Trash piles up in US as China closes door to recycling | Hacker News Reader

Trash piles up in US as China closes door to recycling

phys.org

214 pointskushti272 comments

Years ago there was a "Penn & Teller: Bullshit!" episode on recycling that did a decent job of looking into the psychology and economics of recycling.

What I remember is that most people feel bad about throwing stuff away, so a big part of the recycling movement is based around guilt rather than facts. The slogan "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" is in that order for a reason. Reducing the amount of what you use and reusing what you have is much more important and effective in helping the environment than recycling. Also putting things in a landfill really isn't really a problem. Landfills don't take up a significant amount of space, and when regulated and managed properly they aren't bad for the environment.

As for the economics of recycling:

* Recycling paper is a terrible idea. It takes a lot more chemicals, fuel and labor to recycle paper than produce new paper from trees (and it's a much lower quality product). Also, landfills are able to capture and sell the methane produced from paper as it decomposes, so it makes a lot more economical and environmental sense to just throw it away.

* Recycling glass can be economical depending on the cost of natural gas because the melting point of glass is slightly lower than raw silica. Unfortunately recycling adds cost because of the sorting and cleaning.

* Some plastics can't be made from recycled materials, and even when they can be, the economics of it depends on the cost of crude oil and natural gas. Prices for gas and oil fluctuate a lot, so it's risky for companies to be in the business of processing plastic back into feedstock because they don't know whether they will be able to sell it at or above cost at the time they're buying materials.

* Aluminum is really the only commonly recycled material that makes 100% economic sense. It's really expensive to produce from ore, and cheap produce from recycled materials.

EDIT: Found the episode here - https://www.bitchute.com/video/j0Hd6UfA4MKo/

Some of these claims seem extraordinary, e.g. some casual googling seems to indicate that recycling paper is less chemical and energy intensive than new pulp... so do you have some specific research that supports these ideas, or does it all come from the P&T episode?

Ya, there are too many factors. Turning a pile of very ink-heavy newspapers into crisp white photocopier paper takes lots of chemicals. Turning it back into a 50% content for more newsprint isn't as much of a problem.

Don't you think it takes a lot of chemicals to turn a piece of wood into crisp white paper? Hint: It does.

Then don't subsidize recycling and let the market sort out which is cheaper.

Some costs of making new stuff aren't reflected in the market price. For example the CO2 cost of refining, or the pollution cost of the factory that makes it.

Rather than tax CO2 or pollution, we instead prefer to subsidize recycling.

Why? Dunno.

Recycling has the same sort of costs. In the past year, I've been harmed more by the noise of the recycling truck than the total harm of pollution of manufacturing new materials I could have recycled.

I'm not sure its that simple, presumably part of the subsidy is that we want less physical mass/waste going into landfill so there's an argument to making recycling artificially cheap vs. making new stuff.

While I am hopeful that at some point the market will come up with solutions to recycle material from landfill, I think plastic and carbon taxes still would have a place today (doing something about fishing nets would sure go a long way though…) specifically to help reduce the material burden (or nudge drinks to go back to more aluminum cans)

It isn't intrinsically good to reduce the physical mass of landfill. Recycling is useful if it reduces the cost of manufacturing stuff plus the cost of putting trash in landfill. "Cost" means the amount of human work, minus externalities.

That episode came out ~ a decade ago, wouldn't be surprised if technological advances have changed the economics of paper recycling.

> when regulated and managed properly they aren't bad for the environment.

That's a bold statement I would love to see some sources for.

>Also, landfills are able to capture and sell the methane produced from paper as it decomposes, so it makes a lot more economical and environmental sense to just throw it away.

The price of natural gas has plummeted due to fracking. So much so, that nowadays it is often more economical for drillers to burn the methane off than to build the infrastructure to sell it. I expect the same economics apply to landfills. Plus, methane is 25x as potent as CO2 as a greenhouse gas (hence why it is better to burn methane than release it), so if capturing methane from landfills is at all less than perfect, decomposing paper products are still a significant environmental liability, not to mention an explosion risk. And that's just for paper, one of the most benign things you can throw away...

