People are recycling too much garbage, and it's threatening the industry | Hacker News Reader

People are recycling too much garbage, and it's threatening the industry

nydailynews.com

115 pointsweiming174 comments

The real problem is that we manufacture garbage and buy it at a virtually infinite pace.

Everything you see in the supermarket is garbage - one what is in it has been consumed.

Tell you what is garbage - recycling is garbage.

Our planet is already awash in plastics and that isn't going to stop until we put a stop to the garbage manufacturing industry - i.e. the packaging industry.

"Recycling" is the concept that the packaging industry maintains so that you don't scream in anger at how that industry is polluting the planet.

The truth about recycling came out recently when China stopped accepting recycling from overseas and now the "recycling" i.e. garbage is piling up in incredible mounds here in Melbourne.

Local recycling companies have started to admit they are just throwing it all in landfill.

We need to turn off the garbage manufacturing tap.

There’s a term for this, greenwashing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing

So much this. There is a reason why recycle is the 3rd in "reduce, reutilize, recycle"

It's important people start using more ecological solutions to package and carry stuff around.

Hmm, in the US, I have only heard it "recycle, reuse, reduce".

https://youtu.be/JqUm3M1cpi8?t=691

I actually think it's because the most common phrasing is "reduce, reuse, recycle", the pronunciation of which comes out as "re-duce, re-use, re-cy-cle". The 2-2-3 cadence just sounds more natural than 2-3-2 or 3-2-2.

that's lovely, but thats not the point ;) first you try to not buy it. if you have to buy and have extra garbage, try to do something with it to avoid disposing. if you can't, then try to recycle it. it makes sense

> Everything you see in the supermarket is garbage - one what is in it has been consumed

Only when you buy junk, which I assert is not actually food anyway.

Stick the outside and you'll buy fruit, vegetables, meat, beans, rice and pasta.

You can put all of those into re-usable bags or containers and buy everything you need to eat very healthy meals with no waste at all.

If it comes in a shiny plastic package, plastic bottle or tin can, you shouldn't be eating it anyway (in general)

Do you carry chicken breasts uncovered in your cloth bag or do you just carry them in your bare hands?

You can bring a container that they can weigh and use like a Mason jar.

I live between two major supermarkets, and neither of them provide any way for me to do this. All the meat in both is pre packaged (in store) before it hits the shelf. If you go to the butcher counter, they will package it in front of you.

But this is something which could be changed.

AS far as I know, meat MUST be labeled, which kind of necessitates a container for the label to affix to.

They can just use ... butcher paper.

I'm pretty certain you can't recycle waxed butcher paper.

The UPC revolution is entirely against this - i.e. you are directly opposing the last 40 years of supermarket evolution. Good luck with that.

(remember, Walmart won't even carry products without UPCs, and this is nothing new - as of the 80s)

We have a shop called Nude Foods [1] in Cape Town that is setup like that. They unfortunately don't do meat, but most everything else is covered.

[1] http://nudefoods.co.za/

Idk mate, I just kill my own chickens. /S

Unfortunately, I've never seen unpacked pasta or rice around here. Beans yes, but only a few types (e.g. no lentils).

> If it comes in a shiny plastic package, plastic bottle or tin can, you shouldn't be eating it anyway (in general)

This is a stupid assertion. Plenty of healthy food comes in shiny plastic packages, plastic bottles, or tin cans. You're essentially just shaming people for wanting more convenient food options.

It’s absurd how much goes into the bin. Why can’t restaurants especially use cloth napkins that are cleaned off-site and also silverware, plates and cups like what was done for centuries? Getting all restaurants’ service paraphernalia away from disposable-like-Ikea-furniture to nearly zero waste seems entirely doableb because that’s how it was before. Even store beverage containers like seltzer water are refilled without melting them down, why can’t more manufacturers go back to the deposit system and just clean containers instead of completely destroying and remaking them for every use?

Reduce, reuse, recycle.

Destroy, remake, dispose.

I can't think of one sit-down restaurant that doesn't use cloth napkins.

Napkins as coasters; now that's a different problem.

Most of the more indie places seem to use disposable napkins.

That's true now that I think of it. Mom and pop's don't have that laundry service budget.

Packaging is absolutely necessary for convenience and safety. You can't sell raw meat without a package, for instance; that idea is absurd and stupid. Do you really want to go back to the days when people were constantly suffering from and dying of easily-prevented food-borne illnesses?

For non-food items, packaging is necessary to minimize breakage in shipping. How much more garbage would there be if half the manufactured items were broken in transit?

Recycling is the proper answer to the proliferation of packaging. That we, as a society, aren't setting things up properly to facilitate this and minimize landfilling is our own failure, not that of the Chinese. There is absolutely no reason we can't have companies building large plants to collect recyclables and automatedly sort them and break them down for reprocessing into new packaging. If this isn't happening, it's because of a failure of governance.

> You can't sell raw meat without a package, for instance; that idea is absurd and stupid.

Here in [some european country] preferred way of getting quality meat is at the market, where it is not prepackaged. Larger supermarkets also sell non-packaged meat. What did you mean by such strong assertion?

I mean, it probably still gets packaged in something, it's just not pre-packaged with needless amounts of plastics. (Although I guess I could probably hand them a box I brought in at the supermarket and they'd use it if I asked nicely. Never seen anyone do that though)

Here in the US, the better cuts of meat you get at a market, where they cut and weigh and package it for you on the spot. The keyword here is: "package". They still have to wrap it up in something, even if it's a special coated type of paper. That's a package. They're not going to just hand you a slab of bare meat with their bare hands.

