Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve | Hacker News Reader

Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve

bloomberg.com

640 pointsdanso441 comments

This is a classic externality problem. We can berate consumers all day long to be more diligent in their recycling, but all that finger wagging is for show meant to distract from the real source of the garbage, the manufacturers.

Just like the classic "blame the user" mentality, the users were given an impossibly complex system with barely any incentive to get it right. Nothing about the interface is intuitive or discoverable.

The creators of all this garbage do so because it's profitable. They can create disposable and single use items, in thousands of variations, out of materials that create hundreds of years of environmental impact, and none of that consequence comes back to their bottom line. They'll happily point the finger all day long at us stupid users and inept local governments and bad China, as long as it all distracts from their culpability.

If we forced all producers of trash to account for its safe reuse, recycling or disposal as part of the cost of doing business, this problem would disappear quickly. Because here's the thing, the bill always comes due. If we let them skip out on it, then we will be the ones who pay.

Some times you need pioneers to show that bringing a reusable cup or riding a bike isn't the same as going back to Dickensian times. You need people onboard to pressure politicians into changing laws.

>If we forced all producers of trash to account for its safe reuse, recycling or disposal as part of the cost of doing business, this problem would disappear quickly. Because here's the thing, the bill always comes due. If we let them skip out on it, then we will be the ones who pay.

There's no easy way to do that, as long as we don't have a single planetary government, and as long as we have trade. The producers are in one country, the consumers in other countries, and there's no easy way to implement policies like those you advocate. You'd have to implement insanely complex treaties, which the producer countries aren't going to sign on to.

Much easier is for consumer countries to figure out on their own how to deal with the waste effectively. That might require tariffs, but that's something a single county can easily implement.

In the end, I see this as a technical problem. It's entirely possible to create mostly-automated plants which can process waste and recycle it. We already have such plants: you can see them on YouTube. We just need to build a lot more of them.

> There's no easy way to do that

Leading consumer market governments have been using progressive import controls for many decades to do exactly that. It may not be trivial and it may not be free, but this task is no different in principle from how California's CARB forced carmakers worldwide to adopt more stringent NOx emissions standards, or European regulators forced safer food additives to be used worldwide, or the US FDA forced more stringent drug safety standards worldwide.

Even private companies can be pretty good at this, when someone has to pay for the damage: the IIHS is private (it was formed because NHTSA was not doing as good of a job as insurance companies wanted) and effectively dictates car safety standards on a global scale.

I am not a trade lawyer - but I think this is logical.

If a market imposes the same tax to ANYONE selling in it, irrespective of origin, based on the quality or type of product, then it is not a 'tariff' (an unequal tax based on origin country) but a market tax.

Thus a tax based on the waste-handling cost for ineffective packing or non-durable uses of difficult to re-manufacturer resources could be an effective way of pricing the damage to the commons back on to the individual actors at a point where change can occur because of the pressure.

The EU legislates product safety by making the person who made it available within the EU legally responsible. This is always an EU based entity. If you want to sell something which falls under a range of product classifications within the EU, you have to take responsibility for that product's safety.

Yes, manufacturing may happen overseas, but generally the product is still sold to the consumer by a locally based entity. Legislating that sellers are always responsible for disposing of products they sell isn't hard - we already do it for electronics with the weee directive.

>Yes, manufacturing may happen overseas, but generally the product is still sold to the consumer by a locally based entity.

What about online sales that are shipped from overseas? Legislating against sellers isn't going to work well when the seller is on AliExpress and shipping in a small package from China.

“The creators of all this garbage do so because it's profitable”

Isn’t this rather something that market forces demand, i.e. the consumer choosing the cheapest option? Don’t get me wrong, I completely agree with the rest of what you’re saying, I just think that the businesses aren’t as evil as you portray them to be.

In the end, the solution is probably government regulation by subsidizing alternatives and/or a complete ban on disposable plastics. But even then, when considering the planet as a whole, the Western countries are hardly the biggest pollutors, so we need some world-wide collaboration on this.

>i.e. the consumer choosing the cheapest option

This is what he means by "externality". The disposable plastic garbage isn't really the cheapest option. It's just that the real cost of all the garbage isn't priced in at market.

Remind me again why the 'real cost' of plastic is higher than all the other garbage we put into landfill?

I know there is something going on with microplastics or somesuch that I'm not up to date on, but I would have thought that sealing it in a big hole in the ground would be cheap, effective and safe.

I'm not an expert but I'd imagine the fact that it doesn't really biodegrade would be a reasonably big factor.

Yeah, but ... most things in the earth's crust don't biodegrade. Sandstone doesn't really biodegrade, and we have a lot of sandstone near where I live. What makes plastic worse once it is covered with a layer of soil?

One example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch

A life cycle analysis might hypothetically conclude that landfills are a perfectly sustainable solution to plastic. Unfortunately a lot of this stuff makes it into the ocean instead where it will not biodegrade and will interfere with fisheries and ecosystems. Properly structured economic incentives and laws could solve this problem, as they have solved many problems in the past.

How much waste is making it from a landfill to the GPGP? I'd bet about 0% in the West. Studies have shown that most of the waste in the GPGP is from rivers in Asia.

In my town, it'd be cheaper/better for the environment to landfill all the waste instead of sending it overseas to be "recycled." Our city recently prohibited placing cardboard in the trash. Something I would have thought is easily broken down...

Cardboard is one of the most valuable recyclables.

Additionally, landfills are expensive to build and run so some municipalities are pushing recycling, composting, etc as a cost saving measure. Less trash into landfill, the longer until we have to build a new one.

In the anaerobic environment of a landfill paper takes an extremely long time to break down. There have been excavations of landfills where they found 60 year old newspapers that were still readable. There was so little oxygen in the pile, the process of breaking down the starches, cellulose and ink was taking place with inefficient anaerobic processes rather than much more efficient aerobic processes.

Long story short, a landfill is not the same as a compost heap. Compost heaps are routinely turned over and disturbed to ensure that oxygen permeates through to the core of the heap. A landfill, on the other hand, is explicitly designed not to do that, in order to contain potentially hazardous materials that may leach out of the waste contained therein.

Burying garbage in a big hole in the ground is not a sustainable solution.

Maybe it is? We can dig some pretty deep holes. It may not be pretty but seems to work.

It is just environmental debt that the next generation would have to pay.

Im not sure if you correctly understand what the word "sustainable" means. X is sustainable IFF you can keep doing X forever and not have it kill you eventually. "Seems to work" is perhaps a sub-optimal policy objective.

There's absolutely nothing that you can do indefinitely and not have it kill you.

Not having it kill you isn't the best metric, but land is currently a finite resource.

Pretty much every physical object we had started out underground and was mined by human or plant activity, except for the minerals that are synthesised directly from the air.

It isn't a hill I'm going to fight on, but 'land is a finite resource' has, to me, always meant arable farmland and prime coastal real estate. There is no actual shortage of land. At best, there might be a shortage of prime away-from-water-table-with-less-permeable-rock-surroundings sites that are ideal for landfill - but I doubt that is true.

For example, the deepest mine is about 4km deep, and about half the atmosphere is within 5km of the surface of the earth. Running out of landfill space in that sense is like running out of oxygen. The only limits are transport costs and making sure the landfill is either non-toxic or kept well away from water (which, economically speaking, might be a substantial limit but plastics are clearly quite inert, because we store food in them and they apparently don't degrade).

EDIT But the key point here is that these costs aren't externalities. The people paying for them are the consumers who are buying the plastic. If landfill costs go up, municipalities will start to charge more for waste disposal and consumers will favour products with less packaging.

I guess I've never really thought about it from an unbiased perspective before. How bad are landfills if they are done in some sort of long-term strategy? You can cover over the landfill and make new land with it (many parks are basically this). But I worry about things like battery acid and other chemicals seeping into the water table or causing who knows what damage to the soil.

At least on its face if you're putting the plastic deep in the ground, from whence it came, maybe that's a decent intermediary solution.

But I would also agree with anyone who says its not sustainable. The amount of waste we produce seems a little insane compared to other creatures on the planet.

The Earth has 5-10 billion years left at most, whatever we do to it (unless we reach the point of being able to change its orbit). Less if we're unlucky and get hit by an asteroid etc.. So there's no such thing as truly sustainable, only "good enough".

It can still be the cheapest option even after pricing in the externality. A lot of people forget this, because they advocate such Pigovian taxes with the intent of stamping out the good, irrespective of the (edit: net) value it provides.

I very rarely see anyone come in with the attitude of: "Hey, burn all the gas you want once we have the appropriate carbon taxes!"

One problem with environmental degradation is that effects are often non-linear whereas taxes are typically linear. So "do all the X you want" is not the appropriate response if the tax is simply used as a lever to move behaviour in one direction.

On the other hand, if the government is selling emission rights then this can model non-linear effects. Then it makes sense to say, "go on, use your rights to the full extent."

If you won't quantify how bad the damage is and how much you'd need to erase it, and therefore what at what tax rate you'd be fine with someone consuming to their heart's content, then you think the cost is infinite and therefore have no business proposing policy to begin with.

"Someone consuming to their heart's content" is not bounded.

It seems to me you're arguing that just because a tax is a blunt tool it shouldn't be used at all. But tax rate doesn't have to be set in stone, it can be adjusted dynamically in a feedback loop.

No, I'm saying that advocates should be clear about what the precise harms are and that taxes should be used to ameliorate the harms of the taxed activity, and that anyone unable to put such numbers on it is not advocating a serious policy we should listen to.

Businesses also regularly campaign to not have to take into account their externalities, though.

Easiest solution would be a tax on petroleum as it comes out of the ground. That discourages both plastic and greenhouse gas.

Now how high would that tax need to be to so that everyday goods would dump plastic? And what would that mean for other uses of petroleum?

Let's say you want a plastic bottle to cost 0.1$ more, so that alternative options are considered, and you tax it on the original petroleum and gas processed, what does that represent for the fuel used in a plane?

The problem is that not every use is equal, some are more necessary than others and pricing things by a general tax is not a right solution.

Many countries are banning plastic plates and bags for instance, because their benefit is nearly 0 and their cost is super high because many people just throw them away randomly. On the other hand airplane fuel is not easily replacable right now, so it should probably be taxed less (but still taxed enough to encourage other alternatives to develop).

You don't need to pick and chose good vs bad uses. If their are no alternatives then a small price increase is not a big deal. The most effective policy is one applied evenly that let's the market adjust to externalities.

So really oil should be taxed directly, then you tax plastics above and beyond that as needed. But, you never want to apply discounts for some specific use.

> Now how high would that tax need to be to so that everyday goods would dump plastic? And what would that mean for other uses of petroleum?

Charge what it costs to clean up, and spend the tax on cleaning it up.

> The problem is that not every use is equal, some are more necessary than others

That's exactly why the price mechanism works - the necessary uses will continue to happen even at a higher price, while the frivolous ones will stop.

It would certainly be good for the planet, but since petroleum is an input early in the production chain, that would cause price inflation, resulting in higher costs and lower demand, e.g. 70’s stagflation. Also black markets and resource contention.

Propose this, and even implement it. Then the first economic downturn, whoosh, out the door. Politicians promising the masses the snake oil of economic booms based on cheap energy, driven by lobbyists from the oil industry. Stop me if you heard this one before, but hey, it's reality.

I don't know what distinction you're really drawing. Polluting production reduces the costs for producers.

It should be more expensive to pollute. The problem is that clean-up costs are not factored into production.

And who's the biggest lobby for keeping them factored out?

It rhymes with "choke".

I didn't mean to imply that companies are evil, but amoral. Unless it's controlled by a single or small group of owners(who could inject their personal values), a company must be governed by its profit motive. They're like the proverbial paperclip maximizer AIs.

Competition will always drive companies to produce their widgets at the lowest possible cost and a great way to reduce costs is to externalize them. They will do this to exactly the extent that we allow them. Limits have already been placed on companies in a million ways to get them to play by our rules. If only our legal codes could be as simple as the three laws of robotics...

Why can't it be both a supply and a demand problem?

No actor should be immune to criticism, don't you think?

You're right. And the point is only one side is currently being criticized: the consumer. Nothing is being done on the other side except for all out bans. There is an array of solutions. Pricing is a great one IMO. If that single use plastic bottle of Coke is $1.99 instead of $1.49, and that 50c goes into funding clean up of plastic waste, that's a good market signal. A metal can has recycling value so maybe it isn't charged the 50c fee. And therefore we see more cans in use with more consumer-side recycling.

This also reminds me, in a way, of the argument I always make about water waste.

Yes, it is great to keep your faucet off if you aren't using it. And yes, if enough people keep theirs off, it will make a big impact on water waste.

But as an individual, or a neighborhood, you will never waste as much as factory farms, chemical processing, and many other industries.

Add to it the fact that these companies produce these products, with these wasteful systems, to maintain profit margins so that they can enrich themselves.

If they were making them and breaking even, not paying themselves much. Like if it was a government run industry, and the demand was just so high for this shitty wasteful thing, maybe then you could blame the consumer.

But those who take the most profit accept responsibility.

But the water you and I waste by leaving the sink on, goes back to the water supply.

It is not like drywall manufacturing, where the water is tainted and should not be put back into the supply.

Yes, and I think their point is that the big manufacturers are just going to waste the water you saved, too.

We still get yellowpages telephone books vomited on our porch to throw away, about twice a year. Three guys in an overloaded car grace us with them, one guy on each side of the street, throwing yellowpages at houses, and one guy driving.

All paper recycling does is keep paper prices low enough that these people can afford to print these things and force them on every household in a city. Remind me why I should be recycling a renewable resource again? You end up subsidizing marginal paper using businesses, who enjoy cheaper paper prices because of the efforts of millions of people, all because society thinks tree farmers should be paid less.

Because you're a good citizen, just doing their part! Maybe if we virtue signal enough, they'll save the dolphins!

This is also an important distinction which I forgot to touch on.

Sort of, but not really. The water on the input side of your tap is much more valuable than the sewer side.

It's not usable for drinking water, it is usable for greywater purposes. If you've got a septic system, it'll go through that into the local ground water, if not, it'll go into the septic sewer and eventually to a treatment plant, and from there a river.

If it was originally aquifer water, you've taken (likely) high quality water from a diminishing resource and put it in the environment.

> and from there a river.

And from there it goes to the next community downstream.

Northern California gray water and black water is treated and sent to Southern California as drinking water.

So it depends on where you are.

Is this for real? I didn't know this. Any links?

> so they can enrich themselves

That's the only thing I take issue with here. Characterizing this as intentional misconduct muddies the waters. The line between cutting costs and benefiting from an increased share price is long and winding. Don't blame people; examine systems.

Where most of the money goes is back to keeping costs low for consumers, the same ones that are conscientiously keeping the tap water off.

I understand what you are getting at, but it seems like "blame the system" is an effective excuse for capitalism to literally destroy the planet we live on.

If you subscribe to the "a fool and his money are soon departed" philosophy, which is essentially like, "well if they want products that destroy the world I will give them that" you are passing the moral accountability buck onto human society in its entirety.

