Hmm, that's probably a good point. NYC residents likely have little use for compost. And having to wheel bales (?) of dried poop out of your flat could get a bit annoying. Then again, presumably they already take out their trash, so maybe it's not totally unfeasible?
It's difficult to fully sterilize the compost, and it's very easy to end up with compost that is full of pathogens and parasites. With millions of people in a small area, I think that alone makes this idea infeasible.
The toilets also don't produce bales of dried poop, the composting only partially completes in the toilet itself--it has to be completed outside in a compost heap.
Also dry composting toilets tend to produce more odors than the average person wants to deal with in their small living space.
Shipping by rail and sea is incredibly efficient. Some googling tells me rail is 471 ton-miles per gallon. The average American produces 1600 lbs of trash per year, so you can ship one person's trash for a year almost 600 miles with one gallon of fuel. Even long-distance trash transportation is a negligible contributor to someone's oil use.
This is why markets should make decisions about this stuff (with appropriate taxes for externalities) rather than politicians with their gut instinct...
"We're doing nothing for the environment" doesn't get one elected tho...
Yeah we live in the time where companies look quarter to quarter....or are rewarded by the market by growing like Uber where profits don't even matter.
Not sure we can hope for them to look into the future very far / care.
The likes of Uber are valued highly precisely because investors are looking very far into the future where these companies might become highly profitable.
Markets work based on information. Lack of information causes consumers to buy something they don't want to buy, e.g. negative effects on the environment. Markets should be controlled in a such way that the seller must tell what they are selling, including environmental effects, and they must not lie.
Markets have no interest in environmental outcomes, and most consumers have greedy ones at best. There needs to be some oversight to ensure optimal outcomes for all.
This is true enough (in some markets and some circumstances, yada yada), but sort of missing the point. A world where all the Good Liberals are trained to recycle everything into hand sorted artisinal bins that they keep next to their compost containers is one where people think about what they purchase and push for public policies that worry about resource consumption in ways that benefit all of us.
A world (we live in it) where libertarians tell everyone that "landfill is underrated" is one where people buy and dispose of way too much junk, and create the problems all us communists are vainly trying to solve via personal recycling.
I mean, sure, a world of scientists might be able to handle rules like "recycling that aluminum can is a big win, but the polypropylene bottle with the same product in it is mostly a wash". A world of real people is just going to hear "throw out all the things".
Container deposit for aluminum works pretty well. Steel is relatively easy to extract from trash with magnets. Separating methane producing non-toxic waste might be meaningful too. But having people wash/transport/sort plastics which can't be recycled is bad, and shouldn't be incentivised. Making corporations pay for non-recyclable plastic is a market mechanism which fiscal conservatives should applaud.
Casting this as a goody Lefty vs selfish conservative argument is pointless.
> Making corporations pay for non-recyclable plastic is a market mechanism which fiscal conservatives should applaud.
Citation needed. That sounds like socialist insanity to me. So sure, I applaud it. I just don't see these "conservatives" you are taking about. Even at the level of local politics this tends to be a partisan issue. And you sure sound like a democrat to me...
Conservatives always decry some group getting something for free, which is actually paid for by the taxpayer. Distributing non-recyclable plastic and forcing rate payers to pay to dump it, collect it from rivers and drains etc is it be such case.
A market mechanism uses the power of the market to encourage correct behavior through market forces, instead of penalties, taxes on all, special schemes to give cash to specific state controlled recycling projects, etc. A market mechanism allows free enterprise solutions, whereas 'social insanity' creates inflexible regulatory processes.
> Plastics come from oil, which we are gradually running out of, though not quickly.
I guess it depends on your definition of "quickly", or it would be good to see a citation on this one.
Personally, I believe that if we encourage recycling more, that creates an opportunity for companies to innovate in that space and come up with better recycling methods. So in that respect, I'd prefer to over-recycle than under-recycle.
There's a reason that Recycle comes last in "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle": it's the least desirable option.
If you Reduce, you get an easy win by not needing the resource in the first place; Reuse achieves orders of magnitude of efficiency in the resource's utility (a glass mason jar can be used thousands of times, compared to a plastic one designed to used once and disposed). Recycling is often fraught with inefficiencies of both energy and waste byproducts.
I would love to see more economic incentives around direct reuse (such as Pigovian taxes on disposable plastics, and consumer incentives to return glassware to the grocer and then the manufacturer for direct reuse).
The issues with mason jars and ceramic cup ends up being the amount of energy required to fire the oven. This ends up putting you in a deep hole when it comes to accounting energy inputs, as consumer plastics are essentially repurposed refinery waste.
This leaves you with the choice to either spend a lot of energy or risk environmental contamination. Chemical accounting ends up being a nontrivial problem to address.
I love plastics bags because they get multiple uses in my house as lunch sacks, garbage can liners, etc. those are things that I would have to buy otherwise but now I get to resuse cheap plastics.
On a related point this green new deal housing plan that is being mooted will presumably mandate 200 years design life and much stricter build quality to reduce energy use?
Plastics are a negligible use of oil (compared to transportation), oil can be synthesized, and I assume methane feedstock is adequate for making plastics.
> I guess it depends on your definition of "quickly", or it would be good to see a citation on this one.
A citation in your favor would be how net energy output only slowly declines as EROI plummets[1]. Slow decline is a general property of these types ”Seneca Cliffs”[2] present in collapse.
three main issues: 1) yes the Earth is huge but cities really don't have easy access to landfill, and many are in fact running out of it because transporting garbage is expensive. 2) podcasts aren't convincing sources for a debate. 3) the real debate is "how do we reduce waste", not "landfill vs recycling".
Not really. A => B doesn't imply that not-A => not-B.
Total number of jobs or time spent in the labour market is one thing, but ultimately what we care about is efficiently creating utility. If I need to spend 5h working to get enough money to replace something I could've fixed in 0.5h, that's not good for the economy as a whole.
Were it otherwise, every home would be built without a kitchen and people would go out to eat all the time. We'd need more jobs for people staffing the kitchens, but it wouldn't help people overall.
> Were it otherwise, every home would be built without a kitchen and people would go out to eat all the time. We'd need more jobs for people staffing the kitchens, but it wouldn't help people overall.
Isn't the 'ready meal' phenomenon essentially this? Someone else does the real cooking, you just store then heat it up. Plenty of people survive solely, or mostly, on that.
Seems to me that your two points oppose each other. If the cost of repair is too high because of labor costs, that indicates that it would create jobs, not destroy them.
>But the labor costs in developed economies discourages that
Which is a perfect example of poorly priced externalities. The full cost of disposal should be priced into everything produced. It is completely backwards that throwing a glass bottle in the trash is cheaper than sterilizing and re-using it.
>Properly run landfill doesn’t hurt the environment in itself.
>[...] But a well run landfill site has [...] electricity generation from gases produced by decaying matter,
This sounds like a pipe dream. We don't even have reliable estimates on how much landfill outgas there is, much less a good system for burning it. It's believed to be largely methane, which would be valuable without further processing if it could be captured.
Incidentally, the word "methane" does not appear in the article at all, and no systems describing such a gas capture apparatus are mentioned. But just think about it: a landfill is enormous; they are some of the largest things humans ever build, and some of them are visible from low Earth orbit. How do you plan to capture all of the gas coming out of that? Be honest!
Meanwhile, incinerators (of various designs) work today, have almost all of the upsides of landfills with none of the downsides. The article dismisses incineration with a single reference (b), which is actually an article from Planet Money focusing on recycling. The actual source is probably a footnote within a footnote, because that's as much attention as Americans will pay to incineration, I guess.
I agree that we need to talk about recycling less, but the correct alternative is incineration, not landfills.
I mean, to answer your methane question - after our local landfill was filled up, it was covered with foil, then several layers of soil and finally grass - it's a public park nowadays. The methane is collected at the highest point of the hill that was the landfill, I imagine the layer of foil forces it to go up to the single outpipe at the top.
Yes, there really are several successful companies who specialise in landfill gas recovery, it's profitable and practical. But I don't think it's neccessarily a reason to continue with landfill in itself.
Landfills are going to become a gold mine when someone finally invents a Wall-E robot. With the advances in AI going on right now, it seems like a feasible thing to happen soon.
This is just so far out. "AI" is currently expert systems and we are seeing its limitations (see setbacks in autonomous driving). It has nowhere near the potential to drive the search and extraction of energy sources in landfills.
To me, the idea of a narrow purpose garbage robot operating in the confines of a landfill sounds more plausible than a self-driving car meant to operate an "open world" scenario populated by other AI and humans alike (aka streets with car, bikes and pedestrians on them). And a lot less dangerous to human life too when they are buggy.
While i 100% agree with your point, the (i'm assuming) highly regulated process of creating and running a landfill site doesnt have the same "fail fast, fail often", "MVP", "rapid development" culture that software does.
I don’t think that’s analogous. I suspect there are numerous examples of landfills they don’t hurt the environment, and lots of well studied best practices for how to achieve that in others. The equivalent in software is a sort of spherical cow theoretical construct that nobody has seen, let alone knows how to systematically create.
Part of the problem with landfill is that the economics are largely 'profit first, cost later'. We don't really have a good model to ensure that long term maintenance and care of a landfill site post closure is always adequately funded so there's always a risk that an owner who might well have made all his capital investment back, and more, before the landfill closed just runs out of money and walks away no matter how you provide privately. This is a bit like the issue you have with defined benefit pensions and longevity, only you have less certainty on the costs.
Because the potential environmental consequences of just leaving the site unmaintained or poorly looked after are high, in the developed world government almost always ends up providing a backstop to this. This could be described as 'socialised losses and privatised profits' when it gets used, and we would be right to be very wary of this model, even to pay a premium to avoid it.
I always thought there was a fortune to be made in buying the mining rights to old landfills.
I'd expect compressed old consumer goods to be a rich "ore" for many valuable materials compared to many natural sources, and having the mining operation there would provide an endgame for the landfill that ensured it was being monitored and managed.
The problem is that it assumes that mining operations are well regulated, which I suspect would not be the case.
I once helped out a project which involved talking to a landfill operator. They mentioned that deer like to drink the water pooling in the landfill and theorized that it tasted "sweet." Of course, hunters then kill and eat these deer.
You absorb the heavy metals and other harmful components that the deer have been absorbing by drinking landfill leakage, which is kinda not good for your body.
I think the software analogy is not especially good, but it feels like there's some poorly-aligned incentives in landfill engineering. The point of landfills is to make trash invisible, so saving money by hiding engineering faults in the landfill itself is easy, they get buried along with the trash, and by the time the leakage becomes noticeable, the builder is long gone (bankrupt, merged/acquired, whatever), and the community is left to spend more on remediation than would have been required for prevention.
The solution to this sort of problem is generally regulation and oversight. I try not to be cynical about the utility of that approach, but it's hard.
The difference from software engineering is that, for landfills, the specifications don't change on the fly, and the engineering best-practices to build them actually exist.
I also think that recycling allows companies to waste more, because consumers are more comfortable generating recycling waste than landfill waste, even though for plastics there isn't really much you can do to recycle them.
1. The rate of municipal waste landfilling for the 32 EEA member countries fell from 49 % in 2004 to 34 % in 2014.
2. Overall, the rates of landfilling decreased in 27 out of 32 countries. Between 2004 and 2014, the largest decreases occurred in Estonia (57 percentage points), Finland (41 percentage points), Slovenia (41 percentage points) and the United Kingdom (41 percentage points).
