Recycling Chaos in U.S. As China Bans 'Foreign Waste'
npr.org
npr.org
Recycling, save for very specific things, is neither environmentally beneficial nor economically viable. We recycle so many things because the operations are subsidized, and we feel good because we assume the recycling bin doesn't end up in the dump.
Sorting refuse for recycling is a time consuming, tedious process. I hope that automation can actually make recycling more things viable. Reuse is best, but lots of things can be recycled for raw materials, particularly metals. Plastics don't recycle very well, glass requires more energy to reprocess than making new glass, and paper can be allowed to biodegrade or mixed into existing paper process.
Now, unsaid is that means that advertising and consumerism must be minimized and provide utility other then make you buy the new shiny trendsetting thing.
Generally, when the cost of a bottle or bag is statistically significant, people care for them. Stores sell more bulk stuff, refill bottles, and offer little in the way of their own packaging. It's all a lot less convenient.
In the US, various bulk stores have tried to introduce the packaging reuse notion, but all have gone out of business because we take convenience over reuse.
This will only change when reuse is equally convenient. If I knew how to accomplish that, I wouldn't be pontificating here, but running my own business doing just that.
Pretty straight-forward really. Increase the cost of once-off convenience. If it costs more to do it the dirty way, people will do it the clean way. But in america, they'll just vote in people that will dig a bigger hole. Probably in what used to be park-land.
Placing the blame entirely on idiot consumers isn't the best either. Where are the fortunate people in society who not just educating but also leading by example?
Elon Musk is the only person of importance I can think of that is actually putting their money where their mouth is to make the world a better place.
Seemed like a pretty good idea to me. It went out of business, though, I think because people wanted Pepsi and Coke brands.
Nothing stops the Pop Shoppe from dispensing Pepsi and Coke brands any more than it stops the local pizza place from dispensing Coke brand Coke from the soda fountain.
Surely, the license is not an obstacle since it's already being done.
Ever since they ruined Fresh by just lumping it in with Prime Now deliveries, most items come in disposable paper bags with disposable insulation inserts for frozen stuff.
The delivery vans have doors at the side with rows of shelves that these trays fit onto, so it’s a lot better protected than a parcel thrown into the back of a van.
Picture: http://www.shetlandtimes.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Sa...
But the benefit has to be offset by those who choose to have bags because you get 10 times as many bags as you would if doing the packing yourself.
Not sure of the exact cost but there is a flat charge so it is the same for 1 bag or 100.
'Without bags' isn't always practical with some homes where there is restricted access.
I think the introduction of plastic bottles and paper cartons was the initial reason for dropping it? Back then recycling was purely a direct cost/benefit thing rather than for environmental reasons.
It's not just that. Stores in the US don't trust their customers enough to move away from bulky packaging that takes forever to open.
I particularly loathe styrofoam peanuts and bubblewrap. Those should just be banned (or taxed heavily!). Use cardboard. There ought to be a way to "foam" paper to substitute for styrofoam peanuts. Then the stuff just disintegrates on its own after a while.
Maybe go back to waxed/oiled paper instead of plastic, too.
We just need some leadership(!) from central government to enforce widespread adoption of biodegradable packing materials.
The business model is super simple.
Go down your building. Look at people throwing trash. Do they bother to split paper, plastic or glass? Not at all. They'd throw anything into the closest trash.
Until China starts be more aggressive in cleaning up their environment or the USA decides to sanction against polluting industries, nothing will change.
Not on the scale China's has been. Their environmental destruction has been on such a scale that nearby countries, even those separated by ocean, have greatly impacted air quality and the oceans themselves have been greatly affected.
Sweden wasn't wreaking Poland's skies and waters as it industrialised.
Citation needed.
But just using logic, Sweden has about 10 million people today.
During industrialization it probably had much less (there was a population explosion in Europe after WW2).
Let's say Sweden had 5 million people. Industrializing country of 5 million of people vs industrializing country of 1-1.5 billion is something which is ridiculous to compare.
Imagine trying to industrialize double or triple of Europe from agrarian society again and tell me you think it would be clean and tidy process.
> "The 1950s census showed that China had 557 million people, and some professionally-trained demographers began urging that policies be put in place to limit population growth. Mao Zedong condemned such views on the grounds that under socialism a large population was a great resource, not a threat. Consequently, some of the most prominent proponents of birth control were labelled rightists and removed from power… by the time Mao died in 1976, China’s population exceeded 900 million."