We know that a human is smart, but that people are dumb. We also know that people are responding to norms that they are taught. So you can't teach people to buy your products no matter what with endless advertisements but expect them to change their lives for "the greater good" when your company would literally do anything possible to make a buck.

That's a disproportionate amount of responsibility when "people" as a rule are just doing what they do to get by, but you are doing what you do to get a mansion.

> We know that a human is smart

Not every person is smart, nor does that translate into correct behavior. Even herd mentality has limits.

I don't disagree with you, but the systems-level view is important not insofar as it shows us who to blame, but because it shows us the kinds of solutions that might actually work.

The combination of incentives over the entire system must produce the correct emergent behavior. So, for example, instead of trying to get individuals to voluntarily use less carbon without changing anything else (this will never work), you can educate the public, pressure politicians, and end up with a large-scale carbon tax (although this particular case may be wishful thinking!).

Just because you can't easily put the blame on individuals doesn't mean they're not responsible. Our "system" is great at "blame laundering" or obfuscating ethical implications of decisions through diffusion of responsibility and removal of context at different boundaries. But the system itself is not a thing you can blame, as it's orchestrated by people who wanted it to work that way. Leaders who don't act to change the system are shitty leaders, and they are guilty.

Stealing the term "blame laundering" btw.

Seminal systems theorist Donella Meadows mentioned in an excellent talk[1] that she (and other "systems thinkers") tends to avoid blame entirely, due to understanding the constraints and incentives people operate under.

[1] Timecode to her comments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuIoego-xVc&t=12m55s

Start of her talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMmChiLZZHg&t=7m03s

That's an amazing talk, thank you

agreed, I appreciate the link.

> it's orchestrated by people who wanted it to work that way

This is exactly what I'm talking about. Capitalism is basically a force of nature, like evolution. Claiming anyone can orchestrate it is analogous to intelligent design.

I do agree that we all, and leaders more than most, bear responsibility to improve the system. But don't overestimate the capacity of any one person. If it were that easy to control complex systems, Obama would have closed Guantanamo.

I would replace "orchestrate" with "influence". It's obvious it can be influenced negatively, to make the situation worse in context of this discussion -- otherwise the concept of bearing responsibility to influence it positively, which you acknowledge, would make no sense.

As for "force of nature", that just sounds like what someone living under monarchy might say about monarchy, etc. Yes, trading things is very old and very useful, but from that doesn't follow that the whole package including "obfuscating ethical implications" is a "force of nature" (which to me doesn't really read differently than "the will of God" btw)

> But don't overestimate the capacity of any one person.

We're first and foremost talking about personal responsibility. To speak about "the system" we should "improve" while kinda skipping about that is like talking about a beach while ignoring the concept of a grain of sand. The system is the people, the beliefs they have about the world, the other people, and so on. If you take away the people, there is no system. With different people, there is a different system.

Yes, I cannot easily just change the behavior of others. However, I can change mine, and there are a lot of things I declined to do because I value being able to look at myself in the mirror more than temporary material profit. What force of nature? I only saw and see a bunch of mediocre, insecure people who failed to drag me into their games.

When a group of hooligans steals money from a beggar just to be cruel I may not be able or dare to do anything about it. But it's very easy for me to refrain from stealing from a beggar. It's actually way easier for me to refrain from it than to do it. Other people developed differently, probably had different childhoods and so on -- but we still live in the same "system", and "just" behave very differently in it. That matters.

I agree with most of what you said. I'm not saying capitalism is a mysterious force we can't understand or control, just that it has emergent behavior that is more powerful than any individual directive that can be handed down. Look for another post further down describing this very well.

Monarchy is based on social hierarchy, which is literally a force of nature. So there's that.

It's easy for you to not steal, and that's great. Just remember to credit your parents who raised you, a healthy environment of anyone that you grew up in, and the fortune not to be catastrophically impoverished at a young age. I'm not saying your environment could inside you to steal now (I don't know you), but I assure you, a childhood where you were raised in a lawless gang would not have gifted you the same set of moral values.

Was one prison really so important to TPTB? I think not really. If Obama had actually done what he had claimed to have wanted to do, they wouldn't have implemented their "JFK solution" for that infraction alone. After all he dutifully expanded the murderdeathterrordrone program, just like the presidents before and after him. He persecuted more whistleblowers than any president before him, just like his successor is determined to do. If the spooks want to "get their torture on" near a beach, they can just fly to one of their "black sites" in Thailand or Indonesia. Insisting on a Caribbean beach is for jet-lag wimps.

It's instructive to compare Obama's Guantanamo promise to his successor's tariff and bigotry promises. There are far fewer intellectual objections to closing Guantanamo than there are e.g. to starting trade wars with allies or making racism the national immigration policy, and also it's unambiguously the ethical thing to do. Still, one leader is keeping his awful promises while the other couldn't keep his good ones.

And don't give me the "politics" crap. Democrats lost ground in every legislature in the nation, starting two years into Obama's administration and continuing into the present election cycle during which they will lose even more. [0] Whatever goal was supported by breaking his promise, it wasn't getting Democrats elected.

[0] Remember, once Republicans control 34 state houses (32 now) they can start passing whatever awful Constitutional amendments they want! Do you really want our Constitution to have something about who can use which public restroom? Because this total electoral ineptitude is how you make that happen... in 2020 we'll all have to vote Libertarian just to keep the Bill of Rights intact.

It takes 3/4 of the states to pass an amendment to the constitution, that means 38 (yeah they round up from 37.5), not 34.

Haha of course you're right. I'm not sure what was going on in my brain when I typed that...

There is no "Powers That Be!". That's my whole point. Obama didn't do it because 1) he realized his entire presidency would be devoted on an uphill slog to better the lives of a couple hundred people, and 2) there was no simple answer as to where to put them. You can view the world through an us against them perspective, or you can actually try to understand how all the little bits of it interact with each other.

The simple answer is to let them go. You don't have to let them go in USA. If you can't bribe some Pacific island to take them along with all the Uyghurs, then release them in the benighted desert wasteland from where you kidnapped them. If the nominal government of said wasteland doesn't want them, use some of that good old CIA ingenuity to smuggle them in anyway. What better use of "Special Forces", than to fix previous screw-ups that used Special Forces?

The way to avoid "an uphill slog" is to just do it, via executive order. Obama knew about executive orders; he signed thousands of them while in office. That's a big reason why his successor has had such fun: while laws can only be changed by new laws, executive orders can be changed by new executive orders. Trump has staff whose only job is cataloging executive orders to overturn.

"National security experts" will tell us that the few hundred poor bastards we still have in the hole are some sort of existential threat to us a decade after we kidnapped them, but they are lying as usual. We are vulnerable to actual vulnerabilities, not random people with adverse sentiments. To lock up everyone who hates USA or the horrible things that USA does, we'd have to lock up about a billion people. To change the world, we must change ourselves.

Speaking more generally, this sclerotic way of thinking is why a cretin like Trump can get so deep inside the OODA loop of his political opponents. When they say "we just can't", it's because they can't find a lobbyist or think tank ghoul to tell them they can. When one considers all the truly awful things various politicians have decided they could do, it's a bit sickening.

> the system itself is not a thing you can blame, as it's orchestrated by people who wanted it to work that way

Strongly disagree with that assessment; viewing systems as solely the product of individual decisions is like viewing your brain solely as the product of the movement of individual atoms. You lose all predictive capability. If you do something immoral, is there some group of cells or atoms that I can directly 'assign blame' to?

A more nuanced and honest view would be to observe that certain structures predictably result in the some consequences, often regardless of the initial beliefs, desires, or moral righteousness of the individuals caught within them.

Sometimes the only way to change the outcome is to change the large-scale structure and incentives within the system. We can do that by changing laws, regulations, and also sometimes by naming and shaming certain individuals; but first we have to admit that systems do have 'a mind of their own'.

Actually measuring, or even hypothesizing about, the predictive capability of different models of varying levels of abstraction is something that happens disturbingly rarely in fields that aren't the hard sciences. I suspect an important (but not primary) reason for this is that most people simply don't have an opportunity to be exposed to the type of maths and analysis required for systems theory, and thus are extremely unlikely to surmise that something like systems theory is a distinct thing that can even exist.

If there is a hierarchical structure to the brain wherein some highly influential neurons direct the rest of the brain toward the immoral behavior, you can at least assign the lions share to them.

I do agree that carefully structured incentives and disincentives are the thing that can lead to the best outcomes.

You'll never waste as much as is used in plastic recycling either. The number of separate hot and cold washing stages is quite astonishing.

People behaviour matters indirectly at least. If the environment is important enough in people mind that it affects their behaviours, you bet that politician will play on that card. Similarly, as an investor, if you notice the trend, you will find investing in wasteful companies to be riskier.

This is such a big part of it and it's amazing that they get away with it.

Case in point: Blue Apron. Blue Apron positioned itself as one of the more "recycle-friendly" food delivery services to try and fight the stigma against every delivery having bags upon bags of individually wrapped goods by providing recycling services. As a former Blue Apron customer, I loved that I could separate stuff out (hard plastic, soft plastic, paper, etc.) and throw away anything that touched raw meat and just send it back to them in the same cardboard box I received it in.

Blue Apron then cancelled their recycling services and now just redirects people to do it themselves because "recycling is hard". Now, the number of people that will actually recycle will drop further and Blue Apron doesn't have to change its operations one iota. I cancelled my subscription as soon as they removed the recycling options because they wanted to put the blame on the end user instead of themselves for producing all that waste in the first place.

There is a solution here. Until it's financially incentivized for them to find it, though, we'll be stuck here creating more and more waste.

Blue Apron's cold packs are ridiculous. The goop leaks onto the food, they're a nightmare to dispose of, and they're heavy; probably 75% of the weight of a BA box is the cold packs. If they used dry ice, the boxes would be much lighter weight -- saving on shipping costs -- and they would simply evaporate rather than needing to be trashed.

The CO2 would enter the food, and make it taste like a weird kind of seltzer.

Is all the food air sealed?

CO2 doesn't really go into anything to any significant degree unless it's under pressure.

And yet it did when I had food cooled by dry ice. So what counts more, what actually happened, or the theory?

The reason is that if the item is cold (especially right above freezing) you don't need much pressure to get CO2 to dissolve.

The food was weird it was all tingly and fizzy on the tongue. Kind of like the flavor of flat seltzer.

Solubility of CO2 in water at 0C and roughly atmospheric pressure is about 0.001337 mole fraction [0]. CO2 molecules are 44/18 times heavier than water molecules, so that's about 3.3g of CO2 dissolved in a liter of water. Carbonated water is usually specified in "volumes of CO2". One mole of gas at STP has a volume of about 22.4L, so one liter of CO2 weighs about 2g. "Lightly carbonated" is usually considered about two volumes of dissolved CO2, so 4g/L, which isn't much higher than 3.3g. Assuming the packaging is sealed well enough to maintain a high percentage of CO2 within, and the temperature is low enough, it looks plausible that there would be a noticeable change in taste/mouth-feel. This is confirmed by a study I found showing average taste threshold for dissolved CO2 in water of 0.26g/L [1].

[0] http://sites.chem.colostate.edu/diverdi/all_courses/CRC%20re... [1] https://home.zhaw.ch/yere/pdf/Teil16%20-%20Expression%20of%2...

The theory supports ars. Calculate before you downvote.

One exception: fermenting liquids can become super-saturated with CO2 even if fitted with an air-lock to vent the CO2 to atmospheric pressure. This might cause a rather messy surprise if you add powdered yeast nutrient to an ongoing fermentation and give it a lot of nucleation points.

I’ve experienced this issue just a tiny bit with my delivery of dip’n’dots with dry ice, but more noticeably when putting dry ice in a cocktail.

It is really noticeable in drinks with direct exposure to all that gas and ice. Solid food in a box? I don’t have as much experience with that, so I’m not sure.

It might not be feasible for them. Shippers place pretty strict limits on how much dry ice can go onto one of their planes, on account of not wanting to suffocate the air crew mid flight.

Fortunately, people have built-in biological CO2 detectors. If it is just flight crew (no passengers), they all have oxygen masks they can use if the CO2 suffuses the cabin.

Umm, surely you can see that's a little crazy?

I'm all for environmental awareness - but it's a bit like the people saying, oh, why do you not use re-usable containers for everything, or do you really need to dishwash everything?

Things like food safety, and not making your customers sick are enshrined in law - and that's a good thing.

Even at my work, they aren't allowed to re-serve/re-heat things that have been served once, due to cross-contamination.

I don't see what your reply has to do with my comment.

You're saying the CO2 risk is OK, because they have oxygen masks.

That's like saying, increasing the risk of crashing a car is OK, because we'll have airbags.

What I'm saying is (unless you're PETA), the welfare and safety of your fellow human beings will trump most other things.

There's a reason the crew already has oxygen masks.

The masks are there to survive sudden cabin decompression at high altitudes where the atmosphere is too thin to breath. There is only enough oxygen to last a few minutes.

Further reading: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travel-truths/truth-about...

>[...]do you really need to dishwash everything?

You don't! Unless you have flies and cockroaches infested kitchen, some stray bacteria left after just water-washing will be much less harmful than eating the stuck-on-surface dishsoap (which does not rinse off completely, since it's hydrophobic). I have an even worse opinion of people constantly bleaching their countertops. shudder

As an anecdote, I once had a misfortune of living with a guy who would never rinse off the dishsoap from the dishes at all, just leave them out to dry still covered in suds!

Soaps and detergents are not hydrophobic. They are part hydrophilic and part lipophilic which is how they pull lipids into the water when you wash something.

> Fortunately, people have built-in biological CO2 detectors.

They’re not that sensitive, though, and the symptoms are ambiguous.

Interesting. Didn't know this. And you're absolutely right: https://about.van.fedex.com/blog/dry-ice-shipments-in-air-tr...

I was just fuming at the heavy coolant bags they ship in their packages that are not recyclable and recommended to be thrown in the trash. This is not progress.

I quite liked the convenience and food and recipes, but my nagging guilt over the packaging waste and transportation waste of individually packaged and shipped food, even when recycling, is the reason I stopped taking Blue Apron. Shipping the recycling back to them didn't seem like a net positive either.

But at least they tried! I feel bad picking on Blue Apron when single using plastic water bottles are everywhere.

Don't get trapped in the fallacy of what-about-ism. Just because plastic bottles are a nuisance already present everywhere doesn't give other entities a license to produce more trash.

I wouldn't be surprised if "Pack the box back up and burn a bunch more jet fuel sending it back to New York" turns out to be even worse than just sending it all to the landfill.

Given that they require air mailing boxes full of (mostly, by weight) frozen liquids all over the place on a weekly basis, I'm not convinced that these meal kit services can ever be made sustainable. Compared to that cost, worrying about recycling and whether their food suppliers are organic or not seems like it's probably just bikeshedding.

It might be cool to see what a company like Imperfect Produce could come up with in this space.

Certainly they could be at least as sustainable as any grocery store; they’d just need to create more, smaller distribution centers closer to their customers. The DCs can get their supplies locally or via bulk shipments (and sort out recycling on-site) and then assemble the meal kits and add ice for the last mile.