That has always been true. The incentive to capture methane never has been particularly high, given that transporting a gas is much more difficult than a bunch of unrefined liquids.

> Prices for gas and oil fluctuate a lot, so it's risky for companies to be in the business of processing plastic back into feedstock because they don't know whether they will be able to sell it at or above cost at the time they're buying materials.

This is true in lots of industries that use hedging to control their exposure to commodity prices, why wouldn't that be true here?

Paper only doesn't make sense to recycle if you externalize a lot of the costs.

For example, what if we had to pay to put something in the garbage ... as we ultimately pay China?

Then the equilibrium in the equation changes ...

I find it hard to believe the parent was failing to account for the cost of the landfill. It's the most obvious cost of that strategy, so it would be hard to miss.

On a related topic, to know that the equilibrium changes, you'd need to know the difference in cost before and after accounting for the thing you added.

This discussion would benefit significantly from careful analysis using actual numbers. If there's one thing that Bullshit! got right, it's that there are clear, empirical metrics we can use to evaluate solutions, and we should use them.

I don't know where you live, but here in California I do pay for garbage services.

It might not be profitable to recycle plastics- I'll give you that.

But it's better than sticking it in a landfill and waiting 1000 years. Or worse, tossing it into the ocean.

> worse, tossing it into the ocean

I used to think that. Then I read this and now I'm less sure:

....the most widely-used plastic, the stuff used to make shopping bags, is the one that produces the greatest amount of these warming gases ... after 212 days in the sun, this plastic emitted 176 times more methane than at the start of the experiment. Ironically, when plastics were exposed to air the amount of methane emitted was double the level from sea water.

more here: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45043989

>It might not be profitable to recycle plastics- I'll give you that. But it's better than sticking it in a landfill and waiting 1000 years.

Plastics are basically forever. They just break down into smaller and smaller pieces and contaminate the environment (they've found commercially sold sea salt contaminated with micro-plastics).

With the exception of the plastics that are biodegradable (expensive and extremely uncommon) and the ones that we've discovered worms can eat.

I rinse foil and reuse it, or rinse it before recycling if it's torn. But what I wonder is how dirty is too dirty to recycle in the case of aluminum? I'm not leaving large chunks of food on it, but I'm also not operating a chemistry lab here. I'm just curious what kind of process goes into repurification.

> how dirty is too dirty to recycle in the case of aluminum

I doubt they care about anything on the aluminum at all. If you watch videos of people melting down soda cans into aluminum ingots [0], there is a lot of dross or non-aluminum material that needs to be removed. Since there is already a process in place to eliminate non-aluminum material, I wouldn't worry about a bit of food.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldURYZyRYMA

If it can be cleaned off by a kitchen sink, it can definitely be cleaned off by an industrial recycling facility.

Not necessarily. A kitchen sink might spend 3min cleaning one bottle where an industrial recycling facility won't have more than a 10s budget per bottle before that bottle be deemed either clean or meltable.

>glass

In the good old USSR there was a limited number of sizes/styles of glass bottles and jars in circulation. Each one had a deposit value, and if it had no cracks/chips and all labels were removed, it could be returned for direct reuse, i.e. no melting and further manufacturing was involved. I think it worked OK since it had existed for many decades, and energy was cheap in those days.

IIRC, that is also how they handle half liter beer bottles in places like Germany and Netherlands. As an American, I saw it and thought "Wow. That just makes so much sense. Why don't we do that?"

Perhaps one reason is that those bottles, while completely functional, tend to look pretty rough and worn out after a while, it's obvious that they've been recycled and aren't new.

Is that something a company wants to take a risk on when it comes to the psychology of consumer choice?

You can always take those too worn bottles and recycle that subset into shiny new bottles..

Market the used ones as more valuable than new.

It wasn't all that long ago we did. I remember in the mid-80's buying soda at the grocery store in 6-packs of glass bottles, and bringing the empty bottles back to the store for a discount when buying more. The empties were sent back to the bottling plant, washed, and refilled. It was really interesting seeing the branding variations, depending on the age of the bottle, on the store shelves. I still have a 60's-era 7-Up bottle that had been through around 20 years of reuse when I bought it.

