At least, properly separated, it degrades and can be reprocessed into more paper and cardboard. The US exports CRT televisions and chipsets for electronics with such minimal production quality as to be considered destined-for-disposal.
Even something as simple as being able to have a clerk fill my jar with a weight of instant coffee would cut down my recycling mass by an average of about 50g per week and eliminate some plastic. Glass doesn't have a limit on recycle phases if handled correctly but all plastic other than PLA has a pretty short recycle lifetime.
The almost-invisible consumer habits of the past 100 years circumscribe virtually all of the greatest environmental disasters of the next 100, bearing in mind that "environmental disaster" has only existed since the steam engine or the logging of the Old Growth forests, depending upon where your measure of advanced development begins.
When you visit a grocery store, there's a garbage dump wrapped around most of the products. Some of it's biodegradable, compostable, and recyclable, much of it isn't. We can remediate and save some of these processes and luxuries, but that they are mostly unsustainable is evident to anyone who comprehends industrial engineering.
I don't think environmental disasters are something unique to modern times. There have been books written about the environmental problems the ancient Romans & Greeks faced.
Environmental disasters existed, sure, but they were mostly called something like "the vengeance of the gods". Most of them do represent a form of Themic justice, as our human hubris at being lords of this world causes us to be swept away by storm or fire.
Let me quote you a passage about Roman gold mines:
"Over the pockmarked landscape there would invariably hang a pall of smog belched out from the smelting furnaces through giant chimneys, and so heavy with chemicals that it burned the naked skin and turned it white. Birds would die if they flew through the fumes. As Roman power spread the gas clouds were never far behind."
I agree, though, that this kind of problem was localized and was not in the minds of Romans the way it is in ours.
When people go on about climate change, it bothers me because the fact of if climate change is man accelerated or not is totally irrelevant. CO2 is the least of our pollution problems, when you look at planned obsolescence, cellphones more powerful than 2000s laptops that are designed to only have a 2~4 year lifecycle, the prevalence of electric cards which all take barrels of oil to produce, the total and complete lack of real rail systems in the US, which use a fraction of the power consumption of cars (a system America use to have and is now gone), etc etc etc
Climate change is irrelevant because if people simply consumed less and demanded products that last longer, we'd reduce carbon emissions as well as other forms of pollution. The real inconvenient truth is that overall consumption needs to go down. It means smaller factories, less industry growth, higher paying factory jobs and a total change in our fundamental value systems ... so really it's never going to change until after the next global collapse .. not that 2008 bullshit, I mean a real one.
>Climate change is irrelevant because if people simply consumed less and demanded products that last longer, we'd reduce carbon emissions as well as other forms of pollution.
Not so. Carbon stays and accumulates. It's not the annual emissions which matter, it's the total emissions to date which matters.
At this point, we've already put too much in the atmosphere. Continuing to emit, at a lower rate, would still be adding to the problem. It would be an improvement over emitting even larger amounts, but we'd still be making the overall situation worse off with each passing year.
Stop hand waving. Trees use it, algae use it, at the very least. Carbon doesn't stick around with the persistence of mercury. Rate of emission is precisely what matters. The problem is that it outpaces the consumption. There's an opportunity to create an industry of carbon consumption that will only arise after the crisis point (depending on which countries blink first).
A good chunk of the atmospheric CO2 is only removed by geological processes that take tens of thousands of years. Trees and algea only bind carbon temporarily, it's released when they rot. Only a part of the carbon stays in the soil. The carbon cycle is pretty complex:
Trees and algae also release most of that carbon dioxide, especially at the end of their life cycle. If we wanted to use them to return the atmospheric composition to pre-industrial levels, we would have to prevent the decomposition of large amounts of that organic matter (say by burying it in a coal mine) and I don't see that happening anytime soon.
To be clear, I think we should reduce emissions. But even if they drop to zero today, we still have a problem. Trees and Algae don't use more carbon than the used to. The carbon cycle is fairly neutral in terms of the net change year over year, absent us.
My point in commenting was to say that climate change is not irrelevant, and emphasize that using less is helpful, but won't solve the problem on its own.
It's puzzling how this factualky inaccurate concept, is poisoning the understanding. If it were remotely true, why talk about it at all? We are already dead and the earth will never recover SMH.
Excellent concept, thanks. The persistence of the stock/flow error with carbon really bugs me. The percentage decline countdown is also helpful.
A curious coincidence that on the site's most pessimistic assumptions, the amount of carbon we can emit is ~the sign of the devil: 666,666,666,666 tons
Until our political mentality changes (and this goes mostly for the right but also the left), we're never going to make any significant progress on the environment.
Great comment which I almost entirely agree with. I'd like to point that there have been earlier "environmental disasters" (depending on your definition of a disaster). It has been credibly argued that the use of "desert kites" many thousands of years ago led to the extinction of several species at the hands of humans.
The sheer size and capability of China (hundreds of millions of people willing to work extremely hard in exchange for little money) has allowed a wide variety of things to happen in the world that otherwise simply wouldn't be possible.
Their deciding that they no longer are willing to participate in things like this can be a massive (in a time frame and to a degree that a lot of people will be utterly confused and scratching their heads "but how can this be, it doesn't make any sense!!!???") game changer.
I'm not sure its the 'game changer' they wanted. Labor rates going up in China means, more automation in the US. Its not a matter of them-vs-us jobs; its a matter of cheap labor vs automation. And the smart money is on automation today, since its growing explosively in manufacturing and warehousing.
I am dismayed at how little people care about this. If more people (not even everyone) had some basic knowledge of plastics and the will to rinse the containers they recycle, sorting would be much more efficient. But I'd be willing to bet that most people use their recycling bin as a kind of funny second trash can. I know my roommates do. We got fined and they still put dirty paper towels and plastic containers with food on them in the recycling bin (since technically these are made out of recyclable materials). Effectively though, the recycling is being used like a special garbage can.
why can't this be solved at the recycling center? why do individuals need to deal with this at all? several municipalities handle separation at the waste center. seems on all accounts a win.
one place to monitor for doing it correctly.
one place to easily apply advancements in solutions.
no need to try to herd cats (no need to try to get millions of people to follow exactly the correct proceedures). I watched teams of supposedly smart colleagues be unable to correctly separate their trash. if the average HN reader can't do it why would anyone expect to general population to ever be any better at it?
That works pretty well. The only catch is that you have to mandate the deposit on all bottles, not just glass ones. Otherwise it's cheaper to just sell everything in plastics. Some countries do it. It might work for phones/laptops too. Small deposit, most of the used stuff ends up delivered to the place of your choice. Like the shopping trolley system.
^If you already have big publicly accessible bottle recycle places, these will the raided.
It still does in Germany, The Netherlands and many other countries in the EU. The glass scanners are automated. You put everything in, it scans the barcodes and gives you a ticket you can use to pay for groceries.
As it is, it seems highly unlikely my children are going to be able to put a roof over their heads let alone reproduce. Personally, I feel no guilt leaving a environmentally trashed planet for the children of globalists and those who've profited handsomely over collectively ignoring what's going on in the world.
Well we pay ~40% tax on our salary, I expect government use this money wisely and take care of things like that so I don't have to waste time after a long day of work and rinsing food containers before throwing them in recycling bin.
...bad idea. Here (ireland), we said that too. They said, fine then we'll privatize garbage. Now they don't collect the garbage anymore, but private companies make us sort the garbage into expensive bags that you buy from the garbage companies. They're even stricter on the sorting. Just do your best and say nuttin!
I think so too. Maybe a way around is if you think of it as being largely carrots and sticks. When the stick is big enough the results can be comparable to those of universal virtue.
The problem here in Oregon is not presorting the recycling.
The centers can’t sort to the level of “purity” required and people don’t realize how truly problematic it is to be lazy in presorting.
I honestly didn’t think it was that big of a deal to let some plastic bags make it in to recycling. I know better now, mainly due to local npr reporting.
There is not much to solve laziness, but sorting tech has room to advance.
> We got fined and they still put dirty paper towels and plastic containers with food on them in the recycling bin (since technically these are made out of recyclable materials).
This is a machine vision, machine learning, and robotics problem. If this isn't worth developing, the problem is that recycling isn't worth enough money.
In addition, if a little bit of food destroys your recycling operation, then your recycling operation needs more R&D, not legislating consumer behavior.
It isn't 'worth enough money' because the cost is externalised -- someone, sometime, will pay the cost.
And it's not legislation, it's you having to pay massive waste disposal fees. Next time your trash gets selected for personal auditing (by that nice computer vision algorithm) and your municipal waste fee doubles, you will be incentivised to wash your recyclables.
A similar ripple is happening as China scales back on coal.
