Hacker News Reader

There is a virtuous fervor to recycling -- it's a type of middle class moral purification ritual, something that counterbalances high levels of consumption, even when it wastes more scarce resources than putting trash in a landfill.

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.

Shipping your garbage half way around the world does indeed make little sense. But Recycling itself is a good idea - we used to do this, AT&T did it with everything they made, milk and soda came in reusable bottles, other products like instant coffee, creamer, ovaltine, and others also came in glass instead of plastic - yes, reuse does cost the manufacturer more, but right now, those costs are still present, they're just being passed down to an unknown party, at an unknown point in the future.

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.

Manufacturers should be the ones forced to take their products back. That way they (the only ones who can) will take the cost into account and design differently.

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.

Does that apply to the guy selling a gallon of milk?

Figure that consumer packaging for food, and products generates a ton more volume than a TV set does.

You can buy milk in reusable glass milk bottles. Usually it's a buck deposit on the glass bottle. Return it to the store and you get the deposit back. When the milk company drops off a new shipment, they pick up crates of the empty glass bottles.

It works well if you always remember to bring the bottles back.

Works in much of Europe. In Germany, every store that sells glass has to take it back. You see bottle machines at all the Aldis with scanners. It's mostly automated, and you can tell how old a beer bottle is by how deep the rings are (where the machine rolls it around to scan it).

Just about everywhere in the US does this too (down to rolling the fan around, it’s actually a little fun to watch), but it’s not the same as what the parent is describing since those machines crush the glass to be recycled.

I’m pretty sure the parent is describing reusing the bottles after reconditioning, which requires taking the bottles intact.

>and you can tell how old a beer bottle is by how deep the rings are (where the machine rolls it around to scan it).

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 assumed the machines were like the ones here, that seem to go through an almost identical process, but crush the bottle as a final step.

I’ve had an experience with a poorly recycled bottle in another country that turned me off the idea...

In Germany the bottles are reused, not just recycled. Specifically beer, soda and juice bottle shapes and sizes are standardized for reuse.

Standardizing the shape is probably key to efficient reuse.

Is it part of his business to make trash?

Then yes.

> ... Recycling itself is a good idea ... milk and soda came in reusable bottles, other products like instant coffee, creamer, ovaltine, and others also came in glass instead of plastic - yes, reuse does cost the manufacturer more ...

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".

Arguably, Glass, and Metal are easier to recycle - but more energy intensive to do so - its much easier to sort glass and metal than the 9000 kinda of plastic.

I'd argue that reuse and recycling are in many cases, functionally semantics.

There's no reason to recycle glass. The planet is made of it. Almost every rock you see around you can be melted into glass.

And it's completely harmless if thrown out. At most crush it first.

The only thing worth recycling is metal.

This is dated but really interesting: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/legosti/old/5703.pdf

It's worthwhile to recycle glass.

First paragraph of the conclusion section:

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.

Sure! It's the 2nd best choice. Reuse as much as possible. What can't be reused, recycle. But it's significantly better to recycle it than throw it in the garbage for almost everyone.

Glass is made of sand and oil.

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

I know, I read the whole thing. Glass is also made of limestone, fyi.

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.

Melting rocks into glass takes a lot more energy than melting scrap glass into glass. The ratio is not as good as for aluminium or other metals, but it's still worthwhile afaik.

But transporting heavy glass, sorting it, and everything else makes the ratio for recycling much much worse.

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.

I read once that adding crushed glass to concrete prevents rats from gnawing through it.

Rats can gnaw through standard concrete? No wonder they ended up everywhere on Earth. I would love to see some video of rats chewing holes through concrete walls. A quick search on youtube did not turn up any live rats chewing concrete.

I found the reference:

"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

Ok. I'll buy that. It prevents rats from digging holes in the wet mortar before it drys.

Also the coloring of glass is very important.

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.

RE-usable bottles have a finite usable cycle count. Typically around 20 to 30-cycles[1]. They are better than disposable containers, but like anything else they wear, break down, etc.

[1]http://www.o-i.com/Sustainability/Refillables/

>Shipping your garbage half way around the world does indeed make little sense

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.

> Modern dumps can be very environmentally friendly.

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.

Not even that: The Norwegian government plans to connect the garbage incinerator at Klementsrud to a CO2 capture station, pressurize it, and ship it to an abandoned gas field for storage.

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 :-)

As the comment you were responding to noted, new landfills protect the groundwater by completely lining the dumping area and then capture this methane and use it to produce energy. Cleaner burning and less CO2 than simply burning the waste stream because anaerobic bacteria capture a lot of the carbon and the parts of the waste stream that would produce nasty combustion byproducts are contained underground.

> Recycling does not make much environmental sense and considering it is sort of like a little ritual that washes away your consumption sins

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.

>Modern dumps can be very environmentally friendly.

I'd agree with 'less environmentally damaging' but not as you've put it.

This is an unusual view I have not heard before. Could you link to a good article or study so I can learn more about the argument and data behind it?

I remember watching an episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit ages ago that railed against recycling. This seems to be it: https://vimeo.com/216389085

The core message of that video seems to be some libertarian wet dream, that it costs more money to recycle X than to build X from scratch, and that instead of government subsidies, we should just throw it all away in a landfill, until natural resources are depleted enough that we will be willing to pick up that trash for money.

Wet dream or not, my marginal billable hour is in the triple digits, as is my wife's. In my household, recycling is hugely expensive. There is no way it's cheaper for me to sort my garbage into piles of garbage, so that someone might be able to turn it into something usable. It's a huge tax on the populations where it's legally required, and worse, is no municipality even benefits from this tax.

Then employ someone to do it for you?

It is amazing people think it is worth spending 5 minutes washing out a jelly jar to save 1 cent in glass. I'll wash out cans and glass that clean in one rinsing, but even that is probably not an economical use of time.

Netflix must be expensive for you...

So how much cash did you burn by commenting four threads deep, halfway down the page on hackernews, Mr. Productive?

You make ("wet dream") Libertarians sound unreasonable, as if they want to ruin the world.

But it costs more for most of the things.

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-...

>But it costs more for most of the things. For example, for glass:

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

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoil_tip

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_hierarchy

> But it costs more for most of the things.

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.

> Which is exactly why it is subsidized

That could be spent on more natural resource conserving things. That's the argument.

In particular, it could be spent on "fighting" climate change.