Animal Agriculture Industrial Complex I believe is the worse offender of our planet anyway. Then there's the threat of another H1N1, Avian Flu, Food and Mouth, etc. only a matter of time before they rapidly evolve and overcome anti-biotics and cause a worldwide pandemic.

So may I suggest we simply do what we can to reduce our consumption of meat. As it is simply not sustainable right now.

Instead, try this, Cauliflower that looks like Chicken! Taste is close too!

http://sweetpotatosoul.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Vegan-...

Or burger pattie that is made from Banana flower (i'm from the tropics).

I am hunting for it right now, but I recently read about how soy production has equalled or is getting really close environmental impact of beef.

You must remember that most of these Soy are not for us, but for beef.

> Soybean meal is the largest source of protein feed in the world, and is generally used in animal feed. Therefore, most of the world's soybeans are consumed indirectly by humans through products like meat (chicken, pork and beef), dairy, eggs and farmed fish.

http://wwf.panda.org/our_work/food/agriculture/soy/consumers...

The rules are too complex. If you move home to a few miles away the rules change.

Various parts of the recycling chain are highly fragile and far too easy to pollute (as the article discusses), or too susceptible to not being profitable. We've known that for years. Seems like a giant exercise in missing the point.

Should profit be the prime motive? Should we be recycling when re-use used to work so well for many products? Do we want to actually preserve the planet or merely go through the motions with recycling theatre until waste grows another order of magnitude? The waste from a weekly supermarket shop is horrifying compared to the equivalent waste in the nineties.

I think the time has come to take a cue from earlier times and simply require the manufacturers and retailers to cover the cost - you made it, you pay for its disposal, recycling or reuse. Suspect things would start to resolve quite quickly.

Before you say that can't possibly work, for many categories it used to, and it worked very well. For other categories, it should be ample encouragement to return to less packaging, or for fruit and veg, no packaging. We'd start to see some properly biodegradable solutions.

No, I don't suppose this will be too popular, especially with me wanting regulation to "encourage" it.

We actually have this in Germany for over a decade [1], if not two. Personally, I'd say we got more packaging not less. So I am not sure such we can say it failed, but it's not really working either.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol)

That's... disappointing. I don't know enough about the scheme to comment much. Maybe the fees are low enough to not encourage much change.

Perhaps we need a popular campaign of dumping all the single use plastic back to Tesco etc. :)

The EU is actually pushing some of this. In Germany, stores used to offer plastic bags at checkout. But in the last year or so, nearly all of them switched to paper bags (with loud greenwashed advertising accompanying it) after the EU threatened to outlaw plastic bags entirely.

The EU is now also looking into outlawing some single-use plastic items like straws that contribute a lot to plastic waste. News media fabricated a public outroar over this, making it sound like the EU wants to outlaw childrens' birthday parties, when in actuality the EU focused on plastic items where there exist viable replacements made from decomposable plant-based materials.

UK ban of free plastic bags has been a resounding success if you go on the lack of bags littering streets and countryside. Surprisingly perhaps the UK media seems in favour of the straws and stirrers changes (possibly excluding the Daily Mail). Industry has lobbied against both.

It seems equally clear that in the absence of bans and heavy regulation no effort will be made to reduce use so I'd be in favour of everything that pushes back against the growth of single use plastics.

Green Dot recycles the packaging but I think the GP was proposing that companies recycle (or safely dispose of) any actual durable (not consumable) products they sell. The legal stuff and logistics would be difficult to get right, but it is an interesting idea.

That’s what the WEEE directive has implemented in the EU since 2005. Electrical goods have the recycling cost baked into the price and stores are used as collection points with manufacturers either organizing their own recycling program (e.g. apple) or relying on a recycling organization to do it for them.

Sounds like a good move in the right direction. Is the system working well? Does it apply to all electric things?

Have a look on any nearby electronics, if there's a symbol of a crossed out rubbish bin, often with "EU ONLY" printed underneath, then WEEE apples.

How well it works depends on the country or area. Here in Copenhagen, most apartment blocks have an electronics/electrical bin, so presumably the recycling rate is very high. However, the reuse rate might be lower -- I've taken a few fully-working things out of the bin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Electrical_and_Electroni...

Let's not forget that the green dot (der gruen punkt) program has had a history of corruption, even though it is admired as a model for recycling. One of the initial scandals here[1], but there have been subsequent scandals as well.

[1]http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=93-P13-0002...

Deposit-return schemes are also required in Germany for all disposable drinks containers, and are gaining momentum in other European countries.

At the very least, these schemes are effective at reducing litter and ensuring less plastic waste reaches the environment and oceans.

Yes, and the introduction of deposit-return for non-reuse bottles "killed" the reusable bottles. See [1] on page 8 (only in German), "Einweg-Kunststoff" (non-reusable plastic) won the game. With "Mehrweg-Glas" (reusable glass) loosing the most.

Not sure if reusable glass was so much more environmentally friendly (think transporting heavy empty glass bottles through the countryside by trucks), but environmental effects through transportation might be easier to mitigate long-term than plastic pollution.

Side node: While plastic won the race for water and soda/juices, Germans still prefer their beer to be served in glass.

[1] https://diw-econ.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DIW_Econ_BGVZ...

I'm not sure either - and there's one of the problems. We're not given the full cost and consequence of each alternative.

I did read a piece a few months back discussing glass against recycled plastic. Plastic apparently needs far more washing, and at higher temperature and pressure, before it can be recycled. The washing to remove glue, labels and dried food which are all more difficult to get off plastic, and also because plastic recycling is so easy to pollute and ruin the whole batch.

