats have argued that the legislation is necessary to lower barriers to voting and to make the US political system more democratic and responsive to the needs of voters.
Republicans have said it would take powers away from the states, and have promised to fight it if it becomes law.
Demonstrators hold signs during a protest outside the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. (photo: Dustin Chambers/Bloomberg News)
Massive Facebook Study on Users' Doubt in Vaccines Finds a Small Group Plays Big Role in Pushing Skepticism
Elizabeth Dwoskin, The Washington Post
Dwoskin writes:
Internal study finds a QAnon connection and that content that doesn’t break the rules may be causing ‘substantial’ harm
acebook is conducting a vast behind-the-scenes study of doubts expressed by U.S. users about vaccines, a major project that attempts to probe and teach software to identify the medical attitudes of millions of Americans, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.
The research is a large-scale attempt to understand the spread of ideas that contribute to vaccine hesitancy, or the act of delaying or refusing a vaccination despite its availability, on social media — a primary source of health information for millions of people. It shows how the company is probing ever more nuanced realms of speech, and illustrates how weighing free speech vs. potential for harm is more tenuous than ever for technology companies during a public health crisis.
While Facebook has banned outright false and misleading statements about coronavirus vaccines since December, a huge realm of expression about vaccines sits in a gray area. One example could be comments by someone expressing concern about side effects that are more severe than expected. Those comments could be both important for fostering meaningful conversation and potentially bubbling up unknown information to health authorities — but at the same time they may contribute to vaccine hesitancy by playing upon people’s fears.
The research explores how to address that tension by studying these types of comments, which are tagged “VH” by the company’s software algorithms, as well as the nature of the communities that spread them, according to the documents. Its early findings suggest that a large amount of content that does not break the rules may be causing harm in certain communities, where it has an echo chamber effect.
The company’s data scientists divided the company’s U.S. users, groups and pages into 638 population segments to explore which types of groups hold vaccine hesitant beliefs. The document did not identify how Facebook defined a segment or grouped communities, but noted that the segments could be at least 3 million people.
Some of the early findings are notable: Just 10 out of the 638 population segments contained 50 percent of all vaccine hesitancy content on the platform. And in the population segment with the most vaccine hesitancy, just 111 users contributed half of all vaccine hesitant content.
Facebook could use the findings to inform discussions of its policies for addressing problematic content or to direct more authoritative information to the specific groups, but the company was still developing its solution, spokeswoman Dani Lever said.
The research effort also discovered early evidence of significant overlap between communities that are skeptical of vaccines and those affiliated with QAnon, a sprawling set of baseless claims that has radicalized its followers and been associated with violent crimes, according to the documents.
Facebook has partnered with more than 60 health experts around the globe and routinely studies a wide variety of content to inform its policies, Lever said of the study, in an emailed statement.
“Public health experts have made it clear that tackling vaccine hesitancy is a top priority in the COVID response, which is why we’ve launched a global campaign that has already connected 2 billion people to reliable information from health experts and remove false claims about COVID and vaccines,” she said. “This ongoing work will help to inform our efforts.”
Nearly 30 percent of Americans — and half of all Republican men — say they do not intend to get one of the three federally approved vaccines, according to a March poll by PBS NewsHour, Marist and NPR. An Associated Press-NORC study from late January found that the top reasons for concern over the vaccinations were fear of side effects, distrust of vaccines, and desire to wait and possibly get doses later.
Coronavirus-related misinformation has flooded the company’s platforms, including false narratives about covid-19 being less deadly than the flu, that it is somehow associated with a population-control plot by philanthropist Bill Gates and that vaccines are associated with the antichrist. Its content decisions, potentially anticompetitive behavior and its use by extremist groups to foment violence have drawn the attention of regulators, leading to congressional hearings and major antitrust charges by the Justice Department.
Facebook, which owns WhatsApp messenger and Instagram, collects reams of data on its more than 3.3 billion users worldwide and has a broad reach onto those users’ devices. Public health experts say that puts the company in a unique position to examine attitudes toward vaccines, testing and other behaviors and push information to people.
But the company has a steep hill to climb when it comes to proving that its research efforts serve the public because of its history of misusing people’s data. The company allowed a political research firm to exploit the profiles of tens of millions of Americans, resulting in the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, and at one time manipulated people’s emotions for an internal study.
Since April, the social network has partnered publicly with Carnegie Mellon University researchers to conduct the Covid-19 Symptom Survey, a daily survey of Facebook users that asks people about their symptoms, testing, mental health, attitudes about masks and more recently intent to get vaccinated. A related project has used smartphone data to track if people are upholding social distancing orders and shutdowns. At least 16 million people have been surveyed, making it one of the large public health data collection efforts during the pandemic, the researchers have said.