Transporting ingredients in bulk to the DCs is more efficient than transporting a bunch of individually packaged and individually cooked meal kits.

I wouldn't be surprised to see local distribution through grocery stores (whole foods/ralphs) dominate the subscription meal space over the next few years due to better distribution margins and economies of scale.

This is how it works where I lived in Europe. All the big grocery store chains have their own food subscription boxes, and instead of having it delivered home you can also just pick it up at your local supermarket on you way home from work.

Yes, this is how we do it here in sweden, perfect way of getting rid of the food that is getting close to the best before date without lowering the price. Also easier to sell vegetables that don't look so good.

I stull preffer to select mu goods by myself, it's well spent time away from the keyboard stress and I get to decide how much waste I want to produce by using my 10 year old cotton bags and let the fruit and veggies use their own packaging, that is anyway best for freshness.

That's where I was wondering about Imperfect Produce. It's a company that buys up fruits and veggies that the local distributor couldn't sell to the grocery stores for whatever reason, and delivers a weekly box of whatever they have to subscribers.

Our experience thus far has been that the produce sometimes has some cosmetic issues, but as often as not the only thing wrong with it is that it's just not the size that consumers typically expect, or the distributor just had excess stock. The food is almost always fresher, because it's coming straight from the distributor rather than sitting around on supermarket shelves for a while before you buy it.

Even when delivering, there are minor to moderate efficiencies related to route planning and sometimes electric cars. Electric freezer cars are used, relatively efficient. (dry ice is too expensive and dangerous)

We subscribed to Terra’s Kitchen after trying a few services including Blue Apron and Freshly.

Terra’s Kitchen, in addition to using non-disposable, durable vessels and cold packs that you return, also pre-chops and pre-preps many of the ingredients so meal prep and cleanup is truly 20-30 mins, which is half the time (or less) than Blue Apron.

Here are the vessels they use: https://www.terraskitchen.com/how-it-works/

Highly recommend.

I wonder if the added cost is worth it as far as freshness and quality are concerned. I know I'm not the typical case, but I never got a bad shipment from Blue Apron when I was using it. I really wish I could continue to use it but I just can't justify the amount of waste that piles up over just going to the store myself. I spend almost as much time unpacking and prepping everything for recycling.

So Terra's Kitchen basically sends customers a mini fridge filled with raw ingredients?

Doesn't address the bigger issue, but Sun Basket is for now a relatively environmentally-friendly one - a relatively small amount of paper/cardboard packaging only.

We tried a local alternative to Blue Apron. They hand delivered to our doorstep. It was pretty well done and organized. Packaging didn't seem particularly wasteful to me. Might be worth checking around to see if anyone local is more friendly that way.

Who did you end up using?

Not sure of the name. Some mom-and-pop startup in Utah County. My wife saw a coupon or ad for them and decided to try it out.

We did this as well. They would drop off essentially a gym bag full of food and ice packs on week one. Starting on week 2, you leave the bag, ice packs, and rinsed containers on your porch and they pick it up as they drop off the next batch. It worked great!

They eventually shut down the food part of their business to sell their food business software to other businesses, so we started using Sun Basket. Everything they send is locally recyclable, though I wonder how many people do it. I'm thinking of canceling because they've started including ads for unrelated stuff in their shipments. (This week some meal was "sponsored by" some stupid movie that comes out next week. Ugh.) Other than that, I've been fairly happy with their work.

> There is a solution here.

Rant: the solution is to learn how to read a recipe and cook without a paint by numbers erector set that has an unreasonable packaging:food ratio.

I’m fine with these services as a ‘gateway drug’ to independently cooking for yourself, but they’re insane as a long term thing.

(Not to mention that I have no idea how they stay viable in the long term, given their customer acquisition costs. If anyone makes it work in the long term it will be Amazon/Whole Foods.)

That's nonsense. I have formal culinary training and Blue Apron was never about needing to learn how to read a recipe and cook with "a paint by numbers erector set". It was almost exclusively about the convenience and ease of recycling what was sent.

You're projecting.

No,i agree with parent. What is so damn hard about picking a recipe and then ordering produce/goods from your local grocery accordingly? It seems wasteful to use a service like that purely for convenience.

It's much less wasteful to have many meals made up at once than for everyone to invent ad hoc meals. Also you just get enough of each ingredient for the meal instead of having to buy whatever unit size the grocery store feels like selling.

Great. That's your prerogative. With Blue Apron, I didn't have to leave the house so it was incredibly convenient, the food was good, the variety of recipes was good, and I got to cook with ingredients that I never would have picked out on my own or that just aren't available at my local grocery store.

Convenience is the major factor but there are all kinds of pros to the Blue Apron service that I would continue to benefit from if it wasn't just for the incredibly wasteful packaging and processing. If they just shipped all that stuff without all the wrapping, I'd be fine with that. I've done farm boxes before that didn't need all the plastic.

This is what Blue Apron recommends for "recycling" their freezer packs:

"We recommend cutting the ice pack open and disposing of the gel in the trash. You can then recycle on your own or send back to us!" [1]

Yes, you take the stuff out of the freezer pack bag and put it into a new bag, and recycle the old bag. Where does the new bag go? In the trash.

[1] https://twitter.com/blueapron/status/652141163948847104?lang...

This exact same thing happened with Amazon Fresh. Used to have a way to return ice packs, now you cannot. The instructions are the same: cut the pack, drain gel, recycle?

In Seattle, Amazon Fresh was using dry ice for a while. My friends and I would just cut up the block of dry ice and use it to smoke our cocktails.

It is amazing how often humans continue to essentially create new problems that are easily solvable on their own. A culture of convenience and throw-away (not my problem) or "I don't have the time for x" is why we keep having mountains of waste. Anyone who is concerned with waste can make the conscious choices to eliminate or reduce that waste in a lot of areas of their life.

1. Buy real food and cook it 2. Grow food or contribute to local co-op or farms 3. Make stuff you use all the time 4. Bring your own containers/bags

Usually these are the only options for a lot of things. But there are other cases where just having consumers fed up with companies like in the case above you can shift market incentives with your choice. Lush is a good example of this for instance.

It's a combined effort, you have to not be lazy and actually care about the choices you are making with where you spend your money and companies will respond to the demand. Sometimes it takes more effort, or you can just not buy X and see if you can either make your own alternative or not need X at all.

There are tons and tons of homemade things you can do to eliminate waste by just making it yourself. I've found it generally comes to a few constant categories where I generally produce the most waste.

- Food + Beverages - Hygenics

Sure there are the other areas where I produce trash, but those two categories are the ones where waste is produced every single day so the impact is a lot higher. The solution is relatively straightforward, make more things by hand or purchase goods closer to raw form (Lush seems to be a great example of one that can replace just about all of my hygenic material waste). And second, make more recipes by hand closer to the raw material ingredients and bring your own containers.

> Buy real food and cook it > Bring your own containers/bags

I eat out once a fortnight for dinner and once a week for lunch, and cook the rest of the time. The vast majority of what I buy is fresh food (fruit, vegetables, some small amounts of dairy, meat and pulses). Everything I buy is packaged in single use plastics. My lunch today, the tomatoes came in a cardboard box that was wrapped in plastic, the cucumber was shrink wrapped, the pitta breads came individually wrapped. There are two supermarkets I can choose from and both of them suffer the same problem. All the meat comes in disposable trays with a film covering, and a plastic inlet. Technically the tray is recyclable if I remove the meat and the inside tray and wash it, but my recycling services won't accept it in case it's contaminated by food.

My plastic toothpaste container comes in a cardboard box. My biodegradable bin liners come with a plastic wrapper to protect them.

This isn't something that I can fix, I don't have the option to buy unpackaged goods, or to provide my own containers.

* Toothpaste can be made and or bought from places like Lush where the alternatives can be zero waste. It's a bit out of the ordinary but there are options that even I'm surprised by it.

* Just about all produce/fruit is available without plastic wrapping (except for berries I've found, which is quite annoying). I think the only non-plastic option here is to just try and grow the fruit yourself. Or otherwise take the plastic and grind it into pellets to use for something else. There's some neat stuff related to this. I've also seen this as an option for most local farmers:

https://myplasticfreelife.com/2011/05/irritated-with-plastic...

* Meat is next to impossible for this, but I've found meat available raw in paper wrapping when you get it in some places. This is usually in a place like Whole Foods, but even then the meat comes in a plastic covering like you mention.

I totally see what you're saying, I think I'm just looking at areas where large quantities of everyday plastic waste is avoidable. For instance, when eating out it's not unheard to bring your own container for leftovers instead of having them give you a styrofoam container for the food. And of course I say all this also realizing that a lot of people might not have access to all this ^ :(

For toothpaste, I had a look on the lush website [0]. For me to switch to that, I would be spending 6 times what I currently am on toothpaste, and would also need to travel an extra 3 miles to get to my nearest lush store.

> Just about all produce/fruit is available without plastic wrapping

Maybe if you're shopping in farmers markets. I shop in high street supermarkets, and it _isn't_ available. I have a choice of buying a 1kg bag of onions, or not buying onions. I can buy a 3 pack of bell peppers, or not buy bell peppers. I can buy a 6 pack of Golden Delicious apples, or I can not buy apples. I do try and buy less packaging, but unfortunately the odds are stacked against me.

[0] - https://uk.lush.com/products/tooth-fairy

Meat is easy for me, I just head to the butcher that’s next to the shops. Not only is it cheaper and higher quality, but the only plastic used is the extremely thin bag they wrap the meat in, and they’re happy to use paper instead if you bring it!

There's only one butcher (amazingly) in the area that I live in, and it's only open 8:30 - 5:30 Monday through Friday, which doesn't work for anyone working full time.

I think this is something that depends on the country. As someone used to buy raw food (without any plastic) I get surprised every time I travel to some more "civilized" countries where plastic is every where!

Anwyay, even in the fruit & vegetable shop, most of people pick small plastic bags to put and weight the food. I am one of the few ones that puts everything on the same bag.

I feel the same thing about renewable energy and climate change - a top down approach could have such massive impact, but a bottom up approach is so difficult. There are thousands of groups (there are literally a dozen probably coordinating together in my mid sized city alone) all trying to do the same work from the bottom up and on the ground with churches, local governments, individuals etc but it requires so much pressure and buy in from your average citizen to get anything done that way.

Completely agree. In school, we studied the concept of producer responsibility. It's treated as radical even though it neatly fits into seemingly all ideologies. It allows the market to be efficient and it solves the problem of pollution. You need a beat cop though as the incentive to cheat is there.

Clear example of how the market fails the efficiency test: look at the trend in water bottles and aluminum cans getting taller and skinnier. Takes up more visual space on the shelf. Looks bigger and more substantial, but actually has less product inside. Takes more material and energy to produce. But the markup is larger = more profit! (also a PITA because tall skinny things have a tendency to fall over, but who cares). Producers are cynically anti-consumer and anti-efficiency, completely pro-profit.

I've seen this logic applied to trash in the wilderness, and it's maddening. "Don't blame the consumer for leaving trash everywhere, blame the manufacturers for creating non-biodegradable trash."

Setting aside that even biodegradable trash is harmful to animals, it's ridiculous to absolve people of basic hygiene requirements. If you can haul it in, you can haul it out.

"Don't leave shit in the forrest" is far easier to understand and enforce, however.

Absolutely

There a orders of magnitude less producers of one time use plastic items than there are consumers of them though, so it's vastly easier to regulate on the production end than the consumption end.

> The creators of all this garbage do so because it's profitable

See: Tile.

Except it can also be solved consumer side as well, move over to materials that can easily be reused after being put through a dishwasher and charge a deposit on these items, also structure grocery stores to be in a way that is zero or low waste. The problem exists at every step of the chain, where we should primarily focus on reducing and reusing rather than trying to solve the problem of recycling.

>"...the bill always comes due..."

Yes. But it's __always__ the consumer that pays that bill. Increase in the cost of anything simply gets added to the price.

Yes. You might get manufactures to change. But the consumer is still the one who pays.

The whole point of the concept of environmental externalities and the tragedy of the commons is that the bill comes due for all of us, or our future generations, because a select few consumers got to exploit the environment, courtesy of the manufacturers. The point of the discussion is that this is fundamentally unfair, and consumers should pay that bill.

Furthermore, the cost of the bill is often exaggerated. Yes, retooling the manufacturers' plants to avoid externalizing environmental costs is a large one-time investment that will be passed on to the consumers. But that must be done to stop destroying our environment, and after that initial investment is paid off, the running cost of producing the goods will in almost all cases come back down to what it currently is, so the consumer price will come back down too.

Tragedy of the commons is the best argument I've ever heard for why we need government and the rule of law.

That's fine, but if the consumer pays the real cost up front, people will behave appropriately for whatever that cost is. By hiding the real cost, we distort the market and people make different choices.

Agree. I was simply pointing out that in the end it's the consumer who pays, not the Inc.

What you're talking about is called, in economics jargon, "externalities". The solution is to internalize the externalities, and that is efficiently done with a tax.

I.e. put a tax on plastic. I'd favor a tax on styrofoam peanuts, for example. Have you ever spilled a bag of them outside? I did once by accident. Spent hours picking them all up one by one as they blew around.

Give me crumpled paper padding any day over those damnable infernal peanuts.

It’s not them that will pay the bill though, it’s us, and rightly so. If we want manufacturers to build recyclability into their products, it’s up to us to make the rules to ensure they do so, and pay the increased costs for the goods we buy. There’s no point pretending that only manufacturers are culpable and only they will pay the costs. We’re all in this together.

This kind of thing is the biggest case for government regulation. There are just some things that capitalism alone will never incentivize.

This conversation of externalised abstract costs is very closely related to the “true cost” of “fast fashion” (colloquialism for cheap and ephemeral but stylish clothing now available en masse). Those interested, please take some time to watch the documentary “the true cost” by Andrew Morgan. It is available on Netflix. While that movie is mostly about the human cost not being borne by the customers (because of the failure in the global system to impose the cost on manufacturers) - it touched upon the pollution cost as well.

It's not impossible, you just have to take the time and effort to do the research.

https://zerowastehome.com/tips/

There is a way for consumers to solve the problem themselves, but boycott is a four letter word.

You're right. It's more about production than consumption. I think there should be more standardized way of producing waste, in terms of material, shape and size.

Perhaps we should start doing something like what Taiwan did with their trash: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/separation-anxiety/

> The trucks only accept trash bags officially sanctioned by the government of Taiwan which come in a distinctive blue color, complete with an official seal. The bags range in price and size, from 3 liters to 120 liters. The most popular bag is 25 liters (similar to a tiny bathroom wastebasket liner), which costs about $5 for a pack of 20. This effectively makes a pay-as-you-waste model, incentivizing citizens to recycle and compost as much as possible since those services are offered for free. The musical garbage trucks are tailed by a recycling truck, where workers help the residents sort their recyclables and compost into thirteen distinct bins. Should people fail to sort their materials properly, the government will fine them up to $200.