>>> Almost all of the litter that escapes into nature, especially the sea, comes from poorer riverine countries with bad rubbish collection practices, such as China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Rich countries like the UK or US have rubbish collection rates approaching 100% and are responsible for almost no new waste reaching the oceans.
... Yea, b/c the developed nations of the world don't send their trash to "poorer riverine countries" to get dumped in the ocean. /s
It's not clear that this article makes a relevant point.
The existence of trash isn't under dispute in the article, only a very specific route for trash to reach the ocean. It's not clear that somehow exporting trash, alone, implicates western countries in its reaching the ocean.
Is it mismanaged trash collecting companies in developing countries that dump in the ocean? Is that the route? Or is it dumping in rivers, as the article suggests.
tl;dr: As a sustainable (heh!) solution to the current waste crisis, landfilling everything is not a good solution. We tried it for many centuries and are still paying the price for that approach today. The only people who will benefit from a 'landfill everything' strategy will be 23rd century archaeologists.
As the UK is mentioned a couple of times in the article, I'll add a link to the Wikipedia article on UK National Waste Strategies, as it includes links to the various strategies published by various Governments across the UK since 2000 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Waste_Strategy
While those documents are a bit on the long side, they are very informative about the many, many (many!) complex systems that contribute to planning for, managing, and attempting to reduce waste in a large, rich European nation state.
(Disclaimer: I was part of the team that developed and published the Waste Strategy for England in 2000).
We tried it for many centuries and are still paying the price for that approach today.
Can you elaborate on this? I'm not aware of centuries-old landfills clogging up the landscape and (to any meaningful extent) impinging upon the availability of land.
Happily. Old landfill sites are not built to modern standards and are thus liable to erode, with the potential to contaminate the surrounding areas with a range of interesting toxins. They can also collapse (if they contained a significant amount of biodegradable waste) which is unfortunate if your house is built on top of it.
A quick Google search gave me this link to some ongoing research conducted by Queen Mary College, London, into the risks surrounding historic landfills - https://www.qmul.ac.uk/geog/research/research-projects/histo... - that page does a far better job of explaining the situation than I can.
Exactly. It’s like saying that old sewage systems were not built to modern standards and that led to disease transmission. Therefore sewage systems are bad. That is the whole point of “modern standards”.
There will always be a need for landfill sites. And the current standards for their construction, use and end-of-life maintenance are vastly higher than they were 20 years ago.
Sadly, making sure operational/new landfill sites stick to the standards doesn't fix the problems surrounding old/abandoned landfill sites. If people want to make those sites safe(r), then that's going to cost a lot of money.
In my view, the key barriers to landfill mining are the same as those faced by today's recycling industry: the costs involved in extracting value from waste (someone has to pay the pickers working in the recycling sheds - possibly one of the worst jobs in the world); and finding viable, stable and sustainable markets for the materials that do get extracted. Volatile recyclate markets were a huge problem for sustainable recycling back in 2000 and I doubt much has changed since then.
We really shot ourselves in the foot with this whole pointless "recycling paper and plastic" thing huh?
The convenience of throwing something away is a triumph of modern civilization and one of life's little pleasures, and we had to ruin it by acting like it's wrong when it's actually not.
When I walk up to some wastebins holding a papery-plasticky object with a bit of food stuck to it, my heart sinks. Now I have to think about classifying it into one of 2-4 inconsistent-looking bins, and I feel guilty that the classification isn't perfect - which would be okay if it was for a good cause, but the whole concept of recycling paper and plastic was a net-negative to begin with.
Recycling is one of those things that feels like it solves a problem but doesn't at all - like hybrid cars, US-style airport security, or donating cans of food.
I fully share this cynicism about recycling things that are not aluminum or glass. It also seems that by making people feel better about generating nominally recyclable waste they are encouraged to consume more.
I am at least familiar with arguments against US-style airport security and donating cans of food, but whats wrong with hybrid cars? I don't know of any arguments that they are net neutral / harmful.
Yeah, hybrid cars might be called a "local maximum"... at best.
"Local" because they were always predictably a technological dead end.
"Maximum" because they maybe gave us a slight improvement in fuel efficiency, although gas-efficient internal combustion engine cars may have been the more energy-efficient option all along when you consider the up-front cost and maintenance complexity of hybrid cars' dual engines.
The only thing we know for sure about hybrid cars is that Toyota successfully profited from selling people's self-image about being more energy efficient. But since we also have Tesla in the market, selling the actual solution to the problem of gas-burning transportation, absolutely no one should be buying hybrids.
Toyota was selling mass-produced plug-in "hybrids" and Nissan was selling 100mi range 100% electric Leafs before Tesla had even produced the Model S. Yes, Tesla made them sexy, but Toyota, Nissan, and even Ford & GM did the very early path-finding that I think we needed in order to move ahead with the technology and get to the point where people would feel comfortable considering them at all.
"maintenance complexity of hybrid cars' dual engines"
This is an oft repeated accusation by people who only know the concept of hybrids and have no actual experience with them.
The electrical system of hybrids are inherently low maintenance and the gasoline engines run under very low stress conditions for an engine. The result is that the gasoline engine needs much less maintenance. And the brakes are barely used.
The Prius is a better option from a lifecycle CO2 perspective in many places than either a high efficiency conventional vehicle or a pure battery-electric vehicle. That changes if your electricity comes from more renewable sources -- California, for example. Shorter commutes favor small battery packs or no batteries at all.
No, the real progress has been stalled by low fuel prices. Most people would only buy EV (or Hybrids) if they could see a clear short term lower cost. The current high upfront cost of EVs completely outweighs the longer term savings (or other less tangible benefits) for most people. Hybrids were a good bridge solution with only a small incremental cost and significant savings but they are currently not in vogue with people who want something even more efficient, and the gas prices are so low as to be almost incidental to many buyers.
When my ordinary gasoline car gets nearly 40 mpg on the highway, and not much lower in city, I don't have much incentive to go electric. Thank you, variable valve timing engine.
What really reducd my gas consumption was moving to a place just a few miles from where I work.
In the past, I was bearish on hybrids. They seemed overcomplicated and ineffectual.
After having driven one for a while, I've done a complete 180. The fact is, they're a perfect interim solution which really brings 'the best of both worlds'. One thing I wasn't expecting was how the system trains me to drive differently and minimize wasteful fuel use-- something that simply doesn't exist in non-hybrids. I think they make even more sense for large freight trucks, and I'm looking forward to seeing more of those.
In the U.S., more than half the top-selling vehicles are pure-ICE trucks or SUVs, and I would bet the majority of people buying them don't have a sensible use case. There is plenty of room for hybrids to make a difference. When you can get the same or better performance for half the fuel (or less), it's a no-brainer, and the market will eventually catch up to that.
Your experience doesn't seem like it would refute that? To be fair I'm not sure how you could refute it without long term large scale reliability testing.
Hybrids are more complicated than non-hybrids, not so much mechanically as electrically and in the controls. It takes very sophisticated computer software and calibrations to properly manage the charge/discharge of the battery pack and the electric motors when doing regenerative braking or acceleration, in order to provide the same functionality as a simple throttle and mechanical brakes do in a non-hybrid.
It’s pretty common to see arguments that the net lifecycle impact of a hybrid outweighs that of a traditional car, because it has more impact in manufacturing. It’s not true (there is more impact in manufacturing, but the breakeven point is fairly early) but it’s an attractive notion to people with a contrarian bent, especially those who like to think that environmentalists are stupid.
Incidentally, the same thing exists for pure electric cars, solar panels, and just about anything else of that nature.
Solar panels are tricky because they rely on certain elements which are rather rare actually. I feel like there needs to be a serious study into whether increased mining/production of solar panels is a net gain or loss. It does feel however than reckoning with climate change will require more on the consumption/behavior side than technology side unfortunately.
The energy flow is a bit similar to the cash flow of a SAAS company: As ROI takes a few years, the start of the rapidly growing industry looks like a net negative, but with the installed capacity constantly growing and efficiency getting better, even the industry as a whole is in the black now.
So I did say production, but my main issue isn't mere production but the mining of materials and that mining's impact on the environment. Also, PVs and rechargable batteries do use some rare earths which also sucks because, well they're rare and may eventually be depleted.
Regardless, thanks for the talk, it's interesting. I think someone told me a while back they did an analysis of the difference between gas electricity plants vs solar and they came away with the realization that the only way gas wins is really due to the financing around it, so something totally due to regs and how society is already used to it. I just am not sure solar is going to be the silver bullet and actual reduction of consumption might be the only way to stave off climate change.
Absolutely, reduction should aways be the first option. Just like electric cars are still just a band aid for unsustainable urban design. The optimum would be more human-centric cities that reduce most needs for powered mobility. I have the luck to be able to live like that and it's just great. School, daycare, shopping and our workplaces are all within a 2km radius. Thus our household doesn't need any car, but everyone has a nice bike to get around. We literally save hours each day that would otherwise be wasted on mobility.
The currently externalized costs of mining the rare materials will for sure be disastrous, but then again they would also be for other types of energy production. Relative to other types of energy production, I think one can more or less ignore this point (unless there is some polluting process involved that only affects a specific mode of energy production).
Nearly all current photovoltaic cell production is polysilicon, which does not require any rare elements or any rare-earth elements. There are some PV technologies that use rare elements such as indium and selenium, but they do not use rare-earth elements either; and, in any case, they have been pretty much priced out of the market by falling polysilicon costs. There are many kinds of rechargeable batteries, but none of them, to my knowledge, use rare-earth elements. In particular, the lithium-ion batteries in current large-scale use do not even use any rare elements. (Nickel-cadmium batteries used cadmium, which is about as rare as silver, but not a rare-earth element.)
Finally, rare earth elements are not rare (a dozen of them are each individually more abundant than tin), and there is no danger of depleting them.
These are the factual errors in the first factual sentence of your comment. This level of reliability leads me to believe that you are commenting with no concern for whether your comment is true or false, even without doing a similar level of investigation of the rest of your comment.
I think he was suckered by a deliberate propaganda effort to paint PV as dirty. Shellenberger was spreading that BS, and others picked it up without being sufficiently skeptical.
> Solar panels are tricky because they rely on certain elements which are rather rare actually
Which elements are you thinking of? The vast majority of PV being made today is silicon. The only rare element used in PV is silver for front contact wires, and that can be substituted for with proper design (copper wires can be used if a diffusion barrier layer of nickel or molybdenum is used to prevent its reaction with silicon.)
Brand new traditional car vs. hybrid might be close, but what about hybrid vs. that 2002 honda civic in the used car lot that also gets 45mpg? I think that's the real comparison, because that civic in the lot already exist in your area and works just fine to take you from A to B.
People buy new cars for dumb reasons, usually for nicer seats/better ac/speakers, and they in turn do away with their less shiny but usually still perfectly fine car. The car industry is rampant consumer culture at its worst, sustained by lessees insisting on new car smell.
Wish-cycling. You want it to be true. You have good intentions. You want your waste to be recycled. So you throw it into a recycling bin. Maybe it'll work? It seems better to err on the side that it will? But unfortunately when it gets to the sorting table/machines it often just makes things worse.
2) You have efficient, modern trash incinerators that can recover 90%+ of the energy in plastics, and
3) You make sure that all plastic garbage actually ends up incinerated.
Because the utility you get out of making plastics out of oil, using the plastics for something, and then burning it, is higher than just straight up burning the oil.
But if you fail any of these three points, you're better off banning single-use plastics.
I believe Japan follows this system. It was very confusing when I visited because they sort their waste into combustible and non-combustible, instead of trash vs. recycle.