-Ebrey, Patricia Buckley (2010). The Cambridge Illustrated History of China, p. 327.
In the future, we will likely see an even larger devastation of the environment from India and other countries with large and growing populations.
Not sure what can be done about it. I guess mother nature will sort that out once we run out of resources. It will be like a defensive reaction of an organism, human race might just get purged from the Earth.
All you have to is educate women and give them reliable access to birth control.
In every country where women are empowered to control their own lives and their own fertility, they have chosen to have fewer children.
We don't need some horrible Malthusian resource crunch, we just need feminism.
The fertility rate in China is massively below replacement at 1.57 births per woman. India is barely above replacement at 2.4. The fertility rate in India today is lower than the fertility rate was in the US in 1970. The global fertility rate has halved in 50 years. Even in the poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the fertility rate is declining. The fertility rate in Rwanda has more than halved from 8.4 in 1980 to 3.8 today. As far as I can ascertain, Niger is the country on earth with a persistently high fertility rate.
Population growth is a solved problem.
Capitalism saves us all. Children become too expensive so couple's will only have 2. Or none, if Korea and Japan predict a trend.
I don't think the idea is "extra credit", but rather a matter of scale changing the nature of the problem, just as you wouldn't directly compare the problem of networking 10 computers to the problem of networking 1000 computers.
London's "killer fog" is quite famous, and Russia's Lake Karachay still holds the distinction as the most polluted spot on earth.
Sure, China affects its neighbors. China is a big country compared to Sweden.
And so far not even that was enough to lift 1/3rd of their population out of poverty...
There's nothing unique about China's environmental problems. Every nation in Europe was at least as dirty during their own industrial revolutions. A hundred years ago, every building in urban Britain was jet black with soot. In 1952, the great smog of London killed 4000 people and brought the whole city to a standstill. The urban pollution in modern China would be entirely familiar to any elderly Briton.
China are making great steps to remedy their environmental problems. They're a leading investor in solar, battery and nuclear technology. They industrialised faster than the west and now they're cleaning up the mess faster than we did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Long-Range_Trans...
Comparing the scale of this environmental destruction with anything humanity did 100-200 years ago is what is, as you put it, "compete bunkum".
America's CO2 emissions per capita are still more than twice that of China. The Chinese government is clearly taking major steps to curb their resource use and their environmental impact; the current US administration is repealing environmental regulations en masse and has seriously mooted abolishing the EPA altogether.
China has some serious environmental problems, there's no debate about that. The problem is when China is painted as a unique or extreme environmental villain, which is simply untrue. China's environmental regulations currently lag behind the west by a few decades, but they're making meaningful progress in the right direction.
http://www.sustainabletable.org/906/waste-management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
The very article you linked put the entire amount of US farm waste at 335 million tons. This is much less than China's 1.3 billion tonnes (AKA "metric tons") for pork alone.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/cd.live/uploads/content_image/conte...
> America's CO2 emissions per capita are still more than twice that of China.
Again, from the standpoint of the environment, there is no extra credit for being absurdly overpopulated.
China emits more CO2 than the US, the EU and Russia combined.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
Per capita is the only equitable measure of pollution.
I certainly agree overpopulation of the earth is a tragedy likely felt for generations, but petty bickering over these very issues is why global leaders can't make any progress in greenhouse gas emissions.
> Per capita is the only equitable measure of pollution.
Would you then believe that if Australia were to have a population of 3 billion and produce double the pollution China currently does, that the continent would be doing well on environmental issues simply because per capita numbers were lower?
In any rational analysis, the environmental strain an ecosystem can withstand is directly related to the size of that ecosystem in comparison to the strain.
The strain an ecosystem can withstand is, unfortunately, not increased in a per capita manner as human population in the ecosystem increases. This may not be equitable. Nature often isn't.
But don't you have to admit China is quite socialist / communist and already "hinders" quite a bit? And yet they still rape the environment. Look at what they did with Lake Baikal in a few years. The Gobi desert is expanding. The smog and pollution is worse than LA in the 80s, and so on.
So, what is the answer? "Hindering" capitalism is too vague.
One thing that's undeniable is that without external intervention (which usually means the state), private industry will tend to pollute as much as it can.
Also - remember strong central government isn't inherently "left" or "right" and the current US view of the left/right spectrum isn't the only possible one. Staring at a 2-axis version of the political spectrum is a good way to break a damaging mental habit.