Some people require (or are greatly assisted by) packaged fruit and vegetables: https://crutchesandspice.com/2018/06/06/being-disabled-isnt-...

There should be special medically packaged foods, or tools and services paid for by medical insurance to assist people like this. We shouldn't make things worse for everybody for the few, when there are alternatives.

Why? So a pint of cantaloupe can cost $14?

In the US, consumption of prepackaged fruit and veggies are rare enough that I'd be willing to bet the waste created from these (all the ones I've seen are recyclable containers, BTW) is minimal to all the fast food wrappers, boxed dinner meals, and non-recyclable waste created from how we eat normally.

Modern dumps are sealed very well and can hold huge amounts. At $50 a ton we will never run out of space. Put everything in the dump. Plastic, green waste, garbage, paper, electronics, etc. Sort out pure metals like steel and aluminum. Do methane recovery on the pile and burn it for power. This will sequester a lot of carbon and at some point these dumps are likely to be mined as ore bodies. People can compost at their home if they like, but moving all this green waste around is costly and causes many plant diseases to spread much more quickly. Not to mention how horrible it is to get a load of chipped wood to put on your yard that has poison oak mixed in.

We don't really need this little ritual of recycling to cleanse us of our consumerism sins. If we are really trying to help the environment, reduce, repair, and reuse is much more effective. Buy high quality stuff that lasts a long time.

Edit: Another bonus is that you and your neighbors only have to be woken up early once a week by the one garbage truck that comes by instead of three times with the current separate garbage, recycling, green waste trucks.

I have heard an argument that seperating the plastic (seperate garbage truck once a week) is actually worse for the environment and costs more. But local governments think of it as a huge succes because they only measure how much is seperated in the new proces, not how it compares in all aspects.

The reason it costs more is because workers still have to seperate plastics from other types of plastic. Also the garbage truck every week, which is also the reason for more pollution.

Plus all in all, the seperating plastics makes people moraly satisfied ( "they did their part, now back to buying more shit" ).

Regarding the multiple garbage trucks, there is at least the possibility of the truck having multiple separate containers to store different types of garbage.

Not here, they are different trucks completely.

This city also has 3 systems which require at least 2 different truck types just for mixed garbage. (bags, underground container and bins)

Then there is the greens bin and the trucks for that. The paper bin and the trucks for those. And the plastics are picked up as bags or from a big collection container, so I guess thats 2 different trucks as well.

note: also there are big collection containers for paper and glass, which have different trucks as well.

Part of the problem is that the rules are complicated and there's no feedback loop.

Maybe once every week, 1/52 of the bins should be checked manually before being dumped in the truck. And the owners informed if there are problems like envelope windows or pizza boxes.

Yes, it's expensive to have a separate process to provide that feedback, but it might increase the quality of the recycled materials enough to actually raise the value above the cost of doing it.

> Part of the problem is that the rules are complicated and there's no feedback loop.

For me this is the entire issue. The rules are more nuanced that I can easily remember. Also, I may be mistaken, but it seems like different cities have different rules, which leaves me even more confused even when I'm at home.

You could simplify the rules to “recycle aluminum, trash everything else”.

It takes about 2x as much energy to manufacture new steel than to melt down old steel.

For aluminum, that number is 20x, which means that recycling aluminum prevents a lot of greenhouse gas. Even after you account for the overhead of driving a bunch of collection trucks around and running recycling facilities, you’re still probably coming out ahead.

With steel, paper, glass and plastic, is recycling really beneficial to the planet? It’s difficult to say.

If you recycle paper, you end up with some sludge of degraded fibers. The sludge can be composted, it's just cellulose after all. Sounds like a good deal, doesn't it?

It is, until weird coated papers get into the recycled feed stock. Those are not supposed to be recycled, but who knows all the rules and their exceptions? So weird and wonderful chemicals get into the sludge, and then into the compost, and then onto agricultural land, and into the drinking water supply. One of these chemicals is PFOA (see todays story about the toxicology of perfluorinated compounds), another BPA.

I know of at least two instances where drinking water supplies in Germany were contaminated with PFOA through this route. Much finger pointing ensued, but nobody knows how to remove PFOA from either water or the affected land. But they said recycling is good, didn't they?

Wouldn't regular trash also leach into water supply?

If it goes into a well managed landfill, no.

Certainly not to the same extent that an agricultural amendment will.

Not if it was incinerated. That's definitely where the sludge should have gone, but it's also where paper waste could go. That would also avoid problems with greasy pizza boxes, window envelopes, and impossible to remove toner.

Landfilling organic material is illegal in Germany (or possibly throughout the EU). That definitely applies to both paper and the sludge from recycling it; it might even apply to the black "residual waste" bin.

It seems to me like there needs to be a way for households to be paid for their recycling.

I don't know how it could practically be done, but if a household's recycling contributions could be tagged and tracked throughought the system somehow - then we could pay them for well-formed recycling, and not pay them (or charge them for waste disposal) when it's not well-formed.

There's your feedback loop.

The feedback loop is we charge those who produce non-recyclable products for polluting the planet and then they stop doing that over time.

It's really not hard, we don't charge consumers for producing CO2, we charge suppliers who produce CO2 and they either stop doing that, or charge more for their products and consumers choose the suppliers who stop doing that. We can even let suppliers trade amongst each other to see who can stop doing that best.

It's not that weird a thing, it was a conservative policy back in Reagan's day.

How does this fix the behavior of consumers misusing recycling bins?

It doesn't. It pays for someone else to come through and fix the mistake consumers are making down the road.

You make products that people don't bother to recycle, or that people easily mis-recycle into the wrong bin, you pay to fix it.