Targets the wrong place. It may reduce contamination of recycling streams, but does nothing to encourage less production.

Perhaps a combination approach: $5 for a pack of small bin liners, or return your waste to the shop for free.

If Tesco were filled with piles of consumer waste given back to them I posit the problem would be on the way to being solved within weeks.

> If Tesco were filled with piles of consumer waste given back to them

I vaguely remember seeing something about this happening in Germany where households are charged by the amount of rubbish that has to be collected. So people unwrap things in the shop and leave the packaging behind.

Honestly, companies really ought to be charged for the disposal of all that packaging they choke their products with. There seems to be no back pressure stopping manufacturers from wrapping a 10g USB stick in 400g of plastic packaging/advertising.

In Germany we had rules that shops have to take back packaging, but especially with online shops this just wasn't used enough, so now the shop or manufacturer has to pay a (weight-based) fee for all the packaging they give to consumers. Pretty small though from what I've heard.

I’d be in favor of requiring manufacturers to take back unneeded product packaging, paying for postage if necessary.

EDIT: Reading more of this thread, it looks like everyone is suggesting this, so my comment does not add much.

So why is this obvious solution not implemented?

> So why is this obvious solution not implemented?

I have no inside information but I think it is because manufacturers will collude to add this as a visible added cost to the cost of the product. Consumers will think stuff became more expensive because of some idiots in DC/Brussels.

It's a collective action problem like any other. Collusion on a wide scale in competitive markets is pretty damn difficult, since one company can change their manufacturing processes to produce less waste and suddenly undercut everyone else's prices. "Passing the whole price increase onto the consumer" rarely withstands scrutiny, excluding cases with very low demand elasticity or very oligarchic suppliers. Neither of these are the case for the vast majority of packaged goods that are sold.

The incentive to minimize their packaging already exists though, both in shipping costs and just the material costs.

At least here, experience showed that people do not bring stuff back, I don't think mailing it back would be any better: if they don't want to bring packaging to the store, will they carry it to the post office to mail back?

It also seems like a massive environmental waste to ship individual packages of garbage around, when you can handle it locally just as well, and have manufacturers pay for it.

Because mailing garbage is a terrible idea. It's worse for the environment that almost all other options.

So is driving your garbage back to the store where you bought something.

The whole process, taken as a whole, just doesn't make any environmental sense.

Unless it's a store that you have to drive to anyway. For example, my dry cleaner years ago used to "recycle" hangers. You could bring back your hangers from the previous time and get like 2 to 10 cents off your current order for each hanger you returned. (Don't recall the exact amount, probably closer to 2 cents if I think about it.) This was nice because you were going there anyway, and also because you didn't end up with a closet full of empty hangers!

This is also what we did with soda cans when I lived in Michigan. You'd pay 10 cents extra per can, and then get it back when you returned them. If you didn't return them, the state had 10 cents to use to clean up waste produced by that can. If you did, you got your money back and the can got recycled. It seemed to work pretty well. I remember a year after they started the program noting how much cleaner the roads seemed because people were going out and picking up cans to return them and fewer people were throwing them out their car windows.

Most plastic waste is from weekly groceries. No one in their right mind would make a special trip to take the junk back, simply take a black sack with the previous week's garbage when next going shopping. It would be no additional cost and minimal inconvenience.

It's how recycling used to work. There were big skips for glass, paper, textiles etc in most supermarket car parks. They were well utilised by shoppers before entering the store. Before that we used to return the empties for reuse within the store.

If a campaign of returns caused supermarkets to restrict suppliers, and create less in the first place, I would do so diligently.

>It may reduce contamination of recycling streams, but does nothing to encourage less production.

Sure it does. If you're going to slapped with a $200 fine every time you screw up with your recycling, and you have to pay by the bag to throw stuff in the landfill, if you have half a brain, you're going to think twice about every purchase you make, and if you really need it. That $1 water bottle that costs you $200 because your kid threw it in the wrong bin is going to make you not want to give your kid another disposable water bottle.

Producers only produce as much product as consumers purchase. Less consumption will result in less production.

Or it may just create perverse incentives fir people to throw everything in landfill. Not 100% sure where to put that $1 drink bottle, throw in the trash and don't risk a $200.

Not sure how that could be prevented.

Throwing recyclable goods in to the landfill bag nets you a fine. That's the whole point - you sort correctly, or you pay up. If you are unable to sort your trash - you don't buy stuff. The landfill bags are for non-recyclable items.

That makes no sense as policy. 1 cubic metre of landfill space costs the same whether you fill it with "recyclable" or "non-recyclable" items.

It’s not perfect but it tries to price an externality back in. Consumers may demand better packaging if this was a thing in the US, providing manufacturers to improve their waste level.

They do it really straightforwardly where I live in Wales. Garbage is collected every six weeks, from a 120L wheelie bin. Recycling (six streams) is collected weekly. Either you recycle, or you drown in trash.

Less production means less growth - means less future revenue - which means less chance of paying off all those loans predicated on consumption growth patterns.

Also - consumption isn’t all bad. There’s many poor people who can’t afford much, and we very much are promising a better life where they can consume goods and lead healthy lives (goods such as medicine, clean water and chocolate as much as Coca Cola in a plastic bottle)

And also - if people were charged for old school packaging, costs would go up. People wouldn’t buy as much and this would start a new round of economic troubles.

At its price point, I suspect that plastic is so cheap, that even with all the pollution and waste being collected, it’s still ends up with positive utility.

There’s a report on carry bags which shows reusable cloth bags have significantly higher environmental impact because of the cost of production costs, water use and eventual decay into some carbon gas like Methane.

which costs about $5 for a pack of 20

I’ve never understood why recycling wasn’t self-sustaining, isn’t there value in the raw material?

When I was young reusing was the thing; a glass milk bottle went back to the dairy was sterilised and used again the next day. One bottle, with a recyclable aluminium foil lid, could be used again and again and again. Nowadays we make a glass bottle, use it once, then melt it down and make a slightly different bottle, and we think that’s green!

Ridiculous isn't it? We even kept milk bottle tops and handed in the aluminium foil, and the daily milk was delivered in an electric vehicle.

Bottles got reused enough times (a little less with milk bottles) that older Coke, other pop, and beer bottles started to look rather archaeological from going through the lines 40+ times.

It's always cheaper to make new packaging than recycle old one. It's extremely hard to make any sort of business out of recycling old material. Like you said, reusing would help - but glass has the issue of being very heavy so you're burning more fuel to move it around, while it only takes a drop of oil to make a new plastic bottle that weighs 1/20 of an equivalent glass one.

I'd love to see all drinks being sold exclusively in glass bottles that you have to pay a deposit for - that's how it was when I was a kid in Poland, you had to pay a little bit extra for the bottle and you'd get it back when returning it.

My college room mates and I were still doing this with Miller High Life bottles as late as 2003-2004. If you collected a dozen cases you'd have enough returnables for a free case of beer!

Similar for the plastic beer pitchers at UW-Madison's terrace. You'd pay like a $1 deposit on the pitcher, if you bring the pitcher back, you get the dollar. Drunk kids or the indifferent would leave their plastic pitcher and some enterprising person would come by pick it up and return it for cash. There is a lake nearby, so it's important these didn't make it in the lake.

The deposit system seemed to be pretty effective. Folks took an active role.

Maybe there are modern day systems that could be developed. I wonder if people would subscribe to a Uber/UPS like system for fluids like beer, soda, milk, yogurt or water? Comes in sterilized glass bottles using an electric vehicle. I suppose it could be reusable plastic, but for folks paying a premium, glass would be nice. Something like $50 month for a couple cases of beer, going up in price as you order more.

A festival in Brisbane, Australia had exactly the same approach.

The festival was Parklife and I think it was back in 2012?

$1 price increase on all cups, bottles and food containers. If you brought the item back (it didn't have to be yours!), you got a $1 back per item. It started off as coupons so you could purchase other goods with the coupon but at the end of the festival you could cash them in.

Never in my life have I gone to a one-dayer EDM festival and went home with significantly more money than I started with.

The economics of the choice being, the festival didn't need to pay for cleaners on significant overtime rates. And we're incentivised because I made a fucking profit from an EDM festival!

For the life of me I can't find an article on the event.

Needless to say after some choice after market vitamins, I was motivated to clean the venue during artists I wasn't too interested in. I was also incentivised since the festival was held in my cities Botanical Gardens which are around the corner from my office.

At the end of the festival, not a scrap of rubbish could be found.

It wasn't an absolute success though. Some people started fishing rubbish out of bins to get their own coin back towards the end...

I wish this myth would die, or we fully priced-in the externality cost of plastic recycling.

Look into the roughly 15 step process of recycling those cheap plastic bottles, including pressurised steam, abrasive steps, cold and hot water, and chopping into pieces before yet more washing. It is probably vastly more expensive in energy costs, especially when after all that it's still common to lose batches to contamination. It's miles from returning bottles into the same supply chain and the factory having as first step washing and rinsing the old bottles.

Broken ones were recycled in place, and they were already of exactly the correct type and colour.

Why do they clean it before shredding?

This process starts with the shredding:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyF9MxlcItw

And then giant bales of plastic chips are hand sorted by color in China!

Going entirely on memory, so I may have misrepresented a bit or been out of order. I seem to remember there's an initial automated sort and wash before shredding to remove dead mice, contamination from single stream recycling, assorted junk thrown in the wrong bin and so on. Then after shredding there's washing and rinsing stages, and a steam and abrasive stage to remove glue and labels etc. It left me quite astonished how incredibly involved it is when I looked into it.

Hand sorting? This really is fundamentally broken isn't it?

It was the same in Spain, we carried the casco in the basket (of course not plastic, but hemp)... only the meat and the fish were wrapped in waxed paper and of course the cans, but there were only a few products that weren't fresh.

Now there's an absurd mass of plastics.

Recycling is only economically viable if:

cost of production from raw material > production from recycled material

and

value of recycle material > cost of recycling

My guess on milk bottles is some kind of sanitation and product liability issue.

Yeah, except you can pull the policy levers to change the results.

Some recyclables are really valuable (metal, quality cardboard), but others that we really want to recycle aren't particularly (plastics, glass). Also, morons throw shocking amounts of obvious trash into the recycling stream, which is a huge pain for recyclers, and thus can significantly devalue what should otherwise be a profitable stream of recycling.

What's obvious trash? I look at the labeling on recycling and compost cans in my area and I honestly have no clue what I can recycle and what I can't. My choices are to throw away potential recyclables or recycle trash. People aren't morons, you've just built a bad system.

And to clarify, I'm talking about recycling bins in fast food restaurants and grocery store delis. I've got a pile of used paper and plastic that I just ate off of. What of it can I recycle? The labels are usually either out of date or incomplete or both. And none of the plastics have discernible labeling to help.

It's basically the worst system I can imagine.

There's ambiguous stuff to be sure. But I'm talking about people who throw food scraps, furniture, car tires, ash, bbq coals, construction debris, etc in the recycling. Yes, I've seen all of those things go into the recycling bins and more.

Tricky. The first three should be recyclable: good scraps can be composted, timber and metal in furniture can be recycled, and car tyres can be recycled.

You're being WAY too charitable to end users. People aren't talking about the compost bin. They're talking about the recycle bin. The one for glass, paper, plastics, and cans.

We have a trash bin, yard waste bin, and recycle bin where I live, and I've seen neighbors dump their grass clippings into the recycle bin. I've had family members toss paper plates along with the half eaten hamburger on them into my recycling (NOT compost) bin because the plate is paper.

I don't see how recycling paper products helps anything. Paper = carbon. There is too much carbon in the atmosphere now. Throwing paper away sequesters it from release into the atmosphere and drives up demand for timber - a renewable resource, which removes carbon from the atmosphere.

So much this. The one at my previous office wanted "clean plastic". What's "clean plastic"? Is an empty soda bottle clean? Is an empty salad container clean? Is cling wrap from a sandwich clean?

I'm an environmentally conscious nerd. If my demographic can't figure out how the system works, what do you expect from the general public?

Of course only the trash bin was full at all times.

From what I was told, the food remains on salad or sandwitch container will be destroyed in the process of dealing with separated trash. Theoretically, you dont have to care about it much.

However, it can smell pretty quickly and bugs like it, so if you plan to collect plastic for multiple days especially if it is hot, then you clean it up.

Wow, Clean up trash before we throw it?

We're throwing away our time is all we're doing. Looks like no one here values time. Sorting into 13 bins, etc. We need govt to get out of the way so someone can figure this out and make money (their incentive to figure it out).

Govt's not going to figure this out for us. It has no incentive to.

I just wrote that you don't have to do it, provided you take it out often enough or don't mind smell.

Useless outrage.

Cat litter, needles, food, yard waste, diapers, etc.

Lower your expectations a bit, the people doing the worst aren't wondering what to do with a clean plastic fork.

There is non obvious trash, like "paper" coffee cups that are not actually recyclable.

You have to look at it holistically. In one system everything is thrown in the trash.

In another system you separate out recyclables to be sold, and to reduce how much trash needs to be disposed of. Now you need multiple bins, you need to ensure that trash is not mixed into the recyclables, different trucks or more trucks, more staff.

The cost of labor, the cost of disposing of trash, the capital costs to implement the system, and the income from recycling all effects whether it is sustainable.

They still do that in Spain. It really is unfortunate it's not a standard practice everywhere. With most areas having local bottling plants, it really shouldn't cost /that/ much more to ship bottles back. Regardless, I would love to see us switch back to glass. Even if the bottle doesn't make it's way back into circulation, it will never be an environmental hazard. It's inert and breaks down into sand eventually.

Holy moly! Thirteen bins!!

Still not clear how people are prevented from throwing garbage into the recycle bins. Is the recyclable stuff not placed in bags and therefore easy to be vetted by the staff?

Japan (Sapporo) has a similar system- recycling was placed directly in bins (I don't think there were 13, but there were several).

These kinds of punitive policies have a very obvious side-effect. You dump the garbage in a ravine or stream, or somewhere easy to dump. And so what if you get caught. You get fined a few hundred dollars, where you saved 5x that by dumping.

The problem with recycling is it's recycling... There's a reason why the phrase is "Reduce, Reuse, and finally Recycle".

The upstream firms are Reducing their costs with little regard to reducing environmental impact.

The upstream firms guarantee you can't reuse - it's a missed sale.

So, you percolate through the layers, and then recycling is this all important thing.

This. Where I used to live the only scrap yard would only accept nonferrous metals and the towns would charge for scrap metal. Washing machines on the side of the road was a routine sight, or it was until a new scrap yard that would accept just about anything metal opened up.

edit: I'm struggling to wrap my mind around why this is getting down-voted. I'm providing a real world example of the behavior the person I'm replying to described. I'm not endorsing dumping things on the side of the road. Do people seriously not believe that above a certain price point people will illegally dump their trash and risk the fine?

I mean with scrap metal or whatever it's one thing, but your weekly trash? Unless the cost is exorbitant people are probably just going to pay to have the bags for their trash. Like I think in Japan they were about $5; I'm not going to start trucking my fish bones to the local stream to save five bucks.

