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Comment by oppositelock | Hacker News Reader

Good for China, they've got an environmental nightmare to deal with, and part of it comes from the US offloading lots of "recycling" operations there, and I use that term loosely, particularly for electronics. We also "export" pollution to China by buying cheaper products that would be more expensive if they didn't externalize their pollution costs, and it's sure better to externalize that pollution abroad than domestically. The US, in my opinion, has been burying its head in the sand about the pollution which occurs when manufacturing everything that we use.

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.

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Nobody forced china to take America’s trash. They simply undercut other recyclers, making them economically unviable. The same thing happened with rare earths, china didn’t mind to pollute their land to process them, again making cleaner but more expensive means of production economically unviable. This is really the crux of china’s environmental problems: if your competitors cheat by cutting corners in environmental protection while you don’t, you simply don’t exist after awhile. Unhindered capitalism.

Until China starts be more aggressive in cleaning up their environment or the USA decides to sanction against polluting industries, nothing will change.

It sounds like China is starting to crack down. It's a luxury you have once you're affluent enough. The bootstrapping process is sadly very dirty everywhere that it's happened.

> The bootstrapping process is sadly very dirty everywhere that it's happened.

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.

> 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.

More ridiculous is the idea that a nation deserves extra credit for being ridiculously overpopulated. In China's case, it's doubly absurd given that the CCP strong-armed an already too large populace into having more children for decades before wisely but again brutally reversing course with its famous one child policy.

> "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.

Well yes, I agree with you. China, India and don't forget about Africa (most countries in Africa now have average age around 20-25 years old and are multiplying populations very quickly).

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.

I don't want children. I imagine I'm not the only one. Get a dog or a cat or a goldfish or a cactus instead.

99.9% of people disagree with you. You might not be the only one but you are part of tiny minority which doesn't influence anything. For every person like you who doesn't want kids there are hundred families somewhere in developing world with 5-8 children.

Not as many as you might think: Total Fertility Rate drops rapidly as survival rate and economic activity picks up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate#/media/Fi...

Hans Rosling had a great TED talk or two on the subject!

> Not sure what can be done about it.

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 UN forecast that the global population will reach an absolute maximum of about 11 billion by 2100. Some forecasts are even more conservative, suggesting a peak of 9 billion by 2050. The global birth rate has peaked and is now in overall decline, with most of the developed world being well below the replacement rate. Most of the population growth we'll see over the next century is simply due to more people living longer lives.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E

We can take this both ways: up until the 60s or so the West also viewed more people as a forte. It's just that it started from a lower base, the US started from 100 million people when China was at 300+ million...

Also after WW2 most young men in Europe were dead or maimed so in 50s and 60s governments supported population explosion so Europe would replenish tens of millions of young people it lost in the war and could rebuild its decimated economy.

Ha Mao almost sounds as a Catholic priest!

Capitalism saves us all. Children become too expensive so couple's will only have 2. Or none, if Korea and Japan predict a trend.

> More ridiculous is the idea that a nation deserves extra credit for being ridiculously overpopulated.

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.

You're underestimating the amount of pollution other countries produced during industrialization. There used to be rivers in the US that were flammable because manufacturers discharges so many volatile effluents into them.

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.

England was so polluted that the wildlife evolved dark camouflage to blend in with soot covered trees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution

Pulping and paper plants in the Northeast US used to dump all kinds of junk into rivers. You could tell what color paper was being printed by what color the river was. Lots of really toxic things were done by the US on their way to where they are now.

It hasn't just industrialized though, it's taken on massive scale manufacturing of almost all forms of goods for almost every nation on Earth.

At their scale that's how industrialization works :)

And so far not even that was enough to lift 1/3rd of their population out of poverty...

I'm sorry, but this is complete bunkum. Europe has spent spent decades dealing with major cross-border pollution issues. Sulphur emitted by British and German coal power plants was destroying Polish forests until those emissions were curbed by international agreements. Rivers across the continent were running green with algae because of eutrophication caused by fertiliser run-off and discharges of untreated sewage. There are still major issues with cross-border emissions of persistent organic pollutants and heavy metals.

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...

