Is it time to rethink recycling? | Hacker News Reader

Is it time to rethink recycling?

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117 pointsnkurz147 comments

Recycling sucks. You have to dismantle products and packaging, cut cardboard into little squares no more than 20cm X 20cm, sort glass bottles by colour, remove the labels, or else it won't be (expensively) collected. You can also go drop it off yourself, but you have to pay for the pleasure, and own or rent a vehicle.

Even after all of that, a majority of what is supposed to be recycled ends up being "recycled" into electricity, by an incinerator. That's the case in this neck of the woods, at any rate.

Recycling treats a symptom, not a disease. We allow the production of wasteful packaging, we accept planned obsolescence, and we dispose of things that could be yet used for a long time to come.

A better solution would be to impose the cost of disposal on manufacturers - this already happens to a degree with WEEE, but try actually getting a manufacturer to collect - it's made deliberately difficult as they'd rather you just fly-tip and save them the expense - even though you paid for that service as part of your purchase.

Another better solution would be to pass goods on whole for re-use rather than recycling wherever possible, which has gained some traction through things like freecycle and eBay, but is still a minority case. This behaviour could be encouraged by governments, but is instead actively discouraged, as it hurts sales of new goods, and therefore tax revenues.

As per usual, we'll only change when forced to - by which point it'll be too late. People will use 300 year old toasters in the future, and weep for our wastefulnes.

I do what I can, buy very little new (all of my furniture is pre 1960), dumpster dive, pass things I no longer want or need on, but it's still not enough.

Disposal is not so complicated in all the countries.

In some you have much looser rules, eg. no labels removal, and [directly] paid collection.

While it's true that solving the causes is radically more effective than treating the symptoms, in the isolated view of the garbage recycling, separation by the consumer is still more effective than having it done after collection.

> separation by the consumer is still more effective than having it done after collection.

Why would this be true? I would think that a worker after collection would be 10x more efficient and precise when separating recyclables then individuals doing it piecemeal.

The consumer is certainly paid less than a employee to do that job badly (in comparison), but there's no way that the extra taxes that I would have to pay to have recyclables sorted centrally would be higher than value of the time it takes to sort it myself.

Try to take apart a box where you have half-empty yoghurt cups and newspapers.

And now imagine having them separately.

Separation by the consumer is far easier, because they can make sure in the paper container is purely paper, and it can just be dissolved, cleaned, and recast into paper. And in the plastic container is just plastic, metal and organic stuff, so you can clean it with water, and are left with plastic and metal, and can separate magnetically.

I'm skeptical of this myself. I think the real reason would be: It's cheaper for the recycling company, as it costs them nothing for you to recycle.

Commercial recyclers operate at a scale too large to hire people to sort. They depend on automated sorting, which uses blown air and physics to separate items - plastic flies higher than metal.

What doesn't go into one of the other slots gets sent to the landfill... Including most of the glass jars that you cleaned and sorted carefully.

Actually in some cases the equipment is more advanced. About 8 years ago I visited a mixed recycling facility in London which separated plastic bottles by computer vision triggering a precise air jet to launch each bottle into a different hopper. There was also a stage that used rollers to shatter glass bottles, though I don't remember the purpose of that.

Combined with the traditional sorting techniques, computer vision and AI are improving to such an extent that sorting probably doesn't need to be done by the consumer anymore. It will just take awhile for all the infrastructure to catch up to this reality.

> separation by the consumer is still more effective than having it done after collection

I think this is an antiquated view, because at least some recycling facilities specifically request that you not separate anything. It might sorted by humans after collection, but apparently it's most efficient to have everything dumped into the truck together.

http://durhamnc.gov/862/Recycling

When they are just running it through some magnets to kick out the metal that's worth recycling and feeding the rest into an incinerator/trash-fueled boiler.

In the UK I had two wheelie bins. One was for landfill, the other was for recycling. The recyling bin would take paper, carboard, most plastics, cans, etc. Not glass, which had to be taken to separate bottle banks. Also not some kinds of plastic --- yoghurt pots, mainly.

But on the whole recycling was hardly a burden.

In my town, after the landfill filled up, they built an incinerator. The town dump was turned into a "transfer station" where residents could bring their trash and recyclables. Trash would get "transferred" into trucks and hauled off to the incinerator, where it was converted into ash and electricity. The recyclables which we dutifully sorted into glass, plastics, newspaper, cardboard, metal.. were also hauled off to that same incinerator.

As a condition of building the incinerator in the town, the builder granted us a yearly quota of so many tons of garbage we could dump in there for free. Since our garbage was under that quota, they just brought the recycling there too! Why pay for it to be properly processed when we could burn it for free?

Because you can sell scrap metal and glass for cash, but it doesn't burn. It will contaminate the ash, which you can also sell.

In my town you just have to sort the plastics from the papers and they will collect it for free every Tuesday. The trash bags on the other hand are very expensive and not very big, I find myself trying to get as much as I can in my recycling to avoid having to buy more.

In fact the first week I moved in I didn't crush or sort anything because my landlord told me that was all I needed to do and they still collected it (even though my landlord was wrong).

Its also worth noting that as a result of this system, every house on my street always has a larger amount of recycling then garbage (we don't use bins so its easier to notice), it would be nice if more places did this.

Why not impose the full cost of disposal on people that throw things away? If the prices covered the real costs, and they were reasonably known and understandable, people buying stuff could make their own decisions about the best tradeoffs to make between all the various things you mention.