Coal gets mined in Utah and shipped on unit trains out to Stockton, CA and put on freighters to China. A local developer is trying to move that port to Oakland but upwind of a residential area. He'd been turned down a few times but he tricked an administrator into a bad contract which the city has rejected. A lawsuit was filed.
The Chinese government has already relaxed the proposed rules somewhat, in response to criticism that the increased standards were actually impossible to meet with current processes and equipment. And this article fails to mention that many of the Chinese companies in this sector were grossly negligent in their handling of the "contamination" - of course no one wants to say "our buyer in China had their license revoked because they were literally pouring toxic waste in a river" but that's the sort of thing that was going on.
There are business opportunities here, too. The more positive one is in automated (mostly computer vision based) sorting systems. Automated sorting that's clean enough for China's new standards is possible with existing technology, but there are a lot of opportunities for both new entrants and existing companies in the sector to improve speed and reduce costs. In the long term, this is definitely the path forward.
The second opportunity is for other countries in the Asia-Pacific region that are less picky about environmental regulations, to buy American recycling exports, clean them up to Chinese standards, then resell to China. In the short term, I expect we'll be seeing a lot of this.
Modern dumps can be very environmentally friendly. The bottom can be clay sealed with leak monitoring to protect the ground water. With a little extra effort they can designed for methane capture to prevent problematic off gassing. Maybe aluminum and other purish metal scrap gets taken out of the waste stream and the rest goes back to the Earth. Some carbon capture happens and the site can be mined in the future if it seems worthwhile. Add video monitoring of what goes in for future prospectors to evaluate the ore body and call it a day.
Recycling does not make much environmental sense and considering it is sort of like a little ritual that washes away your consumption sins, maybe a net negative on getting people to consume less. Even mass compost is a problem, potentially spreading plant diseases and, in the Bay Area, getting poison oak in your mulch is a real downside. Oakland is now charging more for compost disposal than for garbage, so some kind of problem is going on with it. Plus one one truck zooming around waking people up in the morning instead of the current three.
Shipping your garbage half way around the world does indeed make little sense. But Recycling itself is a good idea - we used to do this, AT&T did it with everything they made, milk and soda came in reusable bottles, other products like instant coffee, creamer, ovaltine, and others also came in glass instead of plastic - yes, reuse does cost the manufacturer more, but right now, those costs are still present, they're just being passed down to an unknown party, at an unknown point in the future.
We should be trying reduce plastic use to places where really nothing else can do the job - and use more glass, metal, , and paper instead.
Manufacturers should be the ones forced to take their products back. That way they (the only ones who can) will take the cost into account and design differently.
No more greedy planned obsolescence, no more flimsy crap that breaks in 10 days, no more cries about right to repair. The right incentive solves all the problems.
You can buy milk in reusable glass milk bottles. Usually it's a buck deposit on the glass bottle. Return it to the store and you get the deposit back. When the milk company drops off a new shipment, they pick up crates of the empty glass bottles.
It works well if you always remember to bring the bottles back.
Works in much of Europe. In Germany, every store that sells glass has to take it back. You see bottle machines at all the Aldis with scanners. It's mostly automated, and you can tell how old a beer bottle is by how deep the rings are (where the machine rolls it around to scan it).
Just about everywhere in the US does this too (down to rolling the fan around, it’s actually a little fun to watch), but it’s not the same as what the parent is describing since those machines crush the glass to be recycled.
I’m pretty sure the parent is describing reusing the bottles after reconditioning, which requires taking the bottles intact.
>and you can tell how old a beer bottle is by how deep the rings are (where the machine rolls it around to scan it).
That's what the person you replied to is talking about. Here in Vietnam, like Germany, they refill used beer bottles. You can tell a new bottle from old based on the scuff marks the machinery leaves on the glass, which build up over time. These are the "rings" the GP is referring to.
> ... Recycling itself is a good idea ... milk and soda came in reusable bottles, other products like instant coffee, creamer, ovaltine, and others also came in glass instead of plastic - yes, reuse does cost the manufacturer more ...
As you say at the end of my quote, that's reuse, not recycling. Plus you're really only talking about using glass bottles instead of plastic bottles. None of that means that "Recycling itself is a good idea".
Arguably, Glass, and Metal are easier to recycle - but more energy intensive to do so - its much easier to sort glass and metal than the 9000 kinda of plastic.
I'd argue that reuse and recycling are in many cases, functionally semantics.
Recycling of glass containers saves some energy, but not a signifcant quantity compared to
reuse. The primary energy saved is about 2.2 x 10^6 Btu/ton, or 13% of the energy required to
make glass containers from virgin raw materials. This estimate includes energy required for the
entire product life cycle, starting with raw materials in the ground and ending with either final
waste disposition in a landfill or recycled materal collection, processing, and return to the primary
manufacturing process. The actual savings depend on local factors, including population density;
locations of landfills, recovery facilities, and glass plants; and process efficiencies at the specifc
facilities available. The savings increase if wastes must be transported long distances to a landfill
or if the containers are made in an inefficient furnace. They decrease if there is no local MRF or
glass plant, or if material losses in the recycling loop are high. If the MRF is as much as 100 mi
away, savings from recycling are negated.
Sure! It's the 2nd best choice. Reuse as much as possible. What can't be reused, recycle. But it's significantly better to recycle it than throw it in the garbage for almost everyone.
I know, I read the whole thing. Glass is also made of limestone, fyi.
1) Oil was less expensive, inflation-adjusted, in 1994 than it is today ($30/bbl) 2) Only very specific sand is in short supply today (construction and fracking sand, neither of which is fungible with arbitrary sand) 3) Glass is made of natural gas.
Melting rocks into glass takes a lot more energy than melting scrap glass into glass. The ratio is not as good as for aluminium or other metals, but it's still worthwhile afaik.
But transporting heavy glass, sorting it, and everything else makes the ratio for recycling much much worse.
As evidence: In general no one actually remelts recycled glass. Recycled glass is crushed and spread on top of landfills each night to prevent rodents from being active, and to reduce dust and pollution.
That's still considered "recycled". And this is after transporting and sorting! And yet they still don't bother remelting it.
Rats can gnaw through standard concrete? No wonder they ended up everywhere on Earth. I would love to see some video of rats chewing holes through concrete walls. A quick search on youtube did not turn up any live rats chewing concrete.
"Seal holes in foundations of
buildings or entrances to rat
burrows with a minimum of 2 in.
(5 cm) of reinforced mortar mixed
with iron filings (from machine
shops) or broken glass pieces
1/8 in. to 1/2 in. (0.3 cm to 1.3 cm)
long. (You can put some glass in a
tough paper bag and smash it
with a hammer. Shake out the
broken glass pieces into the
mortar as you are mixingi t.) The
glass or the filings deters rats from
digging the filled holes out again
before the mortar hardens."
Clear glass has value, while green and brown tinted glass has much less value.
“Glass recycling” takes all forms though, so now you have to sort optically, which has mixed results, or settle for “all recycled glass is now going to be brown glass”
That doesn’t even get into the part of how dangerous broken glass can be for workers along the recycling supply chain.
I don’t know if it’s worthwhile to recycle glass or not, but I do know it should be questioned rather than assumed to be an absolute benefit.
RE-usable bottles have a finite usable cycle count. Typically around 20 to 30-cycles[1]. They are better than disposable containers, but like anything else they wear, break down, etc.
>Shipping your garbage half way around the world does indeed make little sense
But it did make sense as long as China accepted the garbage. Remember the ships that bring stuff here will go back to China. No sense in them going back empty.
The core message of that video seems to be some libertarian wet dream, that it costs more money to recycle X than to build X from scratch, and that instead of government subsidies, we should just throw it all away in a landfill, until natural resources are depleted enough that we will be willing to pick up that trash for money.
Wet dream or not, my marginal billable hour is in the triple digits, as is my wife's. In my household, recycling is hugely expensive. There is no way it's cheaper for me to sort my garbage into piles of garbage, so that someone might be able to turn it into something usable. It's a huge tax on the populations where it's legally required, and worse, is no municipality even benefits from this tax.
It is amazing people think it is worth spending 5 minutes washing out a jelly jar to save 1 cent in glass. I'll wash out cans and glass that clean in one rinsing, but even that is probably not an economical use of time.
>But it costs more for most of the things. For example, for glass:
You literally chose the worst material (recycling-wise) for your example.
Glass is made of molten sand -- the raw materials are cheap, and all the energy goes into melting it and forming it into the right shape.
Metal is energy-intensive and ecologically damaging to extract and refine[1][2][3], but shaping it from ingots/billets/blooms/slabs to finished product is a relatively small part of that footprint.
Paper is the same story, requiring a lot of "cooking" to break down wood into fibers (much more energy-intensive than re-pulping paper). And there's the footprint of paper forestry itself, which often uses herbicide to control weedy underbrush.