In India Coca Cola or any cold drink 330ml bottles cost about Rs 30, & you get Rs 2 discount/cash-back if you bring the empty one back to the shop

We did -- at least in some places. I remember as a kid sometimes going with my parents to the local brewery. They'd bring back their empty bottles and pick up a fresh pack at a discount.

It's making something of a resurgence in popularity with the craft brewery movement in the United States and the accompanying popularity of growlers and growler fills.

Partly the reason the United States doesn't use reusable bottles anymore is because breweries became national instead of regional in the 1960s and 1970s. When your brewery is located in the same state as the beer is consumed it is easier to get the bottles back. If you are Coors and produce in one plant in Colorado it is more difficult and expensive to get your bottles back from Florida. Also the cost of shipping the heavier reusable bottles negates some of the cost savings as well.

Small dairies in the US do this. Our milk comes in glass bottles and we return them for reuse. I've always hoped this would catch on more.

Ditto. I buy milk from Homestead Creamery. Besides being the best milk I can find in Atlanta, they clean and reuse the bottles. You pay a $2 deposit, which you get back when you bring the bottles back to the store. Presumably they then ship them back to the creamery when they get the shipments of milk in.

It used to be very common. But paperboard or plastic containers are much lighter and save on transportation costs. They also don't have to be returned, cleaned, and sanitized before re-use.

> Years ago there was a "Penn & Teller: Bullshit!" episode on recycling that did a decent job of looking into the psychology and economics of recycling.

I watched that episode and it was hardly a decent job. Penn is a staunch libertarian and that colors his presentation of the facts. Also, it is an entertainment show so they love to have something to yell "bullshit" at. There is no nuance.

For sure, in the zeal to increase recycling percentage, it was a huge mistake for cities which used to collect sorted recyclables to have a "single stream" recycling flow to make it easier for people to "recycle". No argument there.

Something that shouldn't be discounted is that it seems like a relatively simple problem to have NN image classifiers to sort the stream of waste. It doesn't need to be 99% accurate at all -- it is better that it can classify 90% of the items with near 100% accuracy and just throw away the 10% it isn't sure about, resulting in more pure recycling streams.

What bothers me is melting a glass bottle of wine to produce a new glass bottle of wine. Just remove the label and refill the same bottle with different wine! Recycling should be the last resort.

I've seen a few microbreweries re-using bottles lately, I thought it was a fantastic idea. Gives them a bit of character as a bonus too, lots will have scuffs and other markings on them from previous use/transport.

This is how German beer and much else works. Most beer, milk and bottled water is sold in one of about ten shapes of bottle. Four kinds for milk (two sizes two colours), one for water, three for beer, some lesser used that I've forgotten right now, and IIRC the market percentage for these things is 65% at the moment.

I'm sure someone will follow up to explain how horrible the situation is and all about those other 35%, but compared to the US or India it's pretty good.

To be pedantic, there are three shapes of glass bottles for mineral water. A green one for medium sparkling, white for classic sparkling and a fancy one for the hipster water.

This.

In Greece, Italy and Spain (likely elsewhere but these I have seen first hand, and never in the US of A) there are corner markets that sell very good wine from big barrels or stainless steel vats. you can buy or bring your own reusable containers, glass or plastic or whatever.

the problem is too much packaging of any kind. Buy small and local. Much more sustainable.

Are you taking about dollar expensive or Joule expensive? You can easily tweak ROI as a regulator by taxing but EORI is technology and physics limited.

John McCarthy wrote about how future generations would welcome us storing immensely valuable VOCs and complex chemicals and metals underground for them. In all seriousness, waste stream management is like education or healthcare: it's only a net cost if you believe the externalities aren't part of your economic model. If you go full lifecycle, it's jobs, and revenue, and adds to the economy in lots of useful ways.

Turning down radiation storage is like saying no to free money. We should all welcome better long-term storage and compete to host it.

Externalities involve regulation, and that means it isn't real economics to the laissez faire believers of the magic self-correcting free market. I'd like to say they are a fringe, but the think tanks and endowed chairs have made them the dominant thinking in popular culture and, sadly, American politics.