Recycling and reusing are great, but there are real costs to both. I've got a bunch of CDs that I don't really want anymore. I'm certainly not ever likely to use them, given Spotify and the like. But I feel bad enough about just throwing them away that I've just held on to them. I fantasize about giving them away to someone but realistically that would be such a pain in the ass that I almost certainly will never bother. [Now I'm motivated to throw them away!] Just the cost of someone driving to where I live and, maybe, take them from me – for free – has both non-zero environmental and economic costs!

Throwing things away is fine. Not accounting for all the costs, to everyone, is the real problem.

> Why not impose the full cost of disposal on people that throw things away?

Because if the cost is great many people will just dump their trash illegally.

That's part of the cost too! In fact, that's probably one of the most important, and potentially largest, components of the cost to consider.

People already dump their trash illegally. Are you arguing that whatever laws they're breaking should be repealed?

People get into this really nasty habit of thinking law exists in a vacuum free from the existence of human nature. This is sounding a lot like a gun control argument.

Instead, think of this from a goal based perspective. Your goal is to reduce stuff getting thrown in the trash.

Therefore, you want to encourage recycling.

Making recycling expensive harms your goal. You want to encourage people to recycle, not discourage. Don't do it, then.

Trying to force people to recycle doesn't work. It's economically infeasible to track down who threw that oil can in the curbside bin. Negative reinforcement being off the table, use positive reinforcement.

I agree that laws don't exist in a vacuum. What about what I wrote made you think I didn't?

One problem with reframing this in terms of the goal of encouraging recycling is that I don't think that's a worthy goal, in and of itself. I'm pretty sure that some things, like glass, are probably best not recycled.

What I wrote was that, if people decided, e.g. that they really wanted to cleanup all of the waste plastic that wasn't already in landfills, then they should cover that cost. If the costs were really minimal (for whatever reason) that would mean recovering them from specific people or organizations less important. So you're right that it's not always possible, or even desirable, to exactly match costs to those imposing them.

> It's economically infeasible to track down who threw that oil can in the curbside bin.

Sure; but is that because the cost of throwing an oil can in the curbside bin is really small? If the cost of that behavior is itself small, then it can be covered inefficiently, e.g. by taxing the manufacturers of the oil cans or the oil. If the cost tho is large, then maybe individuals shouldn't retain the same latitude they have now to buy oil cans or oil without closer supervision or regulation.

No, I am in favor of anti-litter laws. I had interpretted your argument to imply imposing the cost at the time of disposal, but I realize this is not the only way the cost can be imposed. I see your additional comment, but I'm not sure a straight up tax is the best solution either. If the taxes are levied indirectly then there is very little incentive for any parties to change their behavior. Any effect of behavior on the actual tax rate would be slow and dilute. If you levy the tax at the point of sale it is better, because now consumers are incentivized by price to select eco-friendlier goods and manufacturers are incentivized by the same mechanism to produce them. This solution is still lacking however, because should the consumer ultimately decide to dispose of an item, they've already paid the environmental fee, so why go through the effort of disposing it properly? It seems to me a workable approach might be to impose a materials based "environmental tax" at the point of sale but credit it back when the item is brought to an appropriate recycling center, just like a milk bottle deposit.

I think maybe we seem to be disagreeing because I see it as a feature that

> If the taxes are levied indirectly then there is very little incentive for any parties to change their behavior.

I don't care about any particular behavior per se [in the context of this discussion!]. If the costs of cleaning up people throwing plastic away are being met by a tax, why would one care whether plastic continues to be used for new items and people continue to throw it away?

It's possible that the most efficient behavior – in terms of physics – is to make things out of certain materials and then throw them away after some point. It's not obvious that reuse or recycling are always more efficient than simply 'wasting-and-remaking', given all of the other elements of our environments (like bacteria, fungi, ambient energy, etc.).

> If the costs of cleaning up people throwing plastic away are being met by a tax, why would one care whether plastic continues to be used for new items and people continue to throw it away?

Because it's possible that the costs are not entirely monetary. I agree that there is more nuance to this debate, though. In my opinion one-time use objects made of plastic are appropriate in some contexts (medical care, for instance) and less appropriate in others (plastic silverware).

That's why you see things like bottle deposits. You pay more up front and then get some back if you dispose of it properly.

What about the 10,000 other products that people throw away?

There's a TV that was thrown into the woods down the street from me. One of those large tubes. It'll be there for years.

Such deposits could be expanded to other products. Car batteries are a big success here, they are almost all recycled and typically involve a small deposit you get back ($5 or so) when recycling.

Hard to recycle materials could just be taxed to provide an incentive to use other materials. The city I live in banned free plastic bags and it has significantly cut down on their use. There's no reason why that couldn't be the standard.

"It'll be there for years."

No, not if a good person like yourself does the good work that needs to be done.

Thank you in advance for being a decent person that pitches in anonymously to help the community in which they live.

Well, let's hope a good person takes care of it. Here's another when they're done with that:

https://www.instagram.com/p/4hTbWTAD5a/?taken-by=mmellinger6...

I become physically ill when someone makes the solution my problem. I can't keep up with all the trash in the world. It's like the world is run by happy idiots. Try looking around then come up with a better solution. By now these are circling our oceans:

https://www.instagram.com/p/4KXmvAAD7M/?taken-by=mmellinger6...

https://www.instagram.com/p/39AlorgD4n/?taken-by=mmellinger6...

That's terrible advice where I live. Once I touch the thing, I'm responsible for holding on to it and bringing it to the right facility during the two weekends a year they accept such things AND paying the disposal fee.

Wow. Your city's policies suck. My town (in Germany) has several disposal facilities where citizens can drop up to 2 m³ per year of bulk garbage, toxic and electronic waste free of charge.

BestBuy takes CRT tube TVs for free. Limit of 3. If you see one dumped illegally you can just take it to them. That's what I do.