Facebook has also banned a wide range of baseless or misleading claims about vaccines and covid — removing more than 12 million pieces of content — and connects people to authoritative information with labels on posts and with a banner atop the Facebook site, according to the company.
Facebook’s research into vaccine hesitancy will force the company to walk a fine line if it decides to further police it, since much of the content regards expressions of concern and doubt vs. outright misinformation.
“Vaccine conversations are nuanced, so content can’t always be clearly divided into helpful and harmful,” wrote Kang-Xing Jin, Facebook’s head of health, in an op-ed last week in the San Francisco Chronicle. “It’s hard to draw the line on posts that contain people’s personal experiences with vaccines.”
But according to the documents, Facebook worries that the content that isn’t outright breaking its rules could be problematic. “While research is very early, we’re concerned that harm from non-violating content may be substantial,” the documents said.
That risk of harm seems to be disproportionately impacting a few communities, Facebook’s engineers found.
The results from Facebook’s early research track with findings from disinformation researchers, who have pointed that a small minority of people, particularly influencers and people who post frequently or use underhanded tactics to spread their message, can have an outsize impact on the conversation and act as superspreaders of misleading information.
The researchers noted that while some small percentage of vaccine hesitant comments could be overcome when they are posted in communities with a diverse range of opinions, the concentration of such comments in small groups suggests that they are becoming echo chambers where people simply reinforce people’s preexisting ideas.
In segments that were affiliated with QAnon, the study found sentiment that was skeptical of vaccinations was widespread. “It’s possible QAnon is causally connected to vaccine hesitancy,” the documents said. In QAnon communities, skepticism of vaccines was connected to a distrust of elites and institutions.
Last year, external researchers found that QAnon groups in Facebook were influential in fueling the spread of a misinformation-filled documentary called “Plandemic” on social platforms.
The internal Facebook study found that comments that could contribute to vaccine hesitancy overlap with QAnon but also go well beyond it, into many other different types of communities. While QAnon groups appeared to be more focused on a possible distrust of authority as a reason for doubting the vaccine, other groups had different ways of expressing their doubts and worries. This finding suggests that public health experts will need to develop nuanced messages when trying to address vaccine hesitancy in the population.
Protesters demonstrating against proposed changes to Georgia's voting laws, this month in Atlanta. (photo: Ben Gray/AP)
For Voting Rights Advocates, a 'Once in a Generation Moment' Looms
Nicholas Fandos and Michael Wines, The New York Times
Excerpt: "Opposition to restrictive Republican voting laws - and support for a sweeping Democratic bill - fuels a movement like none in decades. But can it succeed?"
tate and national voting-rights advocates are waging the most consequential political struggle over access to the ballot since the civil rights era, a fight increasingly focused on a far-reaching federal overhaul of election rules in a last-ditch bid to offset a wave of voting restrictions sweeping Republican-controlled state legislatures.
The federal voting bill, which passed in the House this month with only Democratic support, includes a landmark national expansion of voting rights, an end to partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts and new transparency requirements on the flood of dark money financing elections that would override the rash of new state laws.
The energy in support for it radiates from well-financed veteran organizers to unpaid volunteers, many who were called to political activism after former President Donald J. Trump’s upset win in 2016. It is engaging Democrats in Washington and voting rights activists in crucial states from Georgia to Iowa to West Virginia to Arizona — some facing rollbacks in access to the ballot, some with senators who will play pivotal roles and some with both.
Police detain a woman in London at a Memorial site. (photo: Hannah McKay/Reuters)
London Police Face Backlash After Dragging Mourners From Vigil for Murdered Woman
Ben Makori and William James, Reuters
Excerpt: "London police faced a backlash from the public on Sunday and an official inquiry into their actions after using heavy-handed tactics to break up an outdoor vigil for a woman whose suspected killer is a police officer."
The disappearance of Sarah Everard, 33, as she walked home on the evening of March 3, has provoked a huge outpouring of grief and dismay in Britain at the failure of police and wider society to tackle violence against women.
Police had denied permission for a vigil on Saturday evening at London’s Clapham Common, near where Everard was last seen alive, citing regulations aimed at preventing the spread of the coronavirus.
But hundreds of people, mostly women, gathered peacefully at the park in defiance of the ban to pay their respects to Everard throughout Saturday, including Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge.