Radioation storage is a product of obsolete solid rod reactors. LFTRs and other reactors can use them for fuel.

> Externalities involve regulation

Regulation is one possible response to externalities, but externalities don't fundamentally involve radiation.

> and that means it isn't real economics to the laissez faire believers of the magic self-correcting free market.

To be fair, there are more pragmatic laissez-faire types that acknowledge the existence of externalities but merely deny that regulation mitigates them in practice, suggesting instead that if you respond to an extension with regulation you've now got two problems.

And even most people who aren't hardcore laissez-faire types acknowledge that regulatory capture is a real thing.

> Regulation is one possible response to externalities, but externalities don't fundamentally involve radiation.

The only realistic ways to handle externalities are regulations, class-action lawsuits, and (Pigouvian) taxes. Laissez-faire market types typically oppose all three.

For a sufficiently small externality, "ignore it" is a perfectly valid option. I think that's uncontroversial, although there would be substantial disagreement on the actual threshold.

Would you call the worldwide systemic crisis in waste stream management precipitated by China tightening regulation as an instance of For a sufficiently small externality, "ignore it" is a perfectly valid option because personally I wouldn't.

Would you call it a fundamental feature of an externality?

If you live in the Berlin area like me and are looking for ways to produce less waste, then check out this store called Unverpackt: https://original-unverpackt.de/

It's a physical store which sells most everything a normal supermarket does but without the disposable packaging.

Do they sell food? (meat, frozen things, etc.) Because buying food creates the most waste for me.

In many supermarkets/butchers, you can also bring your own resealable plastic containers for meats.

Most will usually insist on washing the container for you (because of regulations), so it's usually better to ask off-peak hours.

so basically how stuff was sold prior to world war 2 or how most stuff is sold on lcoal markets today?

Demographics were very different back then. Nowadays we have one person households. Also nowadays nobody peels potatoes anymore. I honestly wouldn't know how.

Peeling potatoes is not exactly difficult. You would learn it in a few minutes.

There are also (surprisingly) a lot of good Youtube videos on the topic.

If you get a good potato peeler that has a similar shape to this one[1], you'll be able to peel potatoes fast and easy. If you can shave your face (or any other part of you), you can peel potatoes.

On the upside, Chips(fries) taste SO much better when they are just made from fresh potatoes and olive oil.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/ZYLISS-Vegetable-Peeler-Y/dp/B0018IAH...

Yes, let's buy more disposable plastic garbage from China. That will solve our problem with shipping disposed plastic garbage to China.

My peeler has lasted me six years, and I expect it to last me sixteen more. It's also a pleasure to use, compared to the old Soviet steel ones, that my family used to have.

Have considered the fact that the skin is edible? Or that you could boild/roast the potatoes and then peel them by hand? If you're making fries you'll hardly notice the bit of skin at either end :-)

Raw potatoes are good too!

Be careful with this, as uncooked potatoes can be poisonous.

I like raw potatoes too but I have noticed that eating too much is hard on the stomach. Eating a few pieces is fine though.

Don't eat the green bits. They are poisonous and particularly bad if you are pregnant.

Solanine is not degraded much by cooking. It isn't the rawness of the potato that can be dangerous, but exposure to light, particularly when significant enough to cause greening of the skin.

Don't eat green potato skins, or sprouted eyes.

I just don't bother peeling most fruits and vegetables and just eat the peel. Cucumbers and potato skins are fine to me. Obviously things like bananas and oranges need to be peeled but I throw all of that in a compost pile in my backyard. It has the side benefit that my kitchen crash can never smells bad.

Wait, people peel cucumbers? Do they also remove the seeds? Is there some nutrition philosophy where the bit left over has any value?

I'm peeling my potatoes, especially when I'm cooking them in the oven with oil.

Don't peel them. Pat them down with a paper towel to remove any extra moisture (especially if you're cutting them) and then use butter to get that delicious crunch and browning on them.

Thank you for your suggestion, I might try this, but I hesitate to add even more butter to our diet, since we're already eating a lot of it on bread.