I know that many places have modern incinerators, but that's only 1 of 3. If it was in the US, I'd expect that actually sorting trash effectively would be a big problem, despite having a modern incinerator.
Sweden incinerates 97% of all its non-recyclable trash, obviously has modern incinerators, and has some oil-powered power plants for peak load purposes.
"Can you point out anywhere that's made all of 1..3 work successfully? I'd think that most places have 0 of the 3."
Zurich has a very centrally located incinerator (behind the "viadukt" shopping area) and I believe that they generate electricity from the plant. They also have a very granular sorting regime ... it would appear they are covering all three of the bases.
> You make sure that all plastic garbage actually ends up incinerated.
Oddly, this seems to be the most difficult part of the equation here in NYC. Containerization needs to be adopted in order to make the system more efficient and sanitary. Containerization would prevent refuse from spilling into the street, into the storm drains, etc. The current system (curbside pickup of plastic bags) falls over (literally and figuratively) in too many ways and the sanitation workers aren't interested in picking up the slack -- they ignore anything not secured in a plastic bag.
> The convenience of throwing something away is a triumph of modern civilization ...
I think you got it backwards. Throwing stuff away was the normal way of life before modern civilization arrived, just like defecating wherever you find convenient, hunting animals for dinner, or riding hoses on whatever side of road you like.
The wonder of modern civilization gave us so much power to produce stuff that it's no longer feasible to just "throw away" stuff we don't need. Just like modern cars necessitated speed limits, stop signs, and annoying lane-changing rules, mass production requires one to think about how to dispose stuff without ruining ourselves.
So, yeah I think you got it backwards. Maybe recycling doesn't work as well as advertised, but that doesn't mean we are off the hook. It just means we need a different solution.
"The wonder of modern civilization gave us so much power to produce stuff that it's no longer feasible to just "throw away""
By the same token, it gave us the power to produce so much stuff that we can afford to throw stuff away.
Who darns socks anymore? Or has their tv repaired?
Your average family of 100 years ago was throwing away ashes and what? The rag and bone man collected rags and bones, veg peelings would have gone to a chicken/pig/compost. Paper probably went in the fire. Plastic was none existent, metal? (rag and bone man? I'm guessing there was a market for it somewhere).
It isn't the 'normal' thing though, certainly not for younger generations.
What were the economics of your tv repair, what was the cost of the repair v replacement and how old was the tv? Last time I looked into it, they were doubtful they could get the parts, and the likely charge was higher than replacing the tv. The same isnt true for emptying the ashtray. In fact I don't even need to take the car to the garage to empty the ashtray, I can do it myself!
Even in old times it may be less true than you'd think. I was recently reading one of the Little House books to my kid and there's few sentences in there in their move to the west, how Ma cleaned up their lunch scraps and packing them along when on the pioneer trail in the middle of otherwise nowhere in their journey across the Dakotas.
those people were moving to the west in search for a place to live. they moved because they couldn't live where they were. if they could afford to throw stuff away they probably would not have moved in the first place
To outfit a wagon to go West with all the supplies necessary cost the inflation adjusted equivalent of about $100K. Wagons, livestock, supplies to live on while travelling and when homesteading before the first harvest came in were not cheap. That’s without considering the materiel you’d need to set up a farm when you got to your homestead. North America was labour scarce compared to Europe from 1492 on. There was always a place to live and work to do for the able bodied who were willing to work. That’s why millions traveled from Europe to save large sums of money before going home to buy a farm or send for their families from home.
People did not go West because they had no place to live.
i mean live on their own land and have their own farm instead of being a laborer depending on a salary. and since it was expensive many put all they had into that and could not afford to waste any of it.
"To outfit a wagon to go West with all the supplies necessary cost the inflation adjusted equivalent of about $100K. Wagons, livestock, supplies to live on while travelling and when homesteading before the first harvest came in were not cheap. That’s without considering the materiel you’d need to set up a farm when you got to your homestead."
This may be true, generally, but it was not true of the Ingalls family that your grandparent refers to. Their travel and settlement plans were not the most well thought out ...
The tragedy of it is that we are technologically better placed than ever to make and mend items which will last a lifetime, and beyond, but consumerism and never-ending economic growth mean that instead we have planned obsolescence, and almost everything made as cheaply as possible, with consequent reduction in quality and less satisfaction overall.
Most garbage is not obsolete or broken equipment. Most garbage is packaging (cardboard shipping boxes, plastic yoghurt cups etc), which nobody wants or needs to last for a lifetime.
I meant the convenience of tossing something away and having it go somewhere properly out of the way.
You mention "defecating wherever you find convenient" - yes, another pleasure of modern life is that at any time I can walk to a nearby bathroom and defecate, and do so on top of much more sanitary infrastructure than we ever had in the past.
most of what we throw away is packaging. in the past there was little packaging. and most packaging was reusable, a cloth, a bag or a chest for example.
if it wasn't for packaging, in my daily life i would hardly have any trash at all. almost everything i am able to reuse, and i buy with re-usability in mind.
this is not something i learned in school, or from somehow environmentally conscious parents. i am actually not sure where this came from. we did it out of habit. waste not, want not. maybe it came from not being able to afford to keep buying new stuff. it wasn't really conscious.
reusing vs throwing away is more likely split along rich vs poor. and on the past more people were not rich. they were not necessarily poor in the sense of struggling to survive but the average population created everything they needed for themselves or bartered it. there was no space for trash.
buying new things is a sign of wealth. this is especially visible in china where second hand markets are practically non-existent. people pride themselves that they can afford to buy new stuff.
note that reusing is different from recycling. reusing happens at home or on the second hand market. recycling comes from collecting trash and transforming it.
so in that sense recycling is very new. but reusing is old.
Hmm I'm pretty sure these forks and vampire hunting crossbows from then were coming in their plastic wrappers. Else, not sure how they'd handle container shipping without breaking the merchandise.
> Throwing stuff away was the normal way of life before modern civilization arrived
What? Absolutely not. Things were precious and labor was cheap back in the day.
Anything that could be repaired was. Ever heard of "darning socks"? Yeah - no one would do that today, but it was common 100 years ago.
> just like defecating wherever you find convenient
Lol.
People found out pretty quickly that you have to give a crap about where you give a crap or people get sick and die. This is 2000 BC social technology.
> The wonder of modern civilization gave us so much power to produce stuff that it's no longer feasible to just "throw away" stuff we don't need.
BS.
The earth is big. Really big. Stupendously big. Conceptually it's trivial to make a landfill large enough for anything we will make in the next 100 years with space left over.
We don't do this because it's cheaper to have small landfills closer to cities, but that's an economic limitation, not a technical one.
The wonder (and horror) of modern civilization is that this kind of thinking is obsolete. Pregnant women are advised not to eat tuna, caught anywhere, because we managed to pollute the entire ocean with mercury. We're producing so much chemical fertilizers that we create more biologically available nitrogen than the rest of nature combined. And of course we're warming the planet itself.
Even ancient Americans, with their stone tools, managed to exterminate virtually every large animal in the Americas.
> Conceptually it's trivial to make a landfill large enough ...
Conceptually it's also trivial to stop global warming. We just have to stop making any more CO2 (and maybe suck up a bit from the air). Doesn't mean it's easy in practice.
>People found out pretty quickly that you have to give a crap about where you give a crap or people get sick and die. This is 2000 BC social technology.
So is recycling plastic and paper not effective? I have some anxiety issue and one of the ways that they manifest is obsessing about recycling so not having to worry about plastic and paper would be a huge improvement in my quality of life.
Edit: I should clarify, I realize that the article is saying that recycling plastic and paper isn't worth it, but is that a mainstream opinion?
It's strangely mainstream in American libertarian circles (and therefore places like HN), but even they seem to spend most of their time railing against the sheep-like masses who have been hoodwinked so I guess even that is a tacit admission that it's not mainstream.
The article likewise cites a whole bunch of libertarian sources that unsurprisingly conclude that government interference is bad.
On the other hand, here's a document comparing recycling to landfill (and incineration to generate power and a couple of other things). It summarises all the expert research from the actual field, rather than right wing economists.
Generally the experts suggest landfill is the worst option on several scales for basically all materials:
People who think recycling isn't good for the environment seem to fall into the same group as those who really worry about all the birds affected by wind turbines, or the impact of lithium mining or how carbon taxes will hurt the poor i.e. baseless propaganda aimed at people who care about the environment coming from people who clearly don't give a hoot.
Worrying about how carbon taxes will affect the poor is absolutely legitimate, and that's coming from someone that thinks we need one yesterday. Calling it baseless propaganda probably says more about you than it does the argument in question.
As a more generous interpretation of ZeroGravitas' comment: As the bird-and-windmill example shows, those people "worrying" are thought of as denying the fundamental viability of carbon taxes and only use the poor as a popular argument. Worrying about progressive taxation effects is of course very important, but then again also pretty easy to mitigate. And considering the fact that the parties propagating carbon taxes are mostly also the parties caring about the poor, I'm not very worried that the poor will be willingly outpriced of their mobility needs here. After all, that new tax makes the very resources available that would be needed to mitigate the unequal burden it would create.
There's a fairly large contingent in tech that leans libertarian while also recognizing the impending climate disaster. A climate tax is simply accounting for the externalities of your actions.
I wouldn't at all assume that somebody on this site advocating for a carbon tax would take care to not make it regressive, and I think parent's lumping it in with bird strikes (a total red herring considering nobody is talking about banning cats or glass windows) and lithium ion mining (a failure to account for opportunity cost) is pretty conclusive.
Yes I am not from the US and thus I may be biased by the local political spectrum. Libertarianism is something uniquely US-American, I think. We do have bird strike protesters, though, and they pretty much all are from the right.
+1: landfills is the worst option and should be never used for non-inert materials (that is why EU mandates incineration before bringing waste to the landfill). It is very hard and expensive to do it properly, with a perfect first layer, in a stable place, putting a lot of heterogeneous compounds doing a lot of different (and even unexpected) chemical reactions, using pipes to exchange air and drain/burn methane, maintenance and monitoring the site even for hundreds of year after closing it. It is a nightmare to handle that kind of landfills. Please incinerate everything first, and maybe reuse the ashes for public roads, benches and so on.
Newspapers are worth recycling, because they can be turned into new newspapers again, removing the ink and the metal can be done fairly efficiently.
Cardboard can be recycled fairly efficiently, and can be turned into new cardboard.
Plastic-covered/glued/glossy/window envelopes/food containers/other contaminated papers can't be recycled. Just incinerate it, or turn it into pellet fuel and incinerate it.
The alternative to recycling newspaper and cardboard is chopping down forests and turning them into pulp, a process that also needs a lot more logistics, chemicals, energy, and of course forests that you have to re-plant.
Recycling newspaper is a no-brainer from a cost perspective. You can't recycle forever though, each time you lose some wood fibers that are too short and have to be removed from the recycled pulp, so you have to add fresh pulp.
Pretty much all paper manufacturers are now require to plant more trees than they cut down.
Burying old newspapers in the ground is a form of carbon sequestration. Really it comes down to what takes less energy: cutting down the trees, or the transport, sorting and reprocessing of old newspapers.
Article wasn't a surprise, so yes, I think it's pretty mainstream. Definitely recycle aluminium (very energy-intensive to extract), probably recycle glass and other metals, don't worry about anything else.
I'd say that regardless of the effectiveness of recycling you shouldn't be doing it.
The (arguable) utility of your recycling vs. its cost to you is obviously very negative. And not just on purely selfish level: I don't know what your line of work is, but I'm sure society will benefit much more if you were calmer but didn't recycle than the other way around.
