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Comment by danieltillett | Hacker News Reader

This goes for most (almost all) recycling programs.

Recycling programs are a worse than a waste of money since you are using up some of people’s limited support for environmental causes. This would not matter if we did not have some really huge, long term problems that we need to deal with that we are not doing enough about.

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What would you mark as the worthwhile ones?

Personally I place high value on raw material recycling. Even if it's more expensive monetarily, so long as it uses less resources it seems worth it to me.

Aluminum cans are currently recycled more than any other beverage container in the U.S, which is good for business and the environment, says the Aluminum Association, because making a can from recycled aluminum saves not only aluminum but 92 percent of the energy required to make a new can

Aluminum (and steel) is one of the very few things that is in any way worthwhile to recycle. Most of the things that we are urged to recycle (glass, plastics, paper, cardboard, etc) are cheaper and easier to make new from the abundant raw materials.

Corrugated cardboard is a net benefit to recycle, I've heard. Otherwise you are correct. It's just feel-good. Most of what you drop off at recycling centers is just trucked to landfills after it's out of your sight.

> Most of what you drop off at recycling centers is just trucked to landfills after it's out of your sight.

This is definitely not true in Germany. And for glass bottle recycling, most bottles are washed and reused up to 50 times before being melted down.

Lead too because it keeps it out of the environment and reduces the need for lead mining.

Quality Paper (not 5th generation cardboard) is energy-efficient to recycle

It's energy efficient, but it lessens the demand for tree farms, which themselves are good for the environment.

I haven't seen that before. How are tree farms good for the environment?

It depends on how you classify "good for the environment." In terms of biodiversity, if tree farms are replacing old-growth forests, they're terrible for the environment. However, if tree farms are located in places that have long been cleared (such as conventional farm land), they can bring back biodiversity, prevent soil erosion, and most importantly are extremely efficient at carbon capture.

Of course, most of the studies on this are sponsored by the paper industry, and it's really difficult to get unbiased information on the subject.

Battery and fluro tube recycling. These help prevent the contamination of waste dumps with heavy metals although with modern waste dumps that don't leach (as much) this is less of a problem.

The really big environmental issue that is not being tackled is anthropomorphic climate change. Really it is not going to matter how many plastic bottles we recycle if we push CO2 over 1000 ppm and which we are on track to do.

I read that the alloy used in the tops of aluminum cans is different from the alloy used in the body [1], and as a result when they're melted down they create a third alloy. That seems like it's at odds with the claim that it's infinitely recyclable and "can be recycled and back on the store shelf as a new beverage can in less than 60 days" [2]. Anyone know the answer to that?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beverage_can#Fabrication_proce...

[2] http://www.alcoa.com/recycling/en/info_page/why_recycle.asp

(I didn't downvote)

Your wikipedia article says:

> When recycled without other metals being mixed in, the can–lid combination is perfect for producing new stock for the main part of the can—the loss of magnesium during melting is made up for by the high magnesium content of the lid.

If you look at Alcoa's specs, the difference in the alloys isn't just magnesium content. [1] See chromium, for example, which is in the alloy for the top but not the body. Besides, even if you can make the body out of the resulting alloy, you can't make the top.

[1] https://www.alcoa.com/mill_products/catalog/pdf/China_Specs/...

Good point. Yeah was wondering it about the day.

Here we are dutifully separating cans, paper, trash, looking at the little triangle and number on each plastic item. And then I had a vision of these trucks going to the same dump, and dumping it all in one big pile, or putting it on a ship and sending it off to another country to be burried there, away from EPA's reach.

The answer I think is it makes us feel good, it makes us think we are doing this to help mother earth, that is important to many people.

In the meantime maybe there is a coal plant across town that is dumping 1000x worse crap in the air, and putting a plastic bottle in the wrong bin is nothing compared to that.

In a way it reminds me when adults would give kids mindless tasks to keep them busy so they don't get bothered. "Here separate the M&Ms by color, I'll be back to check on your progress" kind of a deal.

Coincidentally, I was watching a fleet of three garbage trucks going though my neighborhood this week, wondering if the impact of running 3x garbage trucks to pick up trash, compost, recycyling was completely offset by the end product. I suspect the answer is no.

3 trucks would only be wasteful if they didn't manage to complete a full load over their entire shift.

I doubt that's the case. (The yard waste and recycling bins are more full in my neighbourhood than the garbage cans...)

I think this is a weird American political myth, like evolution not being real, or global warming being a Chinese conspiracy, or electric cars being worse than gas due to coal.

You go online and you find the same talking point, the same urban myths (they just dump it in a landfill!), the same links to professional political pundit's think pieces rather than to actual expert opinion.

Recycling here is actually on the chopping block because they can't sell the materials at a price that covers the costs.

They've never taken glass for that reason.

The economics are better for bigger population centers, but here the modest amount of material and trucking really put pressure on it.

Of course there are several businesses paying for metal in the area.

So is recycling in your area expensive enough that recovering some of the recycling costs results in a larger loss than losing 100% of the costs of landfill operations? BTW, what area is this?

The recycling is funded by the county landfill. If they stopped accepting recycling from municipalities, they would get more fees at the landfill. They could also put in a tax to fund the recycling, or start charging for recycling drop offs.

Let's go with "small town Midwest".

Normally, the reduction in landfill fees is counted as a saving in favor of recycling, interesting that in your case it's the opposite and seen as an income stream for the people deciding whether to recycle or not. Sounds like a political problem, though I accept that in theory there could be places where it makes neither economic, nor ecological sense to try to recycle. I'd only really trust a proper expert analysis on that though, as it's quite complex (e.g. if you profit from recycling A, but it costs you to recycle B, does it still make sense to recycle both if some of the cost are shared by both materials)

The same entity runs the landfill and the recycling program. It's done to lessen the rate at which waste goes into the landfill, so landfill tipping fees are used to fund the recycling. They don't particularly see the increased fees as an income stream, but they would be a consequence of not accepting recycling anymore. I guess the motivation is that as long as the costs are low, the recycling program reduces capital expenditure on the landfill.

You could just as easily argue that environmental effort is not a zero-sum game, and that recycling gives people a sense of ownership over the environment and increases their appetite for more important efforts.

Or makes environmental effort seem pointless and irrelevent.

This is one of those case where there has been actual research, but the results mat be fairly complex.

There's a counterargument that we have been collectively underpricing nonrenewable resources, to the point that the term itself "nonrenewable resource" points to a price which fails to account for the full-in total economic, natural-capital, time, and impact costs of sustainably sourcing the resource, and potentially by factors of thousands to millions.

That's a concept I'm still working out, and is based on a re-reading of much foundational economic work (Smith, Mill, Jevons, Hotelling, among others). I'm not in the least presenting this as mainstream. But it would call into question the market-price basis of both resources and recycling.

Food for thought, for now.

Plastic recycling was a platic-industry PR campaign to make consimers more friendly to buying plastic by assuaging their feelings of guilt. Now it's embedded in our culture as a received truth.

Source?

Not doubting -- see Annie Leonard's Worldwatch Institute (2013) piece on the fallacy of individual responsibility, particularly in disposable packaging littering. But I'd like to see specifics if you've got them.

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