You should be sorry. China's pork industry alone generates over a billion tonnes of waste per year, accounts for about half of the nitrogen and over 90% of the phosphorus waste put into the South China Sea, is a major portion of world methane pollution and may well be the single largest vector of antibiotic resistant bacteria the world has ever seen. And that's just one industry.

Comparing the scale of this environmental destruction with anything humanity did 100-200 years ago is what is, as you put it, "compete bunkum".

The environmental impacts of the US beef industry are in the same ballpark as the Chinese pork industry. Due to the shift towards feedlot production, it has been getting dirtier in most respects over recent decades. Antibiotic use as a growth promoter is still legal and ubiquitous in the US.

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...

> he environmental impacts of the US beef industry are in the same ballpark as the Chinese pork industry.

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...

So if China were to split into 10 different countries it would somehow become an acceptable level?

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.

If those covered 10 times as much of the earth in similarly temperate regions, I would be inclined to say yes.

> 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.

Sure. Every year they say they will, but it is sort of like a crackdown that lasts for a week or two before everything goes back to normal again. China doesn’t need another crackdown, they need sustained and consistent rule of law.

Yep. Wasn't until the 70s that chemical and nuclear waste stopped being dumped in landfills and the sea.

I also have criticism that I often level at "unhindered Capitalism"

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.

Maybe it's not a capitalist/socialist thing. Maybe it's as simple as good governance vs bad governance.

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.

Oh, it is China's fault to deal with US's problem, by buying wastes in bulk thus delay the innovation? Interesting thought, then Americans should be rejoiced that they finally get the chance to deal with it themselves now.

Well it does signal the end of China’s main selling point for American companies...

The biggest selling point is the Chinese market itself. It is the biggest/second biggest in the world. Money does speak.

No, China’s problem is China’s fault.

China should never have done this. There is no international EPA to stop them from pooping in their own yard so to speak.

> Nobody forced china to take America’s trash. They simply undercut other recyclers, making them economically unviable.

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.

The companies with backup plans would have been outcompeted in the market due to having higher costs than those without backup plans, and so investors would not have supported them.

So now the investors are going to lose out as companies take the hit of setting up new infrastructure in a hurry. You pays your money you takes your choice. Cost now or risk of surprise cost later. Not all investors are short-sighted (though I'll grant you that many are).

The dumb money in 401k, pension funds, passive investments isn't paying that much attention. As long as it keeps up with the market, and the government will print money to ensure it does, it's not possible to isolate and feel the effect of not having the backup plan. And you can't compare the performance of companies that did have a backup with those that didn't because the former never survived or existed, so it's a tough sell to think that far ahead.

That doesn't make it all China's fault though, which is how a lot of discussion about this that I've seen is being framed.

You mean western companies. The market will adapt, it always does. They have to pay more money now, boo boo.

If we were to add externalities into the cost of things, it's likely this will have the added effect of bringing some of the previously off-shored jobs back home. Win-win. Environment wins, blue-collar, non-college American workers win. Possibly offsetting some of the "sharing" economy jobs trend and bring back some real jobs.

More likely it gets off-shored somewhere else.

once goods became cheap, it's hard to make it expensive again (as consumers will have gotten used to the lower price). If it was possible to have the off-shoring, it will happen.

I think you can, if you build in durability (a phone that lasts 7-10 years vs 1-3 year lifecycle, for example. Or a toaster oven, or shoes which get repaired at the cobblers, etc. We can make the TCO of something cheaper long term, if lifetime and repairability are taken into account.

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.

Robots.

The question is how to price in externalities without lobbyists getting the price reduced to a meaningless level.

Instead of finding better ways to sell ads it would be great if the smart people in SV worked on finding better ways for recycling. This would truly benefit mankind.

I've had the pleasure (joking here) of living in some very poor countries, and people there waste little. Why waste a perfectly good glass or plastic bottle by throwing it away, instead of refilling?

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.

> 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.

> 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.

The one place I've seen this work was in regards to dairy products bottled in thick, reusable glass containers. The supermarket would charge something like a $2 deposit refundable upon return of the used bottle.

When I was a kid there was a Pop Shoppe store by my house that sold different flavors of soda pop in thick little glass bottles. You'd grab a crate, fill it up with whatever mix of flavors struck your fancy, and pay a deposit for the bottles. When you'd drank them all you brought your crate of empty bottles back for a refill.