Or stop buying certain things. In America, at least, political decisions are not made with the interest of the average citizen in mind. There is a strong corporate interest in getting you to buy stuff as often as possible and that heavily influences government policy. That is not to say that reducing consumption would not have a significant impact on the prosperity of the average citizen.

I'm of the opinion that the effort should focus on making the re-use of materials profitable. Charge people by weight for what they throw away and provide a financial incentive for re-use/re-cycling of everything from food scraps to aluminum cans and you'll find that your trash disappears from the curb long before the garbage truck comes.

A tax like that would put pressure on corporations to package their products in easily reusable forms, with less packaging, or run their own recycle programs for expensive short-lifespan products like iPhones . This would largely offset the costs on consumer.

A significant amount of packaging could be reduced without much consequence on consumption. Especially for food. Grocery stores could use in-store branding/ads in place of flashy box designs. Plus as ecommerce/drones come to dominate, the need for flashy packaging won't be as important as website marketing.

Those risks IMO would be limited to a transitional period while companies evolve their industrial design. The bigger problem is that it requires a big behavioral change for both producers and consumer... it's difficult to make humans change the behaviour they known their whole lives. Consumers will have to make an additional purchasing investment (analyzing the disposal costs and companies would have to invest in industrial design and rethink retail marketing.

I'm optimistic that packaging will be greatly reduced in the near future.

Much of current packaging is for retail presentation and theft prevention. Completely unnecessary for online shopping.

In fact, I just learned about Amazon's Hassle Free Packaging option, which I imagine is motivated by reducing shipping and handling costs. That package should be arriving today. I have the impression the product's original box is used, vs putting it into another, larger box for shipping.

The American diet is transitioning away from processed foods, which uses a lot of packaging. Kids, old and young, don't need every single thing to be a pretty cereal box or single serve container.

If that's Amazon's motivation then they have a lot of work to do. Their shipping practices are enormously wasteful. They will ship small, non-delicate items in huge cardboard boxes, with inflatable padding thrown in for even more waste. Other shippers have the good sense to use plastic bags for things like clothes, which cuts the weight and volume of the waste enormously. My house orders a lot of Amazon and I spend a lot of time each week just dealing with the enormous amount of shipping waste this generates. It's so bad that I am thinking of checking out Costco instead.

I think it would be simple for Amazon to improve this if they actually cared but for them it's easier to toss everything into huge boxes and let the customer deal with the fallout.

> They will ship small, non-delicate items in huge cardboard boxes, with inflatable padding thrown in for even more waste.

At least we have social networks to rage about it: https://twitter.com/stefanmajewsky/status/642356938324475904 :)

To expand on my last point somewhat, consider plastic items as one example. In the article, the author mentions that some unnamed people [who exactly?] criticize the idea that "the environmental impact of making virgin plastic [are] “minimal,” a conclusion based more on the emissions and energy required to recycle plastic than the fact that the stuff persists in the environment forever.".

Take that last point – plastic "persists in the environment forever" – and let's just assume it's true (for reasonable interpretations of "forever"). What then are the full costs to manage all of the plastic we produce and use? I'm fine with making everyone pay (thru a tax, say) for the costs of cleaning-up (almost) all of the plastic that persists in places we'd rather it not, like the oceans or really any place that's not a landfill. If the tax rate required to cover those costs is really high then that's a nice reliable signal sent to everyone considering buying something that uses plastic that they should reconsider. Some things presumably would still warrant being made out of plastic, regardless of a high tax rate; others could easily be made out of something else.

This is known as a Pigovian environmental tax. It isn't done for the same reason we continue to subsidize the living daylights out of industries like industrial corn farming - while it's likely a good idea in the long run, in the short run it's a fast way of not getting elected for another term.

It's also a really hard thing to do fairly. How do you determine "costs" of specific environmental ills? How much is a pound of waste cardboard worth in tax dollars? What about something entirely non-recyclable, like a designer thermoset plastic?

(I'd love to see it happen though - I just doubt that the political will exists to see it through)

It isn't done

It is done. Ecotaxes & waste disposal fees exist in many countries for various types of products. A common example (at least in Europe) are taxes on plastic bags.

You're right, I should have said "isn't widely done as a full offset". You see watered down versions, but a true Pigovian tax would be priced to offset 100% of the negative externality.

I agree with your first paragraph but not your second. I imagine you've got a pretty strict standard of what would be "fair" but I don't think it's inherently difficult to come up with a technical solution to determining costs or allocating them among different people.

I think you're absolutely right tho that taxes like this are unlikely. They're certainly rare now.

Many communities have thrift stores that take donations. The thrift store then becomes a place of employment for mentally disabled people or others struggling to find work.

You can donate your CDs. Many organizations will pick donations up from your house at no charge, too, so it's barely harder than throwing them in the trash.

Really? At least where I live (NYC), I've heard that lots of places will no longer accept certain items, like books. I'd imagine CDs won't be accepted much longer either.

But, not to (just) be pedantic, there's a real cost in my just searching for an organization to accept my CDs!

If you know of an organization that will accept them then let me know. Otherwise, I don't feel bad about throwing them away. I'm mildly confident some species of bacteria or fungi will digest all of the CDs materials eventually.

Check out murfie.com. They will take your CDs

I use https://www.gogreendrop.com, and they accept CDs and serve a few different charities. They said they don't support a random NYC zip code I tossed into their site, but I don't know if that's city-wide or I just picked a bad one.

http://www.housingworks.org/donate/drop-off-donations/

Your local library is also a good choice too.