Example: plastic bag tax. We could just as easily tax envelopes with plastic windows in them.

For sure, my area doesn't allow glass or paper and there's some weird thing about cardboard, has to be brown or white only or something like that. So we recycle plastics (you can do numbers 1-5 now!) and brown cardboard in the provided bins and take glass, paper and other cardboard to a recycle center once a month. My previous home allowed glass, plastics (1-2 only), cardboard (anything unless it had food pieces on it), and paper; it was about 6 miles from current home. Just different county.

Officially our recycling program takes a lot of surprising stuff, including wax cartons, all types of plastic, and even pizza boxes; glass and metal, too, of course. But no plastic bags and no styrofoam!

Unofficially, though, they only want plastics 1 & 2 and very clean cardboard and paper, if even that. And the metal, but probably not the glass. The thing is that around here the same folks who handle the landfills also handle the recycling, and they will take whatever they can get for free (no money changes hands) if they think they can monetize it - a situation which seems to change on a daily basis. I suspect that an awful lot of what we think we "recycle" around here actually ends up in one of their landfills instead.

its sort of worse than that, a lot of these recycling programs that local councils start running are in fact just rubbish offshoring.

They do deals with big Chinese companies to send recyclables to china to be recycled. Three big problems with this:

1) the climate impact of actually shipping this stuff over seas is huge.

2) There is no oversight on how these companies behave, there has been numerous reports of them NOT recycling at all and many reports of slave labour being used to "sift" the rubbish

3) China is now clamping down on it, they no longer want the rubbish, many councils have no backup plan for this eventuality and yes its likely to head to infill.

In our case we're too centrally located to make shipping stuff offshore economically viable, unlike say the coastal cities. But around here we do have plenty of cheap land available for landfill space, so that's where a lot of our stuff probably ends up. I know that our local recycler does feel at least some of the effects of the Chinese situation, though, and while it hasn't happened yet I fully expect that sometime soon they will be making changes to our current recycling system.

For glass it only ever made sense to reuse it, like cleaning and filling bottles. Otherwise, glass is so cheap and easy to make that recycling makes no sense. It takes just as much energy to melt old glass for recycling as it is to melt sand down for new glass, and the sand is going to come in cleaner and with less contaminates than used glass.

It's not true. Melting of crystals needs about 1/3 more energy and time, and higher temperature, than softening of recycled glass.

http://www.climatetechwiki.org/technology/glass

Or you know, start by simplifying the rules to be closer to what is actually necessary. Things like food and greasy pizza boxen that contaminate other co-mingled stuff are obviously only ever bad to put in the recycling bin. But there are plenty of things that are clearly recyclable yet deemed unprofitable or whatever - eg styrofoam, steel, many plastics - that cities assert are prohibited. These things can still be easily sorted, so a city making a policy that they should not be put in recycling bins is unreasonable. If the sorting center sees enough of it, maybe they can find a better destination for it.

This article completely leaves out the cost to get rid of trash that doesn't go in recycling stream. A city having to pay to get rid of their recycling, while novel, isn't the right comparison. The fallback is to have to pay to get rid of it as plain trash.

Another part of the problem (at least here in Austin): recycling is free; trash isn't.

A 24-gallon trash can costs $17.90/month. A 64-gallon trash can costs $24.30/month. A 96-gallon trash can costs $42.85/month.

You can get as many 96-gallon recycling cans as you want for $0/month.

The obvious goal is to convince people to recycle; but when your small-ish trash can is full, it's pretty tempting to just shove the pizza box from dinner into a recycling bin.

We have this. In addition, putting recyclables in the trash incurs a fine. As you can imagine, grey-area items definitely go in the recycle bin.

This happens in some way in Australia. It's kind of good: you get notice when you throw out something they can't recycle/compost, and they threaten to stop collecting from you if you don't improve. It's kind of bad: I put litter in a black compostable bag instead of a green compostable bag and got a warning :-( When asked, they didn't care - use a green bag. Which means they probably don't notice green non-compostable ones.

But envelope windows are recyclable. Unless you move to a new house and all the rules change.

Yes, but you need to separate the plastic from the paper.

I don’t recycle because of that exact reason. I don’t care that much to spend time sorting garbage. Batteries or toxic materials, I definitely sort, but I’m not going to waste my time inspecting plastics or being told by the garbage cops that this paper or that can’t be recycled.

Yes you basically get assigned a mandated job at probably 30 cents per hour of economic value. I much rather have higher taxes on packaging so the producers try to reduce it. To me it seems this should be a straightforward economic thing, not a character test.

Sometimes I feel that recycling for most of us is just another coping mechanism. It's a way to explain away the amount that we consume. We throw our recycling into the designated bins blindly without being critical about where it's going. Just recently, here in Australia, some of us, including me, learned that much of our recycling is simply being sold and shipped to China and other countries:

https://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2018/china-recycling/stor...

What we really need to do is stop and think about the consequence and byproduct of our consumption. We can start with packaging, especially single use packaging. It's difficult to go the supermarket and buy produce that doesn't come pre-wrapped. Not to mention the issue of our online shopping purchases coming in multiple packages.

Although, there does appear to be change coming. Just recently, our biggest supermarkets just announced that they will cease providing single use plastic bags:

https://www.sbs.com.au/news/woolworths-plastic-bag-ban-start...

That is not the point of the article.

The point is that people are putting things which are not recyclable into their recycle bins. You can't recycle greasy paper. You can't recycle grocery bags. If it isn't clean and well sorted, it costs more to process and ultimately becomes a "feel good" way to send things to the same dump.