Plastics, similarly, are made of an energy-intensive raw material (it's solid oil essentially), but the process from pellets to finished product (typically injection molding) uses comparatively little energy.
Remember, recycling is near the bottom (least favorable options) of the waste hierarchy.[4] My philosophy? Reduce plastic, reuse glass, and recycle metal and paper.
Which is exactly why it is subsidized. The goal is not to save companies money, but to save natural resources. Now, I agree it is debatable whether recycling achieves those goals, but a free-market approach, as introduced in the video, will only be more harmful.
> Recycling does not make much environmental sense and considering it is sort of like a little ritual that washes away your consumption sins
This reminded me of something Slavoj Zizek was talking about. How people need rituals like that to feel like they are saving the environment. So municipalities indulge them and let them read the triangles under each plastic piece of trash and they put it in one of 5 recycling bins, then the trucks pick them up and dump them all in a large dump.
There is a virtuous fervor to recycling -- it's a type of middle class moral purification ritual, something that counterbalances high levels of consumption, even when it wastes more scarce resources than putting trash in a landfill.
Certainly recycling some things makes a lot of sense. For example, scrap metal. But the push to recycle everything has lead to exploding costs and mounting subsidies. For example, the article cites New York spending $300 million on subsidizing recycling, about half the park department budget, rather than what it would cost to put waste into landfills.
By lowering recycling costs, China has played the role of enabler, allowing many middle class households to continue to obtain consumption indulgences at below market rates. If China stops subsidizing this stuff, I hope there is some pushback from communities, or at least from most communities, because we've gone full crazy on recycling.
> Modern dumps can be very environmentally friendly.
Why use dumps at all? Here in Germany dumps are not allowed anymore, instead everything that can not be recycled is being burned; the energy is converted into electricity.
Yes, burning the trash releases CO2 into the atmosphere, but prevents release of the much worse Methane and also protects the ground water.
Not even that: The Norwegian government plans to connect the garbage incinerator at Klementsrud to a CO2 capture station, pressurize it, and ship it to an abandoned gas field for storage.
And since the capacity of the storage site is so much bigger than the Norwegian domestic production, some of Germany's CO2 will eventually be included as well :-)
As the comment you were responding to noted, new landfills protect the groundwater by completely lining the dumping area and then capture this methane and use it to produce energy. Cleaner burning and less CO2 than simply burning the waste stream because anaerobic bacteria capture a lot of the carbon and the parts of the waste stream that would produce nasty combustion byproducts are contained underground.
I highly recommend the documentary Plastic China. It is heartbreaking to watch the stories and struggles of the families that are filmed.
It’s available to stream on Prime video. It is a real eye opener for what happens next to some of the waste we throw into the recycle bin, long after we have forgotten about it.
Seems like Germany had this one figured out. One non-recyclable thing found in your building’s garbage and you’re all in trouble. The US is way too lax on enforcing good practices. We waste too much, and when we do feel good recycling drives we do it lazily.
How about not buying stuff with poor packaging. Sure, sometimes we don’t have a choice, but many times we do. Often it’s as simple as preparing food at home versus getting take out. I’d prefer laws to mandate recycleable packaging. Problem solved. Petrochemical industry will be ticked.
People working 12 hours per day don't really have time to cook. Also if stuff wrapped in plastic is cheaper, people will buy it as money is a limited resource they need for so many other things.
Unless there is government action to mandate some sort of rules around this - mainly to force companies to use reusable containers - blaming little consumers is a fool's endeavor.
Lots of poor and blue collar working class people do 12 hour work days (for example truckers or workers in construction). And these are the people that are usually described here as "primitive" consumers who only eat fast food and buy cheap prepared food in plastic containers.
Annie Leonard, who's written on trash and waste, has an excellent article on this from the 2013 Worldwatch Institute State of the World report:
Framing environmental deterioration as the result of poor individual choices—littering, leaving the lights on when we leave a room, failing to car-pool—not only distracts us from identifying and demanding change from the real drivers of environmental decline. It also removes these issues from the political realm to the personal, implying that the solution is in our personal choices rather than in better policies, business practices, and structural context.
"Moving from Individual Change to Societal Change"
Meanwhile, any individual can burn 100l of fossil fuel per day in his car without repercussions.
Or burn wood pellets, because they are sooo health friendly.
But as long as we have the "improved" "2-year lifetime" "energy saving" light bulbs that were foisted upon the consumer by the light bulb industry, our planet is saved.
I'm confused by Plasticbank. They seem to pay for plastic. While they divert plastic from oceans, doesn't paying for plastic increase demand?
It sounds like the Cobra Effect -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect -- where paying for dead cobras, intending to lower their numbers, motivated people to breed more, which increased their numbers.
One way this could be partially solved is with better technology. Like a digital trashcan that analyzes your trash and alerts you/rejects your trash it if it's not sorted correctly, maybe tell you what item wasn't recyclable. Just brainstorming here. It would help me, because apparently I keep making mistakes in what I think is recyclable and what isn't. Even though I read the guidelines for years now.
impact on my neighborhood economy is severe. i don't know how much is the chinese decision and how much other factors. but we used to have people who regularly stopped by to pick up bulk cardboard and scrap metal. apparently cardboard isn't worth anything at all anymore and we have to manage the impact on our waste stream. and because the price of steel has fallen to $0.03/lb, and id requirements have been toughened up to discourage theft, we can't even get the homeless meth addicts to haul away steel anymore.
thats what we get for clean hot roll scrap around here. none of the people who used to come by with trucks think that its worth the gas money any more. $0.10 is definitely worth gas money, so idk
Of the vegetables in the supermarket, the ecological / organic have the most packaging. I find it ironic that if I want to use reusable bags to buy greens, I am pretty much forced to go non-organic.
Good for China, they've got an environmental nightmare to deal with, and part of it comes from the US offloading lots of "recycling" operations there, and I use that term loosely, particularly for electronics. We also "export" pollution to China by buying cheaper products that would be more expensive if they didn't externalize their pollution costs, and it's sure better to externalize that pollution abroad than domestically. The US, in my opinion, has been burying its head in the sand about the pollution which occurs when manufacturing everything that we use.
Recycling, save for very specific things, is neither environmentally beneficial nor economically viable. We recycle so many things because the operations are subsidized, and we feel good because we assume the recycling bin doesn't end up in the dump.
Sorting refuse for recycling is a time consuming, tedious process. I hope that automation can actually make recycling more things viable. Reuse is best, but lots of things can be recycled for raw materials, particularly metals. Plastics don't recycle very well, glass requires more energy to reprocess than making new glass, and paper can be allowed to biodegrade or mixed into existing paper process.
If we were to add externalities into the cost of things, it's likely this will have the added effect of bringing some of the previously off-shored jobs back home. Win-win. Environment wins, blue-collar, non-college American workers win. Possibly offsetting some of the "sharing" economy jobs trend and bring back some real jobs.
once goods became cheap, it's hard to make it expensive again (as consumers will have gotten used to the lower price). If it was possible to have the off-shoring, it will happen.
I think you can, if you build in durability (a phone that lasts 7-10 years vs 1-3 year lifecycle, for example. Or a toaster oven, or shoes which get repaired at the cobblers, etc. We can make the TCO of something cheaper long term, if lifetime and repairability are taken into account.
Now, unsaid is that means that advertising and consumerism must be minimized and provide utility other then make you buy the new shiny trendsetting thing.
Instead of finding better ways to sell ads it would be great if the smart people in SV worked on finding better ways for recycling. This would truly benefit mankind.
I've had the pleasure (joking here) of living in some very poor countries, and people there waste little. Why waste a perfectly good glass or plastic bottle by throwing it away, instead of refilling?
Generally, when the cost of a bottle or bag is statistically significant, people care for them. Stores sell more bulk stuff, refill bottles, and offer little in the way of their own packaging. It's all a lot less convenient.
In the US, various bulk stores have tried to introduce the packaging reuse notion, but all have gone out of business because we take convenience over reuse.
This will only change when reuse is equally convenient. If I knew how to accomplish that, I wouldn't be pontificating here, but running my own business doing just that.
> This will only change when reuse is equally convenient. If I knew how to accomplish that, I wouldn't be pontificating here, but running my own business doing just that.
Pretty straight-forward really. Increase the cost of once-off convenience. If it costs more to do it the dirty way, people will do it the clean way. But in america, they'll just vote in people that will dig a bigger hole. Probably in what used to be park-land.
> But in america, they'll just vote in people that will dig a bigger hole. Probably in what used to be park-land.
Placing the blame entirely on idiot consumers isn't the best either. Where are the fortunate people in society who not just educating but also leading by example?