So here's a "get out of recycling jail" card for you and others like you. It's like herd immunization: Don't worry about it, we got you covered.
It is entirely dependent on where you live and local recycling demand. My city barely recycles any plastic despite what the markings on it might be, because it's not profitable to recycle certain plastics right now; supply is too high. Paper is fine though if it isn't greasy.
Could also consider not throwing out food. I know servings in the US are huge, so either share the meal with another person or ask for a meal size that you can eat and no more.
If there's food/greade on the item that can't be removed for one reason or another toss it, it can't be recycled efficiently. There solved your moral dilemma. Generally only clean paper, glass, and metal are recyclable. Plastics depend entirely on the locality and still require it to be clean.
Also I work at a food pantry. Donations of canned goods are always welcome, same for razors, toiletries, etc. Anything that can be eaten without a stove is generally welcome.
Recycling has built up such inertia as the "moral" path, regardless of its inefficiencies for most materials, that it's become an unsustainable clusterfuck that we can't move away.
Where I live, it's been codified- municipalities must recycle, and also must discourage landfill-bound waste. The result is that I've been issued a 64-gallon mixed-recycling bin that is picked up once a week, and a small 36-gallon trash can that's picked up every two weeks. There's two people in my household and we both are very conscience of being wasteful- not as some kind of environmental whatever, but it's just in our moral framework. A 36-gallon trash can holds about 2.5 full kitchen garbage bags in it, so if we produce more than 2.5 garbage bags of waste in a 2-week period, we have to hold on to it for another garbage pickup (reducing our available volume for that period then). Anything out there then sits in the sun for 2 weeks stinking and attracting raccoons/rodents until the next pickup.
The result? Anything remotely resembling "recyclable" gets tossed in the recycling bin. Food/grease on it? Put it in the bin. You know where the stuff in that bin goes now? It goes to the recycling facilities and then sits there in huge piles because no one will buy it anymore because the whole system was propped up on bullshit the entire time.
To top all that off, the law also prevents these now-inundated recycling facilities from moving their material to a landfill for proper disposal. So it literally just sits there and we have absolutely no solution for it. It would be political suicide to advocate the loosening of recycling laws, no matter how broken they are, so you'll never have a representatives willing to fix this problem.
That’s a good point: if municipalities want you to recycle, they need to provide the necessary infrastructure, and that means at least three source separated bins (ideally 5-7), and a clean container collection system. Otherwise it just turns people off the whole system. A financial incentive to save money when you don’t throw away as much into the landfill bin helps too.
Any chance you could compost the kitchen scraps in your garden?
With respect to composting- we're also issued a yard waste bin that's for a composting program (a good idea), so some kitchen scraps can go in there (I'm renting and good compost takes longer than I plan on staying here), but food waste/kitchen scraps aren't a large part of what we fill up our landfill bin with. It's mostly food packaging that's definitely too leaky/gross for the recycling bin and general household waste from stuff like emptying the vacuum cleaner or soiled paper towels.
Necessary infrastructure extends beyond just providing for recycling- households are going to produce waste that doesn't make economic or environmental sense to recycle, and all the encouragement and financial incentives in the world aren't going to stop that. Encouraging people to be less wasteful is important, but we need to stop demonizing landfills and use of the landfill bins because that sentiment has perverted the whole household recycling process.
It's gotten so bad here that a few months ago, they had city representatives on the radio threatening fines for people that put non-recyclable waste in their bins, as if that's the solution to mixed-recycling being uneconomical. They went as far as to say that it was malicious- that people were putting non-recyclable stuff, like used pizza boxes (their example), in the recycling bins to purposefully sabotage the whole system. The disconnect is huge and at some point the holier-than-thou attitude and the short-sighted laws passed with it are going to blow up in our collective faces.
Ideally you would incentivize people to create less trash by charging them by weight or volume for collection, but there are two possibilities for households wanting lower bills: reducing waste or littering. And it only takes a few people choosing littering to make a huge mess.
I'd try to collect payment for disposal earlier. If you pay for disposal when you buy the product, it makes doing the right thing easy. It also makes products with wasteful packaging more expensive right there in the store, encouraging people to buy less wasteful alternatives.
This also why I like the idea of bottle deposits and would hope they continue into many other containers. The customer pays them up front and gets paid back when it properly enters the waste stream.
> There's two people in my household and we both are very conscience of being wasteful
> if we produce more than 2.5 garbage bags of waste in a 2-week period, we have to hold on to it for another garbage pickup
It's pretty easy to have much less than 2.5 garbage bags of waste every 2-week. You should read just a tiny bit of zero waste please, it may help you immensely.
You may believe that recycling isn't working, that's fine, but there's plenty of simple easy ways to reduce waste and have less than 2.5 garbage bags of waste every 2 weeks.
The 4 R rules is simple: Refuse, Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.
You're not going to solve the problem and your municipality isn't helping unless it burning the garbage, because that's what contaminated loads are. There's absolutely no reason to have multi stream plastics recycling at the consumer end, save for plastic bags because at scale they can be recycled. Only a very small amount of plastics are monetarily valuable. I would not feel guilty at all about throwing out plastics unless they are clean and food free. It's pointlessly wasteful as most processing plants in the US cannot handle soiled recyclables efficiently if at all. I say this as a long time, Earth hugging, reusable bag toting, fuel efficient vehicle recycler. The US is not a major contributor to plastics pollution. There should be no moral dilemma here. Just by trying to do the right thing in this case you're doing. If you want to do more have a cheese pizza night once a week instead of one with meat toppings and you'll significantly reduce your carbon footprint with minimal change to your lifestyle. If doing the by the planet is your thing having one vegetarian meal that you enjoy a week is going to be significantly more impactful at keeping the planet cleaner and using less resources (the reduce part of the 3rs) than most of the plastics recycling you do. Contaminated glass, plastics, and paper can ruin an entire comingled load which generally happens anyways.
Some specifics on ocean plastics that covers a bit of general plastics.
I end up putting mist of it in the trash bin, except glass or metal. It's too hard for me to know which goes what, how am I supposed to know what's compostable (I only have a broad understanding what composting is, and how it's done), much less if this plastic widget that came with the thing is a recyclable one, a compostable one, or made of styrene (which is neither). So off into the trash it goes.
It boggles my mind that modern fast food restaurants don't have a clear board above the multi-receptacle trash area telling you which bin each single-use item they serve goes into.
I mean, maybe that's partly because it doesn't matter and in the end they're just combining it all and sending everything to landfill regardless. But still; they got the bins, how much harder can it be to put up a sign?
Probably, but in that case, they should be honest and just have a single receptacle.
OTOH, fast food joints are possibly one of the handful of places you could actually do recycling right, since you have a pretty uniform stream of items, thus limiting the need to sort. So instead of having a "recycling" bin, they could have a bin for plastic cutlery, and a bin for straws, and a bin for drink lids, with everything else going in a common trash.
Getting thousands of identical contaminated plastic forks that just need a wash before being melted down is probably a lot more appealing to a recycler than getting a bag that's a big jumble of contaminated junk.
I think the argument that he has better things to do then think of taking a bag "everythere". You do not need a bag small in hand purchases and when you really go shopping you should and can easily bring a bag when you go shopping.
When it comes to regulations I would trust the US with nothing. The EU has probably way better regulations for landfills like for food and other things. While at the same time probably do a way better job at actual recycling.
>when you really go shopping you should and can easily bring a bag when you go shopping.
There's a Danish study[1] that concluded that reusable bags require 50+ uses before breaking even with disposable plastic bags. And that's for one use. If you reuse the disposable bag once (to line your garbage bin, for example), the break even point is now 100+ uses. If you factor in cleaning costs for the reusable bags, I'd be surprised if this practice makes a dent on pollution, if at all.
That study only looked at resource usage, and not the consequences of carelessly discarded shopping bags clogging up rivers and beaches.
The best shopping bag to use is still an upcycled bag made from otherwise discarded material, as you are not creating demand for the production of new bags. Sail cloth is a good sturdy fabric, and a bag made from it will literally last you a lifetime.
Brag, I've been reusing the same backpack from high school for over a decade. It carries about 30l or 16lbs of fluids, I've had the zippers repaired once, and I probably use it at least one a week.
>and not the consequences of carelessly discarded shopping bags clogging up rivers and beaches.
1. plastic garbage winding up in rivers is largely a developing country problem. I don't see many plastic bags (if at all) in my local waterways.
2. why not just responsibly dispose of those bags? It's not hard. They're not going to get lost when you're using them. After that, you're probably home, or at least some place with a garbage bin.
>The best shopping bag to use is still an upcycled bag made from otherwise discarded material, as you are not creating demand for the production of new bags. Sail cloth is a good sturdy fabric, and a bag made from it will literally last you a lifetime.
Are you suggesting people to make DIY cotton bags from scrap fabric they find themselves? You might be able to avoid the high costs of cotton (break even of 7000+ uses), but if you're not into arts and crafts, I suspect the opportunity cost will eat up any savings (if any).
>"why not just responsibly dispose of those bags? It's not hard."
And yet a lot of people carelessly throw away their plastic bags. Their laziness trumps your "it's not hard". Something primarily being a problem in developing countries is not an excuse for not caring about it.
"I don't see any, so it must not be a problem" is not a valid argument. If you've ever tried to remove a plastic bag that was half-buried in sand, you would know. That bag could sit there for hundreds of years without degrading.
My point is that it's better to not have new bags/material made at all. Repurpose something that was already made and used for other purposes, and you lessen the footprint. It doesn't have to be cotton, the woven bags made from recycled plastic are quite durable and long-lasting. In my case, I do have cotton shopping bags, but they're all hand-me-downs from family, I would never buy a brand-new one.
If you want something made from upcycled sail cloth or similar repurposed materials, there are a number of companies who will happily sell you some, including customization.
Remember, it's "reduce, reuse, recycle, in that order.
I don't exactly understand what you are saying but the report you linked shows that the non-reusable plastic bags reach the same negative impact on climate change 150 times faster than reusable cotton bags. How is that good?
When you talk about breaking even you are talking about reaching the same negative impact, I hope, because that's what the report is about.
They even spell out those negative impacts: ozone depletion, terrestrial eutrophication, freshwater eutrophication and water use.
That is a very selective interpretation of that paper.
The study found that some types of reusable bag needed many uses before being a better environmental option than thin plastic bags (e.g. cotton). Other bags, such as sturdier plastic bags designed for reuse were much better options, needing only a few uses to break even, environmentally speaking.
Anyway, 50+ (or 100+) uses - a year or two of weekly shopping - does not seem unreasonable for a cotton bag.
>Other bags, such as sturdier plastic bags designed for reuse were much better options, needing only a few uses to break even, environmentally speaking.
"a few uses" is only true when you're only considering climate change. it's 50+ when you consider all factors.
>Anyway, 50+ (or 100+) uses - a year or two of weekly shopping - does not seem unreasonable for a cotton bag.
The issue here is that at 1 shopping trip per week, it's a little under 2 years to break even with disposable bags plastic bags (assuming you reuse the disposable bag once). To actually make a 50% reduction, you'd need to use it for 4 years. That's a lot of hassle (remembering to bring along the bags, storing it, etc.) for very little benefit (in absolute terms), considering how little materials are in each plastic bag. For instance, according to the table on page 55, each bag has greenhouse effect equivalent to 0.11kg of co2. Over 400 uses with 50% savings, that's 22kg of co2 saved. With the current market price for carbon offset credits (quick search puts it at $25/ton), that's $0.55 saved over 4 years. You might be able to scale that out to 10 bags, but that's still pretty low.