Increase butter, cut out the bread.

Well, since I'm putting my butter on (toasted) bread, it's going to be complicated.

I don't understand why this guy is being downvoted. I don't know how to pluck a chicken like my Depression-era grandparents.

Don't peel potatoes, they're delicious and have ++ nutrients.

Interesting, here in Germany peeled potatoes are pretty much unheard of and only available in jars which are super rare.

This is basically Bulk Barn but without plastic bags, neat!

How much does it cost?

Food without packaging is becoming popular in France too. However, it is usually organic food and it is typically much more expensive than regular, packaged food. I don't want organic. I just want to avoid packaging, and favor local food.

Unfortunately, all these "green" initiatives seem to be based on market segmentation than on real environmental concerns. There is a class of people who prefer organic, dislike packaging and have money. It is good for business and shops make money off it. Is it a good thing. However, I think it would be even better if we could stress the point that green can be cheap.

>However, it is usually organic food and it is typically much more expensive than regular, packaged food. I don't want organic. I just want to avoid packaging

Just avoiding packaging is more expensive, because as this excellent article points out[1], packaging represents the automation of the distribution chain.

> Some of the first packaging arose in the late 19th century. Some of the earliest packaging was for Uneeda Biscuits. They were packaged in a box with wax paper that sealed in the biscuits so they wouldn't go stale. Packaging was all about easing distribution for producers, because before that, everything was sold in bulk containers. The transformation of production and distribution as well as retail sales—going from mom and pop stores to the chain supermarkets we have today—means that packaging represents the automation of the distribution system. I think producers are very conscious of how helpful packaging is in helping them centralize their businesses. In doing that, they get to downsize and streamline and create economies of scale that they couldn't create if they didn't get to consolidate—which is what a lot of the drive behind switching from the refillable to the disposable bottle and can was about. The beer and soda industries consolidated massively in the post-war period, and the number of producers shrank dramatically. And this massive consolidation in both of those industries was facilitated by the switch to disposable containers. The industry no longer has the necessity for regional bottling plants where trucks can only go so far to deliver the products because then they have to go retrieve the empties. Now they can just drive straight through, one way, and they don't have to take anything back. They can go to the next central hub, pick up more stuff, keep driving and drop it off.

In the same way that containerization resulted in massive automation of ports and shipping (thousands of dock-workers vs. a few crane/truck operators), disposable packaging has automated terrestrial distribution channels. This has resulted in massive cost reductions, leading to large scale and consolidation ("let's ship from a single factory to the whole world" vs. "let's ship from a thousand local producers located within 100 miles of the end-consumer").

Packaging is really about automation, which is really about supply-chain lengthening, which is really about maximally concentrating profit.

>green can be cheap

Couldn't agree more. Low-tech is best tech. The permaculture folks realized this years ago.

The shortest/greenest supply chain is having your "grocery aisle" growing in the front yard (designed for zero-inputs[2] and near-zero-labor). Perhaps the ultimate solution isn't "Super Recycling" ie automated plastic sorting (still needed for other plastics btw) but "Super Reducing" -- an inexpensive easy-to-setup food garden that makes the entire supply chain (or most of it) obsolute. It needs to be something that people in suburbs can A) actually use and B) get past their HOA/neighborhood association.

The idiot-proof recycling bin is great, but we also need the idiot-proof organic garden.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20050401192355/http://www.altern... (I know I keep hammering this article, but the author nailed all these issues way back in 2005)

[2] Yes, zero-input gardening is possible even though you're removing material. Soil organisms continuously break down rock for minerals, and plants fix nitrogen and carbon from the atmosphere. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag

I'd like to remind the US of the creation of Keep America Beautiful. I was surprised to discover this was an early piece of corporate greenwashing in the 1950s[0]. Funded by Budweiser, Philip Morris, Coke and others to prevent Vermont bringing a mandatory deposit scheme in for single use packaging. How topical!

Now companies can pollute to their heart's content and make it our failure and their externality. Just by advertising at us to recycle and dispose of our (not that we created or requested it) rubbish carefully.