Elon Musk is the only person of importance I can think of that is actually putting their money where their mouth is to make the world a better place.
The one place I've seen this work was in regards to dairy products bottled in thick, reusable glass containers. The supermarket would charge something like a $2 deposit refundable upon return of the used bottle.
When I was a kid there was a Pop Shoppe store by my house that sold different flavors of soda pop in thick little glass bottles. You'd grab a crate, fill it up with whatever mix of flavors struck your fancy, and pay a deposit for the bottles. When you'd drank them all you brought your crate of empty bottles back for a refill.
Seemed like a pretty good idea to me. It went out of business, though, I think because people wanted Pepsi and Coke brands.
> It went out of business, though, I think because people wanted Pepsi and Coke brands.
Nothing stops the Pop Shoppe from dispensing Pepsi and Coke brands any more than it stops the local pizza place from dispensing Coke brand Coke from the soda fountain.
When I was a kid (in the 1960's), milk bottles were re-used.
We left the empty bottles on the front porch. The milkman (from Alexandria Dairy, if you lived in NoVa like me) came around very early in the morning and exchanged the empty bottles for filled ones. There was a little ice box (literally) by the front door that kept the milk cold.
This service stopped in the mid 70s.
I would love to see Amazon take the lead on this. They should be in a great position to do so as they move to doing more of their own distribution. Ditch the cardboard boxes and bubble envelopes and replace them with reusable bins and pouches that are picked up when the next order is delivered. (And to start with, at least get rid of those horrible bubble mailers that can't even be recycled, and replace them with an all-paper padded envelope...)
Amazon did this for Amazon Fresh grocery delivery back when it was just in Seattle (and then in LA). Unattended deliveries, meaning left on your front porch, came in reusable bags and hard-sided plastic containers.
Ever since they ruined Fresh by just lumping it in with Prime Now deliveries, most items come in disposable paper bags with disposable insulation inserts for frozen stuff.
Tesco in the UK (and I guess other supermarkets but I haven’t used them) give you the option of choosing not to have you groceries delivered in plastic bags. In that case they deliver them in the same reusable plastic trays they use internally. You give them back when you have you next delivery - or keep them for storing your junk as they are stackable and very durable.
The delivery vans have doors at the side with rows of shelves that these trays fit onto, so it’s a lot better protected than a parcel thrown into the back of a van.
In the UK, back in the 70's we had a deposit scheme for glass bottles. And if you couldn't be bothered taking your bottles back to the store for a few pennies each you could be sure some local kid would be more than happy to do it for you.
Not that I know of no. I have heard about the scheme in Northern Europe and it makes a lot of sense.
I think the introduction of plastic bottles and paper cartons was the initial reason for dropping it? Back then recycling was purely a direct cost/benefit thing rather than for environmental reasons.
>In the US, various bulk stores have tried to introduce the packaging reuse notion, but all have gone out of business because we take convenience over reuse.
It's not just that. Stores in the US don't trust their customers enough to move away from bulky packaging that takes forever to open.
I mail order most things. While that saves on pollution from fuel, tires, etc., the amount of packaging material that gets discarded is depressing.
I particularly loathe styrofoam peanuts and bubblewrap. Those should just be banned (or taxed heavily!). Use cardboard. There ought to be a way to "foam" paper to substitute for styrofoam peanuts. Then the stuff just disintegrates on its own after a while.
Maybe go back to waxed/oiled paper instead of plastic, too.
It's not like people get out of college uniquely qualified for writing a Twitter clone. The same people that use machine learning for ads could also use it for sorting trash. And manipulating it would be a hard problem for robotics.
As Larry Ellison and other godfathers of the start of the IT industry once said (paraphrasing), "It's impossible to find someone who has the necessary skills and 10 years in the industry. Just hire the smartest people we can find and let them figure it out." Worked before, why wouldn't it work again?
Larry Ellison had two big advantages, though - a well-circumscribed problem domain and an obvious business model. Recycling has neither. It's a much more difficult problem.
My best suggestion to SV is not consume so many energy per people. But that actually a problem for whole American, not just SV. Turn off the light when you are not in the room, try not using plastic bags, stop mining Bitcoin etc
Nothing the SV can do. It's a user problem, not a technical problem.
Go down your building. Look at people throwing trash. Do they bother to split paper, plastic or glass? Not at all. They'd throw anything into the closest trash.
Nobody forced china to take America’s trash. They simply undercut other recyclers, making them economically unviable. The same thing happened with rare earths, china didn’t mind to pollute their land to process them, again making cleaner but more expensive means of production economically unviable. This is really the crux of china’s environmental problems: if your competitors cheat by cutting corners in environmental protection while you don’t, you simply don’t exist after awhile. Unhindered capitalism.
Until China starts be more aggressive in cleaning up their environment or the USA decides to sanction against polluting industries, nothing will change.
It sounds like China is starting to crack down. It's a luxury you have once you're affluent enough. The bootstrapping process is sadly very dirty everywhere that it's happened.
> The bootstrapping process is sadly very dirty everywhere that it's happened.
Not on the scale China's has been. Their environmental destruction has been on such a scale that nearby countries, even those separated by ocean, have greatly impacted air quality and the oceans themselves have been greatly affected.
Sweden wasn't wreaking Poland's skies and waters as it industrialised.
> Sweden wasn't wreaking Poland's skies and waters as it industrialised.
Citation needed.
But just using logic, Sweden has about 10 million people today.
During industrialization it probably had much less (there was a population explosion in Europe after WW2).
Let's say Sweden had 5 million people. Industrializing country of 5 million of people vs industrializing country of 1-1.5 billion is something which is ridiculous to compare.
Imagine trying to industrialize double or triple of Europe from agrarian society again and tell me you think it would be clean and tidy process.
More ridiculous is the idea that a nation deserves extra credit for being ridiculously overpopulated. In China's case, it's doubly absurd given that the CCP strong-armed an already too large populace into having more children for decades before wisely but again brutally reversing course with its famous one child policy.
> "The 1950s census showed that China had 557 million people, and some professionally-trained demographers began urging that policies be put in place to limit population growth. Mao Zedong condemned such views on the grounds that under socialism a large population was a great resource, not a threat. Consequently, some of the most prominent proponents of birth control were labelled rightists and removed from power… by the time Mao died in 1976, China’s population exceeded 900 million."
-Ebrey, Patricia Buckley (2010). The Cambridge Illustrated History of China, p. 327.
In the future, we will likely see an even larger devastation of the environment from India and other countries with large and growing populations.
Well yes, I agree with you. China, India and don't forget about Africa (most countries in Africa now have average age around 20-25 years old and are multiplying populations very quickly).
Not sure what can be done about it. I guess mother nature will sort that out once we run out of resources. It will be like a defensive reaction of an organism, human race might just get purged from the Earth.
99.9% of people disagree with you. You might not be the only one but you are part of tiny minority which doesn't influence anything. For every person like you who doesn't want kids there are hundred families somewhere in developing world with 5-8 children.
The UN forecast that the global population will reach an absolute maximum of about 11 billion by 2100. Some forecasts are even more conservative, suggesting a peak of 9 billion by 2050. The global birth rate has peaked and is now in overall decline, with most of the developed world being well below the replacement rate. Most of the population growth we'll see over the next century is simply due to more people living longer lives.
The fertility rate in China is massively below replacement at 1.57 births per woman. India is barely above replacement at 2.4. The fertility rate in India today is lower than the fertility rate was in the US in 1970. The global fertility rate has halved in 50 years. Even in the poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the fertility rate is declining. The fertility rate in Rwanda has more than halved from 8.4 in 1980 to 3.8 today. As far as I can ascertain, Niger is the country on earth with a persistently high fertility rate.
We can take this both ways: up until the 60s or so the West also viewed more people as a forte. It's just that it started from a lower base, the US started from 100 million people when China was at 300+ million...
Also after WW2 most young men in Europe were dead or maimed so in 50s and 60s governments supported population explosion so Europe would replenish tens of millions of young people it lost in the war and could rebuild its decimated economy.
> More ridiculous is the idea that a nation deserves extra credit for being ridiculously overpopulated.
I don't think the idea is "extra credit", but rather a matter of scale changing the nature of the problem, just as you wouldn't directly compare the problem of networking 10 computers to the problem of networking 1000 computers.
You're underestimating the amount of pollution other countries produced during industrialization. There used to be rivers in the US that were flammable because manufacturers discharges so many volatile effluents into them.
London's "killer fog" is quite famous, and Russia's Lake Karachay still holds the distinction as the most polluted spot on earth.
Sure, China affects its neighbors. China is a big country compared to Sweden.
Pulping and paper plants in the Northeast US used to dump all kinds of junk into rivers. You could tell what color paper was being printed by what color the river was. Lots of really toxic things were done by the US on their way to where they are now.