It all really depends on how much painpoint there is regarding refuse/recycling.

The more rules, fines, restrictions the state implements, the less people will comply. And lack of compliance means stuff is thrown away in others' yards, dumped on the commons, or otherwise hidden to the nature of the trash.

Because of onerousness with local ordnances with regarding paint, many people just end up hiding the containers in dog food bags. I've seen quite a few of those already in the local dumpster.

I see this a lot across British Columbia Lower Mainland, but rather with old mattresses and soft furniture. It's relatively expensive to recycle those, so people just dump them in bushes and even on random people's front yards.

Is careful sorting of trash/recycling really a good use of time?

Seems better to put that effort towards development of techniques to sort en-masse. Likely controversial, but I think there is also an argument for simply throwing hard-to-recycle items in a landfill. If consumption continues to increase, it will likely become economically viable to eventually mine those landfills for raw materials.

I'd say yes it is a good use of our time. I really want ours to be the generation that stops punting problems out to the next generation. I'd be happy if my friend's children don't need to grow up worrying about how to deal with oceans filled with plastics, global warming induced fire storms and flooded coastal cities.

I'm pretty careful about following my city's recyling guidelines, but I don't think recycling is always the right way to handle a material. It doesn't neccessary solve the problems you mentioned.

Improperly sorted plastics are burried in a landfill. They will not fill the ocean with plastic whether recycled or trashed. Global warming is mostly a matter of energy usage, so recycling only helps that when it's more energy-efficient than the alternative.

The fact that beaches around the world are covered in huge quantities of washed up plastic suggests that someone, somewhere is dumping an awful lot of it into the ocean. (And not just in Asia)

It's mostly Asia dumping.

Isn't our generation the most overworked, least-amount-of-free-time one? How does this extra job fit into that major issue?

By exercising other parts of your brain you let those used for work recover.

I'm hoping this is sarcasm. If not, I don't need the government assigning me work to "exercise other parts of my brain" thanks.

Putting a coke bottle in a recycling vs trash can does nothing to reduce its probability of ending up in the ocean. But doubling the number of trucks picking up waste at my house does double the CO2 emitted into the atmosphere.

Trucks in my local area of London pickup both mixed recycleables and landfill waste in a single visit - waste is separated into two bins, and the truck has two separate receptacles for waste. No extra ongoing emissions, streams are kept separate, and the household overhead of sorting is negligible.

There is an entirely separate, less frequent service that collects organic waste, so there’s probably some overhead there.

Assigning me a chore that benefits a business that I pay a service fee for is unacceptable. I'm paying them to take away my waste. If they want to sort it or alphabetize it or apply the Dewey decimal system they're welcome to. But I won't do chores for someone else without an employment agreement and adequate compensation.

Do you feel the same way about putting your trash in bins (or even bags), as opposed to leaving individual items strewn about your lawn for them to pick up? Do you feel the same way about getting your car to the mechanic instead of having him pick it up from wherever you left it?

The line you're drawing to define "labor done on behalf of a paid service provider" is laughably ridiculous. The service they provide is "picking up sorted bins of trash". You're not "doing their work for them" to meet the terms of the paid service agreement.

I can get the car picked-up for repair if I want to. Where can I subscribe for a service "picking up unsorted garbage"? The problem is that garbage collectors are granted monopoly and use it to extract free labor from customers.

This is govt monopoly btw, not some private monopoly like Google (which is earned and can go away).

No one stops anyone from providing that service.

Maybe it depends on the city, but often it's a municipal government granted monopoly. E.g. in San Francisco it's Recology.

https://www.aoausa.com/magazine/?p=4982

I bet, each city, that enforces waste sorting, has a monopoly.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. What I meant is a sorting service, not a collection service.

I feel the same way. There need to more options to waste management. I don't want to feel obligated to sort out trash. Take my trash, sort it out and bill me.

This is insanity on stilts.

Interestingly, many of the things that we've though would be huge problems in the future turned out to be non-issues or much less of an issue than we thought. A few examples:

-Population crisis

-Peak oil & oil crisis

-Global cooling concern in the 1970s

-Ozone crisis

-Rainforest crisis

-Worldwide food shortage

You mean to say that we have stopped cutting down entire rainforests??? Do tell me when this miracle happened?

How about the fact that we are going to be 10 billion by the end of the century?

And the only reason that we have managed to avoid a food shortage has been the increase in the use of fertilizers which in turn is depleting the soil at a faster rate than ever before turning arable land into dust bowls and rivers becoming so polluted by the chemicals that there are massive extinction events in the population of fish all around the world?

Same for the oil crisis, the shale oil has stopped the crisis in its tracks but only for a short amount of time as the demand keeps on rising and inevitably the price per liter/gallon is going to be back to what it was before the GFC. Also, fracking is polluting the soil more than ever before.

In short most of the crises that you mentioned have not been solved, but simply delayed.

Eventually, they will catch up with us and somebody is going to have to pay? But who? Most likely taxpayers as always.

What I find baffling is what are you going to say to your kids/ grand-kids when they ask you where the forests went? Why is the air so polluted? Why are the rivers so toxic and completely empty?

Should I go on?

I'd highly recommend checking out "Enlightenment Now". Lots of interesting points in there but one of the most eye-opening is that many environmental problems are best solved indirectly.

People generally don't want to live in smog/pollution if they have a choice but will do whatever it takes to survive even if that means harming the environment.

For example, no amount of lecturing or rainforest protests are going to stop people that depend on slash & burn for survival. Best option is to open up trade, provide GMOs & fertilizer, and provide economic opportunity so they have options other than slash & burn.

You also see this with China, they've made huge progress environmentally, mostly because they can now afford to.

I believe some of them can't be mixed, like if you throw something oily and paper in the same bin, the paper can't be used anymore. Also plastic bags make things very difficult to sort, and are difficult to separate from other things.

I'm skeptical that it will ever be economical in a scalable way to mine landfills, but I don't know enough to dispute it.

Whoever's first to figure out garbage mining will be phenomenally wealthy.

Yes it is a good use of time. Our community (400K) has a green bin program as well as recycling. Green bins are for organic waste. Our community's landfill diversion rate is 81%. Landfill waste only needs to be picked up once every two weeks. We are looking to increase landfill diversion rate through textile recycling.

So yes it is good because it is the only solution we have on hand that is effective. Development of reclamation techniques should be done in parallel to landfill diversion.

Single-stream recycling is pretty wasteful, so probably.

If everyone is personally familiar with the effort that goes into sorting trash/recycling, then they may be more likely to reduce their trash usage.

Is mining something from a landfill really a good use of time?

Only if it can be automated in the future.

> Is careful sorting of trash/recycling really a good use of time?

Price mechanisms let you answer that question yourself. Say you have 5 bags' worth of rubbish of which 3 bags' worth is recyclable. You can either spend the time to sort the one from the other, or you can pay for 2 extra bags.

If 25 Liters is a “tiny” bathroom trash can I shudder to think what is used in the kitchen.

Right. We put 3 liter bags into our tiny bathroom trash can, and 25 liter bags into the big kitchen trash can.

In Vancouver we have standardized waste bins which come in different sizes, and the amount you pay the city annually for waste collection depends on the size of bin you choose.

(Recyclables are handled separately and there's no charge for them regardless of the volume you're leaving for collection.)

This system is a great incentive for people to put all sorts of stuff into recycling that they shouldn't.

I'm not sure what it's like in Vancouver, but in Niagara Falls if the garbage people see something in your recycle bins that isn't supposed to be there they don't pick up the bin and leave a note saying what was wrong.

Norway and the Netherlands are successfully trialling waste-to-energy with carbon capture. If some waste cannot be economically recycled, why not use it as fuel for electricity generation?

We're still going to need some amount of fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. A yoghurt pot or a pizza box might not be recyclable using current processes, but it's perfectly good fuel.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187661021... http://www.vivis.de/phocadownload/Download/2017_eaa/2017_EaA...

We have the pay-as-you-throw waste model in my city in GA. I think it works very well. We also have a very liberal recycling policy. I think these things really changed my family's trash habits for the better.

Japan has a similar bag system too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv68j5KQUU4

Now you doubled CO2 emissions of your fleet and incentivize people to litter or dump in public trash cans.

A better solution would be human or robotic waste sorting at the dump, or clean incineration.

Agree completely. Saw it firsthand in Fiji. City trash fee just drives people to dump in the bushes. My suggestion of adding dumpsters was met with concerns about reducing tax revenues. Yeah, they don't have dumpsters because they are afraid people will put trash in them, FFS :(

I’ve teavelled entire Taiwan by car and did not notice any excessive dumping.

Yes, and that's a dataset of n=1. Things like littering have a million different factors go into them, including culture. It's not unreasonable to think that in other cultures, increasing the incentive to litter would in fact increase litter.

An exponential fine on littering would, however, absolutely destroy any incentives on littering. Starting with $10^n, where n is the n'th time you are caught littering. Also a corporate fine for dumping trash and waste illegally, $1000^n.

It really is not hard to take care of your environment!

I have to counter regarding incentives with my own annecdote. I was buying a lot of sparkling water and got tired of collecting and recycling the empties. I bought a popular carbonating unit.

I suspect culture will have a huge impact on how well the solution works.

I would love robotic waste sorting, I hope someone is working on that!

Perhaps a color coding for different materials would make consumer and robotic sorting simpler.

This or a very primitive 4 bit rfid

This works pretty well in Germany too, and in Palo Alto, but it causes people in the UK and in eastern California (and likely other places too) to just dump their trash by the side of the road.

If anyone is interested in seeing these crazy garbage trucks, I have a video. You can hear them coming from far away.

https://youtu.be/BtpWn6PuDX0

This model of only accepting trash in official bags, or requiring a pre-paid sticker/tag for each bin/bag collected is quite common around the world. Certainly not unique to Taiwan.

Switzerland does this too, the bags have a little stamp or sticker that costs $5. There are also 10 different bins to presort waste. It works quite well. They put a lot of effort into the design and ease of use at the collection stations (which are free vs the for pay garbage). It's called "polluter pays".

They also enforce like Taiwan, $10,000 find for illegal dumping. And they actually look through your trash for bills and letters with your address. The Swiss don't seem to love the system, more like tolerate it.

Cool pictures:

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

There's a picture of the 10 bin recycling thing halfway down this page:

https://www.quora.com/How-can-we-make-Kathmandu-a-clean-city

-removed by author-

Because no city had ever passed laws that the President doesn’t like.

And the President is also in charge of local waste disposal, as we all know.

-removed by author-

> the executive branch followed certain norms around this, until this administration

Which norms? Which administration didn't act differently than all others? Reagan firing the FAA unionizers was a new one.

Obama said he couldn't “waive away the law Congress put in place.” DHS went and legalized a few million anyway, years later. Sounds very familiar, but somehow different?

I'm not sure what you're talking about, but it sounds awfully revisionist.

It sounds similar to the Japanese model. But it requires serious changes to the type of goods produced. For instance, Japanese drink bottles have labels that can easily be removed because the bottle, cap, and label are recycled separately. It's not like you just start categorizing the trash and you're done.

Also, the way waste management is handled at the municipal level definitely complicates things for us.

This is a very bad idea, because people will just throw out trash in the environment. It is a thousand times better to have trash thrown in a proper dump rather than on the street, in a back alley or in the wilderness. Most of the plastic trash that is causing problems is improperly dumped trash.

25 liters is like a medium to large kitchen trash.

Given an estimated 13 liters per person per week in the household here, $5 for 20 isn't providing a whole lot of incentive.

Pay per bag is not uncommon in the US where trash is collected by private companies. Many charge for each bag they pick up.

That pay-as-you-go system is used in Wellington, NZ as well.

Recycling bags are free, but you have to pay for landfill bags (around $2). That way, there's an incentive to recycle as you save money.

> the residents sort their recyclables and compost into thirteen distinct bins

13. There's a moment you have to choose between the fine and getting the fuck out of stupid land. Around 3 different bins will do it for me: consumers waste is nothing compared to industrial waste. Trash sorting is the little act which help some people feel good but helps a lot less than not going on their annual holiday to the other side of the world. It's green theatre.

It's incredible that corporations are allowed to pump out massive quantities of single use plastic and then we blame the consumer for not recycling it. The idea that the solution is to change the habits of billions of people rather than enforce some rules on a few thousand companies is just crazy.

It's the same with drought conditions in California, asking millions of people who collectively use like 7% of the water supply to sacrifice, with no attention to the small number of agriculture/industry companies using 93% of the water.

>The idea that the solution is to change the habits of billions of people rather than enforce some rules on a few thousand companies is just crazy.

It's an idea that those companies themselves invented and promulgated. https://web.archive.org/web/20050401192355/http://www.altern... (edit: archive to unbreak formatting)

As always, follow the money.

The entire packaging industry is ridiculous.

For example: Why do garbage bags come in boxes or bags when they could be stored inside a garbage bag that's folded up properly to contain them?

Marketing and shelf space reasons.

I'm confused. Don't they come on rolls? The most packaging I've known for garbage bags is a paper label holding the roll together.

Not around here. They're in rolls, but boxed.

That seems like a very small efficiency gain. At one bag per week, a single, recyclable cardboard box of 45 garbage bags will last you just under a year. Each box folds down to about one legal-size manilla envelope. I'm personally okay with wasting one manilla envelope per year.

It's an example of how the product could be the packaging. You, personally, use one box per year. Cleaning companies go through a lot more.

Even if it's just one box per year, it's one box that doesn't need to exist, the bag itself is more than adequate. That and the bag company has to buy boxes for no reason other than a lack of awareness on their own part.

A big part of the problem is consumer education, we're lazy by nature and marketing takes advantage of that, i've seen 3 peeled nectarines on a foil wrapped foam tray or tuna in metallized plastic pouches or srink-wrapped cucumbers or potatoes, my coworker bring his lunch on a foam tray everyday together with plastic fork and knife these are after discarded so he doesn't have to wash anything.

Whenever I by garbage bags, they come in a roll. The only packaging they have is a sticker for the barcode and sometimes a couple of rubber bands to keep them nicely rolled up.

I wish they sold them here like that. Instead they come in boxes for reasons I cannot explain.

Not only that but consumers can be punished for not recycling or disposing of these things properly and yet corporations not only don't have punishments for this stuff but they're incentivized to further increase the quantities produced and, on top of that, make them cheaper which further increases the likelihood of the items being non-recyclable.

You know that famous Indian crying from litter on the highway campaign? It was funded by the packaging industry. It was part of a propaganda campaign (a.k.a public relations) by packaging company to place the blame on litter and non-reusable packaging on the consumer instead of the industry.

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

Looks exactly like the "Jaywalking" playbook:

https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-invention-of-jaywalking-...

EDIT: As an aside, the argument that buying a new car is waste always annoyed me. Maybe if I crushed my old car, but how does changing owners shorten the useable life of a car?

Ditto for smartphones. So what if I upgrade every year, when the device I had 5 years ago is still being used by someone else and is fine for their needs?