Yeah just donate them to your local library. I did that with all my physical media and they were overjoyed. Other people will checkout your music, movies, etc

I donated all my CDs to the local library, but I don't know if they put them in circulation.

Simple: because now you're talking about creating a gigantic government bureaucracy to look at every single product on the market and figure out its disposal cost, and then add disposal taxes to every single product. That'll make it pretty hard, for instance, for some small company to come up with a new product and sell it, because they'll have to get Federal regulators to check it out, which will probably cost a fortune. Or what if some little neighborhood deli decides to make a new special sandwich on Saturdays? Nope, can't do that, because we have to spend $10,000 for Federal regulators to come assess its disposal cost. And it has to be Federal because people routinely take things across state lines before disposing of them, so it's a Federal matter.

In one word, it's infeasible.

Cradle to Cradle?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0865475873/ref=as_li_tl?ie=...

> You have to dismantle products and packaging, cut cardboard into little squares no more than 20cm X 20cm, sort glass bottles by colour, remove the labels

This doesn't describe recylcing in any place I've lived or seen for a long time. Either all materials go in one big bag/box or at most they are sorted into paper and 'other'.

Some of what you describe I saw with early recycling programs long ago, but I've never heard of 20x20cm squares of cardboard.

The extent of pre-sorting needed depends completely on the local recycler company and how modern their systems are.

Where I lived recently, there were no specific guidelines about coloured glass, labels or cardboard dimensions.

In NYC, it's even simpler — only two bins: (1) glass, plastic, metal and cartons (mostly juice containers), and (2) paper and cardboard. By metal, they mean almost anything made of metal, including spray cans and filing cabinets (!).

> We allow the production of wasteful packaging, we accept planned obsolescence,

Regarding planned obsolescence, it seems fairly easy to legislate away - just pass a law that mandates a minimum of 5-10 years warranty for consumer goods (cars, laptops, smartphones, home applicances). This way, the manufacturers will reengineer the devices to last longer.

I agree. This is one of those cases where I think regulation over markets is warranted. The free market won't solve this problem because it's cheaper to make junk that breaks and people are too focused on the now to care if their stove will work in 10 years.

It's one of those greater-good problems that the market ignores but would benefit society as a whole. As a consumer, it would be nice to have protection against shoddy craftsmanship as well.

Something like this might even have the side effect of moving more production jobs back to in-country factories where quality can be controlled much better than in a foreign country.

EDIT: Thought about this more. There has to be some body that regulates what constitutes an appliance worth warranting. Maybe this could be done on a cost basis, but then would you have to have a warranty on an expensive piece of art? If you did have some sort of department deciding these things, would that allow for corruption? Would the microwave lobby somehow worm their way out of having a microwave being included as a warranty-guaranteed appliance? No easy answers, unless I'm missing something.

Ha ha, actually, I'm in a "foreign" country (Poland, biggest producer of home applicances in Europe due to proximity to West EU markets and low cost of labor), so moving back is not what I would consider a good thing :)

Interesting, I didn't know that most appliance production happens in Poland. I was trying to find a general way of noting the production relationship between the US and China, but I know not everyone here is from the US and not all countries ship manufacturing off to China. Maybe the "foreign" country remark was a bit too general.

Obviously there will always be a cheapest place to manufacture things, but seeing the difference from when things were manufactured "in-house" in the US years ago and how they function now, it's night and day. People are sold on features, not longevity...but I would much rather have fridge that lasts 30 years and keeps my food cold than one that orders new food online when I'm out and breaks after 2 years and can't be repaired.

I want there to be a more realistic balance between cost and longevity so the things we put so much resources into building don't just end up in a landfill two years after their creation. We're offsetting economic costs in exchange for environmental costs. It's an enormous debt that we'll have to pay back soon.

> Interesting, I didn't know that most appliance production happens in Poland.

From what I've read, their weight and bulkiness makes shipping from Asia to Europe costly, and this negates the potential gains from moving production to say China.

> Obviously there will always be a cheapest place to manufacture things, but seeing the difference from when things were manufactured "in-house" in the US years ago and how they function now, it's night and day.

I think these two events have a common root cause - the corporations have been trying to squeeze more and more profits, esp. since the seventies, which resulted in both sending production abroad and amping up planned obsolescence. As a counterexample, Russian appliances from the USSR era were actually pretty solid, with a lot of them going on for 20-30 years without repairs. It wasn't caused by rigorous manufacturing standards and QA (as the were both terrible/borderline nonexistant), but by good, simple designs which had longetivity as a design goal.

Make trendy the people like this San Francisco family that lives with almost no garbage.

This is mostly a cobra effect of modern opulence, people had nothing and knew how to reuse. Now we just meh out of the issue and put it aside like morons. There are more and more attempts at reducing waste but it's still shown as niche in TV news and such.

Make Kanye West use glass bottles and tote bags.

Every single Japanese home separates their trash into: (1) burnable trash, (2) plastic, (3) paper-pack, (4) PET bottles, (5) cans, (6) glass bottles, (7) cardboard, (8) broken glass, metal, etc., and (9) large items such as furniture.

When I first moved to Japan, I thought it was crazy how many rules there were about separating garbage. It was inconceivable to me that people took the time and effort to ensure that the plastic bits from product packaging go into one bin, and the paper bits into another.

The first time I had to wash a plastic food container and leave it out to dry so that I could throw it away clean, I balked. No one could possibly put up with this nonsense.

Guess what? It's been over a year now since I moved to Japan, and the garbage routine is a completely invisible part of my life. You get into the habit. It feels good to do your part. Everyone else is doing their part, too.

Is Japan the perfect (or even the most effective) country in terms of recycling and waste management? Not at all. Is it by far the cleanest place that I've ever lived in (including USA and Europe)? Absolutely, yes.