I'm sorry, but this is complete bunkum. Europe has spent spent decades dealing with major cross-border pollution issues. Sulphur emitted by British and German coal power plants was destroying Polish forests until those emissions were curbed by international agreements. Rivers across the continent were running green with algae because of eutrophication caused by fertiliser run-off and discharges of untreated sewage. There are still major issues with cross-border emissions of persistent organic pollutants and heavy metals.
There's nothing unique about China's environmental problems. Every nation in Europe was at least as dirty during their own industrial revolutions. A hundred years ago, every building in urban Britain was jet black with soot. In 1952, the great smog of London killed 4000 people and brought the whole city to a standstill. The urban pollution in modern China would be entirely familiar to any elderly Briton.
China are making great steps to remedy their environmental problems. They're a leading investor in solar, battery and nuclear technology. They industrialised faster than the west and now they're cleaning up the mess faster than we did.
You should be sorry. China's pork industry alone generates over a billion tonnes of waste per year, accounts for about half of the nitrogen and over 90% of the phosphorus waste put into the South China Sea, is a major portion of world methane pollution and may well be the single largest vector of antibiotic resistant bacteria the world has ever seen. And that's just one industry.
Comparing the scale of this environmental destruction with anything humanity did 100-200 years ago is what is, as you put it, "compete bunkum".
The environmental impacts of the US beef industry are in the same ballpark as the Chinese pork industry. Due to the shift towards feedlot production, it has been getting dirtier in most respects over recent decades. Antibiotic use as a growth promoter is still legal and ubiquitous in the US.
America's CO2 emissions per capita are still more than twice that of China. The Chinese government is clearly taking major steps to curb their resource use and their environmental impact; the current US administration is repealing environmental regulations en masse and has seriously mooted abolishing the EPA altogether.
China has some serious environmental problems, there's no debate about that. The problem is when China is painted as a unique or extreme environmental villain, which is simply untrue. China's environmental regulations currently lag behind the west by a few decades, but they're making meaningful progress in the right direction.
> he environmental impacts of the US beef industry are in the same ballpark as the Chinese pork industry.
The very article you linked put the entire amount of US farm waste at 335 million tons. This is much less than China's 1.3 billion tonnes (AKA "metric tons") for pork alone.
So if China were to split into 10 different countries it would somehow become an acceptable level?
Per capita is the only equitable measure of pollution.
I certainly agree overpopulation of the earth is a tragedy likely felt for generations, but petty bickering over these very issues is why global leaders can't make any progress in greenhouse gas emissions.
If those covered 10 times as much of the earth in similarly temperate regions, I would be inclined to say yes.
> Per capita is the only equitable measure of pollution.
Would you then believe that if Australia were to have a population of 3 billion and produce double the pollution China currently does, that the continent would be doing well on environmental issues simply because per capita numbers were lower?
In any rational analysis, the environmental strain an ecosystem can withstand is directly related to the size of that ecosystem in comparison to the strain.
The strain an ecosystem can withstand is, unfortunately, not increased in a per capita manner as human population in the ecosystem increases. This may not be equitable. Nature often isn't.
Sure. Every year they say they will, but it is sort of like a crackdown that lasts for a week or two before everything goes back to normal again. China doesn’t need another crackdown, they need sustained and consistent rule of law.
I also have criticism that I often level at "unhindered Capitalism"
But don't you have to admit China is quite socialist / communist and already "hinders" quite a bit? And yet they still rape the environment. Look at what they did with Lake Baikal in a few years. The Gobi desert is expanding. The smog and pollution is worse than LA in the 80s, and so on.
So, what is the answer? "Hindering" capitalism is too vague.
Maybe it's not a capitalist/socialist thing. Maybe it's as simple as good governance vs bad governance.
One thing that's undeniable is that without external intervention (which usually means the state), private industry will tend to pollute as much as it can.
Also - remember strong central government isn't inherently "left" or "right" and the current US view of the left/right spectrum isn't the only possible one. Staring at a 2-axis version of the political spectrum is a good way to break a damaging mental habit.
Oh, it is China's fault to deal with US's problem, by buying wastes in bulk thus delay the innovation? Interesting thought, then Americans should be rejoiced that they finally get the chance to deal with it themselves now.
> Nobody forced china to take America’s trash. They simply undercut other recyclers, making them economically unviable.
Though conversely, no one forced western countries to send their waste to China without at least having a backup plan for if the economics (or relevant political matters) changed, as they apparently have.
The companies with backup plans would have been outcompeted in the market due to having higher costs than those without backup plans, and so investors would not have supported them.
So now the investors are going to lose out as companies take the hit of setting up new infrastructure in a hurry. You pays your money you takes your choice. Cost now or risk of surprise cost later. Not all investors are short-sighted (though I'll grant you that many are).
The dumb money in 401k, pension funds, passive investments isn't paying that much attention. As long as it keeps up with the market, and the government will print money to ensure it does, it's not possible to isolate and feel the effect of not having the backup plan. And you can't compare the performance of companies that did have a backup with those that didn't because the former never survived or existed, so it's a tough sell to think that far ahead.
Recycling, save for very specific things, is neither environmentally beneficial nor economically viable.
To me that has always seemed like a problem to be solved, rather than just tossing it all. Sure, that's the way it is today, but is it the way it has to be? If metals are so eminently recyclable, why can't other materials be?
I also have a sneaking suspicion that raw materials & landfills are just as subsidized if not more, making it difficult to rely on cost effectiveness as the ultimate arbiter of environmental friendliness or total social cost.
I don't understand why there's so little education in America about what is recyclable and what isn't. When I lived in Japan, every district in most cities had detailed documentation about what goes where on what day, how to clean it, etc. When you go to restaurants, there's images of the items that are recyclable on their respective recycle bins and images of what goes in the trash on the trash bins. There's also drains to pour out pet bottles, etc.
Is it that hard to spread some basic documentation about recycling?
Aren't we losing money by no longer being able to sell our recyclables to China? Isn't the crux of this article the exact opposite of what you're saying?
the biggest impact for some people reading Hacker News is that there is now a pretty big uncertainty on those "second hand" Xeon processors you purchase on ebay.
This is going to work out great. All the technology for automatically sorting and recycling plastic exists. There are production plants using it. The best sorters aren't widely used yet, but they're available. Even ABS/polyethylene/polystyrene sorting is available. The US has been shipping unsorted wasted to China, but now will have to sort and recycle it domestically.
The biggest plastic recycling plant in the US is in Riverside, California.[1] In go mixed bottles, out come injection molding pellets. The technology is working at scale right now.
Bloomberg sees this ban as a boost for the US plastics industry.[2]
We have that in the UK now, except that it's still partially sorted by hand. Starting at 44'30", this programme has a section showing a mixed recycling facility: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3f5bnw
Nice. Most of the sorting is done by mechanical methods - shakers, screens, flotation tanks, magnets - but most plants still have a few manual pickers pulling out strange stuff. That's a robot job.
Then glass and plastics are chopped into pellets, and sorted by color and material. That uses the same vision technology used to sort farm products. Vision-based sorting is so fast that it's routine to sort individual peas using machine vision. Sorting glass cullet into clear, amber, and green works just as well. Sorting plastic by type is rarer, but here's a line for that.[1]
Here's a overview of a production recycling plant.[2] A random mix of stuff goes in, and stage by stage, each material flow becomes more uniform, until material ready for reuse comes out.
I'm a little bit disappointed as the story just looks for new ways to get rid of the plastic problem. Why not produce and use less plastic? In the EU some countries ban plastic bags, others introduced or increased prices for bags. On the other hand more paper bags are available and prices for them dropped, too, resulting in more people using paper bags or starting to use cotton-bags.
Agree. A lot of this has to do with habits. If you know that plastic bags are 10 cents each then suddenly you quickly learn to always bring 10 reusable bags with you to save the money.
Mostly I have just gotten very good at balancing a surprising number of items on my body while walking out of the store.
(and I started long before we got a plastic bag fee, fresh bags rarely crossed my personal convenience/waste threshold and I still happily pay when they do)
The problem with solutions like this is that life is more complicated. Plastic bags are easy and energy efficient to produce and to ship to the end-user. Paper bags degrade incredibly poorly in the anaerobic environment of landfills and they use more energy for shipping to the end-user. IIRC, a paper bag that is not reused three times before being thrown away or recycled ends up using more energy and resources than the plastic bags being banned, and a high-density plastic bag needs to be reused 10 times, and a cloth bag needs to be used 150+ times to be better than low density plastic bags.