6 billion fewer plastic bags were issues in the UK after they started getting taxed. That's only a small amount of CO2 saved per bag, but not negligible on a national scale, and it's completely avoidable.
Plus you only have to have a very small percentage out of 6 billion bags escaping the standard refuse system for them to become an environmental problem in themselves.
Landfills should be utilized much less for municipal waste, but doing this would require much better waste separation.
It's probably better to burn or recycle things that don't decompose readily, such as plastic. Landfilling plastics just takes up a lot of space for a long time. Recycling or burning plastic also reduces litter.
Recycling paper doesn't matter as much, since it is very biodegradable. I suspect that recycling paper leads to energy savings in the pulp & paper industry.
Aluminum is one of the best candidates for recycling as it is very efficient and cuts down on the need for aluminum ore. Steel is somewhat less efficient.
There is a lot of talk about sequestering carbon to reduce the problems of increased atmospheric CO2. Burning plastic seems to be the exact opposite of that.
>Landfilling plastics just takes up a lot of space for a long time.
Is that really an issue when said space can still be used for parks or other green spaces? Besides, US is a really big place. As long as we're not burying it too close to urban centers it should be fine.
Not a single person in the world (rounded down – I’m sure you might be able to find someone) is opposed to people using plastic straws for medical purposes. Just as not a single person in the world is opposed to allowing disabled people access via cars, even if in general cars might not be allowed.
These kinds of arguments are such obvious strawmen. I‘m always so confused when people use them, apparently even in good faith, thinking they hold any kind of water. I’m always disappointed when someone uses arguments like that, it’s so absurd.
Overall I would just argue that straw bans and the like are often not enough or waste valuable political capital, even if they might be effective. That much is certainly true. The focus on personal responsibility is toxic and derailing since climate change categorically cannot be solved with appeals to personal responsibility.
The UK is banning straws but will still allow people to buy straws from pharmacies. That seems like a good balance.
Our local high street only allow disabled drivers to park. So the 'pedestrianised' high street is full of the cars of disabled drivers. That doesn't seem to be such a good balance.
Ps I feel there's a good rhyme hiding somewhere with your straw man straw ban.
If your strategy is in place, use all the tactics that contribute to it. But if you don't have your strategy in place, tactics can do nothing or even move you backward.
Corporations like recycling because it promotes growth -- the opposite of reduction.
We are stepping on the gas, thinking we're stepping on the brake.
> Corporations like recycling because it promotes growth -- the opposite of reduction.
I don't think this is strictly true. It certainly is not the explanation for why we have most of the recycling programs we do have.
Overpaying for unnecessary recycling reduces growth. Economically efficient recycling increases it.
Both corporations and environmentalists should support efficient recycling and oppose innefficient recycling.
There may be some methods of recycling that are environmentally efficient but economically inefficient, but that would be due to externalities that need to be regulated anyway.
The issue of expecting and engineering unending growth is an interesting topic but doesn't really have anything to do with this article.
>Both corporations and environmentalists should support efficient recycling and oppose innefficient recycling.
Are you saying that's what corporations should morally do, or that that's what they should logically do to increase profits? It could be that a corporation saying "buy our stuff then recycle it" causes more people to buy the stuff than saying "buy our stuff then throw it away". In that situation, a profit motivated corporation would promote recycling even if it hurts the environment.
I'm speaking of broad interest categories. Obviously aluminum mining companies aren't going be in favor of aluminum recycling, but in general, lower aluminum prices increase economic growth potential and should be supported by other companies in general purely out of self-interest.
> There may be some methods of recycling that are environmentally efficient but economically inefficient, but that would be due to externalities that need to be regulated anyway
Are there many known examples of this? Kinda curious about what shape this problem takes in context
> Corporations like recycling because it promotes growth -- the opposite of reduction.
What do you mean by "promotes growth" here? You pay for your recycling just like your trash. Why would any company like it more than reducing overall waste?
Not OP but if you look at packaging you can find examples where it’s in an industry’s interest to create disposable packaging over recycled packaging. Be it plastics, glass, aluminum, tin or cardboard. But also your “cell” batteries and clothing, etc.
It promotes their growth -- say packaged good companies like Coca-Cola, Trader Joe's, or Starbucks. Clothing companies like H&M and Zara. Most unnecessary material stuff.
> 99% of things Americans buy end up in landfills within one year.
What "things" means here? A car is a "thing" and a toothpick is a "thing". I can use the car for 10 years and I use several toothpicks per day. So on average, I throw nearly everything very quickly, but the picture seems to be misleading if we remember we're comparing toothpicks to cars...
Another way to put it is whether this is 99% of “individual items” or 99% by mass or volume, etc., and which such way of measuring gives the fairest picture of the lifecycle of products going to landfills.
Averaging over categories of wildly distinct things is misleading. It's like taking average temperature of all human bodies in the hospital and judging public health by that measure - ignoring the fact that some of those are dead bodies in the freezer and some are running high fever. Or, another example, if you look at average wealth of people in a pub, and Bill Gates and Warren Buffet walk in to have a pint, the average wealth would jump up, but nobody really became any richer. Conclusions made on this kind of measures make sense only in specific conditions, but when we could a huge expensive car as one thing and 1000 tiny toothpicks as 1000 things and averaging over that, it can not help but being misleading.
Governments should tax products for their disposal costs. Eventually everything needs to be disposed of so charge it at purchase time and remove the costs the individual pays later for garbage collection. This would mean products that don't use wasteful packaging become cheaper and people would buy less junk.
Every board room: "Just put some soil and seeds into this used plastic bottle and it becomes a handy plant pot - therefore it has an extended use and shouldn't need disposing of, hence zero disposal tax!"
> Corporations like recycling because it promotes growth -- the opposite of reduction.
Put a bit more directly, corporations like recycling because it shifts the burdens of waste onto consumers and society at large, while allowing them to continue pursuing growth and privately concentrating profits.
The real problem is we are using a long term material for short term purposes only because it seems cheap. All plastic will be with us for generations if not forever in terms of human time. We can and should produce an alternative and not poison the environment if we work at it. Yes it's not as bad as we thought but it certainly is bad. Plastic has a place in our daily life but not as a use once and throw away.
I'm one that believes the use of taxes as way to change consumption. So charging a tax to help reflect the true value of plastic, to reduce usages and find alternatives. It's a hard issue but burning it or dumping is not the solution.
We used to use glass, which doesn't really break down biologically, just mechanically (you can turn it back to sand) - I think we ought to be using all the plastic we make as some sort of fuel for power generation, it burns quite readily.
We're annually putting hundreds of megatons of plastic into the environment, much of it reduced to microscopic particles and fibers. I think we're going to see increasing adaptation of microorganisms to eating the stuff, to the point it all becomes biodegradable.
Sure, depends only on your ethic.
E.G (note devils advocate)
A utilitarist might argue, that killing of a larger amount of humans that are not worth it might be for the greater good of all
A extremist fascist even has a pretty clear definition of worth added to that
Asimovs concept of being killed instead of retirement
Various concepts in fiction of adding globally some additions to drinking water to lower fertility on global scale
Chinas politic of one child per family was even somewhat fair as it discriminates equally
There are a lot of elements in that story that don't quite make sense to me.
Taking care of the best planet around is always going to be easier and better than packing everybody off to some other planet, even one that's just as good.
They way I see it, it's even going to be possible to even collect all the mercury out of the ocean and clean up other seemingly impossible messes.
That's just magical thinking. Nothing suggests that it is in the realm of possibility.
What is the energy potential in the materials in a landfill? How much is wasted by scouring them and trying to properly extract it? Compared to preventing the capture of those materials there in the first place?
Putting the survival of our species on the possibility of some pixie dust is not rational. It is hard to face the truth, but burying your head in the sand is counter-productive.
If certain resources do get more sparse, it will easily become economically viable to expand landfill mining and we already have the technology required to do so. At the end of the day, it's an energy question more than anything. With cheap solar plus the fact that landfills produce their own free energy (methane) there is no need to be alarmist and consider them a threat to our species.
“Reusable straws and bags are often more resource intensive than single-use ones. Ever noticed that plastic bags and straws are both incredibly thin and incredibly cheap? Almost no resources go into making each one — it’s kind of amazing.“
I’m confused by these new plastic bag rules in some cities. What is the underlying reasoning that was used to advocate for them?
It was this section of the posted article which caught my attention:
“The problem of rubbish polluting the sea, rivers and land can be most cheaply addressed by improving rubbish collection and making sure everything gets to landfill.
Almost all of the litter that escapes into nature, especially the sea, comes from poorer riverine countries with bad rubbish collection practices, such as China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Rich countries like the UK or US have rubbish collection rates approaching 100% and are responsible for almost no new waste reaching the oceans.
Focussing on recycling is a distraction from making sure everything gets collected and cheaply buried underground — something which many countries already do successfully.”
Just want to say that my grandfather, while working at Hughes, was one of the earliest proponents of aluminum recycling, but everybody was mad at him because they had to pay CRV (which is a terribly-designed incentive actually). Then he was one of the earliest opponents of recycling plastics, and he received nearly universal excoriation, including from my own family. Now the facts are slowly trickling out of the cultural taboos, and perhaps rationality will prevail either way, but it’s been about 50 years now, and it seems like maybe cultural consensus on technical topics is a poor indicator of fact.
I think if we only used two kinds of plastic for food or consumer packaging, plastic recycling would make more sense, we unfortunately use like 10, which means s high labor cost for sorting.
Plus a myriad of additives in the plastic, plus various contaminants. Which makes it kind of hard of to recycle without seriously degrading the end product, even if we had everything nailed to spec and not the chaos we are in now.
I my book, we need to make energy production seriously cheap (renewables, plus maybe nuclear) and put some of the energy excess into transporting heavier but inert packaging such as glass, metal and carton. And by decree lock down the types of plastic and additives which are allowed to use.
In a 100% renewable economy, there will be a need for storable chemical energy for filling rare prolonged outages of wind and solar. Refuse, and in particular high energy density refuse like plastics (made from renewables feedstocks), would be good for this.
As a meta observation, he seems to assume that materials production and disposal would improve over time while recycling technology would not, and that the economics wouldn't change either. Some of the sources he cites for the inefficiency of recycling date from the 1990s and he's obliged to find something more recent.
Arguably recycling technology has more potential to improve since large-scale recycling efforts in the US have only been around since the 1980s. Landfills have been around forever.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 399 ms ] threadhttps://www.freshairfortheeastside.com/latestnews/2018/1/22/...
There’s even a poop train to Alabama:
https://beta.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/04/...
An NYC poop train bound for other parts played a big role in season 4 of the television show Billions.
https://uproxx.com/tv/billions-stock-watch-poop-train/
The toilets also don't produce bales of dried poop, the composting only partially completes in the toilet itself--it has to be completed outside in a compost heap.
Also dry composting toilets tend to produce more odors than the average person wants to deal with in their small living space.
Poopetual motion? (sorry for the shit jokes)
It is almost the last step in the treatment process, using a centrifuge to remove the majority of liquid.
Some municipalities will sell the sludge, and it is spread on agriculture fields.
"We're doing nothing for the environment" doesn't get one elected tho...
Not sure we can hope for them to look into the future very far / care.
I really think there is a difference in "look at this market share" and critical thinking about how Uber can get to sustainability.
I think the whole tech company IPO is a weird otherverse that isn't as much about the future as folks think.
A world (we live in it) where libertarians tell everyone that "landfill is underrated" is one where people buy and dispose of way too much junk, and create the problems all us communists are vainly trying to solve via personal recycling.