I'm not suggesting that Japan has the answer. I'm just observing that a sorting effort made from the bottom up distributes the work and avoids the expense of sorting later. Until I'd seen it in action, I would never have believed that people would tolerate such a confusing and onerous system.

Recycling looks as the perfect activity to apply the strategy of gamification.

E.g. Each family could have a card and get some score for amount of recycling materials. Then this score could be translated as prizes for children, pets, etc.

That idea is pretty fucking insulting. If my local community came up with that I would trash the notification and card straight away.

Maybe you should use your anger as fuel to elaborate a bit more your comment..

I don't see how you can't see that as insulting. It is treating you as a child.

My local council has a reward scheme. Recycling earns points redeemable at participating local shops.

I suspect it is ineffective. I've always recycled as much as I can but the incentives are too small for me to bother signing up, let alone encourage someone else to recycle more.

That would definitely piss me of too. Enough so that I wouldn't do it and just throw it in the wrong bin, or just dump it somewhere. If I were to clean it that much, I would expect to be payed the full value of the materials, plus cost of labor and water.

Some would consider themselves payed in full in the fact that their environment is clean. Less taxes being used to clean the streets or wherever people's 'dumpsite' is, if you prefer.

Oddly enough, Japanese people do it because it's not that much trouble and the rewards for the overall community are substantial—perhaps even existential—in nature. I agree with you that a selfish, lazy culture where everyone is in it for their own short-term gain will not be able to function in this way. There is indeed a problem with foreign enclaves in some Japanese cities refusing to put in the effort. As far as I know, that is where the municipal authorities come into the picture, levying fines, etc.

There is a very strong "can't do" attitude that is pervasive all across America and Europe (with perhaps Scandinavia excepted) and it is quite obvious once you join a group that actually puts in the effort to serve the group's overall interests based on rational thinking.

I'd much rather pay someone else to sort out garbage. Ideally machines would take over the task and reduce the cost to a minimum.

It's safe to say that you missed my point.

After you've mixed everything together, it's not always possible to sort out things into separate materials. This is the entropy applied to waste management. And it's the reason why it's better to sort out garbage at the source.

That's because Japanese society is superior that way: people want to work for the good of their society.

That approach would never work in America because the American mentality is "fuck you jack, I got mine". So to make recycling work really well here, it has to be invisible: you need to use automation on the whole waste stream to pull out recyclable materials because Americans are just too lazy, entitled, and downright stupid to recycle on their own. Half of them even think that recycling is a bad thing (similar to how many Americans think the Moon landings never happened, and that the Earth is 6000 years old).

There's a reason that "recycle" comes last in the "reduce, reuse, recycle" catchphrase. There's a frightening amount of food, for example, that could simply not be wasted at all.

Came here to drop this comment -- it's so often ignored!

There needs to be another word in that mantra: "repair".

Except that repair costs be too much in many cases (ie the replacement part or the labor cost) that it is cheaper to buy a new product for just a little more.

Which ignores the waste disposal externality and alternative uses of the resources used for replacement. The whole point of the slogan is to address the fact that being wasteful has costs that you don't see up front.

Besides that, the manufacturer has an intrinsic incentive to encourage people to throw away something only 1% broken to buy a 100% new replacement. Do you think Apple must glue the batteries inside the unopenable iPhone case, when other manufacturers have user-replaceable battery packs?

> Which ignores the waste disposal externality and alternative uses of the resources used for replacement. The whole point of the slogan is to address the fact that being wasteful has costs that you don't see up front.

It is a rare person who will pay >100% to repair a broken device rather than pay 100% to replace it with a newer, possibly superior product in order to avoid the (more or less abstract in our minds, despite being very real) cost of all the externalities of that decision.

It usually manifests as a person who will pay more up front for something with a lower total cost of ownership.

For example, Person A buys a new phone for $500 every 2 years. Person B buys a new phone for $525, and spends only $75 to replace the battery for a 3rd year. After 6 years, Person A spent $1500, and Person B spent $1200. Person B preferred to buy a phone that was more expensive up front, but cheaper to repair later.

But the other side of the equation is that the company selling to Person A makes more money by diminishing repairability. Person B is furious that Person A even exists, because the producers would always prefer to sell to the person willing to pay a higher price.

repair falls into reuse in my mental model

I always felt that reuse was finding another distinct purpose for an item after its original purpose had been fulfilled.

For instance, cutting up old milk jugs as scoops or as root-watering funnels would be a re-use, whereas washing out the plastic jug to hold water instead of milk would be a repair.

Scuttling an old naval ship as an artificial reef would be a re-use. Permanently mooring it and opening it for museum tours would be re-use. Stripping it of war materiel and refitting for use as a passenger ship would be re-use. Replacing the obsolete artillery guns with modernized radars and air/missile defense systems and replacing all worn or corroded parts would be a repair.

As such, I would put "repair" before "reduce". If you spend 120% on resources at construction time to also build repair parts, that item might last 50 years under repair instead of being reduced to 90% of normal resources and then reused after only 20 years. I have to assume that when something is reused, that it is simultaneously being replaced in its original purpose, which implies additional use of resources.

But that's the thing: I don't think most people realize that the phrase is a hierarchy. They just think it's a flat list of things you can do. At least that's how I was taught and other places (like the EPA website) imply.

and slightly worse, in the 80's and 90's - the song went, "recycle, reduce, reuse", which for me solidified the order.

Yes, for example this startup is doing something interesting in latam. http://algramo.com/en/

Some companies refuse to give away or discount for items because then people will spend less on food (with that supplier).