They may dissolve in the ocean, but the US does not dump its garbage in the ocean. When you put them in a landfill the last for a very long time. A very, very long time. When people want to determine the age range from a core sample of a landfill then just look for paper because it does not degrade in an anaerobic environment.
>'CEO Steve Miller says the robot uses cameras and artificial intelligence to separate recycling from trash "in the same way that a person would do it," but faster and more accurately.'
This looks like an issue we could actually address.
What if every recycler world wide could get their hands on open source AI sorting software and open robotics.
Anyone know of any open source projects along these lines?
Homo sapiens have existed hundreds of thousands of years without plastic.
13 hours this post has been up and almost no mention of reducing plastic consumption. It costs zero, sends the signal upstream to produce less, and solves all these problems.
How do we not even talk about using less?
I reduced packaged food by about 95% and found it improved my life. My diet became more delicious, convenient, and cheaper, based more on fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, and bulk legumes, nuts, and grains. Here's a video on it: http://joshuaspodek.com/leadership-environment-podcast-5.
It's been more than six months since I've emptied my landfill garbage and months since I emptied my recycling. My compost, on the other hand, I empty a couple times a month.
How is the headline for this story not: "It's past time we stop producing garbage by 90%. It will improve your life"?
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[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 316 ms ] threadIn some regions, pirated materials derived from metals, petrochemicals, and advanced dyes are immediately destroyed and shoveled into landfills: http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/steam-rollers-c...
The brown paper bag and the Anchor Hocking jar are going to come back in a big way...
As well they should.
Back when I was growing up we weren't taught to recycle, we were taught the three R's.
1. Reduce 2. Reuse 3. Recycle
And those R's were supposed to be in order of priority.
and is far from unique in doing so..
http://www.baph.org.uk/forum/topic/carrongrove-mill-denny/
When you visit a grocery store, there's a garbage dump wrapped around most of the products. Some of it's biodegradable, compostable, and recyclable, much of it isn't. We can remediate and save some of these processes and luxuries, but that they are mostly unsustainable is evident to anyone who comprehends industrial engineering.
"Over the pockmarked landscape there would invariably hang a pall of smog belched out from the smelting furnaces through giant chimneys, and so heavy with chemicals that it burned the naked skin and turned it white. Birds would die if they flew through the fumes. As Roman power spread the gas clouds were never far behind."
I agree, though, that this kind of problem was localized and was not in the minds of Romans the way it is in ours.
I wouldn't consider the mass deforestation of the entire Mediterranean basin "localized".
Climate change is irrelevant because if people simply consumed less and demanded products that last longer, we'd reduce carbon emissions as well as other forms of pollution. The real inconvenient truth is that overall consumption needs to go down. It means smaller factories, less industry growth, higher paying factory jobs and a total change in our fundamental value systems ... so really it's never going to change until after the next global collapse .. not that 2008 bullshit, I mean a real one.
Not so. Carbon stays and accumulates. It's not the annual emissions which matter, it's the total emissions to date which matters.
At this point, we've already put too much in the atmosphere. Continuing to emit, at a lower rate, would still be adding to the problem. It would be an improvement over emitting even larger amounts, but we'd still be making the overall situation worse off with each passing year.
Stop hand waving. Trees use it, algae use it, at the very least. Carbon doesn't stick around with the persistence of mercury. Rate of emission is precisely what matters. The problem is that it outpaces the consumption. There's an opportunity to create an industry of carbon consumption that will only arise after the crisis point (depending on which countries blink first).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle
My point in commenting was to say that climate change is not irrelevant, and emphasize that using less is helpful, but won't solve the problem on its own.
It's puzzling how this factualky inaccurate concept, is poisoning the understanding. If it were remotely true, why talk about it at all? We are already dead and the earth will never recover SMH.
A curious coincidence that on the site's most pessimistic assumptions, the amount of carbon we can emit is ~the sign of the devil: 666,666,666,666 tons
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/desert-kites-out...
I guess it's possible because "developed nations" send back empty container ships which might as well be turned into dump trucks?
Their deciding that they no longer are willing to participate in things like this can be a massive (in a time frame and to a degree that a lot of people will be utterly confused and scratching their heads "but how can this be, it doesn't make any sense!!!???") game changer.
one place to monitor for doing it correctly.
one place to easily apply advancements in solutions.
no need to try to herd cats (no need to try to get millions of people to follow exactly the correct proceedures). I watched teams of supposedly smart colleagues be unable to correctly separate their trash. if the average HN reader can't do it why would anyone expect to general population to ever be any better at it?
^If you already have big publicly accessible bottle recycle places, these will the raided.
The centers can’t sort to the level of “purity” required and people don’t realize how truly problematic it is to be lazy in presorting.
I honestly didn’t think it was that big of a deal to let some plastic bags make it in to recycling. I know better now, mainly due to local npr reporting.
There is not much to solve laziness, but sorting tech has room to advance.
This is a machine vision, machine learning, and robotics problem. If this isn't worth developing, the problem is that recycling isn't worth enough money.
In addition, if a little bit of food destroys your recycling operation, then your recycling operation needs more R&D, not legislating consumer behavior.
And it's not legislation, it's you having to pay massive waste disposal fees. Next time your trash gets selected for personal auditing (by that nice computer vision algorithm) and your municipal waste fee doubles, you will be incentivised to wash your recyclables.
Coal gets mined in Utah and shipped on unit trains out to Stockton, CA and put on freighters to China. A local developer is trying to move that port to Oakland but upwind of a residential area. He'd been turned down a few times but he tricked an administrator into a bad contract which the city has rejected. A lawsuit was filed.
http://nocoalinoakland.info/tagami-files-for-summary-judgmen...
http://www.wri.org/blog/2017/01/china%E2%80%99s-decline-coal...
I don't think Tagami will have demand but the lawsuit goes on.
There are business opportunities here, too. The more positive one is in automated (mostly computer vision based) sorting systems. Automated sorting that's clean enough for China's new standards is possible with existing technology, but there are a lot of opportunities for both new entrants and existing companies in the sector to improve speed and reduce costs. In the long term, this is definitely the path forward.
The second opportunity is for other countries in the Asia-Pacific region that are less picky about environmental regulations, to buy American recycling exports, clean them up to Chinese standards, then resell to China. In the short term, I expect we'll be seeing a lot of this.
Recycling does not make much environmental sense and considering it is sort of like a little ritual that washes away your consumption sins, maybe a net negative on getting people to consume less. Even mass compost is a problem, potentially spreading plant diseases and, in the Bay Area, getting poison oak in your mulch is a real downside. Oakland is now charging more for compost disposal than for garbage, so some kind of problem is going on with it. Plus one one truck zooming around waking people up in the morning instead of the current three.
We should be trying reduce plastic use to places where really nothing else can do the job - and use more glass, metal, , and paper instead.
No more greedy planned obsolescence, no more flimsy crap that breaks in 10 days, no more cries about right to repair. The right incentive solves all the problems.
Figure that consumer packaging for food, and products generates a ton more volume than a TV set does.
It works well if you always remember to bring the bottles back.
I’m pretty sure the parent is describing reusing the bottles after reconditioning, which requires taking the bottles intact.
That's what the person you replied to is talking about. Here in Vietnam, like Germany, they refill used beer bottles. You can tell a new bottle from old based on the scuff marks the machinery leaves on the glass, which build up over time. These are the "rings" the GP is referring to.
I’ve had an experience with a poorly recycled bottle in another country that turned me off the idea...
Then yes.
As you say at the end of my quote, that's reuse, not recycling. Plus you're really only talking about using glass bottles instead of plastic bottles. None of that means that "Recycling itself is a good idea".
I'd argue that reuse and recycling are in many cases, functionally semantics.
And it's completely harmless if thrown out. At most crush it first.
The only thing worth recycling is metal.
It's worthwhile to recycle glass.
Recycling of glass containers saves some energy, but not a signifcant quantity compared to reuse. The primary energy saved is about 2.2 x 10^6 Btu/ton, or 13% of the energy required to make glass containers from virgin raw materials. This estimate includes energy required for the entire product life cycle, starting with raw materials in the ground and ending with either final waste disposition in a landfill or recycled materal collection, processing, and return to the primary manufacturing process. The actual savings depend on local factors, including population density; locations of landfills, recovery facilities, and glass plants; and process efficiencies at the specifc facilities available. The savings increase if wastes must be transported long distances to a landfill or if the containers are made in an inefficient furnace. They decrease if there is no local MRF or glass plant, or if material losses in the recycling loop are high. If the MRF is as much as 100 mi away, savings from recycling are negated.
Sand is apparently in shorter (not short) supply. Oil isn’t. I think it’s a different world than the 1994 article you link to
1) Oil was less expensive, inflation-adjusted, in 1994 than it is today ($30/bbl) 2) Only very specific sand is in short supply today (construction and fracking sand, neither of which is fungible with arbitrary sand) 3) Glass is made of natural gas.