China should never have done this. There is no international EPA to stop them from pooping in their own yard so to speak.
Though conversely, no one forced western countries to send their waste to China without at least having a backup plan for if the economics (or relevant political matters) changed, as they apparently have.
To me that has always seemed like a problem to be solved, rather than just tossing it all. Sure, that's the way it is today, but is it the way it has to be? If metals are so eminently recyclable, why can't other materials be?
I also have a sneaking suspicion that raw materials & landfills are just as subsidized if not more, making it difficult to rely on cost effectiveness as the ultimate arbiter of environmental friendliness or total social cost.
There are industries that are inherently pollutant or energy intensive.
Rich countries tax and regulate it. China welcomes it with open arms, allowing them to operate under very lax regulation.
China put itself in this situation.
Recycling does not make much environmental sense and considering it is sort of like a little ritual that washes away your consumption sins, maybe a net negative on getting people to consume less. Even mass compost is a problem, potentially spreading plant diseases and, in the Bay Area, getting poison oak in your mulch is a real downside. Oakland is now charging more for compost disposal than for garbage, so some kind of problem is going on with it. Plus one one truck zooming around waking people up in the morning instead of the current three.
We should be trying reduce plastic use to places where really nothing else can do the job - and use more glass, metal, , and paper instead.
No more greedy planned obsolescence, no more flimsy crap that breaks in 10 days, no more cries about right to repair. The right incentive solves all the problems.
Figure that consumer packaging for food, and products generates a ton more volume than a TV set does.
It works well if you always remember to bring the bottles back.
I’m pretty sure the parent is describing reusing the bottles after reconditioning, which requires taking the bottles intact.
That's what the person you replied to is talking about. Here in Vietnam, like Germany, they refill used beer bottles. You can tell a new bottle from old based on the scuff marks the machinery leaves on the glass, which build up over time. These are the "rings" the GP is referring to.
I’ve had an experience with a poorly recycled bottle in another country that turned me off the idea...
Then yes.
As you say at the end of my quote, that's reuse, not recycling. Plus you're really only talking about using glass bottles instead of plastic bottles. None of that means that "Recycling itself is a good idea".
I'd argue that reuse and recycling are in many cases, functionally semantics.
And it's completely harmless if thrown out. At most crush it first.
The only thing worth recycling is metal.
It's worthwhile to recycle glass.
Recycling of glass containers saves some energy, but not a signifcant quantity compared to reuse. The primary energy saved is about 2.2 x 10^6 Btu/ton, or 13% of the energy required to make glass containers from virgin raw materials. This estimate includes energy required for the entire product life cycle, starting with raw materials in the ground and ending with either final waste disposition in a landfill or recycled materal collection, processing, and return to the primary manufacturing process. The actual savings depend on local factors, including population density; locations of landfills, recovery facilities, and glass plants; and process efficiencies at the specifc facilities available. The savings increase if wastes must be transported long distances to a landfill or if the containers are made in an inefficient furnace. They decrease if there is no local MRF or glass plant, or if material losses in the recycling loop are high. If the MRF is as much as 100 mi away, savings from recycling are negated.
Sand is apparently in shorter (not short) supply. Oil isn’t. I think it’s a different world than the 1994 article you link to
1) Oil was less expensive, inflation-adjusted, in 1994 than it is today ($30/bbl) 2) Only very specific sand is in short supply today (construction and fracking sand, neither of which is fungible with arbitrary sand) 3) Glass is made of natural gas.
As evidence: In general no one actually remelts recycled glass. Recycled glass is crushed and spread on top of landfills each night to prevent rodents from being active, and to reduce dust and pollution.
That's still considered "recycled". And this is after transporting and sorting! And yet they still don't bother remelting it.
"Seal holes in foundations of buildings or entrances to rat burrows with a minimum of 2 in. (5 cm) of reinforced mortar mixed with iron filings (from machine shops) or broken glass pieces 1/8 in. to 1/2 in. (0.3 cm to 1.3 cm) long. (You can put some glass in a tough paper bag and smash it with a hammer. Shake out the broken glass pieces into the mortar as you are mixingi t.) The glass or the filings deters rats from digging the filled holes out again before the mortar hardens."
"Common Sense Pest Control" by Olkowski pg. 633
Clear glass has value, while green and brown tinted glass has much less value.
