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Comment by csense | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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