I mean, sure, a world of scientists might be able to handle rules like "recycling that aluminum can is a big win, but the polypropylene bottle with the same product in it is mostly a wash". A world of real people is just going to hear "throw out all the things".
Casting this as a goody Lefty vs selfish conservative argument is pointless.
Citation needed. That sounds like socialist insanity to me. So sure, I applaud it. I just don't see these "conservatives" you are taking about. Even at the level of local politics this tends to be a partisan issue. And you sure sound like a democrat to me...
A market mechanism uses the power of the market to encourage correct behavior through market forces, instead of penalties, taxes on all, special schemes to give cash to specific state controlled recycling projects, etc. A market mechanism allows free enterprise solutions, whereas 'social insanity' creates inflexible regulatory processes.
I guess it depends on your definition of "quickly", or it would be good to see a citation on this one.
Personally, I believe that if we encourage recycling more, that creates an opportunity for companies to innovate in that space and come up with better recycling methods. So in that respect, I'd prefer to over-recycle than under-recycle.
If you Reduce, you get an easy win by not needing the resource in the first place; Reuse achieves orders of magnitude of efficiency in the resource's utility (a glass mason jar can be used thousands of times, compared to a plastic one designed to used once and disposed). Recycling is often fraught with inefficiencies of both energy and waste byproducts.
I would love to see more economic incentives around direct reuse (such as Pigovian taxes on disposable plastics, and consumer incentives to return glassware to the grocer and then the manufacturer for direct reuse).
This leaves you with the choice to either spend a lot of energy or risk environmental contamination. Chemical accounting ends up being a nontrivial problem to address.
All grocery packaging should either be multi use or compostible. I hate how plastics are used where they don't need to be
http://siluria.com/Technology/Oxidative_Coupling_of_Methane
A citation in your favor would be how net energy output only slowly declines as EROI plummets[1]. Slow decline is a general property of these types ”Seneca Cliffs”[2] present in collapse.
[1] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-03-12/the-real-energ...
[2] https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/08/seneca-effect-o...
If you make things more repairable -> net consumption might go down -> this might lead to loss of jobs.
Does my analysis make any sense?
Total number of jobs or time spent in the labour market is one thing, but ultimately what we care about is efficiently creating utility. If I need to spend 5h working to get enough money to replace something I could've fixed in 0.5h, that's not good for the economy as a whole.
Were it otherwise, every home would be built without a kitchen and people would go out to eat all the time. We'd need more jobs for people staffing the kitchens, but it wouldn't help people overall.
Isn't the 'ready meal' phenomenon essentially this? Someone else does the real cooking, you just store then heat it up. Plenty of people survive solely, or mostly, on that.
Not if people, foreseeing high repair costs, simply figured out how to do without the items altogether and stopped buying them.
How would it impact the internal economy? Wouldn't it just reduce imports and improve the country's trade balance?
Seriously wondering. I most probably don't know enough about all that to make any statement
Which is a perfect example of poorly priced externalities. The full cost of disposal should be priced into everything produced. It is completely backwards that throwing a glass bottle in the trash is cheaper than sterilizing and re-using it.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20435310
>[...] But a well run landfill site has [...] electricity generation from gases produced by decaying matter,
This sounds like a pipe dream. We don't even have reliable estimates on how much landfill outgas there is, much less a good system for burning it. It's believed to be largely methane, which would be valuable without further processing if it could be captured.
Incidentally, the word "methane" does not appear in the article at all, and no systems describing such a gas capture apparatus are mentioned. But just think about it: a landfill is enormous; they are some of the largest things humans ever build, and some of them are visible from low Earth orbit. How do you plan to capture all of the gas coming out of that? Be honest!
Meanwhile, incinerators (of various designs) work today, have almost all of the upsides of landfills with none of the downsides. The article dismisses incineration with a single reference (b), which is actually an article from Planet Money focusing on recycling. The actual source is probably a footnote within a footnote, because that's as much attention as Americans will pay to incineration, I guess.
I agree that we need to talk about recycling less, but the correct alternative is incineration, not landfills.
... and properly written software has no security vulnerabilities.
Because the potential environmental consequences of just leaving the site unmaintained or poorly looked after are high, in the developed world government almost always ends up providing a backstop to this. This could be described as 'socialised losses and privatised profits' when it gets used, and we would be right to be very wary of this model, even to pay a premium to avoid it.
I'd expect compressed old consumer goods to be a rich "ore" for many valuable materials compared to many natural sources, and having the mining operation there would provide an endgame for the landfill that ensured it was being monitored and managed.
The problem is that it assumes that mining operations are well regulated, which I suspect would not be the case.
I think the software analogy is not especially good, but it feels like there's some poorly-aligned incentives in landfill engineering. The point of landfills is to make trash invisible, so saving money by hiding engineering faults in the landfill itself is easy, they get buried along with the trash, and by the time the leakage becomes noticeable, the builder is long gone (bankrupt, merged/acquired, whatever), and the community is left to spend more on remediation than would have been required for prevention.
The solution to this sort of problem is generally regulation and oversight. I try not to be cynical about the utility of that approach, but it's hard.
The difference from software engineering is that, for landfills, the specifications don't change on the fly, and the engineering best-practices to build them actually exist.
I also think that recycling allows companies to waste more, because consumers are more comfortable generating recycling waste than landfill waste, even though for plastics there isn't really much you can do to recycle them.
1. The rate of municipal waste landfilling for the 32 EEA member countries fell from 49 % in 2004 to 34 % in 2014.
2. Overall, the rates of landfilling decreased in 27 out of 32 countries. Between 2004 and 2014, the largest decreases occurred in Estonia (57 percentage points), Finland (41 percentage points), Slovenia (41 percentage points) and the United Kingdom (41 percentage points).
... Yea, b/c the developed nations of the world don't send their trash to "poorer riverine countries" to get dumped in the ocean. /s
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/28/treated-...
The existence of trash isn't under dispute in the article, only a very specific route for trash to reach the ocean. It's not clear that somehow exporting trash, alone, implicates western countries in its reaching the ocean.
Is it mismanaged trash collecting companies in developing countries that dump in the ocean? Is that the route? Or is it dumping in rivers, as the article suggests.
tl;dr: As a sustainable (heh!) solution to the current waste crisis, landfilling everything is not a good solution. We tried it for many centuries and are still paying the price for that approach today. The only people who will benefit from a 'landfill everything' strategy will be 23rd century archaeologists.
As the UK is mentioned a couple of times in the article, I'll add a link to the Wikipedia article on UK National Waste Strategies, as it includes links to the various strategies published by various Governments across the UK since 2000 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Waste_Strategy
While those documents are a bit on the long side, they are very informative about the many, many (many!) complex systems that contribute to planning for, managing, and attempting to reduce waste in a large, rich European nation state.
(Disclaimer: I was part of the team that developed and published the Waste Strategy for England in 2000).
Can you elaborate on this? I'm not aware of centuries-old landfills clogging up the landscape and (to any meaningful extent) impinging upon the availability of land.
A quick Google search gave me this link to some ongoing research conducted by Queen Mary College, London, into the risks surrounding historic landfills - https://www.qmul.ac.uk/geog/research/research-projects/histo... - that page does a far better job of explaining the situation than I can.
Sadly, making sure operational/new landfill sites stick to the standards doesn't fix the problems surrounding old/abandoned landfill sites. If people want to make those sites safe(r), then that's going to cost a lot of money.
In my view, the key barriers to landfill mining are the same as those faced by today's recycling industry: the costs involved in extracting value from waste (someone has to pay the pickers working in the recycling sheds - possibly one of the worst jobs in the world); and finding viable, stable and sustainable markets for the materials that do get extracted. Volatile recyclate markets were a huge problem for sustainable recycling back in 2000 and I doubt much has changed since then.
The convenience of throwing something away is a triumph of modern civilization and one of life's little pleasures, and we had to ruin it by acting like it's wrong when it's actually not.
When I walk up to some wastebins holding a papery-plasticky object with a bit of food stuck to it, my heart sinks. Now I have to think about classifying it into one of 2-4 inconsistent-looking bins, and I feel guilty that the classification isn't perfect - which would be okay if it was for a good cause, but the whole concept of recycling paper and plastic was a net-negative to begin with.
Recycling is one of those things that feels like it solves a problem but doesn't at all - like hybrid cars, US-style airport security, or donating cans of food.
I am at least familiar with arguments against US-style airport security and donating cans of food, but whats wrong with hybrid cars? I don't know of any arguments that they are net neutral / harmful.
"Local" because they were always predictably a technological dead end.
"Maximum" because they maybe gave us a slight improvement in fuel efficiency, although gas-efficient internal combustion engine cars may have been the more energy-efficient option all along when you consider the up-front cost and maintenance complexity of hybrid cars' dual engines.
The only thing we know for sure about hybrid cars is that Toyota successfully profited from selling people's self-image about being more energy efficient. But since we also have Tesla in the market, selling the actual solution to the problem of gas-burning transportation, absolutely no one should be buying hybrids.
This is an oft repeated accusation by people who only know the concept of hybrids and have no actual experience with them.
The electrical system of hybrids are inherently low maintenance and the gasoline engines run under very low stress conditions for an engine. The result is that the gasoline engine needs much less maintenance. And the brakes are barely used.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/04...
The Prius is a better option from a lifecycle CO2 perspective in many places than either a high efficiency conventional vehicle or a pure battery-electric vehicle. That changes if your electricity comes from more renewable sources -- California, for example. Shorter commutes favor small battery packs or no batteries at all.
What really reducd my gas consumption was moving to a place just a few miles from where I work.
After having driven one for a while, I've done a complete 180. The fact is, they're a perfect interim solution which really brings 'the best of both worlds'. One thing I wasn't expecting was how the system trains me to drive differently and minimize wasteful fuel use-- something that simply doesn't exist in non-hybrids. I think they make even more sense for large freight trucks, and I'm looking forward to seeing more of those.
In the U.S., more than half the top-selling vehicles are pure-ICE trucks or SUVs, and I would bet the majority of people buying them don't have a sensible use case. There is plenty of room for hybrids to make a difference. When you can get the same or better performance for half the fuel (or less), it's a no-brainer, and the market will eventually catch up to that.
From a mechanical pov?
Your experience doesn't seem like it would refute that? To be fair I'm not sure how you could refute it without long term large scale reliability testing.
Incidentally, the same thing exists for pure electric cars, solar panels, and just about anything else of that nature.
The energy flow is a bit similar to the cash flow of a SAAS company: As ROI takes a few years, the start of the rapidly growing industry looks like a net negative, but with the installed capacity constantly growing and efficiency getting better, even the industry as a whole is in the black now.
Regardless, thanks for the talk, it's interesting. I think someone told me a while back they did an analysis of the difference between gas electricity plants vs solar and they came away with the realization that the only way gas wins is really due to the financing around it, so something totally due to regs and how society is already used to it. I just am not sure solar is going to be the silver bullet and actual reduction of consumption might be the only way to stave off climate change.
Relevant: https://earthjournalism.net/stories/the-dark-side-of-renewab...
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3mavb/we-dont-mine-enoug...
The currently externalized costs of mining the rare materials will for sure be disastrous, but then again they would also be for other types of energy production. Relative to other types of energy production, I think one can more or less ignore this point (unless there is some polluting process involved that only affects a specific mode of energy production).
Finally, rare earth elements are not rare (a dozen of them are each individually more abundant than tin), and there is no danger of depleting them.