“Glass recycling” takes all forms though, so now you have to sort optically, which has mixed results, or settle for “all recycled glass is now going to be brown glass”
That doesn’t even get into the part of how dangerous broken glass can be for workers along the recycling supply chain.
I don’t know if it’s worthwhile to recycle glass or not, but I do know it should be questioned rather than assumed to be an absolute benefit.
But it did make sense as long as China accepted the garbage. Remember the ships that bring stuff here will go back to China. No sense in them going back empty.
For example, for glass: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15890032
And an overview: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/opinion/sunday/the-reign-...
You literally chose the worst material (recycling-wise) for your example.
Glass is made of molten sand -- the raw materials are cheap, and all the energy goes into melting it and forming it into the right shape.
Metal is energy-intensive and ecologically damaging to extract and refine[1][2][3], but shaping it from ingots/billets/blooms/slabs to finished product is a relatively small part of that footprint.
Paper is the same story, requiring a lot of "cooking" to break down wood into fibers (much more energy-intensive than re-pulping paper). And there's the footprint of paper forestry itself, which often uses herbicide to control weedy underbrush.
Plastics, similarly, are made of an energy-intensive raw material (it's solid oil essentially), but the process from pellets to finished product (typically injection molding) uses comparatively little energy.
Remember, recycling is near the bottom (least favorable options) of the waste hierarchy.[4] My philosophy? Reduce plastic, reuse glass, and recycle metal and paper.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_mine_drainage
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_smelting
Which is exactly why it is subsidized. The goal is not to save companies money, but to save natural resources. Now, I agree it is debatable whether recycling achieves those goals, but a free-market approach, as introduced in the video, will only be more harmful.
That could be spent on more natural resource conserving things. That's the argument.
In particular, it could be spent on "fighting" climate change.
I'd agree with 'less environmentally damaging' but not as you've put it.
This reminded me of something Slavoj Zizek was talking about. How people need rituals like that to feel like they are saving the environment. So municipalities indulge them and let them read the triangles under each plastic piece of trash and they put it in one of 5 recycling bins, then the trucks pick them up and dump them all in a large dump.
This is a great article: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/opinion/sunday/the-reign-...
Certainly recycling some things makes a lot of sense. For example, scrap metal. But the push to recycle everything has lead to exploding costs and mounting subsidies. For example, the article cites New York spending $300 million on subsidizing recycling, about half the park department budget, rather than what it would cost to put waste into landfills.
By lowering recycling costs, China has played the role of enabler, allowing many middle class households to continue to obtain consumption indulgences at below market rates. If China stops subsidizing this stuff, I hope there is some pushback from communities, or at least from most communities, because we've gone full crazy on recycling.
Why use dumps at all? Here in Germany dumps are not allowed anymore, instead everything that can not be recycled is being burned; the energy is converted into electricity.
Yes, burning the trash releases CO2 into the atmosphere, but prevents release of the much worse Methane and also protects the ground water.
And since the capacity of the storage site is so much bigger than the Norwegian domestic production, some of Germany's CO2 will eventually be included as well :-)
The biggest plastic recycling plant in the US is in Riverside, California.[1] In go mixed bottles, out come injection molding pellets. The technology is working at scale right now.
Bloomberg sees this ban as a boost for the US plastics industry.[2]
[1] https://www.kcet.org/shows/socal-connected/carbonlite-inside...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-06/china-s-b...
Then glass and plastics are chopped into pellets, and sorted by color and material. That uses the same vision technology used to sort farm products. Vision-based sorting is so fast that it's routine to sort individual peas using machine vision. Sorting glass cullet into clear, amber, and green works just as well. Sorting plastic by type is rarer, but here's a line for that.[1]
Here's a overview of a production recycling plant.[2] A random mix of stuff goes in, and stage by stage, each material flow becomes more uniform, until material ready for reuse comes out.
When you visit a grocery store, there's a garbage dump wrapped around most of the products. Some of it's biodegradable, compostable, and recyclable, much of it isn't. We can remediate and save some of these processes and luxuries, but that they are mostly unsustainable is evident to anyone who comprehends industrial engineering.
"Over the pockmarked landscape there would invariably hang a pall of smog belched out from the smelting furnaces through giant chimneys, and so heavy with chemicals that it burned the naked skin and turned it white. Birds would die if they flew through the fumes. As Roman power spread the gas clouds were never far behind."
I agree, though, that this kind of problem was localized and was not in the minds of Romans the way it is in ours.