[0] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/more-recyc...

>*"Now companies can pollute to their heart's content and make it our failure and their externality."

Not that I disagree with your overall sentiment, but are you suggesting that it's not my responsibility to throw garbage into a trash can?

It's not just about throwing garbage into trash can. The main question is about how much of garbage is being recycled? And who will pay for the recycling if you mandate 5 different types of garbage and mandate maximum possible recycling? Many of the European countries have major focus on percentage of garbage being recycled. Some countries even reached 70% or so and have plans to increase it even further.

Again, I don't disagree with anything you are saying here, it just seemed you were implying before that corporations hold some kind of responsibility to ensure trash doesn't end up on the ground.

When in my (limited) experience, 99% of trash on the ground is from the public, while 99% of pollution of the water ways (edit: and landfills) is from corporations/industry/government. (1% being the exceptions, and these being made up numbers anyways...)

Edit: above comment was a sent to wrong post...

Not at all, but human nature being what it is, I would like systemic solutions that personal responsibility can be a constituent part of. Not to discover the body putting out advertisements to keep the place tidy and care for the environment are also a lobby group formed to prevent legislation impacting manufacturers in that area. Makes me wonder about the history of the UK equivalent!

If the trash can't be easily recycled or is excessive that's a manufacturer problem even if it all ends up in the correct bin. If reuse and deposit schemes would help that's a manufacturer or legislative problem. So it goes on. I'd even argue that takeaways and franchises have partial responsibility for trash around their outlets. Produce less, with less impactful materials. After all the customer wanted a burger or coffee not a selection of impossible to recycle junk.

One of those groups is going to some lengths to avoid their responsibilities. The other, on the whole, is trying or is required via kerbside collections from their homes. On windy days kerbside collections in these parts don't pick up all the blown away plastic. That should be their responsibility too. Presumably my local authority didn't specify that adequately in the outsourcing contract - though it shouldn't be necessary.

As is, it looks like we've landed most of the responsibility on those least able to do anything about it.

I accidentally replied to a different commenter thinking it was your reply:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17680544

> just seemed you were implying before that corporations hold some kind of responsibility to ensure trash doesn't end up on the ground

I'd argue they do, or at least should. As do we, the end customer.

No law, advertising campaign or regulation has yet achieved 100% compliance. It's the responsibility of producers and retailers to realise, or be forced to realise, that in selling to humans some portion of their trash will be disposed of lazily or inconsiderately and mistakes will be made. They made it, they cannot be absolved of all responsibility the moment it's handed to the customer. Particularly when the quantity created is ever increasing and producers seem ever more inclined to single use plastic - because for them it is consequence-free.

There's an army of psychologists employed trying to create need or desire where there was none, or encouraging further sales. How might they nudge a real improvement in trash disposal? Maybe a 25p or $1 deposit on a bottle or container would be a good start. Maybe we'd want to require benign and decomposing materials knowing full well we're over-evolved apes that would once harmlessly drop the banana peel or chicken bone wherever we finished with it.

Responding to a straw ban with a sippy-cup lid that uses more plastic (hello Starbucks) is taking the piss and ignoring all the now well known public concerns. If there were any natural justice that should result in a business-threatening boycott and draconian legislation in response. Whether the straw ban was well intentioned but misguided is a separate conversation.

Consumers have less power to reduce resource usage than companies. When companies put the burden on consumers it's a bit of a farce. There's only so much power the average consumer has to choose brands that are more ecologically friendly.

As long as we self-identify as "consumers," and believe our only lever for change is to "choose brands," we will have no power whatsoever.

> are you suggesting that it's not my responsibility to throw garbage into a trash can?

They're suggesting the idea that it's solely the individual's responsibility was invented and promoted (for obvious reasons) by companies that manufacture disposable products, starting in the 1960s.[1]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20050401192355/http://www.altern... (archive to fix formatting)

While packaging leads to some pollution problems you only have to see the results of large gatherings in outdoor events and even in some stadiums that America has a problem with people who don't care, don't think its their job, or worse think its cool to trash a place. In many places you just have to look along the side of the road to see the problem. Where I am it is a common use of prisoners to clean up the shoulders.