> EDIT: As an aside, the argument that buying a new car is waste always annoyed me. Maybe if I crushed my old car, but how does changing owners shorten the useable life of a car?

What's the person who buys your car doing with their old car? Presumably either crushing it or selling it on to someone with an even older car. If we assume a constant number of drivers (for simplicity) then every new car bought ultimately corresponds to one car getting disposed of.

I think we blame the person who buys it, as we should.

I used to live in central New Jersey, where the people of Waste Management would send out quarterly fliers telling people "When in doubt throw it out"[0]

I now live in Seattle, and when I tell people this campaign, they get extremely preachy and judgmental. Then when I try to explain that no, it's actually better for the environment, things really go no where. I should probably just give up on that.

[0] http://www.hamiltonnj.com/filestorage/228309/252258/Calendar...

We used to have separate stream recycling here... it was actually easier, you put glass and metal in one bin, I believe 1&2s in the next and 3s in the third, everything else was tossed.

I've had this fight with my roommate here in Seattle as well. He obsesses over which thing goes into our recycle bin. Trashing it fixes a lot of the overhead and you can always recycle glass/metal easily.

If you are forced to haul your own trash 10 miles to town as we are, you really want to separate the recycling because it significantly reduces the volume of trash (which can't be stored for long) vs recycling (which can). Also bears aren't interested in recycling material.

Method cleaning products was usually a little understated about their environmental bent.

One particular time they got loud was when they created a non-recyclable package for refills for their hand soap and dish soap dispensers.

From memory, they looked at the net recovery rate for the material they were considering, and it was something like 30% after inputs. But they could engineer a durable water tight material that was less than 20% of the thickness of the recyclable version, and which packed better meaning lower shipping costs (and resources).

And given that these were for refills (Reuse!), they felt fully justified in making disposable packaging. But apparently a little defensive...

> I now live in Seattle, and when I tell people this campaign, they get extremely preachy and judgmental.

Seattle and the region have been leading recyclers for decades. Waste Management sends a similar brochure to King County residents: http://wmnorthwest.com/kingcounty/calendars/guidelines.pdf

They do have the brochures, but they are missing one of the important ideas (maybe just my opinion) "When in doubt, throw it out", meaning that economically and environmentally it is better to err on the side of throwing away something recyclable rather than erring on the side of contaminating the stream with something that is not recyclable.

And while the pacific northwest is good at getting things into the recycling stream, it might not always be for the best, and end up in the landfill anyway: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfil...

Heh, first time I've seen this part:

• Two (2) feet apart with lids opening toward street • At least three (3) feet from cars, trees and mailboxes, fences and utility boxes

Lol. Yeah. As if there's enough room on the street to do that with modern townhouse designs.

This has long driven me crazy. I have a version of this argument with my wife every few weeks. I live in a city that has three bins: compost, landfill, and recycling, and overall the city (SF) does a really good job apparently of sorting trash.

But if you want a system that doesn't break down if someone throws a handful of batteries in the compost bin, then someone or something somewhere still has to sort the trash stream.

So, at best, you've used all the labor of everyone in SF to reduce the number of people/things/processes downstream to sort the trash properly.

So, yes, the ball is ultimately in the manufacturer's court for a lot of this, but home recycling is at best a terrible use of labor/time/money. Raise taxes to hire more sorting capability, because if it requires 100 more trained humans sorting somewhere downstream that's surely less than all-the-people-in-SF-a-few-minutes-everyday to do a less-than-perfect job.

Also, I think a lot of these laws also do another disservice in that they make people feel like they're doing something to help the situation which keeps them from actually solving the problem.

Like the new plastic straws ban to keep plastic out of the ocean. If the problem is "keep plastic out of the ocean", then solve "why does plastic get in the ocean" problem. Banning plastic straws might be part of the solution, but what seems to happen so often is that we make one of these "feel-good" laws that keeps a negligible amount of plastic out of the ocean, and I have to drink out of a shitty straw, and people think that someone we've made substantive progress to a real solution.

> If the problem is "keep plastic out of the ocean", then solve "why does plastic get in the ocean" problem.

But then how can someone start a KickStarter so you have to carry a thick metal straw around with you all day and then have to think about cleaning every time you use it, and in between different drinks if you don't want to have your first drink contaminate the taste of the second? https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/908228738/finalstraw-th...

I just stopped using straws a couple years ago when I got my tonsils out and couldn't use them – never went back.

Just drink like you would from any other cup. You don't need a straw. And honest to god things taste better without a straw. You'll drink less sugary trash and appreciate it more.

It's slightly inconvenient with my super cool mustache.

A Kickstarter opportunity for some sort of fashionable IoT enabled moustache drinking shield.

On the blockchain.

Single-stream recycling is a good alternative to this, and has been implemented in Austin. They essentially take your idea to the limit - if someone has to go through it anyway, why not just put it all in one big bin and sort it out later? So they do. Mostly works?

According to the article, that doesn't work at all, though. Not only does the stuff not get sorted properly in the end but things that could have potentially been recycled are now unable to be recycled because they're contaminated.

That doesn't sound like a "mostly works" scenario except in the most bare definition of the phrase.

I think it “mostly works” for the company with the cushy contract to provide single stream recycling.

> I have a version of this argument with my wife every few weeks.

You make some good points here no doubt, but recycling is definitely not worth arguing with your wife over. Be loving and overlook her (perceived) faults.

I'd argue that having (respectful) arguments is a pretty healthy thing for a couple.

One solution to this problem is for one of you to develop a serious drug habit or to have an affair.

You're not wrong, but home diversion isn't entirely pointless. The best tax-funded downstream sorting system is no match for the moldy lasagna covering the scrap paper in your OmniToss Multi-Bin™.

Moving towards a standard where all food waste is compostable (except, probably, metal cans) seems like a big step forward. Food waste is generally the most unpleasant to handle, so its presence makes sorting the remainder of the stream more difficult. In Japan, some municipalities have a special system for food waste:

https://www.japanfs.org/en/news/archives/news_id027774.html

This sounds like a difficult problem, because compostability and shelf stability are contradictory goals. Pretty much by definition, anything that doesn't break down on a store shelf after a day, is going to pile up in the compost pile. It's not a problem for fresh foods intended to be consumed that day, but if your produce bags were compostable, they would not be very useful.

My produce bags are compostable, and they work fine. For one, they don't need to last very long - you can't keep produce for weeks anyway. For another, they mostly only break down in the environment of a municipal composting system, which gets hot and is quite different from your backyard compost heap.

Grocery stores around where i live in the sf bay area seem to be switching to them. I think they tried earlier, but I'm guessing they were too much more expensive?

Quite a marvel of engineering, from what i can tell.

Your point still stands though - shelf packaging needs to be pretty robust.

I expect compostable waste is just so messy its less work overall to keep it separate. But if it is as economical to separate after mixing as you expect, then its a business opportunity.

Plastic straws end up in the ocean because straws are given out when people purchase drinks. Those straws are then thrown indiscriminately into rivers or the ocean, or thrown off a cruise/boat, or left by the beach for the tides to swallow them up. You can't fix human behavior as there will always be people who just don't give a f. A ban on plastic straws is probably one of the best solutions.

On the whole multi-bin thing that puts the burden on people to sort their trash - I totally agree with you. I've never understood why that was necessary. In the end, the trash still needs to be sorted anyway, since, again, some people DGAF.

> Also, I think a lot of these laws also do another disservice in that they make people feel like they're doing something to help the situation which keeps them from actually solving the problem.

Suppose home recycling is pointless and all it does is annoy consumers for no reason. Could that cause consumers to buy things in packages that are easier to recycle? It's possible that if government took care of that, consumers would stop caring about it and produce a lot more trash.

To be clear, I'm not saying home recycling is completely pointless. I think it does a lot to raise awareness that "all this has to go someplace, so at least think about it". But that's PR, not a solution.

I'd prefer some sort of solution that directly impacted your wallet if you didn't give a shit about what waste you produce. I'm not sure what that is, but a similar example would be "save water during a drought" or just "save water" PR campaigns. Don't waste everyone's time with a bunch of easily-ignored signs and commercials. Charge 5 bucks a gallon for water. When your sprinkler watering the sidewalk all night costs you 1500 dollars, you'll be sure not to do that twice.

And you save money on TV commercials and waste less trees making posters. :-)

Let's look at some actual numbers without the hype.

"91% of potentially recyclable plastic ends up in landfills, or worse, in oceans."

So right there, no ratio. How much goes into the landfill and how much into the ocean? Because lets face it:

Landfill>Ocean

For comparison, 8m tonnes of plastic ends up in the ocean annually according to the cited 2015 UCSB study: http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2015/014985/ocean-plastic

That's 8m tonnes globally. The US makes about 30m tonnes a year. What's the US' share of plastic in the ocean?

https://jambeck.engr.uga.edu/landplasticinput

About 340 tonnes a year. Yeah, that's a lot, but that's 0.00425% of the total. We're in 20th place.

China drops 2.4m tonnes a year. About 30% of all the plastic waste that goes into the ocean each year.

Article does nothing to point out the plastic waste just getting chucked into rivers in India and Asia.

My cynical take is that these kinds of articles are cooked up in major polluters PR departments. It's classic misdirection, and we seem to fall for it every time.

Also how countries are still delivering their waste to there knowingly(!) that it has a high chance of reaching the ocean. They want to get rid of it for the lowest cost and then blame the other country for not following through.

How much of that 2.4m tonnes comes from other countries though? And the other countries know that it's not getting recycled properly yet still send it over to offload their guilt.

Also you can't just use raw numbers as the population numbers are completely different. Waste generated per capita (excluding and import/export) would be a more accurate metric.

None, at the moment, considering China just instituted a plastic waste import ban.

But you're still implying that people are sending it to China in order to alleviate themselves of guilt, without China's consent. That's crap. They were conducting waste/recycling operations for business. If you agree to send plastic waste to China, then it's on China NOT to chuck the plastic in a river. Just because they're negligent doesn't make you liable.

I think the article makes some good points but it keeps jarring me with the "impossible to recycle" statements.

There is "recycling" as implied by the author of the article which is that the material is converted into feedstock to make the same material again, there is "recycling" which can be defined by "is used again", and their is "recycling" which is defined as "it didn't end up in a landfill or ocean." The nuance is important.

For example, you can chemically break down plastic by exposing it to high heat in an oxygen free environment (like a nitrogen)[1]. For many polymers this will reduce it to essentially various long chain polymers, some water vapor, and some left over carbon. You can incinerate plastic in a closed loop exhaust system and extract net positive energy from it. You can mechanically decompose it (think shreedding) and then either ultrasonically or thermally bond into engineered materials (which are not yogurt cups but can provide structural insulation for example)

I had thought at one time that using an engineered material approach you could make things like picnic tables for Forest Service campgrounds (they would be extremely durable, insect and weather immune, and difficult to burn) however in discussions with people who could advocate for such a program I learned that they often just re-used lumber they were clearing as part of the forest management mission for such things so their materials were "free" to begin with. Conceptually though I still like the idea.

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/app.1974.070...

Startup I will never get around to:

A store which sells only bulk and fresh food, and durable containers: mesh bags, Mason jars, glass bottles.

Every container, dispenser, and display has a scale, and unlocks with a nearfield chip. Enter the store, tap phone or insert chip card, get a card.

Fill up your cart, stick the card back into the slot, get charged, done. One customer service kiosk for buying back clean containers at 80% of retail cost.

Depending on where you live, it might already (mostly) exist, minus the NFC part.

Grocery co-op in my area has a big back room of bulk goods, sells durable containers too, run by hippies and has been around for decades.

The real hurdles with selling bulk & having customers reuse containers is handling tare smoothly and getting customers to remember to bring their containers.

There was a zero-waste grocer in Austin, but they recently went out of business. http://austin.culturemap.com/news/restaurants-bars/04-25-18-...

So the exact opposite if Blue Apron?

There's a store in Berlin selling food without packaging: https://original-unverpackt.de/

There's a network of those in France, called "Day by Day". Most items are sold without packaging. Apparently they started in 2013.

http://daybyday-shop.com

Call me crazy but I'd love to see the next round of LEED certifications require any food establishment with seating for dining required to serve with reusable dinnerware and utensils, i.e. plates, forks, knives, spoons, cups and glasses. The amount of plastic wasted by people like me who get lunch from a food court, walk ten feet away to eat lunch and then toss single use items is astounding.

Yet there's no other solution without restaurants moving back to reusable items: health code won't allow them to take my container for food nor should it.

It's true you can't carry your own plate around and expect restaurants to serve your food on it, but unless you're eating soup this component is often the only one that can be made truly compostable without significant compromise. And you can always reject single-use utensils and rock your own fork.

I'd love to see that too. I've seen a range of industrially-compostable products, such that I feel it ought to be possible to eliminate the recycling bin altogether (for plastics, I guess metals/glass/paper still work), and have cities/states mandate the use of compostable packaging. They'd save a ton on reducing landfill/plastics recycling, and also being able to sell the resulting compost.

It's way past time to start pricing in externalities. More of a push to "reduce and reuse".

Lets start with the supply chain. Don't just dump this on consumers. I want to see less individually plastic wrapped/boxed fruit.

Consumers are at fault there, too. If people didn't buy it, companies wouldn't produce it. Consumers need to be disincentivized from purchasing such wasteful products.

Consumers are limited because suppliers (in aggregate) often control the market.

If all the stores supply wasteful products, what are your options. If you're a store and you have limited options on what you can sell (because all the suppliers have wasteful packaging) what are your options?

The problem (plastic junk) comes from the supply-side. It doesn't really help consumers for the most part - heck I think most would prefer fruit that was local (all else being equal).

Granted, it should be attacked from all sides, but how much of that do consumers actually need?

It's possible (not easy, nor very practical let's say) to have almost zero waste if you're really dedicated. This is 4 years worth of trash that fits in a mason jar: https://youtu.be/BxKfpt70rLI?t=30s

So making a pretty sizable reduction even as things are should be doable.

Easy if there were more alternatives. Most products are packaged in plastic with no alternatives. I recently saw a shop which is committed to selling everything in open crates (fruits/veggies - bring your own bags) or using only 100% recyclable materials (glass, paper or biodegradable plastic).

Exactly. In addition to regulation on what is okay packaging, if producers somehow had more responsibility for where the end waste goes, it would encourage a closed system

It's in corporations interest to shift the responsibility entirely in the consumer

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-per...

Don't regulate packaging, put a Pigouvian Tax on it. It's far better.

Why is that? A tax is slower and exempts the wealthy while inflicting the costs onto the poor.

Regulation is cheaper, better, fairer and faster at getting policy implemented than a technical tax, and doesn't have the behavioral issues that abound when telling people they are "taxed" for doing something.

Taxes don't always need to be slower or more weighted to lower income (e.g. property taxes). However, they tend to be gamed more easily and sometimes have unintended consequences.

Regulation and taxes go hand in - how are you going to pay for regulatory enforcement unless you dip into some general fund? Answer: a tax.

The biggest lie about government is the one that claims all taxes are bad. Without taxes, you get Somalia. Someone is going to run the roads/commerce and enforce a tax to do so - do you want it to be the local strongman or an elected official (where you may be able to vote on how taxation works and/or vote someone else in)?