Later on Saturday dozens of police officers marched into the crowd to shouts of “shame on you”. Scuffles broke out and officers dragged women away from the scene.
“Last night people were very, very upset, there was a great deal of emotion, completely understandably, and the police, being as they are operationally independent, will be having to explain that to the Home Secretary,” safeguarding minister Victoria Atkins told Sky News.
London police chief Cressida Dick backed her officers and said that they needed to make a very difficult judgement.
“We’re still in a pandemic, unlawful gatherings are unlawful gatherings, officers have to take action if people are putting themselves massively at risk,” Dick told reporters.
Asked if she was considering resigning, she said: “No, I’m not.”
Home Secretary Priti Patel, the minister in charge of policing, described footage of the incident as “upsetting”. Her office said she had ordered an independent inquiry after an initial police report left some questions unanswered.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan also said he was not satisfied with police chiefs’ explanation of the events and said officers’ conduct must be examined.
“WOMEN DON’T FEEL SAFE”
An image of officers handcuffing a woman on Saturday night as she lay on the floor was widely shared and condemned on social media.
The woman, Patsy Stevenson, told LBC radio: “The main point that everyone was trying to get across when everything happened is that women don’t feel safe, they don’t feel safe walking down a street and that’s the bare minimum we should feel the freedom to do.”
She said she was fined 200 pounds ($278) for breaching COVID regulations
Everard’s murder has resonated with woman across the country, prompting thousands to share on social media their experiences of violence and sexual assaults perpetrated by men, and vividly describe the daily fear they feel.
On Sunday, hundreds gathered outside police headquarters and marched to a grassy square outside parliament where they lay down en masse in calm protest. Some carried anti-police placards, while others protested against violence against women.
Separately, a steady flow of quiet mourners continued to visit the site of the vigil, placing flowers around a bandstand.
“I feel very angry that they think that they have the right to dictate how we mourn and how we react,” 24-year old student Lilith Blackwell told Reuters at the bandstand.
A police officer charged with Everard’s murder appeared in court on Saturday. Police discovered her body on Wednesday in woodland about 50 miles (80 km) southeast of London. The court heard that her body was found in a builder’s refuse bag, and identified using dental records..
'Innayat-ul-Rehman was starving. The 10-year-old hadn't seen his family in a week.' (photo: Bhat Burhan/Daily Beast)
Rohingya Genocide Survivors Rounded Up to Be Sent Back to Myanmar's Killing Fields
Bhat Burhan and Yashraj Sharma, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "After fleeing genocide in Myanmar, Rohingya refugees in India are being deported back to the place where they had faced massacre after massacre."
ATHINDI, Indian-administered Kashmir—Innayat-ul-Rehman was starving. The 10-year-old hadn’t seen his family in a week. That day last Saturday, he had stayed awake until the sun came up, staring at his empty two-room tin shack, with belongings and dirty dishes scattered around him. The boy would usually spend six days a week in a makeshift school built for Rohingya refugees, returning to sleep in his mother’s arms on the weekend. But now, he wondered if he’d ever see her again.
Rehman had just found out that his 45-year-old mother, Anwar Ara, and 13-year-old sister, Jannat Ara, were rounded up, detained, and shifted to a jail in Hiranagar, 37 miles away, along with about 170 others. The mass raid that took Rehman’s family away from him was part of a wider pan-India crackdown on Rohingya refugees by the Narendra Modi government. Long rattled by frequent displacements, countless Rohingya now face deportation to Myanmar, which is currently simmering under a military coup.
The military junta in Myanmar has seized unprecedented control since it carried out the coup on Feb. 1, taking over hospitals and communications. More than 50 civilians have been killed as protests for the return of democracy continue. Rohingya refugees who return to the country face even greater danger than others. The same military junta responsible for burning down their villages, murdering thousands of their people, and raping scores of women and girls are now in charge of the country.
Refugees in Bhatindi told The Daily Beast that the police personnel had approached them last Saturday with a list of names. “We were told to renew our documents,” Muhammad Faisal, one of Rehman’s neighbours, said. “Some left with the police and others were about to leave when we heard that police had detained our people, including Innayat’s mother and sister. We were afraid and decided to stay put.”
The officials were unavailable for comment, but Reuters quoted unnamed personnel describing the crackdown as “part of an exercise to trace foreigners living in Jammu without valid documents… we have started the process of deportation of these refugees.”
The United Nations has maintained its position that deporting the Rohingya violates the international legal principle of refoulement—sending refugees back to a place where they face danger. However, the Modi government has rejected that position, arguing that it is not signatory to the specific U.N. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, nor the Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees.