Children are the best chance of changing it all up. Get them early and emphasize the positives while not dwelling on the negatives. Plus it is always good and sit down and see if we are living up to our own standards. Its one thing to complain on a message board it is another to set an example and hold to it

When it comes to packaging its going to take a combination of consumer pressure and possible regulation. What we must not do is react stupidly like the recent straw bans because when people mock something they don't respect the reasons behind it and it cascades.

I think we have to go at all sides.

Young kids are definitely part of the solution. Though by the time they reach teen it often seems any and all interest in tidiness has vanished. They'll usually regain it in some years. :)

Humans of all ages will be lazy and inconsiderate at times. Accept that as a known and cater accordingly. Fewer and benign materials, decomposing harmless materials and systems that encourage consideration like use of deposits on containers. Require more of retailers, manufacturers and event organisers. Once a few bins overflow and it no longer looks that tidy a lot fewer people will care to dispose carefully, etc...

When I was a kid, the “bottle depot” was a very motivating way to go out of one’s way to collect stray bottles.

Deposits at time of purchase have proven effective. Put a deposit on every product with recyclable material using some generic measurement (like “weight of packaging”), such that when you return it you receive a quick and approximate return (in this example, by weighing everything you recycled and just not caring too much what the breakdown was).

This * 1000. The way things work nowadays is the supermarket chain doesn’t pay the cost of polluting the planet.

Every goddamn product is planed obsoletion so it can be cheap with a fat price margin and the customer has to keep on buying every couple of years.

Charge supermarkets for plastics and pay customers to return recyclable things and that’s a huge motivator to reduce landfill garbage in half.

I’m also a big believer that we need better robotics. When I saw Wall-E I just got super excited by seeing trash recycling robots.

Robots should be doing stuff humans don’t do, not replacing them. It shouldn’t be a zero sum game.

There are already some pretty impressive recycling robots, especially in the field of sorting out mixed recyclables (scanning the incoming stream and shooting stuff that matches certain parameters into a separate area). It's pretty cool, you should check it out. I don't know how economical they are but they still require human backup because of the sheer variety of (incorrect) crap put in recycling bins.

You need to be careful putting taxes on these things because of their regressive nature. Who winds up feeling the pinch when you add a $.05/can tax on soda cans? Does that person really have time to make extra trips to the supermarket to redeem a few dollars worth of cans?

Also while landfills are among the ultimate NIMBY things, we're not running out of space on this earth in any real sense.

Some things are just not worth doing economically. Maybe we should go back to the old ways and have consumers sort into only a few categories that are easier to manage - e.g. "paper" and "bottles and cans", and not bother with the rest.

Have you been to a landfill? We shouldn't be doing that to our planet even if it was twice the size.

The amount of garbage piling up on this rock is mind-blowing, and there's literally nothing we are doing about it once it's in the ground. It just stays there seeping out heinous juices into the surrounding area.

People are worried about tens of tons of radioactive waste material that we're sealing inside special containers and putting in specially designed vaults when hundreds of tons of trash are being dumped per day per landfill. I'm not worried about people getting cancer from radioactive waste 10000 years from now, I'm worried about people catching the plague from all the footlong rats crawling over their local landfill.

> It just stays there seeping out heinous juices into the surrounding area.

A proper landfill has multiple layers of protection to the ground below it and a web of drain pipes to ensure that the fluids don't collect up or, worse, leak out into the ground.

How many landfills are proper landfills, and not half-assed landfills, or just holes in the ground? Out of all those proper landfills, how many are properly maintained? Like everything, protection and drainage degrades with time.

Are you asking about any first world country, or about random third world countries?

In rich countries the norm is all active landfills are properly maintained. There are a few bad apples that are caught once in a while, and a number of long abandoned landfills that cause problems, but for the most part a landfill in any first world country is not an environmental disaster.

In poor countries people just toss things wherever with no concern.

Do you have examples of such proper landfill, as well as their cost vs capacity? It sounds awfully expensive for a trash stock pile.