People need to be much more careful about what and how they recycle so as to keep costs down and have fewer things which could be recycled thrown in the dump.

A load of paper can be contaminated with food scraps so that is becomes impossible to recycle.

TL;DR don't put something into a recycling bin unless it is clean and you are sure that it is recyclable (read the guidance you get from your local authority)

> You can't recycle greasy paper.

> People need to be much more careful about what and how they recycle

I'd say maybe pizza boxes should stop saying they're recyclable and start saying "DO NOT RECYCLE AFTER CONTACT WITH FOOD"...

My local recycling company clearly states that I should recycle used pizza boxes in the "paper packaging" box when searching on their webpage. So I guess it depends on the recycling process.

They should place a layer of grease-proof paper between the pizza and the box. In fact I could swear some pizza places used to do this, many years ago?

But at least Pizza boxes are biodegradable. Unlike plastic waste, they don't end up dispersed in our environment and washing up on beaches years later.

Well I didn't know that until today. Some information campaigns would be good.

I think they do have information campaigns, but it's hard to tell the information from the disinformation these days.

Unfortunately, I don't think the rules of what's acceptable to recycle and what's not are clearly defined or communicated.

I tend to err on the side of recycling because I feel like putting a recyclable in a landfill hurts the environment more in the long run, but it would be nice to feel more confident about which bin to put an item in.

That's up to your recycling company. I have found that most distribute sheets that clearly list what is acceptable: https://www.losalamosnm.us/UserFiles/Servers/Server_6435726/...

Or at least try in a less slick way: https://www.gwinnettcounty.com/portal/gwinnett/Services/Soli...

What a lot of people do understand is why not. For instance, I read an article where my local recycler said that their biggest problem is loose sheets of thin plastic, which jams rollers in their equipment.

And then there's Japan:

http://homeandawaywithlisa.com/blog/2013/1/31/taking-out-the...

I continually have fought this battle with my girlfriend, her mother and roommates… They are convinced you put almost any packaging plastic or paper into recycling. I had to hang the 'what items are recyclable' sheet over the bin.

Parent's point is that recycling is a myth in practice, it's just a form of "selling indulgences" for the son of waste. We're never going to do better, the value of recycling is in the delusion.

My mother is a school teacher. They have two bins, trash, and the blue recycling bin. At the end of the day, the janitor would just tip the recycling bins into their trash bucket. Everyone knew that.

This isn't the same as where I live and work now. We have extensive recycling programs.

It's hard to do anything good for the community in places that are so individualistic. If it helps someone other than them, even if it ALSO helps them, it's something to be avoided. "A rising tide lifts all boats" doesn't make sense to them because the only important thing is that their boat is lifted higher. They legitimately just do not care about others

Can 98% of my mail not come just so I put it in the recycling bin without review?

As for the disposal industry, we can learn a lot from Japan, but it starts with cultural expectations and education. It can get weird in some countries like Argentina (this knowledge is over a decade old, this may have changed) you don’t get the cartons or jugs for your milk. You get a plastic bag. The store keeps the carton and recycles it for their own monetary reasons.

> Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.

AKA: "Tracking you without consent was part of our DNA; oops"

http://www.tronc.com/gdpr/nydailynews.com/

If you look at the source I think they've done it quite well! They put everything, including the fonts and the image into the source and as a result it's all a single file website! It might also be the reason why the body font (PT Serif) looks a bit off compared to the one on Google fonts, notably the 'i', over here: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/PT+Serif

I would bet its globally more optimal to have all trash sorted and cleaned and recycled at a plant than to have each individual in every household do a poor job of it themselves.

Local sorting for compostable, definitely trash and possibly recyclable would be an improvement over what you're suggesting, then separation of recyclables can be done on the dry pile without the compostable trash ruining it (cardboard that has been wet is no longer recyclable, for example).

I tend to agree with this although I haven't done all of the math.

It seems however that their might be a net social good to create a recycling industry which consists of living accomodations, facilities for sorting, facilities for cleaning, and facilities for reconstituting bulk goods out of recyclable material, and then a set of factories that would use that to create 50 - 100% post consumer products for sale in the general market.

The purpose of these economic units would be three fold, one it would provide housing and an income to anyone who was willing to work and it would not require a lot of pre-requisites for the work. Second it would reduce the landfall load and burdened cost of recycling by minimizing transportation costs while effectively recycling. And lastly it would provide a stream of goods and bulk materials for industry that would provide a means to offset some if not all of the cost of the operation.

As a government sponsored activity I feel it could simultaneously provide living accommodations and meaningful work for a large chunk of the homeless population and an even larger fraction of the post-felony population.

Recycling goods and people, so to speak.

But seriously, why should businesses get to externalise the costs of disposal of the junk they make? Just make businesses responsible for the life cycle of their products.

Businesses will simply pas that cost along to consumers, making consumers ultimately responsible - just like we are now. I’m not sure what model of ‘make business pay for it’ doesn’t translate to ‘make consumers pay for it’.

Of course, that is the point! Then the business which produces lots of waste (and has to charge for it) is competing with business which produces little waste.

>edit

Consumers pay for some of the cost individually now, and some of the cost socialised through government. But neither consumer nor government have the power to minimise waste in the production of goods. Putting a clear monetary incentive on the backs of consumers and the responsibility with the market will actually change things.

It will be for sure when the process can be automated. I'm guessing it will be not more than 10 or 20 years until we have robots that sort through the trash and separate things with a much finer level of detail.

Almost every human endeavor has progressed better due to the specialization of labor. Automation is not required. 10 people sorting trash full time will do a far better job than an equal amount of effort distributed over 1000 people.

