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Comment by SteveNuts | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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