As evidence: In general no one actually remelts recycled glass. Recycled glass is crushed and spread on top of landfills each night to prevent rodents from being active, and to reduce dust and pollution.
That's still considered "recycled". And this is after transporting and sorting! And yet they still don't bother remelting it.
"Seal holes in foundations of buildings or entrances to rat burrows with a minimum of 2 in. (5 cm) of reinforced mortar mixed with iron filings (from machine shops) or broken glass pieces 1/8 in. to 1/2 in. (0.3 cm to 1.3 cm) long. (You can put some glass in a tough paper bag and smash it with a hammer. Shake out the broken glass pieces into the mortar as you are mixingi t.) The glass or the filings deters rats from digging the filled holes out again before the mortar hardens."
"Common Sense Pest Control" by Olkowski pg. 633
Clear glass has value, while green and brown tinted glass has much less value.
“Glass recycling” takes all forms though, so now you have to sort optically, which has mixed results, or settle for “all recycled glass is now going to be brown glass”
That doesn’t even get into the part of how dangerous broken glass can be for workers along the recycling supply chain.
I don’t know if it’s worthwhile to recycle glass or not, but I do know it should be questioned rather than assumed to be an absolute benefit.
[1]http://www.o-i.com/Sustainability/Refillables/
But it did make sense as long as China accepted the garbage. Remember the ships that bring stuff here will go back to China. No sense in them going back empty.
For example, for glass: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15890032
And an overview: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/opinion/sunday/the-reign-...
You literally chose the worst material (recycling-wise) for your example.
Glass is made of molten sand -- the raw materials are cheap, and all the energy goes into melting it and forming it into the right shape.
Metal is energy-intensive and ecologically damaging to extract and refine[1][2][3], but shaping it from ingots/billets/blooms/slabs to finished product is a relatively small part of that footprint.
Paper is the same story, requiring a lot of "cooking" to break down wood into fibers (much more energy-intensive than re-pulping paper). And there's the footprint of paper forestry itself, which often uses herbicide to control weedy underbrush.
Plastics, similarly, are made of an energy-intensive raw material (it's solid oil essentially), but the process from pellets to finished product (typically injection molding) uses comparatively little energy.
Remember, recycling is near the bottom (least favorable options) of the waste hierarchy.[4] My philosophy? Reduce plastic, reuse glass, and recycle metal and paper.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_mine_drainage
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_smelting
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoil_tip
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_hierarchy
Which is exactly why it is subsidized. The goal is not to save companies money, but to save natural resources. Now, I agree it is debatable whether recycling achieves those goals, but a free-market approach, as introduced in the video, will only be more harmful.
That could be spent on more natural resource conserving things. That's the argument.
In particular, it could be spent on "fighting" climate change.
I'd agree with 'less environmentally damaging' but not as you've put it.
This reminded me of something Slavoj Zizek was talking about. How people need rituals like that to feel like they are saving the environment. So municipalities indulge them and let them read the triangles under each plastic piece of trash and they put it in one of 5 recycling bins, then the trucks pick them up and dump them all in a large dump.
This is a great article: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/opinion/sunday/the-reign-...
Certainly recycling some things makes a lot of sense. For example, scrap metal. But the push to recycle everything has lead to exploding costs and mounting subsidies. For example, the article cites New York spending $300 million on subsidizing recycling, about half the park department budget, rather than what it would cost to put waste into landfills.
By lowering recycling costs, China has played the role of enabler, allowing many middle class households to continue to obtain consumption indulgences at below market rates. If China stops subsidizing this stuff, I hope there is some pushback from communities, or at least from most communities, because we've gone full crazy on recycling.
Why use dumps at all? Here in Germany dumps are not allowed anymore, instead everything that can not be recycled is being burned; the energy is converted into electricity.
Yes, burning the trash releases CO2 into the atmosphere, but prevents release of the much worse Methane and also protects the ground water.
And since the capacity of the storage site is so much bigger than the Norwegian domestic production, some of Germany's CO2 will eventually be included as well :-)
Other examples abound. Shipping chickens harvested in Arkansas to be butchered in China and sold in Massachusetts is another.
https://www.snopes.com/china-chicken-reshipped/
It’s available to stream on Prime video. It is a real eye opener for what happens next to some of the waste we throw into the recycle bin, long after we have forgotten about it.
Heh. Thanks.
This sounds an awful lot like "blame the litter bugs".
Adam Ruins Everything - The Corporate Conspiracy to Blame You for Their Trash:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koqNm_TgOZk
Unless there is government action to mandate some sort of rules around this - mainly to force companies to use reusable containers - blaming little consumers is a fool's endeavor.
Especially when it comes to things I'd like to switch on in the store before taking it home to discover that it's not working as intended.
Framing environmental deterioration as the result of poor individual choices—littering, leaving the lights on when we leave a room, failing to car-pool—not only distracts us from identifying and demanding change from the real drivers of environmental decline. It also removes these issues from the political realm to the personal, implying that the solution is in our personal choices rather than in better policies, business practices, and structural context.
"Moving from Individual Change to Societal Change"
http://blogs.worldwatch.org/sustainabilitypossible/wp-conten...
Or burn wood pellets, because they are sooo health friendly.
But as long as we have the "improved" "2-year lifetime" "energy saving" light bulbs that were foisted upon the consumer by the light bulb industry, our planet is saved.
https://plasticbank.org/
http://www.earthbench.org/how-to-bottle-brick.html
It sounds like the Cobra Effect -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect -- where paying for dead cobras, intending to lower their numbers, motivated people to breed more, which increased their numbers.
Since when? I'm pretty sure it's around $0.10/lb right now and stainless is around $0.30/lb.
Recycling, save for very specific things, is neither environmentally beneficial nor economically viable. We recycle so many things because the operations are subsidized, and we feel good because we assume the recycling bin doesn't end up in the dump.
Sorting refuse for recycling is a time consuming, tedious process. I hope that automation can actually make recycling more things viable. Reuse is best, but lots of things can be recycled for raw materials, particularly metals. Plastics don't recycle very well, glass requires more energy to reprocess than making new glass, and paper can be allowed to biodegrade or mixed into existing paper process.
Now, unsaid is that means that advertising and consumerism must be minimized and provide utility other then make you buy the new shiny trendsetting thing.
Generally, when the cost of a bottle or bag is statistically significant, people care for them. Stores sell more bulk stuff, refill bottles, and offer little in the way of their own packaging. It's all a lot less convenient.
In the US, various bulk stores have tried to introduce the packaging reuse notion, but all have gone out of business because we take convenience over reuse.
This will only change when reuse is equally convenient. If I knew how to accomplish that, I wouldn't be pontificating here, but running my own business doing just that.
Pretty straight-forward really. Increase the cost of once-off convenience. If it costs more to do it the dirty way, people will do it the clean way. But in america, they'll just vote in people that will dig a bigger hole. Probably in what used to be park-land.
Placing the blame entirely on idiot consumers isn't the best either. Where are the fortunate people in society who not just educating but also leading by example?
Elon Musk is the only person of importance I can think of that is actually putting their money where their mouth is to make the world a better place.
Seemed like a pretty good idea to me. It went out of business, though, I think because people wanted Pepsi and Coke brands.
Nothing stops the Pop Shoppe from dispensing Pepsi and Coke brands any more than it stops the local pizza place from dispensing Coke brand Coke from the soda fountain.
Surely, the license is not an obstacle since it's already being done.
Ever since they ruined Fresh by just lumping it in with Prime Now deliveries, most items come in disposable paper bags with disposable insulation inserts for frozen stuff.
The delivery vans have doors at the side with rows of shelves that these trays fit onto, so it’s a lot better protected than a parcel thrown into the back of a van.
Picture: http://www.shetlandtimes.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Sa...
But the benefit has to be offset by those who choose to have bags because you get 10 times as many bags as you would if doing the packing yourself.
Not sure of the exact cost but there is a flat charge so it is the same for 1 bag or 100.
'Without bags' isn't always practical with some homes where there is restricted access.
I think the introduction of plastic bottles and paper cartons was the initial reason for dropping it? Back then recycling was purely a direct cost/benefit thing rather than for environmental reasons.
It's not just that. Stores in the US don't trust their customers enough to move away from bulky packaging that takes forever to open.
I particularly loathe styrofoam peanuts and bubblewrap. Those should just be banned (or taxed heavily!). Use cardboard. There ought to be a way to "foam" paper to substitute for styrofoam peanuts. Then the stuff just disintegrates on its own after a while.
Maybe go back to waxed/oiled paper instead of plastic, too.
We just need some leadership(!) from central government to enforce widespread adoption of biodegradable packing materials.