These are the factual errors in the first factual sentence of your comment. This level of reliability leads me to believe that you are commenting with no concern for whether your comment is true or false, even without doing a similar level of investigation of the rest of your comment.
Which elements are you thinking of? The vast majority of PV being made today is silicon. The only rare element used in PV is silver for front contact wires, and that can be substituted for with proper design (copper wires can be used if a diffusion barrier layer of nickel or molybdenum is used to prevent its reaction with silicon.)
People buy new cars for dumb reasons, usually for nicer seats/better ac/speakers, and they in turn do away with their less shiny but usually still perfectly fine car. The car industry is rampant consumer culture at its worst, sustained by lessees insisting on new car smell.
- consumer-sorted recycling is a BandAid virtue-signal and ineffective because it gets mixed up, under-sorted and contaminated
- post-consumer waste-stream separation works. Stanford does it because five bins was ridiculous
- all trash should be recycled, composted at-scale to reach near zero landfill stream
- Structural waste reduction by source-return reuse, recycling
- single-use plastics should be eliminated
- plastics that cannot be recycled should be banned from retail sale, packaging, products and landfills
Maybe very large taxes on landfill waste would compel recycling and manufacturing to get their acts together?
1) You already have oil-powered power plants, and
2) You have efficient, modern trash incinerators that can recover 90%+ of the energy in plastics, and
3) You make sure that all plastic garbage actually ends up incinerated.
Because the utility you get out of making plastics out of oil, using the plastics for something, and then burning it, is higher than just straight up burning the oil.
But if you fail any of these three points, you're better off banning single-use plastics.
Zurich has a very centrally located incinerator (behind the "viadukt" shopping area) and I believe that they generate electricity from the plant. They also have a very granular sorting regime ... it would appear they are covering all three of the bases.
Oddly, this seems to be the most difficult part of the equation here in NYC. Containerization needs to be adopted in order to make the system more efficient and sanitary. Containerization would prevent refuse from spilling into the street, into the storm drains, etc. The current system (curbside pickup of plastic bags) falls over (literally and figuratively) in too many ways and the sanitation workers aren't interested in picking up the slack -- they ignore anything not secured in a plastic bag.
I think you got it backwards. Throwing stuff away was the normal way of life before modern civilization arrived, just like defecating wherever you find convenient, hunting animals for dinner, or riding hoses on whatever side of road you like.
The wonder of modern civilization gave us so much power to produce stuff that it's no longer feasible to just "throw away" stuff we don't need. Just like modern cars necessitated speed limits, stop signs, and annoying lane-changing rules, mass production requires one to think about how to dispose stuff without ruining ourselves.
So, yeah I think you got it backwards. Maybe recycling doesn't work as well as advertised, but that doesn't mean we are off the hook. It just means we need a different solution.
By the same token, it gave us the power to produce so much stuff that we can afford to throw stuff away.
Who darns socks anymore? Or has their tv repaired?
Your average family of 100 years ago was throwing away ashes and what? The rag and bone man collected rags and bones, veg peelings would have gone to a chicken/pig/compost. Paper probably went in the fire. Plastic was none existent, metal? (rag and bone man? I'm guessing there was a market for it somewhere).
This was the situation in the UK at least.
I have done both in the last two years. I also do not send my brand-new car to the junkyard once the ashtray is full. It's wasteful.
It isn't the 'normal' thing though, certainly not for younger generations.
What were the economics of your tv repair, what was the cost of the repair v replacement and how old was the tv? Last time I looked into it, they were doubtful they could get the parts, and the likely charge was higher than replacing the tv. The same isnt true for emptying the ashtray. In fact I don't even need to take the car to the garage to empty the ashtray, I can do it myself!
People did not go West because they had no place to live.
What deflator was used to make this calculation?
This may be true, generally, but it was not true of the Ingalls family that your grandparent refers to. Their travel and settlement plans were not the most well thought out ...
You mention "defecating wherever you find convenient" - yes, another pleasure of modern life is that at any time I can walk to a nearby bathroom and defecate, and do so on top of much more sanitary infrastructure than we ever had in the past.
i'd like to see some evidence to that.
most of what we throw away is packaging. in the past there was little packaging. and most packaging was reusable, a cloth, a bag or a chest for example.
if it wasn't for packaging, in my daily life i would hardly have any trash at all. almost everything i am able to reuse, and i buy with re-usability in mind.
this is not something i learned in school, or from somehow environmentally conscious parents. i am actually not sure where this came from. we did it out of habit. waste not, want not. maybe it came from not being able to afford to keep buying new stuff. it wasn't really conscious.
reusing vs throwing away is more likely split along rich vs poor. and on the past more people were not rich. they were not necessarily poor in the sense of struggling to survive but the average population created everything they needed for themselves or bartered it. there was no space for trash.
buying new things is a sign of wealth. this is especially visible in china where second hand markets are practically non-existent. people pride themselves that they can afford to buy new stuff.
note that reusing is different from recycling. reusing happens at home or on the second hand market. recycling comes from collecting trash and transforming it.
so in that sense recycling is very new. but reusing is old.
What? Absolutely not. Things were precious and labor was cheap back in the day.
Anything that could be repaired was. Ever heard of "darning socks"? Yeah - no one would do that today, but it was common 100 years ago.
> just like defecating wherever you find convenient
Lol.
People found out pretty quickly that you have to give a crap about where you give a crap or people get sick and die. This is 2000 BC social technology.
> The wonder of modern civilization gave us so much power to produce stuff that it's no longer feasible to just "throw away" stuff we don't need.
BS.
The earth is big. Really big. Stupendously big. Conceptually it's trivial to make a landfill large enough for anything we will make in the next 100 years with space left over.
We don't do this because it's cheaper to have small landfills closer to cities, but that's an economic limitation, not a technical one.
The wonder (and horror) of modern civilization is that this kind of thinking is obsolete. Pregnant women are advised not to eat tuna, caught anywhere, because we managed to pollute the entire ocean with mercury. We're producing so much chemical fertilizers that we create more biologically available nitrogen than the rest of nature combined. And of course we're warming the planet itself.
Even ancient Americans, with their stone tools, managed to exterminate virtually every large animal in the Americas.
> Conceptually it's trivial to make a landfill large enough ...
Conceptually it's also trivial to stop global warming. We just have to stop making any more CO2 (and maybe suck up a bit from the air). Doesn't mean it's easy in practice.
The earth is big from the perspective of one human, but we are 8 billion. The earth used to be stupendously big, but it is not anymore.
So it only took us, what, 1.5 million years?
Edit: I should clarify, I realize that the article is saying that recycling plastic and paper isn't worth it, but is that a mainstream opinion?
The article likewise cites a whole bunch of libertarian sources that unsurprisingly conclude that government interference is bad.
On the other hand, here's a document comparing recycling to landfill (and incineration to generate power and a couple of other things). It summarises all the expert research from the actual field, rather than right wing economists.
Generally the experts suggest landfill is the worst option on several scales for basically all materials:
http://www.wrap.org.uk/content/environmental-benefits-recycl...
People who think recycling isn't good for the environment seem to fall into the same group as those who really worry about all the birds affected by wind turbines, or the impact of lithium mining or how carbon taxes will hurt the poor i.e. baseless propaganda aimed at people who care about the environment coming from people who clearly don't give a hoot.
I wouldn't at all assume that somebody on this site advocating for a carbon tax would take care to not make it regressive, and I think parent's lumping it in with bird strikes (a total red herring considering nobody is talking about banning cats or glass windows) and lithium ion mining (a failure to account for opportunity cost) is pretty conclusive.
That said, I'd be happy to learn I'm mistaken.
Newspapers are worth recycling, because they can be turned into new newspapers again, removing the ink and the metal can be done fairly efficiently.
Cardboard can be recycled fairly efficiently, and can be turned into new cardboard.
Plastic-covered/glued/glossy/window envelopes/food containers/other contaminated papers can't be recycled. Just incinerate it, or turn it into pellet fuel and incinerate it.
What chemicals are involved in that process?
Is cardboard similar?
Does this take into account the logistics costs?
Recycling newspaper is a no-brainer from a cost perspective. You can't recycle forever though, each time you lose some wood fibers that are too short and have to be removed from the recycled pulp, so you have to add fresh pulp.
Burying old newspapers in the ground is a form of carbon sequestration. Really it comes down to what takes less energy: cutting down the trees, or the transport, sorting and reprocessing of old newspapers.
So like I said, it's a no-brainer to recycle newspapers.
The (arguable) utility of your recycling vs. its cost to you is obviously very negative. And not just on purely selfish level: I don't know what your line of work is, but I'm sure society will benefit much more if you were calmer but didn't recycle than the other way around.
So here's a "get out of recycling jail" card for you and others like you. It's like herd immunization: Don't worry about it, we got you covered.
Also I work at a food pantry. Donations of canned goods are always welcome, same for razors, toiletries, etc. Anything that can be eaten without a stove is generally welcome.
Recycling has built up such inertia as the "moral" path, regardless of its inefficiencies for most materials, that it's become an unsustainable clusterfuck that we can't move away.
Where I live, it's been codified- municipalities must recycle, and also must discourage landfill-bound waste. The result is that I've been issued a 64-gallon mixed-recycling bin that is picked up once a week, and a small 36-gallon trash can that's picked up every two weeks. There's two people in my household and we both are very conscience of being wasteful- not as some kind of environmental whatever, but it's just in our moral framework. A 36-gallon trash can holds about 2.5 full kitchen garbage bags in it, so if we produce more than 2.5 garbage bags of waste in a 2-week period, we have to hold on to it for another garbage pickup (reducing our available volume for that period then). Anything out there then sits in the sun for 2 weeks stinking and attracting raccoons/rodents until the next pickup.
The result? Anything remotely resembling "recyclable" gets tossed in the recycling bin. Food/grease on it? Put it in the bin. You know where the stuff in that bin goes now? It goes to the recycling facilities and then sits there in huge piles because no one will buy it anymore because the whole system was propped up on bullshit the entire time.
To top all that off, the law also prevents these now-inundated recycling facilities from moving their material to a landfill for proper disposal. So it literally just sits there and we have absolutely no solution for it. It would be political suicide to advocate the loosening of recycling laws, no matter how broken they are, so you'll never have a representatives willing to fix this problem.
Any chance you could compost the kitchen scraps in your garden?
Necessary infrastructure extends beyond just providing for recycling- households are going to produce waste that doesn't make economic or environmental sense to recycle, and all the encouragement and financial incentives in the world aren't going to stop that. Encouraging people to be less wasteful is important, but we need to stop demonizing landfills and use of the landfill bins because that sentiment has perverted the whole household recycling process.
It's gotten so bad here that a few months ago, they had city representatives on the radio threatening fines for people that put non-recyclable waste in their bins, as if that's the solution to mixed-recycling being uneconomical. They went as far as to say that it was malicious- that people were putting non-recyclable stuff, like used pizza boxes (their example), in the recycling bins to purposefully sabotage the whole system. The disconnect is huge and at some point the holier-than-thou attitude and the short-sighted laws passed with it are going to blow up in our collective faces.
I'd try to collect payment for disposal earlier. If you pay for disposal when you buy the product, it makes doing the right thing easy. It also makes products with wasteful packaging more expensive right there in the store, encouraging people to buy less wasteful alternatives.
> if we produce more than 2.5 garbage bags of waste in a 2-week period, we have to hold on to it for another garbage pickup
It's pretty easy to have much less than 2.5 garbage bags of waste every 2-week. You should read just a tiny bit of zero waste please, it may help you immensely.