When the compactor in the truck smashes the used cat litter into the paper, maybe the task isn't the same anymore.

My old town toyed around with this. No idea if they're still doing it but the idea was everything coming in would at least get a rough sorting. Seems like a MUUUUUCH better solution, even if it costs more.

https://foresternetwork.com/daily/waste/far-from-typical/

The page is GDPRed. Cached copy: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JDyVEp...

My wife tells me that growing up in India, people would come door to door to collect metal and paper to be recycled -- to make money. That's not practical in the U.S. because people's time is much more valuable. If recycling really made sense, you would not need to mandate it.

> My wife tells me that growing up in India.

She's correct. This still exists in smaller cities. I did this with all my books when I went last time.

American children did the same thing in WWII (for the war effort, not money). In that case there was no mandate, either - it was all community-organized and sometimes highly competitive.

As long as the cost of pollution from creating the products isn't baked into the cost of the price consumers pay, it will always seem not worth it to individuals. The problem is that we have so much pollution now its affecting us at a planetary level.

This is a good situation for the government to come in and mandate a solution instead of letting the tragedy of the commons play out. A better solution might be mandating that pollution costs are baked into the product's costs, but doing nothing is just going to hurt everyone

I definitely remember this being a thing in small-town America in the 1980's -- particularly with aluminum cans, which I suppose is one of the more valuable recyclables. Schools and churches would ask people to save their cans and bring them in as a fundraiser, and you'd sometimes see people walking up and down the highway picking up the cans thrown out by litterbugs.

And yet today I have to pay someone to haul away my valuable materials. :)

People (like, random people, not officials) still do this for aluminum cans in US states with bottle deposits. They go door-to-door pulling cans out of recycling bins and bringing them to deposit centers en masse. I've seen this both in Boston and in the rural town I grew up in. The guy who frequented my childhood home actually made enough money to leave each "customer" a jar of peanuts each year at Christmas.

And even if you have to pay someone to take recycling it makes sense because the damage to the environment is less than just dumping it in a landfill. That's a cost that's externalized by manufacturers and not easily recouped without mandatory recycling. (The alternative is to tax manufacturers and importers for all the trash they generate, equivalent to the environmental damage it causes. Bottle bills effectively combine these two approaches.)

> pulling cans out of recycling bins

That's illegal in my area, and I assume in most areas with recycling programs. You want to pick up stray cans and recycle them then that's one thing, but pulling them out of recycling bins is considered theft.

It’s kind of funny. The waste management firms worked with the city to require recycling. So now every home has to pay an additional fee for a recycling bin plus pick up. And of course the management company only wants to be in this particular business if they can sell the materials on to someone else. As soon as China stopped buying our recyclables WMNW started asking the city for permission to just stick everything in a landfill.

I am required to sort my trash, compost, and recyclables. I’m supposed to wash and peel labels. I have to pay to have it picked up. The least that should happen is that the waste management company be required to actually recycle this stuff.

See... we've known for ages that recycling is a bit of a losing proposition: otherwise we'd get paid for our used TP rolls like we do with aluminium cans.

The distribution of labour in this case makes the economics even worse. The scenario you describe is a (I'm guessing, you're on HN), well-paid highly education citizen literally washing garbage before throwing it out, and paying for the privilege of an inefficient disposal system that requires routine intervention... I think an end-to-end total cost accounting wouldn't look too favorable.

Penn and Teller (of all people) actually covered the recycling situation in detail some years back, so in spite of the fact that I myself am a conscientious recycler I know that a lot of this is probably wasted effort. But in my situation it effectively doubles my weekly waste disposal capacity, which I've used to great effect over the years.

BTW, our local recycler doesn't require a lot of effort on our part, nor do they have a lot of restrictions on what we try to recycle. No food scraps, no plastic bags, and no styrofoam, but that's about it. Also no washing, no label removing, and no sorting on our part.

Penn & Teller Bullshit! - (2-05) - 205 - Recycling

https://vimeo.com/216389085

Theft from whom? From the house/apartment, or from the recycling company?

Also note the decision that law enforcement could go through peoples' trash cans on the curb, because... I'm not sure the exact legal reasoning. But if the reasoning is "because it's not their property any more, it's the trash company's", well, did law enforcement get permission from the trash company? Somehow I doubt it.

This happens all over San Francisco. If it's illegal, it seems to be completely unenforced.

Definitely unenforced and definitely illegal.

https://www.recology.com/recology-san-francisco/faq/

In my CA neighbourhood, metal scrap collection cars will come around on trash day. All the neighbours know that bulky items with high metal content can be left separate from their trash and it will get picked up.

There are a ton of people on the fringes that make extra cash hauling scrap metal, at least when the prices make sense. I had a couple uncles that would regularly go out "junking", picking up old cars and stoves and stuff.

When I was a kid (mid eighties UK) everyone got their milk delivered nightly in glass bottles which, when empty, were left out for collection by the milkman on the next delivery. Nearly waste free (foil caps aside), efficient and not too expensive, albeit slightly more expensive than supermarket. We've taken several steps backwards in that regard.

People in the US totally recycle metal, but paradoxically it is never encouraged since the economic incentives are so large. For example: One of the main reasons that abandoned buildings in Detroit decay so quickly is that they are generally stripped of their wiring and plumbing since copper and lead are so easy to turn into money.

http://www.scrapregister.com/scrap-prices/united-states/260

Because partly, what can be recycled where is very confusing!

Where I live, our recycling facilities can't recycle certain "recycle numbers". And they have a "no plastic bags" policy even if they have recycling numbers and indicators.