I wouldn't consider the mass deforestation of the entire Mediterranean basin "localized".
Climate change is irrelevant because if people simply consumed less and demanded products that last longer, we'd reduce carbon emissions as well as other forms of pollution. The real inconvenient truth is that overall consumption needs to go down. It means smaller factories, less industry growth, higher paying factory jobs and a total change in our fundamental value systems ... so really it's never going to change until after the next global collapse .. not that 2008 bullshit, I mean a real one.
Not so. Carbon stays and accumulates. It's not the annual emissions which matter, it's the total emissions to date which matters.
At this point, we've already put too much in the atmosphere. Continuing to emit, at a lower rate, would still be adding to the problem. It would be an improvement over emitting even larger amounts, but we'd still be making the overall situation worse off with each passing year.
Stop hand waving. Trees use it, algae use it, at the very least. Carbon doesn't stick around with the persistence of mercury. Rate of emission is precisely what matters. The problem is that it outpaces the consumption. There's an opportunity to create an industry of carbon consumption that will only arise after the crisis point (depending on which countries blink first).
My point in commenting was to say that climate change is not irrelevant, and emphasize that using less is helpful, but won't solve the problem on its own.
It's puzzling how this factualky inaccurate concept, is poisoning the understanding. If it were remotely true, why talk about it at all? We are already dead and the earth will never recover SMH.
A curious coincidence that on the site's most pessimistic assumptions, the amount of carbon we can emit is ~the sign of the devil: 666,666,666,666 tons
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/desert-kites-out...
one place to monitor for doing it correctly.
one place to easily apply advancements in solutions.
no need to try to herd cats (no need to try to get millions of people to follow exactly the correct proceedures). I watched teams of supposedly smart colleagues be unable to correctly separate their trash. if the average HN reader can't do it why would anyone expect to general population to ever be any better at it?
^If you already have big publicly accessible bottle recycle places, these will the raided.
The centers can’t sort to the level of “purity” required and people don’t realize how truly problematic it is to be lazy in presorting.
I honestly didn’t think it was that big of a deal to let some plastic bags make it in to recycling. I know better now, mainly due to local npr reporting.
There is not much to solve laziness, but sorting tech has room to advance.
This is a machine vision, machine learning, and robotics problem. If this isn't worth developing, the problem is that recycling isn't worth enough money.
In addition, if a little bit of food destroys your recycling operation, then your recycling operation needs more R&D, not legislating consumer behavior.
And it's not legislation, it's you having to pay massive waste disposal fees. Next time your trash gets selected for personal auditing (by that nice computer vision algorithm) and your municipal waste fee doubles, you will be incentivised to wash your recyclables.
There are business opportunities here, too. The more positive one is in automated (mostly computer vision based) sorting systems. Automated sorting that's clean enough for China's new standards is possible with existing technology, but there are a lot of opportunities for both new entrants and existing companies in the sector to improve speed and reduce costs. In the long term, this is definitely the path forward.
The second opportunity is for other countries in the Asia-Pacific region that are less picky about environmental regulations, to buy American recycling exports, clean them up to Chinese standards, then resell to China. In the short term, I expect we'll be seeing a lot of this.
Coal gets mined in Utah and shipped on unit trains out to Stockton, CA and put on freighters to China. A local developer is trying to move that port to Oakland but upwind of a residential area. He'd been turned down a few times but he tricked an administrator into a bad contract which the city has rejected. A lawsuit was filed.
http://nocoalinoakland.info/tagami-files-for-summary-judgmen...
http://www.wri.org/blog/2017/01/china%E2%80%99s-decline-coal...
I don't think Tagami will have demand but the lawsuit goes on.
It’s available to stream on Prime video. It is a real eye opener for what happens next to some of the waste we throw into the recycle bin, long after we have forgotten about it.
Heh. Thanks.
This sounds an awful lot like "blame the litter bugs".
Adam Ruins Everything - The Corporate Conspiracy to Blame You for Their Trash:
Unless there is government action to mandate some sort of rules around this - mainly to force companies to use reusable containers - blaming little consumers is a fool's endeavor.
Especially when it comes to things I'd like to switch on in the store before taking it home to discover that it's not working as intended.
Framing environmental deterioration as the result of poor individual choices—littering, leaving the lights on when we leave a room, failing to car-pool—not only distracts us from identifying and demanding change from the real drivers of environmental decline. It also removes these issues from the political realm to the personal, implying that the solution is in our personal choices rather than in better policies, business practices, and structural context.