The business model is super simple.
Go down your building. Look at people throwing trash. Do they bother to split paper, plastic or glass? Not at all. They'd throw anything into the closest trash.
Until China starts be more aggressive in cleaning up their environment or the USA decides to sanction against polluting industries, nothing will change.
Not on the scale China's has been. Their environmental destruction has been on such a scale that nearby countries, even those separated by ocean, have greatly impacted air quality and the oceans themselves have been greatly affected.
Sweden wasn't wreaking Poland's skies and waters as it industrialised.
Citation needed.
But just using logic, Sweden has about 10 million people today.
During industrialization it probably had much less (there was a population explosion in Europe after WW2).
Let's say Sweden had 5 million people. Industrializing country of 5 million of people vs industrializing country of 1-1.5 billion is something which is ridiculous to compare.
Imagine trying to industrialize double or triple of Europe from agrarian society again and tell me you think it would be clean and tidy process.
> "The 1950s census showed that China had 557 million people, and some professionally-trained demographers began urging that policies be put in place to limit population growth. Mao Zedong condemned such views on the grounds that under socialism a large population was a great resource, not a threat. Consequently, some of the most prominent proponents of birth control were labelled rightists and removed from power… by the time Mao died in 1976, China’s population exceeded 900 million."
-Ebrey, Patricia Buckley (2010). The Cambridge Illustrated History of China, p. 327.
In the future, we will likely see an even larger devastation of the environment from India and other countries with large and growing populations.
Not sure what can be done about it. I guess mother nature will sort that out once we run out of resources. It will be like a defensive reaction of an organism, human race might just get purged from the Earth.
They can purge themself all the ways they like.
All you have to is educate women and give them reliable access to birth control.
In every country where women are empowered to control their own lives and their own fertility, they have chosen to have fewer children.
We don't need some horrible Malthusian resource crunch, we just need feminism.
The fertility rate in China is massively below replacement at 1.57 births per woman. India is barely above replacement at 2.4. The fertility rate in India today is lower than the fertility rate was in the US in 1970. The global fertility rate has halved in 50 years. Even in the poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the fertility rate is declining. The fertility rate in Rwanda has more than halved from 8.4 in 1980 to 3.8 today. As far as I can ascertain, Niger is the country on earth with a persistently high fertility rate.
Population growth is a solved problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E
Capitalism saves us all. Children become too expensive so couple's will only have 2. Or none, if Korea and Japan predict a trend.
I don't think the idea is "extra credit", but rather a matter of scale changing the nature of the problem, just as you wouldn't directly compare the problem of networking 10 computers to the problem of networking 1000 computers.
London's "killer fog" is quite famous, and Russia's Lake Karachay still holds the distinction as the most polluted spot on earth.
Sure, China affects its neighbors. China is a big country compared to Sweden.
And so far not even that was enough to lift 1/3rd of their population out of poverty...
There's nothing unique about China's environmental problems. Every nation in Europe was at least as dirty during their own industrial revolutions. A hundred years ago, every building in urban Britain was jet black with soot. In 1952, the great smog of London killed 4000 people and brought the whole city to a standstill. The urban pollution in modern China would be entirely familiar to any elderly Briton.
China are making great steps to remedy their environmental problems. They're a leading investor in solar, battery and nuclear technology. They industrialised faster than the west and now they're cleaning up the mess faster than we did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Long-Range_Trans...
Comparing the scale of this environmental destruction with anything humanity did 100-200 years ago is what is, as you put it, "compete bunkum".
America's CO2 emissions per capita are still more than twice that of China. The Chinese government is clearly taking major steps to curb their resource use and their environmental impact; the current US administration is repealing environmental regulations en masse and has seriously mooted abolishing the EPA altogether.
China has some serious environmental problems, there's no debate about that. The problem is when China is painted as a unique or extreme environmental villain, which is simply untrue. China's environmental regulations currently lag behind the west by a few decades, but they're making meaningful progress in the right direction.
http://www.sustainabletable.org/906/waste-management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
The very article you linked put the entire amount of US farm waste at 335 million tons. This is much less than China's 1.3 billion tonnes (AKA "metric tons") for pork alone.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/cd.live/uploads/content_image/conte...
> America's CO2 emissions per capita are still more than twice that of China.
Again, from the standpoint of the environment, there is no extra credit for being absurdly overpopulated.
China emits more CO2 than the US, the EU and Russia combined.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
Per capita is the only equitable measure of pollution.
I certainly agree overpopulation of the earth is a tragedy likely felt for generations, but petty bickering over these very issues is why global leaders can't make any progress in greenhouse gas emissions.
> Per capita is the only equitable measure of pollution.
Would you then believe that if Australia were to have a population of 3 billion and produce double the pollution China currently does, that the continent would be doing well on environmental issues simply because per capita numbers were lower?
In any rational analysis, the environmental strain an ecosystem can withstand is directly related to the size of that ecosystem in comparison to the strain.
The strain an ecosystem can withstand is, unfortunately, not increased in a per capita manner as human population in the ecosystem increases. This may not be equitable. Nature often isn't.
But don't you have to admit China is quite socialist / communist and already "hinders" quite a bit? And yet they still rape the environment. Look at what they did with Lake Baikal in a few years. The Gobi desert is expanding. The smog and pollution is worse than LA in the 80s, and so on.
So, what is the answer? "Hindering" capitalism is too vague.
One thing that's undeniable is that without external intervention (which usually means the state), private industry will tend to pollute as much as it can.
Also - remember strong central government isn't inherently "left" or "right" and the current US view of the left/right spectrum isn't the only possible one. Staring at a 2-axis version of the political spectrum is a good way to break a damaging mental habit.
China should never have done this. There is no international EPA to stop them from pooping in their own yard so to speak.
Though conversely, no one forced western countries to send their waste to China without at least having a backup plan for if the economics (or relevant political matters) changed, as they apparently have.
To me that has always seemed like a problem to be solved, rather than just tossing it all. Sure, that's the way it is today, but is it the way it has to be? If metals are so eminently recyclable, why can't other materials be?
I also have a sneaking suspicion that raw materials & landfills are just as subsidized if not more, making it difficult to rely on cost effectiveness as the ultimate arbiter of environmental friendliness or total social cost.
There are industries that are inherently pollutant or energy intensive.
Rich countries tax and regulate it. China welcomes it with open arms, allowing them to operate under very lax regulation.
China put itself in this situation.
Probably Africa ... someone there will surely be happy to take money to dump first world "recycling" by a roadside.
What's really needed is a ban on exporting garbage/recycling from this country, not a game of musical chairs whilst various countries ban "importing".
Or just dump it in the Pacific Ocean .... oh hang on we already do.
Is it that hard to spread some basic documentation about recycling?
The biggest plastic recycling plant in the US is in Riverside, California.[1] In go mixed bottles, out come injection molding pellets. The technology is working at scale right now.
Bloomberg sees this ban as a boost for the US plastics industry.[2]
[1] https://www.kcet.org/shows/socal-connected/carbonlite-inside...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-06/china-s-b...
Then glass and plastics are chopped into pellets, and sorted by color and material. That uses the same vision technology used to sort farm products. Vision-based sorting is so fast that it's routine to sort individual peas using machine vision. Sorting glass cullet into clear, amber, and green works just as well. Sorting plastic by type is rarer, but here's a line for that.[1]
Here's a overview of a production recycling plant.[2] A random mix of stuff goes in, and stage by stage, each material flow becomes more uniform, until material ready for reuse comes out.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mppwM_gkSY
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkILrp11Jq0
(and I started long before we got a plastic bag fee, fresh bags rarely crossed my personal convenience/waste threshold and I still happily pay when they do)
There was a scandal with chemical waste killing a few Africans couple of years back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Ivory_Coast_toxic_waste_d...
I think that countries should take care of their own waste. That's what we get taught as kids right? Clean up after yourself.
This looks like an issue we could actually address.
What if every recycler world wide could get their hands on open source AI sorting software and open robotics.
Anyone know of any open source projects along these lines?
13 hours this post has been up and almost no mention of reducing plastic consumption. It costs zero, sends the signal upstream to produce less, and solves all these problems.
How do we not even talk about using less?
I reduced packaged food by about 95% and found it improved my life. My diet became more delicious, convenient, and cheaper, based more on fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, and bulk legumes, nuts, and grains. Here's a video on it: http://joshuaspodek.com/leadership-environment-podcast-5.
Here's a podcast episode on it: http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/joshua-spodek.
It's been more than six months since I've emptied my landfill garbage and months since I emptied my recycling. My compost, on the other hand, I empty a couple times a month.
How is the headline for this story not: "It's past time we stop producing garbage by 90%. It will improve your life"?