Seemed like a pretty good idea to me. It went out of business, though, I think because people wanted Pepsi and Coke brands.

> 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.

There probably IS some sort of licensing agreement preventing that, else they would have.

Restaurants and clubs have soda fountains letting customers fill themselves unlimited soda.

Surely, the license is not an obstacle since it's already being done.

The parent company of the Pop Shoppe made soda. I would be surprised if they allowed franchisees to use other suppliers.

When I was a kid (in the 1960's), milk bottles were re-used. We left the empty bottles on the front porch. The milkman (from Alexandria Dairy, if you lived in NoVa like me) came around very early in the morning and exchanged the empty bottles for filled ones. There was a little ice box (literally) by the front door that kept the milk cold. This service stopped in the mid 70s.

I would love to see Amazon take the lead on this. They should be in a great position to do so as they move to doing more of their own distribution. Ditch the cardboard boxes and bubble envelopes and replace them with reusable bins and pouches that are picked up when the next order is delivered. (And to start with, at least get rid of those horrible bubble mailers that can't even be recycled, and replace them with an all-paper padded envelope...)

Amazon did this for Amazon Fresh grocery delivery back when it was just in Seattle (and then in LA). Unattended deliveries, meaning left on your front porch, came in reusable bags and hard-sided plastic containers.

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.

Tesco in the UK (and I guess other supermarkets but I haven’t used them) give you the option of choosing not to have you groceries delivered in plastic bags. In that case they deliver them in the same reusable plastic trays they use internally. You give them back when you have you next delivery - or keep them for storing your junk as they are stackable and very durable.

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...

'Tesco in the UK ... give you the option of choosing not to have you groceries delivered in plastic bags.'

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.

Doesn’t the bag charge apply to delivered groceries?

It does but you don't pay 5p per bag as you do in store, you pay something like 40p regardless of how many bags are used.

'Without bags' isn't always practical with some homes where there is restricted access.

In the UK, back in the 70's we had a deposit scheme for glass bottles. And if you couldn't be bothered taking your bottles back to the store for a few pennies each you could be sure some local kid would be more than happy to do it for you.

Uh, you don't have one now? In Finland the vast majority of glass or plastic beverage bottles and aluminum cans are under a national deposit system.

Not that I know of no. I have heard about the scheme in Northern Europe and it makes a lot of sense.

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.

I was going to post that the US does this, but more correctly some states do this. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_deposit_legislatio...

>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.

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 mail order most things. While that saves on pollution from fuel, tires, etc., the amount of packaging material that gets discarded is depressing.

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.

Lately, I've noticed a lot more starch peanuts being used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foam_peanut#Starch-based_packi...

We just need some leadership(!) from central government to enforce widespread adoption of biodegradable packing materials.

I don't get styrofoam or bubblewrap in Amazon packages. Just those "bubble pads" that I have to deflate to dispose of.

Producing a Twitter clone and dealing with toxic materials are two entirely different skill sets.

It's not like people get out of college uniquely qualified for writing a Twitter clone. The same people that use machine learning for ads could also use it for sorting trash. And manipulating it would be a hard problem for robotics.

As Larry Ellison and other godfathers of the start of the IT industry once said (paraphrasing), "It's impossible to find someone who has the necessary skills and 10 years in the industry. Just hire the smartest people we can find and let them figure it out." Worked before, why wouldn't it work again?

Larry Ellison had two big advantages, though - a well-circumscribed problem domain and an obvious business model. Recycling has neither. It's a much more difficult problem.

Receive waste. Process it. Sell the recycled materials, get rid of the byproduct.

The business model is super simple.

My best suggestion to SV is not consume so many energy per people. But that actually a problem for whole American, not just SV. Turn off the light when you are not in the room, try not using plastic bags, stop mining Bitcoin etc

Nothing the SV can do. It's a user problem, not a technical problem.

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.

Then build trash sorting robots. That's a technical problem. Or figure out how to pack things with less material.

The robot to sort plastics is fine. The problem is people keep feeding it with sand and cardboard.

Recycling, save for very specific things, is neither environmentally beneficial nor economically viable.

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.

All rich countries do it.

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.

To be honest, large chunk of this junk is also produced by China. So if you are appealing on fairness then this is not quite correct.

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