"Moving from Individual Change to Societal Change"
http://blogs.worldwatch.org/sustainabilitypossible/wp-conten...
Is it that hard to spread some basic documentation about recycling?
Other examples abound. Shipping chickens harvested in Arkansas to be butchered in China and sold in Massachusetts is another.
I guess it's possible because "developed nations" send back empty container ships which might as well be turned into dump trucks?
Their deciding that they no longer are willing to participate in things like this can be a massive (in a time frame and to a degree that a lot of people will be utterly confused and scratching their heads "but how can this be, it doesn't make any sense!!!???") game changer.
It sounds like the Cobra Effect -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect -- where paying for dead cobras, intending to lower their numbers, motivated people to breed more, which increased their numbers.
Since when? I'm pretty sure it's around $0.10/lb right now and stainless is around $0.30/lb.
13 hours this post has been up and almost no mention of reducing plastic consumption. It costs zero, sends the signal upstream to produce less, and solves all these problems.
How do we not even talk about using less?
I reduced packaged food by about 95% and found it improved my life. My diet became more delicious, convenient, and cheaper, based more on fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, and bulk legumes, nuts, and grains. Here's a video on it: http://joshuaspodek.com/leadership-environment-podcast-5.
Here's a podcast episode on it: http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/joshua-spodek.
It's been more than six months since I've emptied my landfill garbage and months since I emptied my recycling. My compost, on the other hand, I empty a couple times a month.
How is the headline for this story not: "It's past time we stop producing garbage by 90%. It will improve your life"?
(and I started long before we got a plastic bag fee, fresh bags rarely crossed my personal convenience/waste threshold and I still happily pay when they do)
Probably Africa ... someone there will surely be happy to take money to dump first world "recycling" by a roadside.
What's really needed is a ban on exporting garbage/recycling from this country, not a game of musical chairs whilst various countries ban "importing".
Or just dump it in the Pacific Ocean .... oh hang on we already do.
This looks like an issue we could actually address.
What if every recycler world wide could get their hands on open source AI sorting software and open robotics.
Anyone know of any open source projects along these lines?
Most glass that is sent to recycle, if broken and not directly re-usable, is used as ‘daily cover’.
That means they grind it up into bits, then spread a 1” layer on top of the landfill each day to help introduce stability, and start the decomposition process.
Regulations in this area need to shift from recycling to sustainability.
"KAB downplayed industry's role in despoiling the earth, while relentlessly hammering home the message of each person's responsibility for the destruction of nature, one wrapper at a time. ....KAB was a pioneer in sowing confusion about the environmental impact of mass production and consumption."
Then in the 80s the industry faced another challenge; the landfill crises that led to recycling. Heather Rogers writes:
"All this eco-friendly activity put business and manufacturers on the defensive. With landfill space shrinking, new incinerators ruled out, water dumping long ago outlawed and the public becoming more environmentally aware by the hour, the solutions to the garbage disposal problem were narrowing. Looking forward, manufacturers must have perceived their range of options as truly horrifying: bans on certain materials and industrial processes; production controls; minimum standards for product durability."
"In essence, Keep America Beautiful managed to shift the entire debate about America’s garbage problem. No longer was the focus on regulating production—for instance, requiring can and bottle makers to use refillable containers, which are vastly less profitable. Instead, the “litterbug” became the real villain, and KAB supported fines and jail time for people who carelessly tossed out their trash, despite the fact that, clearly, “littering” is a relatively tiny part of the garbage problem in this country (not to mention the resource damage and pollution that comes with manufacturing ever more junk in the first place). Environmental groups that worked with KAB early on didn’t realize what was happening until years later."
https://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-design/recycl...
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/05/origins-anti-lit...
There was a scandal with chemical waste killing a few Africans couple of years back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Ivory_Coast_toxic_waste_d...
I think that countries should take care of their own waste. That's what we get taught as kids right? Clean up after yourself.
In some regions, pirated materials derived from metals, petrochemicals, and advanced dyes are immediately destroyed and shoveled into landfills: http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/steam-rollers-c...
The brown paper bag and the Anchor Hocking jar are going to come back in a big way...
As well they should.
Back when I was growing up we weren't taught to recycle, we were taught the three R's.
1. Reduce 2. Reuse 3. Recycle
And those R's were supposed to be in order of priority.
and is far from unique in doing so..