You may believe that recycling isn't working, that's fine, but there's plenty of simple easy ways to reduce waste and have less than 2.5 garbage bags of waste every 2 weeks.
The 4 R rules is simple: Refuse, Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.
You still got 3 R to works on.
Some specifics on ocean plastics that covers a bit of general plastics.
https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4671
Thanks, I never realized
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/im-begging-you-stop-donatin...
I mean, maybe that's partly because it doesn't matter and in the end they're just combining it all and sending everything to landfill regardless. But still; they got the bins, how much harder can it be to put up a sign?
OTOH, fast food joints are possibly one of the handful of places you could actually do recycling right, since you have a pretty uniform stream of items, thus limiting the need to sort. So instead of having a "recycling" bin, they could have a bin for plastic cutlery, and a bin for straws, and a bin for drink lids, with everything else going in a common trash.
Getting thousands of identical contaminated plastic forks that just need a wash before being melted down is probably a lot more appealing to a recycler than getting a bag that's a big jumble of contaminated junk.
I think the argument that he has better things to do then think of taking a bag "everythere". You do not need a bag small in hand purchases and when you really go shopping you should and can easily bring a bag when you go shopping.
When it comes to regulations I would trust the US with nothing. The EU has probably way better regulations for landfills like for food and other things. While at the same time probably do a way better job at actual recycling.
There's a Danish study[1] that concluded that reusable bags require 50+ uses before breaking even with disposable plastic bags. And that's for one use. If you reuse the disposable bag once (to line your garbage bin, for example), the break even point is now 100+ uses. If you factor in cleaning costs for the reusable bags, I'd be surprised if this practice makes a dent on pollution, if at all.
[1] https://www2.mst.dk/udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...
The best shopping bag to use is still an upcycled bag made from otherwise discarded material, as you are not creating demand for the production of new bags. Sail cloth is a good sturdy fabric, and a bag made from it will literally last you a lifetime.
It is also healthier for your spine than an equivalent bunch of bags, and keeps hands free. What's not to like?
1. plastic garbage winding up in rivers is largely a developing country problem. I don't see many plastic bags (if at all) in my local waterways.
2. why not just responsibly dispose of those bags? It's not hard. They're not going to get lost when you're using them. After that, you're probably home, or at least some place with a garbage bin.
>The best shopping bag to use is still an upcycled bag made from otherwise discarded material, as you are not creating demand for the production of new bags. Sail cloth is a good sturdy fabric, and a bag made from it will literally last you a lifetime.
Are you suggesting people to make DIY cotton bags from scrap fabric they find themselves? You might be able to avoid the high costs of cotton (break even of 7000+ uses), but if you're not into arts and crafts, I suspect the opportunity cost will eat up any savings (if any).
And yet a lot of people carelessly throw away their plastic bags. Their laziness trumps your "it's not hard". Something primarily being a problem in developing countries is not an excuse for not caring about it.
"I don't see any, so it must not be a problem" is not a valid argument. If you've ever tried to remove a plastic bag that was half-buried in sand, you would know. That bag could sit there for hundreds of years without degrading.
My point is that it's better to not have new bags/material made at all. Repurpose something that was already made and used for other purposes, and you lessen the footprint. It doesn't have to be cotton, the woven bags made from recycled plastic are quite durable and long-lasting. In my case, I do have cotton shopping bags, but they're all hand-me-downs from family, I would never buy a brand-new one.
If you want something made from upcycled sail cloth or similar repurposed materials, there are a number of companies who will happily sell you some, including customization.
Remember, it's "reduce, reuse, recycle, in that order.
When you talk about breaking even you are talking about reaching the same negative impact, I hope, because that's what the report is about.
They even spell out those negative impacts: ozone depletion, terrestrial eutrophication, freshwater eutrophication and water use.
The study found that some types of reusable bag needed many uses before being a better environmental option than thin plastic bags (e.g. cotton). Other bags, such as sturdier plastic bags designed for reuse were much better options, needing only a few uses to break even, environmentally speaking.
Anyway, 50+ (or 100+) uses - a year or two of weekly shopping - does not seem unreasonable for a cotton bag.
"a few uses" is only true when you're only considering climate change. it's 50+ when you consider all factors.
>Anyway, 50+ (or 100+) uses - a year or two of weekly shopping - does not seem unreasonable for a cotton bag.
The issue here is that at 1 shopping trip per week, it's a little under 2 years to break even with disposable bags plastic bags (assuming you reuse the disposable bag once). To actually make a 50% reduction, you'd need to use it for 4 years. That's a lot of hassle (remembering to bring along the bags, storing it, etc.) for very little benefit (in absolute terms), considering how little materials are in each plastic bag. For instance, according to the table on page 55, each bag has greenhouse effect equivalent to 0.11kg of co2. Over 400 uses with 50% savings, that's 22kg of co2 saved. With the current market price for carbon offset credits (quick search puts it at $25/ton), that's $0.55 saved over 4 years. You might be able to scale that out to 10 bags, but that's still pretty low.
It's 4 uses for a heavy-duty "bag for life" to be better for the environment than a disposable one.
As supported by this Environment Agency report: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
6 billion fewer plastic bags were issues in the UK after they started getting taxed. That's only a small amount of CO2 saved per bag, but not negligible on a national scale, and it's completely avoidable.
Plus you only have to have a very small percentage out of 6 billion bags escaping the standard refuse system for them to become an environmental problem in themselves.
I think it is well worth it.
Landfills should be utilized much less for municipal waste, but doing this would require much better waste separation.
It's probably better to burn or recycle things that don't decompose readily, such as plastic. Landfilling plastics just takes up a lot of space for a long time. Recycling or burning plastic also reduces litter.
Recycling paper doesn't matter as much, since it is very biodegradable. I suspect that recycling paper leads to energy savings in the pulp & paper industry.
Aluminum is one of the best candidates for recycling as it is very efficient and cuts down on the need for aluminum ore. Steel is somewhat less efficient.
Organics should always be composted if possible.
Is that really an issue when said space can still be used for parks or other green spaces? Besides, US is a really big place. As long as we're not burying it too close to urban centers it should be fine.
These kinds of arguments are such obvious strawmen. I‘m always so confused when people use them, apparently even in good faith, thinking they hold any kind of water. I’m always disappointed when someone uses arguments like that, it’s so absurd.
Overall I would just argue that straw bans and the like are often not enough or waste valuable political capital, even if they might be effective. That much is certainly true. The focus on personal responsibility is toxic and derailing since climate change categorically cannot be solved with appeals to personal responsibility.
Our local high street only allow disabled drivers to park. So the 'pedestrianised' high street is full of the cars of disabled drivers. That doesn't seem to be such a good balance.
Ps I feel there's a good rhyme hiding somewhere with your straw man straw ban.
Reusing and recycling are tactical.
If your strategy is in place, use all the tactics that contribute to it. But if you don't have your strategy in place, tactics can do nothing or even move you backward.
Corporations like recycling because it promotes growth -- the opposite of reduction.
We are stepping on the gas, thinking we're stepping on the brake.
Covered in episode 183 of Leadership and the Environment: http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/rants-raves-monologues-volume...
I don't think this is strictly true. It certainly is not the explanation for why we have most of the recycling programs we do have.
Overpaying for unnecessary recycling reduces growth. Economically efficient recycling increases it.
Both corporations and environmentalists should support efficient recycling and oppose innefficient recycling.
There may be some methods of recycling that are environmentally efficient but economically inefficient, but that would be due to externalities that need to be regulated anyway.
The issue of expecting and engineering unending growth is an interesting topic but doesn't really have anything to do with this article.
Are you saying that's what corporations should morally do, or that that's what they should logically do to increase profits? It could be that a corporation saying "buy our stuff then recycle it" causes more people to buy the stuff than saying "buy our stuff then throw it away". In that situation, a profit motivated corporation would promote recycling even if it hurts the environment.
Are there many known examples of this? Kinda curious about what shape this problem takes in context
What do you mean by "promotes growth" here? You pay for your recycling just like your trash. Why would any company like it more than reducing overall waste?
A statistic from The Story of Stuff https://storyofstuff.org/movies/story-of-stuff comes to mind that something like 99% of things Americans buy end up in landfills within one year.
Manufacturers slap the word "recyclable" on those products to get people to buy more of them, hence growth.
What "things" means here? A car is a "thing" and a toothpick is a "thing". I can use the car for 10 years and I use several toothpicks per day. So on average, I throw nearly everything very quickly, but the picture seems to be misleading if we remember we're comparing toothpicks to cars...
The other is a raw materials subsidy for manufacturing paid by the taxpayer.
Municipal recycling programs are often a profit center for the municipalities running them.
Put a bit more directly, corporations like recycling because it shifts the burdens of waste onto consumers and society at large, while allowing them to continue pursuing growth and privately concentrating profits.
I'm one that believes the use of taxes as way to change consumption. So charging a tax to help reflect the true value of plastic, to reduce usages and find alternatives. It's a hard issue but burning it or dumping is not the solution.
The estimated max is 11 billion because the birthrate is very low right now.
The 'problem' is that we live longer.
A extremist fascist even has a pretty clear definition of worth added to that
Asimovs concept of being killed instead of retirement
Various concepts in fiction of adding globally some additions to drinking water to lower fertility on global scale
Chinas politic of one child per family was even somewhat fair as it discriminates equally
And they might get all the energy they need to do it from the garbage itself. Hey, if insects can do it, robots will eventually be able to do it.
Wall-E was solar powered and was just supposed to compact trash for incineration.
https://pixar.fandom.com/wiki/WALL•E_(character)
Taking care of the best planet around is always going to be easier and better than packing everybody off to some other planet, even one that's just as good.
They way I see it, it's even going to be possible to even collect all the mercury out of the ocean and clean up other seemingly impossible messes.
What is the energy potential in the materials in a landfill? How much is wasted by scouring them and trying to properly extract it? Compared to preventing the capture of those materials there in the first place?
Putting the survival of our species on the possibility of some pixie dust is not rational. It is hard to face the truth, but burying your head in the sand is counter-productive.
If certain resources do get more sparse, it will easily become economically viable to expand landfill mining and we already have the technology required to do so. At the end of the day, it's an energy question more than anything. With cheap solar plus the fact that landfills produce their own free energy (methane) there is no need to be alarmist and consider them a threat to our species.
Here's an article I found on a quick search: https://www.wired.com/2012/01/ff_trashblaster/
I’m confused by these new plastic bag rules in some cities. What is the underlying reasoning that was used to advocate for them?
Politicians took a highly visable problem that affects the majority of their constituency and "solved" it.
It doesn't matter if it's an actual problem or not to politicians, it only matters if their voters think it's a problem.
Roughly, plastic bags are bad for wildlife and enough of them don't make it into the landfill that it's a problem.
“The problem of rubbish polluting the sea, rivers and land can be most cheaply addressed by improving rubbish collection and making sure everything gets to landfill.
Almost all of the litter that escapes into nature, especially the sea, comes from poorer riverine countries with bad rubbish collection practices, such as China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Rich countries like the UK or US have rubbish collection rates approaching 100% and are responsible for almost no new waste reaching the oceans.
Focussing on recycling is a distraction from making sure everything gets collected and cheaply buried underground — something which many countries already do successfully.”
I my book, we need to make energy production seriously cheap (renewables, plus maybe nuclear) and put some of the energy excess into transporting heavier but inert packaging such as glass, metal and carton. And by decree lock down the types of plastic and additives which are allowed to use.
Arguably recycling technology has more potential to improve since large-scale recycling efforts in the US have only been around since the 1980s. Landfills have been around forever.