We also have an additional bin for compostables, which sometimes increases the confusion for certain items. For instance, paper goes into recycling but not shredded paper, which needs to go with the compostables.

Let’s find the best possible explanation that doesn’t acknowledge the insanity of accepted consumer packaging practices and made-to-replace product cycles.

Placer County in California pays for one bin recycling. Don't make people think, just allocate resources to cover recycling as a part of the waste stream.

The economics are broken. Incent cleaner waste stream, and you'll get better outcomes. I have no idea how to incent it except to note cash-back schemes aren't being pointed to here.

The economics of garbage sorting are broken. but that doesn't mean garbage is broken, or recycling is broken. It means we need to look at what we want. If we want more people to recycle more, we need to tool up to handle more incorrect waste going into the input buffer.

If we want people to recycle "better" we need to be prepared to lose some inputs, because of the cost burden in the community of dealing with contamination. Or, we need to remove the complexity by making it easier.

Personally, my bugbear is the local (Qld, Australia) refusal to take the shopping bags full of recycles. The bags are recyclable, the contents are recyclable, but our local provider has decided not to accept the bags, but only the contents "because reasons"

This needs to be removed from the hands of the public and forced onto the recycling industry. These are solvable problems, and I would go so far to suggest they perhaps are not that difficult to solve.

Recycling as a profit center is part of the issue.

Some areas I've lived in have a single recycling bin for all recyclables, some force it on the households to separate paper from metals and plastics, and some have a bin for each.

As the article mentions paper and cardboard can be mechanically separated from other materials, the reason some areas don't do this is not because they don't have the resources, it sometimes because different recyclers are paying the municipality (or whoever is in charge) for the material. So the sorting is then pushed on to the households to do.

Aside from being too complicated, with too many overlapping rules, the sorting of packaging should be placed on the recycler who is in the business of recycling.

In 1996, the New York Times reported that recycling is often just expensive virtue signaling.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-...

The system in the Bay Area is especially broken because it is built to nudge everyone to put as much as possible in recycling/compost. We've got very limited trash space, expensive upgrades to larger trash bins, and huge recycling/compost bins.

Crazy bonkers idea...

The cities I've lived in (in the US) provided the garbage and recycle bins. How about printing the recyclable materials and exceptions ON THE BINS. Put it on the lid, so it can be easily customized for each community. It amazes me that no one has proposed this yet.

Another idea - randomly choose streets to spot check recycling behavior and flag the cans based on their score. Nothing exotic - don't have to do it constantly or over large areas, simple 3 score system (good, acceptable, and poor), and just a quick peak in the bins as they are manually thrown into the truck. Your score is affixed to the bin, which you are rolling out every week for all the neighborhood to see. Of course there would have to be some discretion, like people just moving in, hence the process being manual, and probably some exemption process. The next week, those rated poor will be rechecked and rescored. Fail again and you get a warning that has the problems checked off from a list. After 4 consecutive failures you receive a fine. Or maybe you have to deliver your garbage to a sorting facility where someone will go over the process. Or there's a class.

There are lots of options beyond throwing up a website hidden behind 3 different local government portals.

The items that are worthwhile to recycle change depending on what various buyers are paying.

But that doesn't really matter to the average resident - I've never received a notification that the recyclables list has changed, let alone fire pricing reasons.

Different communities have slightly different rules (they've been 90%+ the same from my experience), but that's why I said to print on the lid. Same bins can be bought in bulk and the only logistics would be dealing with a smaller, easier to transport lids.

Or just use a big, super strong sticker. New rules? New sticker covering the old one.

Wow. Did I just see a page informing me about the site being blocked in Europe?

"And then there are items that should go straight to the trash — garden hoses, wood pallets, or, on one recent afternoon, a bound stack of roofing shingles."

Ideally this stuff should be redistributed to places it can actually be used ("freecycling")

Now this is something that AI should help with.

Sort of. Machine vision is helpful, but the more trash in the recycling stream, the more dexterity your processing automation requires to handle non-compliant material, as well as the costs of trashing that non-compliant material.

More emphasis needs to be placed on reducing the waste stream as a whole (trash and recyclables), and then leaning on a recycling lifecycle (with the remaining material disposed of with plasma gasification).

Still it seems like this would be a great automation problem to work on - not your standard shiny tech problem but something that would really make a difference.

I wouldn’t talk someone out of working on solving the waste stream problem.

Already working in the most advanced recycling plants. Stadler's latest plant has zero people hand-sorting.[1] Here's NYC's big plant in Brooklyn.[2] Sill some hand-sorting. A robotic one from Japan.[3]

It may not be profitable, but it's quite possible to separate just about everything automatically now.

[1] http://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/stadler-installs-fully... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUrBBBs7yzQ [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxkklR3BNFc

Awesome links, thanks for sharing! I won’t call the technical problem “solved”, but the larger issue is the politics that people think recyclables have suffient value to self-sustain recycling operations, and that isn’t the case. You’re going to have to pay for both your trash and recyclables to be disposed of, you’ll just pay less for the recyclables.

Or blockchains, or 3d printers or whatever next year's exciting buzzword is.

Containerization

Or you can just cut the problem in half overnight by mandating that manufacturers indicate on the packaging whether or not it is recyclable. We already have the recycle logo on the most common items, but as the article indicates, the biggest issue is with people hoping that an item can be recycled and throwing it in the blue bin in earnest optimism. Putting "Please dispose in trash, this item is not able to be recycled" on the container will take you further than any tech solution.

If you make manufacturers label the material, it becomes an easier AI problem to solve.