Taxes are fine, but thinking that you can replace regulation with a tax -- pigouvian or no -- is fantasy

Prices do a great deal of work communicating and providing feedback about what consumers value. When you ban the product outright, you lose any ability to use that price information to make good tradeoffs between various goals of environmental improvement and consumer satisfaction. Ignoring the price that these regulations put on consumers isn't in their best interest.

The underlying problem is that manufacturers of things we buy have been permitted to "externalize" part of their supply chain cost (onto the rest of us).

So the fix would be to un-do that : if you sell something, you have to take back all the waste and packaging.

Probably not going to happen, but this is the real problem.

Or just charge manufacturers a "packaging tax" based on weight and composition of any materials included with a product but not part of said product. You could use the money to pay for better sorting of the waste stream.

Hence it is always important to remember: reduce, reuse and recycle, in that order. You don't have to recycle if you can reuse.

While I agree with that order of operations so to speak, I'm not sure why the responsibility is pushed onto consumers. It's hard to make a choice when it comes down to plastic, plastic, or plastic.

What is being/can be done to get companies to stop using plastic in packaging? I understand that it is necessary for a lot of modern conveniences, but surely there is something that can be done to curb the production and use on the manufacturing side.

The problem is that companies use a stupidly ridiculous amount of plastic. The other week I bought some dessert which had a non-recyclable box, then each portion was in a non-recyclable plastic cup, held in place by a non-recyclable plastic tray with a non-recyclable plastic lid on each cup. Absolutely insane.

That's the place for regulation. Let's forbid the damned thing or at least tax it heavily. Anything not reusable? Make them pay for externalities.

It is completely possible to orient purchases away from plastic. In fact if someone believes that plastic is bad then they should have some stake in it by making those decisions themselves.

I went through reducing my plastic use myself, it was not difficult to reduce my plastic use by 50% or more:

A: look at my trash before I move it to the curb to see what plastic things were in there

B: find substitute for the obvious things, like using water bottles, buying vegetables using reusable bags instead of buying them in packages, switching to a non-plastic dental floss, etc

... and that is all. Companies respond to consumer demand. You can play a part in it by orienting your demand to non plastic items.

I'm all for personal responsibility but I don't think that there is a critical mass to invoke production changes. (Anecdotally) for every one person I know taking the time to be conscious, I know two that couldn't care less.

I believe most people fall into the 'not my problem' bucket.

If someone wants to reduce plastic in the world but doesn't change their own behavior then it is hard to take them seriously.

> What is being/can be done to get companies to stop using plastic in packaging?

On the "is being done" front, order stuff from the Amazon Basics line, which packages everything in (1) cardboard that is (2) easy to open without slicing your own fingers.

Products sold at retail are purposefully put in huge plastic envelopes that are nearly impossible to open. This serves two goals related to preventing shoplifting - the thief can't get the tiny item out of its packaging while in the store, and the packaging is too large to carry out of the store without being obvious. It's all downside for customers.

But selling goods by mail-order doesn't have shoplifting problems, so shippers are free to use packaging that's less likely to injure the customer. The catch is that you need to buy something that is never intended to be sold retail anywhere.

Then we need to reduce the amount of garbage produced.

"Plastics make it possible" to be wasteful.

Yes! And you can extend it to five R's: Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose, and Recycle.

You don't have to buy or accept products that can harm you, your company or the environment. Vote with your dollar. Refuse non-recyclable giveaways/swag; plastic bags; toxic chemical solvents; items with unnecessary packaging; single use plastic; phone books.

Use less. Think about what you use and buy. Reduce junk mail, mailed bills; acquisition of unnecessary toys and tools; the amount of energy you use; water and wastewater; waste in manufacturing processes; acquisition of cheap products that may not last long.

Why buy something twice when you can buy it once and reuse it over and over again, such as cloth grocery and produce bags; water bottles/travel mugs; packable metal cutlery set; glass jars from pickles, jellies, and salsa; bring old takeout containers for restaurant doggy bags; a normal mop head rather than a disposable; washable dish cloths rather than paper towels; refurbished or used clothes, electronics, cars, etc; building materials from home improvement donation centers; rechargeable batteries; shoes and boots that can be resoled or re-glued; sewing for minor tears in clothes; borrow or rent rather than purchasing for one use; food scraps as flavoring for stocks and soups; food waste as composte; leftover plastic bags as waste containers or for organizing.

Take something and use it for something else. Repurpose junk mail envelopes as scrap paper; cereal bag liners, for handling/storing foods or organizing home goods; torn or worn clothes as rags; donate unneeded items rather than throwing away; tires as wall insulation or boat fenders; glass bottles for glass walls; plastic drums as floats, feed troughs, compost bins, rain barrels.

If the above 4 options won’t work (refer to this guide as well http://thegreeningofwestford.com/2012/02/how-to-recycle-ever...) recycle paper, plastic, metal, and glass; fabrics and textiles, including ripped or stained; electronics, accepted at some electronics stores and special recycling centers; wine corks, accepted at some wine and food stores; home good and building materials, to re-stores and habitat for humanity; books, home goods, clothing, and other items to thrift stores.

A remarkably accurate summary of the mess we've brought upon ourselves. It very much is a game, or recycling theatre.

I'm always confused why we aren't pyrolyzing refuse and reusing the hydrocarbons in them.

It's energetically and monetarily expensive, but both costs are more or less paid for by the output products and input products, as far as I am aware. And you get out fairly high quality fuels.

My guess is that you may end up with more than just hydrocarbons, and then you have to dispose of those waste byproducts. You certainly wouldn't do this to electronic waste, but, perhaps, if you could guarantee a pure stream of plastics, you could make it work.

Well, one of the major problems is that if you pyrolyze PVC you get hydrochloric acid as a byproduct, but you can extract that by washing. These are known, operating plants, they just aren't operational here, for whatever reason.

Air pollution is worse than landfills. Incineration increases our exposure to heavy metals and dioxins. Burning plastic is a fairly nasty process and can only be done "cleanly" at very high temperatures.

Trash also contains stuff like batteries that explode when burned.

Not incineration. Pyrolysis, in an anoxic environment. It's the same process by which syngas is produced, except that the results are longer chain carbons and thus just have to be cracked and distilled rather than Fischer-Tropsch'd into usable feedstocks. You use about 30% of the input mass of organics to power the process (usually the lightest fraction that is equivalent to syngas), and the result is about 10% waste material and 60% usable mass fractions in the fuel-to-wax range, just like a normal oil refinery.

There is only one answer, ban all consumable plastics. Absolutely no reason to use them when alternatives exist in every application of them.

I think I could handle one bin for plastic, one bin for metal+glass, one bin for paper. Anything more complicated I don't really trust myself do right without a lot of vigilance.

And I've heard that things as typical as staples in the cardboard/paper stream ruin everything cost-wise, which makes it all seem sort of lost-cause-ish.

At one point in NYC we had to use four - FOUR - different bins. In a tiny ass apartment. And still, there were so many damn edge cases that I gave up. Sorry, but I have a full time job and plenty to do outside of work. Make the recycling process easy on my end and I'll do it. Make it ridiculously complicated and I won't.

Honest question - at what point do my tax dollars cap out and the onus gets put back on me? Might be naive, but I always wanted to know the answer.

The 70% landfill rate for Europe is probably true but if you look at countries individually it’s a completely different stories. The top 10 recycling countries in the EU have leas than 5% landfilled plastics.

https://www.plasticseurope.org/application/files/5715/1717/4...

While the marketers will cry, if more packaging was more standardized then reuse would be easier and ideally less expensive.

The standardization of shipping containers made the movement of goods more effective and less expensive. It's time to do the same for packaging.

As a side note: perhaps less disposable is appropriate at times as well. Those 16.9 oz water bottles are purposely one-and-done. It's 2018. Certainly someone can find a way to make them so they can be reused.

I have no affiliation with the company Renewlogy (formerly PK Clean) in Salt Lake City, but they have a very interesting method for turning plastic into diesel fuel that is in use today:

https://www.deseretnews.com/article/900014582/utah-based-ren...

The Chinese ban on plastics is not having a major impact in Salt Lake City, according to Sophia Nicholas, Salt Lake City sustainability department communications manager.

Officials in both Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County say they are still picking up plastics from recycling bins as usual. By contract, none of that is ending up in landfills. Salt Lake City's contracts require the recycling vendors to accept and recycle plastics No. 1 through No. 7.

“We know that there is a lot of a upheaval right now,” Nicholas said. “But the markets are dynamic and they’re finding other alternatives for that type of material.”

The city of Boise, Idaho, recently banned plastics No. 3 through No. 7 in its recycling program and contracted with Renewlogy. Residents must separate those plastics into separate bags that now come to Salt Lake City.

Unfortunately that article reads like a press release from "Renewlogy" and doesn't seem to have a complete basis in reality. In reality at present the area is facing a $900,000 increase in recycling costs largely because china isn't taking it anymore.

https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2018/06/26/curbside-...

-snip, self-censorship for safety-

This is a good point. I’m reminded of a thread from yesterday: [1]. There are tons of places where nobody gives a single crap about waste disposal. The sides of the roads are literal trash heaps. “The West” is not going to solve this global problem by making everyone sort their trash into 10 different bins. It needs to stop at the source: the companies producing all this waste (mostly discarded packaging).

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17403526

EDIT: updated for the sensitive

small nit - the sorting of trash is not the exclusive domain of women. "by making people sort their trash". :-)

(I say this as the household Ph.D. trash sorter...)

Thanks for updating. --the sensitive.

This. Visit Mumbai and tell one of the hundreds of million people that live on 50 cents a day to use their last ounce of energy to walk a piece of plastic to the trash can. I recycle gladly in California, but am realistic that problems at this scale MUST and WILL be solved by technology. Instead of finger wagging, readers of Hacker News may be the most qualified for building a machine that crawls dumpsites searching for plastic.

I get so angry when people throw trash from the car window.

Have you ever heard of leading by example?

It's not mutually exclusive to coercion.

The entire population of Azerbaijan is less than Los Angeles (The greater LA area at least). The US is huge and our per capita pollution is a lot higher too.

So because no one recycles in your country, everyone else should adopt your standards and not recycle too?

I think this should be added to the comment guidelines: please don't ask leading, nonconstructive questions as comments.

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

should cover it

I've always thought the single bin was stupid. Remember when you at least separated paper, plastics and cans? It's way way easier, efficient and less labor intensive for a consumer to do that very basic sorting than getting a facility to do it.

It's like data entry people who copy paper forms to a machine. Why not have a device the consumer can type their own data into? You'll get less mistakes and save a lot of time.

Having four basic sort bins is a very low effort for the person throwing shit out. It also reduces the amount of contaminates and makes life easier for people who do have to sort through all that.

American bottle deposits also suck pretty bad compared to our EU counterparts. At least in The Netherlands and Germany, every shop that sells glass has to take that glass back. Many have machines that scan the barcodes on the bottle and issue you a ticket you can use for purchases or cash.

The bottles actually get reused too. Old German beer bottles often have physical have grooves on them from the plastic rollers in machines! They get reused that much!

As much as I hate plastics, I find that it is here to stay. As consumers, what we can do is to reduce the plastics that we use. Re-use plastic bags. Re-use takeout containers (always have a bunch of them in my car). Reduce purchases of food items that are wrapped in plastic (they are mostly processed food anyway). Buy produce that isn't shrink-wrapped. Don't use a straw for drinks. Don't ask for plastic cutlery when getting takeout.

I do think that some sort of tax on plastic use would help deter and reduce, but not completely eliminate plastic waste. Restaurants should be taxed on every plastic takeout container they use. Manufacturers, food producers should be taxed on plastic packaging. Blue Apron should be taxed for all the plastic containers that they send out to customers.

Maybe Elon Musk would be the new China and ship the world's plastic waste to space. It would cost quite a bit of fuel though so maybe it's not as sustainable or eco-friendly.

Someone pitch to Elon their bioreactor that converts plastic to rocket fuel.

I mean wouldn't that be cool?

I have single stream recycling and the shit that people put into it is ridiculous sometimes. Greasy pizza boxes are a popular one.

Our recycle company specifically told us to throw pizza boxes in the recycling. I'm told there are some ways to still use it just not in making paper again.

They can probably be composted.

There could be concerns over potential toxins arising from the breakdown of the inks and adhesives used in making the boxes entering the food stream?

Can't you just compost it?

In Minneapolis, greasy pizza boxes specifically go in organics recycling (aka "municipal compost"). Chicken bones and dairy products too - It's amazing what you can put in there.

http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/solid-waste/organics/index.h...

Huh, everywhere I've lived has specifically excluded pizza boxes.

I just checked our website again, and the flyer I remember seeing is gone, replaced with one that says pizza boxes are recyclable now. "No food residue. No liner." Accompanied by a picture of a clearly never used pizza box.

So now I'm not sure. Is oil soaked into it OK as long as you scrape every last bit of solid food out of it? Do you need no food residue (literally impossible), or is a small amount acceptable? I'm more informed than when I started, but still uncertain.

Apparently we can't recycle shredded paper, that's news to me. This list is now standardized across all of Connecticut. You can search an item and see what to do with it.

http://www.recyclect.com/

>You can put your pizza box in recycling if it does not contain food residue. The liner should go in the trash.

This is another problem: what goes in what bin is different in every city. I still don’t know if cardboard goes in trash, recycling or organically in my new city. Standardize the rules.

it isn't just different in every city, they change everywhere, all the time, unpredictably.

the university i worked at had different recycling rules than the city it was located in, because they operated their own little recycling facility. by the time i left the sorting rules they handed out to all 10,000 employees quarterly consumed an 8.5x14 sheet of colored paper.

a local fast food restaurant has something like four different disposal bins, and i'm pretty sure that at least 3 of them aren't mutually exclusive in their descriptions of what they accept. none of the bins match my understanding of what any of the local waste disposal companies accept in a given stream.

I think the basic problem is that there is no feedback mechanism for recycling. For example, I could judge an eaten-but-not-entirely-washed-out plastic container of hummus to be clean enough for recycling, but I will never know if it is ultimately recycled or thrown away once it leaves the green bin.

Machine learning could help consumers by leaps and bounds by being able to say with a picture or two whether a given item is recyclable.

I don’t know how you would incentivize people to use such an app, but I imagine options such as redeemable points or discounts (like paying less for coffee in a reusable container at most coffee shops) or public shaming (like when the power company tells you how much you spend on electricity versus your neighbors) could help make recycling more efficient.

Aside from that, though, I’m not sure how to do much more on the consumer side of things. As others have mentioned here, the choices are often plastic, plastic, and plastic.

Well, in Japan the trash all has labels telling you what category it is and they're much more fine-grained (you might have to peel off one part and throw it away separately from the rest, for instance).

During wartime, A significant difference to waste stream happened inside manufacturing, as a function of government directive. I believe its written up in quite a few places, my source is 'the peoples war' by Angus Calder.

