Comment by tomkarlo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomkarlo | Hacker News Reader

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You can't base recycling decisions only on what's "cost effective" while not considering revising the fees people pay to dispose of household. Generating trash isn't supposed to be inherently costless, and it really shouldn't be.

Even glass has become questionable in terms of recycling economics[0] based on current fees, partially because Americans generally fail to clean the containers properly.

"It's cheaper to dump it in a landfill" is frankly, a lame approach that ignores the environmental costs and short-sightedness of creating more landfills. Do you want to live on a landfill, or next to one? They're basically a toxic waste dump.

The obvious answer is to do what other countries do: charge a lot for disposal of non-recycleable/non-compostable garbage, charge much less for recycling properly (and that includes cleaning and sorting), and use the fees from the garbage to subsidize the cost of recycling. This results in 1) less waste in landfills 2) more recycling 3) less pollution and 4) less use of non-renewable resources.

[0] http://www.waste360.com/glass/focusing-economics-glass-recyc...

Doesn't this beget an economic feedback cycle? I.e., if it's more cost productive to send to a landfill, then more waste will be sent to a landfill, and so the costs to do so will go up as "demand" (waste) outstrips "supply" (landfill space). Then the cost effective pendulum swings back to recycling. Is that already happening?

In some ways, recycling should pay for itself. Consumers generate raw material for free, which through aggregation, sorting, and rectification (de-generating into raw-er materials) gains value for recyclers.

Depends how you define "cost productive". Cheaper on a cash basis, but that ignores the (not insignificant) externalities of doing that, such as landfill remediation down the road, and increased cost of transporting other trash to more distant landfill sites.

It's easy to say recycling should "pay for itself" but if you're going to do that, you need to consider the entire economic picture, not just how much value is generated from the recovered goods. There's also landfill savings, protection of the environment, reduced usage of energy (both in disposal and generation of new materials), etc. Given all of those, it can be entirely rational for a government to subsidize recycling heavily, because the overall impact is still "cost effective."

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