Similarly dated electronics doesn't get given away but gets disposed of because otherwise people could avoid buying new items.

Make things have long warranties and companies will introduce party's that wear, blame the customer, and then be sure those parts aren't available anymore.

To do this properly we need to transition away from capitalism; but the most powerful capitalists are the ones with the power to force the transition.

There's legislation happening to avoid that, for example http://time.com/4146012/france-food-waste-law/

> Officials in the French Parliament voted unanimously to put an end to food waste by forcing large grocery stores to donate unsold food.

True, for a start they have to through out all food at the end of the day where I work (we get free food for lunch), rather than save any of it for the next day (even if it would have been perfectly fine).

That is most of the food waste, but not the part that is mostly visible, which can't really be avoided, because few people have chickens to feed it to.

I honestly feel recycling is wasted effort. It's largely a way of buying off our existential terror with publicly visible pious busywork. Rubbish which actually makes it to landfill, as a problem, is not the big one or even in the big few. Rubbish that does not, which ends up as polluting litter or in the sea, is a larger problem but one recycling completely doesn't address.

So far as I'm concerned, what a landfill is, is a resource mine we don't yet have the technology or desire to exploit. A bit of futuristic technology, and we could be disassembling it for gold, iron, rare earths, hydrocarbons, etc. It's not gone, but it's put aside. And putting things aside can be fine if you come back for them.

The part about plastics being useless to recycle actually makes a lot of sense, if you live in a place where trash is incinerated for electricity or heat, and you have oil-powered electricity. Making virgin plastic from the oil you saved by burning plastic trash in its stead is better/cheaper/more energy fficient than recycling the plastic trash.

Aluminium is always extremely cost-effective to recycle, because making aluminium from bauxite requires enormous amounts of electricity, but re-smelting aluminium containers is cheap.

I'm surprised that glass was not cost-effective to recycle according to the article. I thought that since it's generally easy to sort and re-smelt, it's be all good. But maybe the raw materials are so cheap that it outweighs the cost of recycling?

I'm no expert, but I think glass has a lot of additives that impact its reuse. Colors for sure, but also strength, clarity, thermal conductivity, and maybe more. But for glass bottles specifically, if people got over being sensitive to the bottle color (both consumers and brand-conscious producers) it would probably be ok to lump the bottles together.

Where I live, glass is collected in three bins, labeled "white glass", "green glass", and "brown glass". The classic question is "What about blue glass?" As it turns out, all oddly-colored glass should go into the white glass bin since the recycling processes for green and brown glass are tuned for the specific dyes used.

> Making virgin plastic from the oil you saved by burning plastic trash in its stead is better/cheaper/more energy efficient than recycling the plastic trash.

Do you have data on this? I didn't find any cited in the article. If it's true, I would be very interested.

The efficiency arguments against glass that I've seen involve the sheer weight of transport (and the gas / cost involved) from use point to plant, amount of breakage that occurs that endangers employees, and the limited cost savings of recycled glass over new glass. Forget where I read it, but apparently much of the recycled glass is ground up and used for fill because of the lack of demand for the post-recycled product.

Yeah. The energy cost to just melt sand into glass isn't likely to be significantly different than remelting it for recycled products. And I'm willing to bet that there are plenty of natural silica sources at a higher purity than whatever you get out of the mixed glass recycling tub.

> mixed glass recycling tub.

That’s why in some countries glass recycling is separated by color.

You seem to be guessing, when you could look this up very easily.

"Every metric ton (1,000 kg) of waste glass recycled into new items saves 315 kilograms (694 lb) of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere during the creation of new glass."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_recycling

How much is that as a percentage overhead, though? I'm guessing not much. It takes a lot of fuel to get something that hot. The point was why recycling glass is less economically favorable, not that the carbon advantage specifically was zero.

Who uses oil to generate electricity?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/power-plant...

Traveling through Germany, any grocer I bought a glass bottle from required a deposit that was returned when the bottle was. Shipped back to original producer, then cleaned and refiled.

you have oil-powered electricity

There's not a lot of that about (1%): https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=427&t=3

I agree that we should rehabilitate incineration where it's more efficient than recycling and doesn't produce anything bad (dioxins were a problem at one point). It's certainly better than it ending up in the sea.

Container deposit schemes are getting some discussion in the comments, so it seems an apt time to mention their history in Australia [1]. SA has had the scheme since '77, and the NT managed to introduce it - then reintroduce it - just in 2013. No other state presently has such a scheme.

The most disturbing part is what happened in NT. The proposed scheme - which had massive community support - was challenged by beverage manufacturers - Coca Cola, Schweppes and Lion - based on some very dubious claims about it being an expensive and ineffective way to recycle.

In other states it has been a political football: parties support the idea when campaigning, then promptly forget about it once in government. The paranoid part of my brain wonders about behind-the-scenes influence of donors on this pattern.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_deposit_legislation_...

As a side point, in Asia I'm used to experiencing that a beverage bought in a platic bottle must be consumed on premises, so the bottle can be immediately put in a container for collection. That's a lot more satisfying than having to look for a bin because I got thirsty.

beverage bought in a plastic bottle must be consumed on premises

Interesting.

Beverage waste is huge. My locale recycles aggressively. Including a separate waste stream for compost (for better or worse).

Seeking to further reduce their waste stream, my local university assessed what's what. Something like 50% of the waste by weight is fluids. From sodas, lattes, etc.

Since attending that talk, I was trying to imagine a trashbin that would puncture beverage containers, letting the fluid drain out the bottom.

I like your (Asian on premises) solution better.

I did a thorough economic analysis of littering and discovered that just dropping my crap on the street, at the beach or in the park was far less effort and time than carrying it to the nearest trash can.