“Any plan to forcibly return Rohingya and others to Myanmar will put them back in the grip of the oppressive military junta that they fled,” Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director of Human Rights Watch, told The Daily Beast. “Myanmar’s long-abusive military is even more lawless now that it is back in power, and the Indian government should uphold its international law obligations and protect those in need of refuge within its borders.”
Myanmar does not recognize the roughly 1.1 million Muslim Rohingya, one of the largest ethnic minority population in the country, as citizens. The stateless people have fled in flocks, escaping repetitive crackdowns by the junta in the last decade. Since 2016, more than 6,500 Rohingya, including at least 730 children under the age of 5, have been killed by the military, according to medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).
India, where about 40,000 refugees reside, has been one of the primary destinations for the Rohingya. But recent mass detentions have signaled that the country has become an increasingly unsafe place for Muslims under the leadership of Hindutva nationalist Modi.
Following the weekend raids, a few Rohingya Muslims who had settled in Jammu over the last decade left their shacks, fearing further crackdown. A few of them traveled to the national capital and sat in protest in front of the office of the United Nations refugee agency, the UNHCR. On March 11, 88 of them, including pregnant women and children, were detained too.
But Rehman has refused to leave. The door lock to his home is broken—so he doesn’t stray far from his shack. What does he have if not his mother and sister, he wondered. His father had gone missing after the ethnic cleansing in 2016 worsened. “I don’t even remember his name,” Rehman said. “If he is still alive, I don’t think he can even find us [and if he does] I won’t even recognize him.”
Since then, his mother, Ara, worked hard to feed her children. She peeled the skin off walnuts, cleaned them for a local dealer and earned $68 in a month—but that wasn’t enough to sustain the family of three. The dealer has employed other women refugees, often exploiting them for cheap labor, too. Among them was Yasmeena Akhtar.
Akhtar worked double shifts as a maid in the area to be able to take care of her ailing parents: 73-year-old Soliha Ahmad and 65-year-old Zahoora Ara. The duo fled Myanmar in 2012.
Ahmad worked as a daily-wage laborer in Jammu till 2018 before his deteriorating health incapacitated him. Now, Yasmeena’s meagre earnings would buy food while savings brought medication for Ahmad.
Last Saturday, Ahmad and Ara were bedridden, waiting for Yasmeena to return with food. She didn’t. Other refugees last saw Yasmeena outside the neighbourhood with a United Nations card—before she too was detained and shifted to the same jail, which police call a “holding center,” in Hiranagar.
The parents only knew about her detention when she called from the police station. “Taking care of you was not in my destiny, that’s why Allah sent me to this jail,” she said over the phone. “I’m not afraid of this jail but for both of you. I don’t know how you will survive without me. Who will feed you?”
When the darkness comes, Rehman gets scared. “Since that day, I’m afraid to sleep because my mother and sister are not at home,” he said. Sitting at the crossroad outside the concentration area, he awaits the return of his mother and sister as thousands of other Rohingyas stare at an uncertain future, with their lives upended yet again.
Recycling plastic waste in a microwave? (photo: Grist/pioneer111/RG-vc/Getty Images)
Microwaves Could Be the Future for Plastic Recycling
Marc Fawcett-Atkinson, Canada's National Observer
Fawcett-Atkinson writes: "It's been almost a decade since Jocelyn Doucet first experimented with recycling plastic waste in a microwave."
Now he says the technology derived from those early efforts will make it possible to produce plastic almost exclusively from recycled materials.
“We’re consuming more and more plastics,” says the Quebec-based engineer and founder of Pyrowave, a company pioneering microwave-based plastic recycling technology. “Yet there are not that many solutions to address the end-of-life problem, and this is what we’re proposing.”
The technology is so promising it has caught the attention of French tire giant Michelin. Last year, the company announced a partnership with Pyrowave to build a microwave recycling system for tires. It will be the first time Doucet’s technology is used on a commercial scale.
Most recycling in Canada today is mechanical, where plastics are shredded before being melted down to make new, usually lower-quality, products. For the process to be viable, the stream of plastics entering the processing facility needs to be clean and well sorted, which poses huge logistical challenges. Pyrowave’s technology then uses high-powered microwaves to break clean polystyrene — a common plastic used to make everything from yogurt cups to keyboards — into molecular components, or monomers, that manufacturers can use to create entirely new polystyrene plastic.
Simple as it sounds, the approach is novel. Few researchers had successfully used microwaves to break plastic into its constituent parts until Doucet, who has a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the Polytechnique de Montréal, took up the challenge with a team in 2009.