In principle, if manufacturing is obligated to handle waste stream better, the evidence is, it can.

Fast Company published a good article [1] about the Precious Plastic effort [2] to spread open source DIY machines that recycle plastic. I hope someone helps them publish plans for a limonene-based styrofoam recycler as well, as that is supposedly a fairly simple reaction. Then agree upon standardized sizes, and manufacture bricks of plastic-encased styrofoam insulation, where the plastic casing is designed to interlock into near-airtight joints. Then pump out insulation for the housing of the co-op members helping, 4-5 feet thick, and you start creating near PassivHaus-grade insulation.

Use other plastics to create a mechanically interlocking building envelope perhaps, and thermal bridge isolation pieces, and you could drive ACH in the way building down.

Other uses for recycled plastics that would help those who are short on capital but long on sweat equity might include really large fan blades for whole room ceiling fans, shelving, storage boxes, body weight equipment like traveling rings, and playground equipment. All of these don't need to be sophisticated, and confer allow the capital-constrained to avoid having to use as much capital.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/40486883/these-diy-machines-let-...

[2] https://preciousplastic.com/en/index.html

I was thinking about this issue recently. Surely part of this is a UI issue. How do I know what is recyclable and what isn't? Do I need to prepare it in some way before I put it in the bin?

Governments have control over regulating a great number of things. Why not regulate packaging by requiring easy to identify recycling instructions? Standardise the bin colours across a large area - ideally an entire country - to make sure it is easy to provide 1-to-1 mappings between graphics and target bins, then require manufacturers provide clear labeling of how to dispose of the packaging. Surely the manufacturer knows without a doubt what it is making things out of. They should also know therefore how to recycle it. If some materials are more recyclable than others, regulate in favour of the more recyclable materials. Single material packaging should be favoured over multi-material packaging. Should it be rinsed before being added to a yellow bin? Have standardised graphics to show those two things.

If governments provides some incentive/encouragement/regulation for businesses to produce packaging that is not only recyclable, but also easily sorted by consumers, surely that will solve a lot of contamination issues and promote better practices by consumers.

It's quite typical that when somethung in the political realm fails, our instinctive diagnosis is moral.

House prices rise? Its either corporate greed or NIMBYism. People got addicted to medicines? Pharmaceutical companies are cynical. Welfare system is full of mess? You just can't trust poor ___ people. King lost a war? Someone hasn't been pious enough.

Pollution? Ecological degradation? Extinctions? No one cares any more. In the past, we lived in harmony with nature. We took no more than we needed. We had morals.

Bollocks. Morality is just the easy answer. These are practical problems, not moral ones. What we need is more competence, not more righteousness.

Anyway, I find this striking:

"91 percent of potentially recyclable plastic in the U.S. ended up in landfills – or worse, in the oceans. (79% in Europe)"

There is a massive difference between landfill and ocean. There is a massive difference between landfill 1 and landfill 2. Recycling has been idealised as some sort of moral goal. Garbage has been vilified as a moral failing. The practical impacts on the environment have a lot more to do with how much garbage makes it to landfill, and what they do with it there.

Give me 0% recycling and 0% stray garbage and I think we'd have a big net win.

I teach college and I see students throwing their empty recyclable bottles into the trash nearly every day when the recycling bin is literally right next to it.

I suspect that separating a stream of trash is simpler if the stream is younger and lower volume. Suppose we created a "Recycler" -- a mandatory household appliance like "Dishwasher" and "Dryer" and "Oven". This fantasy device has a few holes on top for common use cases, it beeps at the user if they screw up or when full, and it compacts the waste into small blocks. A cross between a paper shredder and trash compactor.

Since it integrates with your household Nest devices, you can link the device to the city waste department to receive sweet rebates on the electricity you wasted to power it. Rebates that the city pays for with the money they receive from taxes levied on manufacturers.

The entire scheme is far more wasteful than requiring manufacturers to pay for disposal of their packaging, but since it pushes even more burden onto the consumer I think it's a winner.

Is there a place where the world can provide ideas on how to solve complex global issues? Something that that curated the best ideas, forms pros and cons to approaches proposed and automatic weighs the risks? I guess what I imagine is some sort of machine learning solution that takes in account the knowledge of the internet and allows for weighing of various factors based on assigned trust scores. It seems weird that we live in this information rich society, a ton of ideas float around the web but they are never acted upon or formulated in ways that harness public support. Am I just envisioning a utopian idea or is this possible to build? There Must be a way to pull most prominent ideas into one place for public scrutiny without creating additional noise.

Whenever you think about plastic consumption, remember that gasoline weighs about 6 pounds a gallon.

Especially remember this if you drive to the grocery store and are precious about plastic bags.

I mean, please do make sure they end up in a properly managed waste stream, but maybe consider what to prioritize.

We should charge per unit of garbage generated (per liter or whatever), and have tracking on how much of it was actually recyclable, which would cause some percent of the price to be refunded (billed at a lower rate to encourage recycling). Otherwise we will be constantly drowning in trash. It blows my mind that we allow people to create as much trash as they want for a flat fee when there's such a negative externality affected on our environment and community, especially since it's a much less controversial and nebulous problem than something like climate change. Billing the consumer for trash affects the design of packaging and shipping of everything they consume.

My comment is late but it’s against the prevailing mood of the top comment -

People are ignoring a very critical factor - “disposable culture” is the brother of cheap and convenient goods.

This means that poor people can get cheap food in cheap packagaging with better safety levels than otherwise.

This means - packets of Singl use detergent - affordable to people in poverty.

It means less paper use - which means less pollution in the creation process.

Mumbai has asked people to not use plastic - meat vendors are asking people to bring tins to carry meat. Those need to be cleaned which means an increase in water use.

This is a much bigger problem than it seems.

the last paragraph is key. even if we recycled 100% of the plastic it still inevitably leads to pollution (all this talk about sorting is irrelevant!). we need to be using better materials.

It's not helpful to throw up our arms and say nothing can be done just because pollution wasn't eliminated 100%. It is helpful to compare magnitude. If we can reduce pollution by 1% or 10% or 90%... any amount is better than no reduction. If sorting helps 10%, and it takes almost no effort, then it's very relevant.

I agree that better materials is a good idea. Same goes for many other suggestions here, reducing demand, charging producers, new ways to reuse and recycle. It all helps. So don't give up before you start just because it can't be perfect. Nothing's perfect.

The plastics problem must be addressed by standardised, washable, refundable containers that manufacturers can package their products in and put a paper label on.

The packaging industry is creating an infinite flow of garbage and recycling is just the distraction that this industry creates to stop us being enraged at the unstoppable flow of garbage that it creates.

The idea of single use plastic wrappers for food or any other product must end.

Also the idea of destroyable/recyclable non-standard container sizes must end.

I'm working with a plastic recycler in Kenya that may be solving issues in a novel way: https://make-it-initiative.org/africa/cpt_startup/gjenge-ent...

Contact me if you want an intro to them, they are seeking grant and equity funding to grow their ability to recycle plastic bottles into building blocks

Until the issue is fixed, what’s wrong with landfills? What’s wrong with something taking a long time to decompose? My understanding is landfills done right are ok.

How is plastic waste ending up in landfills even a problem? If we don’t have the technology to efficiently recycle plastic waste now, we will in 50 years. Future landfill miners will praise us for our foresight. I’m having a hard time understanding the concern given the bigger environmental problems out there. Habitat loss, pollution, and climate change are less visible but more pressing problems.

The solution is charging people directly for trash pickup which creates more of an individual incentive to focus on product packaging. Also, you could offer incentives for collecting and (cleanly) burning plastic for energy (given its mostly petroleum based). Recycling programs today are a joke and often can’t breakeven

Increasing the burden on the consumers is just going to make individuals more opposed to whatever you're making them do. People already burn and dump trash on their own with the relatively light taxation we levy on them to process their garbage.

I wonder how bad are the economics of going back to glass for product packaging, eg, like milk bottles. We still do it for beer so it mustn't be atrocious. Could we make inroads that way? I'm envisioning there'd be order 1-2 dozen standard bottle sizes to make recycling easy (cheap) to automate.

Caltech used to have a great recycling facility with dumpsters for the various kinds of plastic. It was open to the community and always in use. It required more time and attention to get it right but it certainly wasn't onerous. But then they bulldozed the facility to build more student housing.

Thought experiment. Does it actually make any sense to recycle things now that are going to last 100s or 1000s of years? Shouldn't we just landfill them and later, when we need them, and the technology is orders of magnitude better just go dig it up and recycle it then? Why recycle now?

Let’s not forget that this is also a cultural issue. When I compare living in Europe with living in the States for example I had to say that Americans use a lot more single use plastic than Europeans. Avoidance is possible. Maybe not to the same extent, but it definitely can play a role

I've often wondered about some kind of in home melting device for plastics, like a big pressure cooker. So much plastic recycling is actually empty containers. Heating and compressing would greatly reduce the footprint and might make reuse easier too? Would this be viable?

This is the result of corporate greed combined with the tragedy of the commons. Corporate greed makes the waste, consumers act primary in self-interest and select for short-term cheapness, and politicians don't want to reign or regulate that greed or consumer selfishness.

I still don't understand why we don't have a general tax on using certain materials that are hard to recycle or cause waste, if you taxed plastic per gram and made it more expensive to use than cardboard or aluminium we would see a major switch.

Doesn't better garbage sorting seem within reach of current machine learning tech and robotics?

The solution is charging people directly for trash pickup which creates more of an individual incentive to focus on consumer packaging. Also, you could offer incentives for collecting and (cleanly) burning plastic for energy (given its mostly petroleum based)

Why not levy a very substantial tax on this damaging product - like with do for cigarettes? Regulate with economic incentives seems usually to be the right solution. Also, if the US could just get to European levels, that would cut US waste by almost half.

I'd like to add. At this point, when possibe buy food in glass. For example, apple sauce.

What does this mean? REDUCING and REUSING plastic use is critical. Solutions to the recycling problem are poor at best and innovation takes time. Don't just put it in the better looking bin and expect that someone will "figure it out".

If we can't robotically seperate the different types of plastic presently, could we tag new plastics with something machine readable? Bar codes seem impracticle for some uses. So just invent a micro tag, I guess.

I get a ton of crap at work and other places for mentioning that consumer recycling is a giant farce and is nothing more than a distraction for the consumer so they can feel like they’re ‘doing somethkng’ while nothing that matters actually changes.

Here's an idea, why not collect all the soda bottles and place them in front of respective corporate head quarters? I am sure Coca Cola will get a kick out of it and they might do something about creating a recycling program.

In one state in Australia they used to have a pay per container returned so for example 5c per bottle.

If this buyback was paid for by the manufacturer it could incentivize recycling, create jobs and help pay for recycling and sorting.

unpopular opinion:

Add a sales tax on everything that has plastic in it.

If not using plastic increases the price then the majority of people just will not choose the more expensive option.

Sure motivated people will see the benefit, but most people will see shrink-wrapped item at $5.99 vs 'better' item at $6.50 and will just pick the cheaper one.

The app store pricing is an example of this. "$5 for a game is outrageous, i'm going to play this terrible one for $1 instead." well actually they are going to pick the free game with advertising, tracking, and all kinds of darkpatterns instead. but the idea is the same

What do modern plastic free food containers look like? Are they any good at keeping insects out? My mom tells me stories of how often candy bars had larvae in them back when they were just wrapped in paper.

One of the ways to solve this issue is to incentive or give rewards to customers who give back their plastic waste. In Germany and Scandinavia, its been in place for years.

I'm always impressed with how Japan handles recycling, despite being a heavy plastic user and producer. Last figure I read was 70% of all plastic recycled.

> While there ought to be a fine for the carcasses and Christmas lights...

Maybe, but I can tell you that passers-by put non-recyclable materials in my bins every chance they get.

I try to reuse some significant parts of our packaging stream, such as 1Kg yogurt containers, bringing them to the shop to use for mixing epoxy instead of buying mix cups.

Since I thought of recycling as having a high reuse rate (so having the hope that each bit of plastic might get used more than 2x), I used to think that this was a poor substitute and felt a bit bad about it.

Since reading a number of articles like this, I feel much better about it, since this material is at least getting 200% of the original use, which seems considerably greater than the actual recycling re-use rates.

So, reuse > recycling, yay!

I preferred the 3 separate ones.. cans, plastic, paper. Made it easy to keep the food/water/residue crap off the paper.

I have seen lots of gripes here about corporate America in these comments, but very little in the way of realistic solutions.

Real solution is to move the cost up the chain such that there is a "plastic tax" like there is a carbon tax.

You could pay per item, so people would not recycle items that they won't get paid for...

Why not ban manufacturing certain plastics that end up in consumers' hands?

Annie Leonard has a great piece on the history of the "individual accountability" trash movement. TL;DR: it's an accountability avoidance maneuver by the drinks, beverages, and fast-food industries, principally.

http://www.worldwatch.org/system/files/AlterNet-SOW13-AL-102...

(Mostly the same material here: https://www.salon.com/2014/06/18/big_plastics_pr_disaster_wh...)

Her book and project, The Story of Stuff, are highly recommended.

https://storyofstuff.org/about/annie-leonard/

Maybe because they are "consumers"

TLDR:

> 91 percent of potentially recyclable plastic in the U.S. ended up in landfills – or worse, in the oceans.

> Yes, trash has become complicated

> Even if consumer participation in recycling were 100 percent, we wouldn’t be close to recycling 100 percent of the material [...]

> [...] nearly all current “recyclable” plastics [...] get a second life as a handbag or lawn chair [...]. They’re not really recycled so much as “downcycled.”

Comment from a similar recent thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17359807)

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.

Please don't recycle comments from previous threads.

It's a fine comment, but HN threads are supposed to be conversations and we're trying to avoid repetition.

I think that's an example of reuse, which is better than recycling.

Ah yes. I was carried away by the title.

Ok. With China not taking in trash anymore, I imagine these kind of stories will continue to be on the front page for awhile. I think it is worth while for people to be exposed to this possible alternative to the current recycling system. I guess a custom response to someone else's comment is more what you are hoping for?

Yes, exactly.

Its always just cooperations, solving their tax-worthy public problems by dividing and conquering it as challenge for the individual.

I'm not sure I want to live in a world where people are allowed to vote and drive cars and own guns who can't figure out which bin their garbage belongs inside.

I have never lived in a place where the instructions weren't provided and clear.

Here are some instructions from Sweden. There are 10 categories. I think there could be more.

https://www.affarsverken.se/Documents/Renhallning/Sorterings...

I've worked at many tech companies (arguably dealing with the smarter side of humanity), and have had to re-educate many people including software engineers on what's garbage, recycling or trash. The problem isn't that people are too dumb to recycle, it's that they don't care.

So someone still has to sort it. Raise taxes. Hire sorters. Save time and money by having software engineers spend more time learning software engineering, not whether a corn-based plastic spoon should go in compost or recycling.

This is a problem with capitalism. A sense of social responsibility is traded for personal satisfaction what I am assuming is some form of subtle aggression to those in non-western cultures knowing that their garbage will be sent to poorer and brown communities to live with.

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