A libertarian friend pointed out that if there was economic value to not littering then someone would already be paying to take my trash from my hand as I drop it.

So now I can litter with a clear conscience, as I've proved its better to do so.

I do not disagree with the final conclusion or at least statement of this article, “The ultimate solution, … is better design of products and packaging further upstream to plan better for end of life and avoid the waste issue altogether.”

Packaging is the problem. We should only use goods that can be recharged or refilled. Otherwise, the problem goes on and on.

FWIW, Stanford both does recycling (usually 4 or 5 cans in Tresidder [0]) and post-consumer separates trash into recyclable materials.

Judging from the typical Tragedy of the Commons recyclable contamination disaster at places like Costco, perhaps relying on consumers to put things in the right place is a fool's errand... robotic with human automation at refuse processing points probably is a more efficient way to centralize and drive down the net cost of recycling with scale.

0: http://bgm.stanford.edu/pssi_flyers

This piece recycles (sorry) the prophetic arguments from this classic 1996 article by John Tierney, which generated more reader response than the NY Times had then ever received: http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-garb...

Business idea: A weekly newspaper or website that just republishes decade-long articles that were prophetic at the time and are still valid today.

Recycling imposes a cost on me. I would like to know which parts of it are really worth doing and which are not.

I really only worry about recycling metal. Soda, canned goods, that sort of thing. I've been a bit skeptical of recycling paper since I started recycling, the trees used for paper are plentiful, and are grown as a crop. Plus, as far as I can understand all the same processes that it takes to make paper from tree pulp are also used when recycling paper, so that seems like a neutral process at best.

Plastic I try to reuse whenever possible.

One other benefit to recycling other than reducing new material usage is keeping stuff out of landfills. Landfills are anaerobic, which means most bacteria that breaks stuff down can't live in them, so things break down extremely slowly[1]. That slow breakdown means we need more space for landfills, which are toxic environments. So even if the recycling process is neutral, or even somewhat more costly than producing new material, keeping stuff out of landfills is another benefit that you might not have considered in your calculation.

In addition, cities with recycling programs can actually sell the material they gather back to companies, literally turning garbage into money and creating a revenue source for the city[2,3]. One important component in this is that the cities can get a higher price for higher quality recycling streams, where the output is all composed of one type of material. This is why, even though St Paul is now single-sort, I still separate my paper from the other recycling. It helps keep the paper higher quality by avoiding getting it dirty and wet, and costs me no real effort.

[1] http://environment.about.com/od/recycling/a/biodegradable.ht...

[2] http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/03/recycling-in-the-us-a...

[3] http://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2015/12/recycling-matching-...

I'm from a place where less than one percent of all household waste ends up in a landfill, so moving to the US and learning that most of my trash actually just goes on a dump somewhere was quite a shock to me. So why doesn't the US have more trash incinerators? It seems like such a no-brainer to me if you care about the environment?

Is burning trash better* than a landfill? Honestly asking, I don't know and this is something I'd love to be better educated about. Seems like you'd have lots of toxic fumes from burning, which may make it less of a no-brainer.

* I don't know how to define "better".

You can burn it cleanly, at sufficiently high temperatures. In the nordic countries, this heat is then going into city-wide central heating networks, meaning it substitutes natural gas or electricity for domestic heating.

There's still going to be emissions though, right? What are the emissions? Just steam and CO2?

> sufficiently high temperatures

Can you fuel such a fire with only the trash? Or do we need to supplement with other fossil fuels?

A combination of high temperature, gas residence time, and various scrubbing technologies can more or less solve the toxic emissions problem from incinerators. On the other hand, landfills will emit huge amounts of methane for decades, and at this point relatively few landfills are equipped to collect this gas.

From a strictly air quality-focused perspective (my professional area), I would say incinerators are usually better. I would guess that incinerators are also preferable from a soil and water quality perspective, but I can't say for sure.

"Is burning trash better* than a landfill? Honestly asking"

I don't know a lot about this, but I do know that the nordic countries all incinerate their trash, and do so with scrubbers/filters that negate the pollution coming out of the incinerator.

Word on the street is that the nordic countries do everything better than we do and are the bright shining example for all things urban progressivism ... so ... I guess it's the right thing to be doing :)

It cannot be implemented everywhere. Sweden now needs to import trash to power its district heating, see e.g. http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/3/27/sweden-wants...

"Everywhere" does not have the same need for heating during winter as Sweden does.

Your evidence it can't be implemented everywhere is a country that implemented so much if it that they can save money by importing trash?

We have a lot of empty space and until very recently it was way worse for the environment to burn than bury.

Plasma gasification incinerators are quite clean.

Yes and it's quite new, huge amounts of waste have been (and continue to be) burned in much more dirty methods.

The US (and the world in general, really) has a lot of open land. We're in no danger of reaching "peak landfill" anytime soon, and if/when we do, it will probably be feasible and cheaper to lift and launch waste into the sun instead of trying to recycle it.

Regarding that last bit:

http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/shooting_for_the_sun/

Nice one, hadn't seen that particular article about the problem before. A hidden underlying detail in my comment is an assumption that such a waste crisis is so far in the future that we'll have things like space elevators (making getting to orbit easy) and solar sails (making reducing the starting earth-to-sun relative velocity doable in less than a year), though.

An awful lot of pulp wood comes out of managed woodlands. I'm not sure it is very comparable to growing a crop. The timescales for harvest are 30 and 40 years, and it's land that people think of as forests, not as plantations.