At the time, he was working on food waste technologies and wanted a new challenge. “We started getting approached for plastic waste,” he says. Plastic recycling was something new.
He wondered if pyrolysis could be used in the recycling process. Pyrolysis is a chemical process that burns carbon-based materials like wood or plastic without oxygen to remove the material’s hydrogen and oxygen molecules, leaving nothing but carbon. It’s ancient — Egyptians used pyrolysis to make charcoal.
Doucet thought a modified version could be used to recycle plastic.
“Very quickly, we fell on a microwave unit in the lab and started playing with microwaves,” he said. They found high-powered microwaves worked — an exciting discovery for the environmentally minded team.
Doucet’s microwave process uses electric energy instead of heat, dramatically reducing the amount of energy and greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) needed to produce polystyrene plastic, he says. According to a forthcoming life cycle assessment by Pyrowave, producing polystyrene using microwave pyrolysis recycling is 40 percent more energy efficient than virgin oil production, Doucet adds.
Observers are reserving judgment.
“Pyrowave’s technology might play a role in terms of displacing the production of virgin plastic and materials, but until we have more transparent and verifiable data on the yields, environmental and climate impact, we need a cautionary approach,” says Shanar Tabrizi, chemical recycling and plastics-to-fuel policy officer for Zero Waste Europe.
Those potential impacts are broad, from the energy required to collect, sort, and clean plastic waste before the recycling process to managing the toxic residues created by plastic additives. She also noted life-cycle assessments can be misleading, depending on their methodologies.
“It’s hard to assess (Pyrowave’s) claims and see whether there might be significant pollutants released in the process,” says Richard Heinberg, senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute. “In general, anything we can do to recycle plastic in more environmentally friendly ways helps, but reducing the scale of production and consumption is even better.”
Maximizing the environmental potential of Doucet’s technology demands a wholesale restructuring of how we produce and dispose of plastics, the Quebec researcher said. New facilities that use microwave pyrolysis to manufacture plastic will need to be built. And as long as the price of virgin-oil plastic remains low, recycled plastic can’t compete. It will take government regulations mandating that new plastic products contain mostly recycled materials to make the switch, Doucet said.
He compared microwave pyrolysis recycling and virgin-oil plastic manufacturing to the difference between steam and electric trains. As electricity became widespread, train engineers quickly realized it was more efficient to build entire rail systems based on high-speed electric trains than it was to replace coal with electric heating coils in steam train boilers. The new technology pushed a wholesale shift in how rail systems worked.
“This is the opportunity to completely rethink,” Doucet says.
The petrochemical and oil and gas industries so far show no signs of slowing down.
Virgin-oil plastic factories have been integrated into oil and gas infrastructure like refineries and pipelines for decades — investments that industry is loath to abandon. The sector is betting on continued plastic production to stay afloat as the world transitions away from fossil fuels, with plastic manufacturing anticipated to fuel between 45 percent and 95 percent of the sector’s future growth. Fossil fuel and petrochemical companies are even spending $509 billion more worldwide to expand their facilities by 2024, according to a September 2020 report by the Carbon Tracker Initiative.
That has environmentalists concerned. While recycling — including microwave pyrolysis recycling — can be part of the solution, it can’t be used to justify current levels of production and plastic use, said Laura Yates, lead plastics campaigner at Greenpeace Canada. The organization has been leading efforts for greater government regulations to decrease overall plastic production and implement stringent recycling requirements in Canada.
In particular, Yates is concerned about efforts by the plastics industry to convert plastic waste into vehicle fuel. That will continue to stimulate virgin-oil plastic production and fail to reduce overall GHG emissions, Yates said.
Still, there are glimmers of hope. Virgin-oil plastic production decreased by four percent in 2020, and the trend is expected to continue in the coming decades, according to the Carbon Tracker Initiative. That shift is driven by more stringent rules in China and Europe mandating that plastic products be made primarily from recycled materials. They have also started to make recycled plastic economically competitive in those markets, Doucet said.
As well as the shift in Europe, the federal government is currently drafting new plastics regulations that could see similar policies implemented here, despite intense pushback from the plastics industry on key parts of the planned regulations. Doucet is hopeful that if the new rules are implemented, they will help make plastic recycling — including microwave pyrolysis recycling — commercially viable in Canada.
Doucet is honest about his technology’s limitations. It is only one tool to end the plastic crisis, not a panacea. Reducing how much plastic we use and ensuring what gets produced gets recycled more efficiently remain essential.