I'm genuinely curious as to which side of the equation you'd like to implement this solution - the consumer who throws the item away or the central sorting center that receives the items? Sure, a metro area sorting center might be interested, but many are government owned and require approval or even a referendum to increase the budget for this type of system. Rural sorting centers have no budget and the most high tech piece of equipment are the metal detectors positioned along conveyors (just before a couple scores of humans who do the actual sorting). You can give people an app to scan an item before they toss it, but that implies they'll actually use it. I want futuristic automated flying trash-sorting robots too, but I also don't think we've exhausted the easier options before jumping right into the high-cost tech solution.

I don’t know the best solution, but making it an easier problem to solve is always beneficial.

I like the idea, but there is the problem that not all cities/recyclers have the same capabilities, though.

If there was a database that described the recylability of a product, then that could be cross-referenced with what a municipality or waste management company is able to recycle. Pair that with simple app and that would make disposing of certain kinds of waste very clear.

Or you could just drop your junk in the trash and forego downloading, installing, learning, using, and ultimately wasting your life on an app.

Obviously the ideal is to reduce "disposable" waste and we have lived 6000+ years as homo-sapiens without most of this modern stuff.

I like the idea I heard about in a European country (sorry, forgotten which), where there is a disposal tax paid on all goods by the manufacturer so that the removal of waste is already paid for and doesn't require people to fly-tip etc. This is presumably a nice financial incentive for people to make better packaging to reduce their tax and therefore their sale prices.

The country is Germany, the program is called 'Der Grüne Punkt' ('The Green Dot'):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol)

In Sweden we incinerate[1] the trash in super hot ovens and use the resulting heat to heat our homes. We do recycle as well but as we sometimes even import trash to burn (it's a cold country after all) I don't feel so bad when throwing something in the ordinary bin instead of sorting it proper.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incineration

In our area, landfills are scarce, so local governments are incentivized to push waste into the recycling stream.

The result is that they trained people "when in doubt, put it in recycling". Now that recyclers don't want to accept the low grade stuff from them, they have a re-education problem on their hands.

I imagine the government employees who put out the bad information leading to this are all still employed and have probably been promoted.

Stanford / Palo Alto gave up on a lot of recycling and went to “off-site sorting.” Stanford used to have 5! bins.

Another fail is “recycling” at Costco, where basically no recycling happens and people just throw things in carelessly into any of the 3 bins. Worse, the staff contribute to its demise equally by eliminating the sorting signs and turning bins around to hide their labeling. Red, green, blue ... go figure which is which.

Up here in Portland they only give us a tiny trash can and a full size recycle so we kinda don't have a choice BUT to recycle everything. When I lived downtown they only picked up trash every other week. They've recently introduced a 2 dollar/month "recycling surcharge" because they're effectively just trashing all recycling.

That GDPR wall made me LOL

Straight up: If recycling things was valuable, recyclers would be paying people for their recyclable goods, independent of what trash collection does.

Recycling may be the best option for the environment, but economically it's somewhere between a wash and a cost. Cities should budget appropriately

"Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries".

Is there another way to access this?

> "Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries".

> Is there another way to access this?

GDPR (and, for that matter, all state interference in the internet) in a nutshell. What a shitshow.

(Of course, it's also the fault of websites doing the sorts of bad-faith tracking that GDPR, in good-faith, tries to prevent, but the result is predictable all the same).

This is a good reason to have an account with a VPN service.

Recyclable materials already have stamps on them to indicate how they should be recycled (if at all), but it seems nobody was ever taught how to use them.

I'm not sure why this is downvote-worthy. Did you all get taught how the recycling codes work?

I can't fathom why you're being downvoted.

I remember clearly in elementary school being taught the names of every single type of cloud, but I'm sure I never, ever had anyone sit me down and explain the recycling codes.

Many places tell people to ignore the numbers.

https://www.portlandoregon.gov/sustainabilityatwork/article/...

State and Federal governments should outlaw any non-recyclable plastic. I'm okay paying higher prices, but they should streamline the plastics that are used in packaging and in products so that everything can be recycled and consumers don't have to think about it. When I order things from Amazon, and it comes in things like styrofoam, it is absolutely maddening, in 2018.

The Federal government should pass a law where absolutely no non-recyclable plastic can be used anywhere. Let our costs go up, it will make things like recycling a lot more economically viable by simplifying things incredibly.

This isn't going to help.

Almost all plastic is recyclable already - but not when it's mixed with other junk.

What they should do is stop recycling glass, and recycle paper separately. That would solve the problem much easier.

Why stop recycling glass?

Because it's worthless.

Because it contaminates everything else, making it much harder to recycle the other items.

Because there's no reason to recycle it, the planet is made of it, we're not going to run out, and it's impossible to waste it.

Do you know what they do with recycled glass right now? They crush it, and use it as a landfill cover (instead of sand). There's little point in spending all that effort to do that.

Interesting. I had no idea.

So I guess... just use (and reuse) glass but don't recycle it?

I think what docker_up is saying is that if all materials were recyclable there wouldn't be "other junk" to mix in. I actually agree strongly with this, although I'm not sure how it could be practically implemented.

The other junk can be recyclables as well - glass for example.

But when mixed, it's too hard to recycle.

Site says it's unavailable in Europe. What happened to the first2 Ws in the acronym WWW?

GDPR happened. But to be honest, if news site needs so much information about me then I don't want to visit that website...

I don't like to recycle cans at my apartment bins because I know the bins will be contaminated. Not a big surprise. You can't guarantee that everybody will follow the rules. And the rules change too.

To be clear, I take the cans to a nearby depot.

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