(there are certainly tree plantations that are very comparable to growing crops, it's just not the only source for pulp)

It's only 30-40 years if you go in and flatten it. Even in the northeast, as cold as it is, you can cut over the same piece of woods every 5-10 years, if you're the tiniest bit selective about it.

In the South, they have tree farms growing fast-growth eucalyptus hybrids that they can turn over even faster.

According to TFA, for household recycling, aluminum and cardboard are the most valuable.

Also according to TFA, the economics for plastic (as it's currently priced, externalities not included, blah blah) are not as favorable.

So TFA taught me to be less skeptical about cardboard recycling.

I live in a municipality that does not recycle aluminum or any other metal at all. They only take plastic, glass, and paper.

Yeah, that is strange. The opposite of the expected outcome for an economically rational recycling operation.

I wouldn't mind at all if the municipal recycling program took my recycling, sorted it, and routed the less valuable materials straight to the landfill based on current market conditions and analysis of all the criteria mentioned in the OP (cost of new materials, cost to recycle, carbon footprint, etc.). I put it out in one unsorted cart regardless and they have to sort it either way.

It has crossed my mind that they may already do this, either on the sly or per a policy in some terms I haven't read.

If they had more flexibility with the economics, maybe they could stop charging residents $6/month (the fee in my city for recycling pickup) to feel like we're doing the right thing.

Does anyone know about the relative trade-offs of composting and recycling? Many of the trendier environmentally-aware people I see around me seem to prefer composting, including compostable disposable cups, etc.

But it's not clear to me that composting would be better. What is the chemical composition of this compost of somewhat random materials? Is it safe? Is there waste? Is it usable as quality compost? Does it get used? How much demand is there? etc.

You also need to look at fuel costs of transportation. I compost all my food waste, and use the compost to grow vegetables. The council could also take my food waste, but the nearest municipal composter is apparently about 20 miles away.

One big advantage to composting is that little bits of food clinging to the container are a feature, not a bug.

So it saves a lot of water and (if hot water is needed) energy over washing and recycling paper or (with PLA and such) plastic.

The composting facilities I'm aware of are for-profit, but they typically get paid at both ends of the business (http://cedar-grove.com/about-us/faq/).

Why is recycling almost a religious issue for some people? How has reduce, reuse, recycle been turned into just recycle? Some people even talk about reuse and incorrectly call it recycling. It seems as if many people have been brainwashed via propaganda about recycling. How did that happen?

Speaking for myself: Waste is immoral.

I blame my Presbyterian upbringing, W. Edwards Deming, my 4th grade teacher, and Peter Drucker for the washing of my brain.

I would really like to see a longterm container pipeline. In true recycling, we wouldn't have any plastic containers, period. Everything should be served with, on or in durable, lasting materials, or easily recycled post compost paper.

We just don't have an accommodating container infrastructure to manage that, but what if I could take a cup from Starbucks and when I'm finished with it, put it in a recycling bin, it goes to a center for sanitization, then is redistributed to McDonald's? It would be like how a hotel works, but on the scale of a city.

Interesting article. It focused on economics, but didn't really factor in the environmental effects of landfilling or recycling. I wonder how that impacts the economic assessment. Still, generating less waste in the first place is always a good goal. I like the thought of shifting responsibility of recycling to the manufacturer. It would encourage less use of wasteful materials that have little recycling value.

It seems like we could achieve the economic goals mentioned in the article and avoid the pitfalls of plastic in the environment by simply getting over our dislike of waste incineration. Modern incinerators are quite wonderful things, but need careful management of a couple waste byproducts. I was pleasantly surprised at the comprehensiveness of the wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incineration

I am skeptical of pretty much all analyses of recycling and environmentalism that start from a primarily economic angle. The main problem being is that (obviously!) economic forces have driven us into the situation in the first place. The market supports overproduction, overpackaging and oversupply. All of those are economic activity that is marked in the "good" column by governments and societies.

Ultimately, lowering the production of a good used by people is a reduction in economic activity. Reduce, reuse, and recycle means less economic activity, but not less wealth. Until we realize this, we are destined to pursue policies that are bad for the environment and waste resources.

It really depends on how long or short sighted the economic rational wants to be. If you include the cost of pollution, including people's desire to live without pollution and the cost to reduce it to acceptable levels for people, then economics encompasses everything needed to correctly assess a scenario (but whether we can correctly create and interpret the model is a much more dicey).

Edit:

> The main problem being is that (obviously!) economic forces have driven us into the situation in the first place.

Yes, costs of pollution were (are?) not being correctly applied to those creating the pollution. That's not a failure of economics, it's a failure of people to correctly account all the economic factors that exists.

I don't disagree with you(1), but time and again people have shown that their economic calculations have a time horizon well short of a single human lifespan.

(1) by a technicality; since complete environmental collapse and subsequent starvation could be "calculated" as a total loss for humanity. But no one does calculations in these terms; they do it in money.

> time and again people have shown that their economic calculations have a time horizon well short of a single human lifespan.

I don't disagree with that either, but I think that has historically been largely due to our erroneous belief that we had a negligible effect on the world at most, which is thinking that is thankfully coming to and end. I don't doubt there was a time in the past where we believed we couldn't affect the ocean, and prior to that a river or the soil in an area. That isn't a good track record to hoping we understand it earlier next time (if our species is lucky, in some number of decades or centuries the discussion will be about our effects on the solar system, not our planet), but it does point towards eventually getting the idea and taking steps to fix the problem behavior, even if it's not always adhered to or a perfect solution.

Why not consume less?

Because of the debt spiral induced imperative of growth.

So this guy criticises recycling by creating an economic model that fails to take into consideration externalities of product consumption and discard. Not a very useful model and we would do well to not pay it much heed

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