I just watched this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooRVhRt1p54, which another commenter said may be the catalyst for China's ban on importing recycling. I'd be hard-pressed to say a well-run landfill is worse than what I just watched.

> Who winds up feeling the pinch when you add a $.05/can tax on soda cans? Does that person really have time to make extra trips to the supermarket to redeem a few dollars worth of cans?

Where grocery stores take back empties, one just needs to collect the empties and bring them on their next trip to the grocery store, then put them in the recycling machine. You need to go to the store to buy more soda anyway, so it's not really an extra trip.

If anything, the problem in California (not sure about other states), is that grocery stores don't take back empties. Instead, they need to be brought to a recycling plant, which is usually out of the way as well. In practice, it just becomes a 5 cent tax since going to the recycling plant is an extra trip, unlike the grocery store.

The issue is energy. Energy to build the robots, energy to power their efforts. Both the power and the plastics come from the same finite fossil fuel resources and will get ever more expensive as extracting that resource gets more expensive. To tackle the recycling problem we have to tackle the energy problem or we'll make no progress addressing the essential cost. The only viable thing to do otherwise is reduce plastic production and use.

I agree but the only way we will reduce plastic production is if we price in the cost of disposal.

This is definitely a great way to get people to recycle but I think the problem here is that because recycling companies can't send plastics and paper to China they don't have anywhere to sell the recycling to be reused. Not enough companies are buying it to make new products

That's often because the recycled materials are of low quality, due to lack of sorting.

Someone still has to recycle it (which isnt really happening in the US) and then they need to sell it for more than they are paying with the deposit return. This is probably not going to be worth the effort in the US. China was our go to affordable recycling partner, and now they have found to not be profitable enough to be worth it.

The problem isn't that people aren't recycling enough. The problem is that recycling is now more expensive than landfills, because it is not producing valuable enough material. If we encourage more people to recycle, it will just cost even more.

It depends Where you live, in a lot of countries/regions neither separated waste bins nor products from recycled material are available. In Germany Both is present, making the process much more ready and economic than in the U.S. I wished though that more People would support this System, both in countries Where it’s facilitated but also in countries that have no central System for that in place.

I wonder if PET bottles could be reusable if not crushed. If they are still usable then they would just wash them in the factory and fill them again.

Of course, they could get scratched or something during use, but people could be taught it's better if you buy a scratched bottle than putting plastic bottles in landfills.

It can be done. Two years ago I've seen it done with Coca-Cola bottles in Germany. They'd have those thick bottles with visible scratches coming from cleaning and reuse. About the same time as I first discovered this practice, they abandoned it for some reason; on my next trip, I found only regular, single-use bottles. To this day I wonder about the reasons behind this change.

German here, it depends on the chain of super market and some other factors but multi-use Coca Cola bottles are definitely still a thing.

> It's relatively hard to sanitize PET because tiny defects hold contaminants really well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene_terephthalate#PET.... Also I would guess that the defects add up over time and you'd need a way to test each bottle's integrity before shipping it out again.

From your sibling comment. Just reposting since you might not other see it and it seems to address your question. Well, assuming these bottles are made from the same sort of plastic.

It's relatively hard to sanitize PET because tiny defects hold contaminants really well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene_terephthalate#PET... Also I would guess that the defects add up over time and you'd need a way to test each bottle's integrity before shipping it out again.

Grew up in a rural area. 45 minute drive to nearest recycling center. My father would collect an entire truck load of bagged recyclables and bring it there. He would walk away with maybe 5$ if he was lucky.

5$ to bring 15 bags 45 minutes away... I don't see an incentive here for people who live in rural areas, which is quite a lot of people.

Germany: 45 second Walk down the stairs for separate Paper, Glass, plastic/foil and bio waste bins - Even in rural areas sometimes to this extend.

Not to mention that there are often different bins for different color glass (have seen them in public areas, not sure if this happens for residential as well). And iirc you may get yelled at for doing it wrong

Rural and suburban means very different things in Europe than it does in the Americas, often orders of magnitude more distance.

I took an entire truck load of household trash (cleaned out a house after tenants moved out), and it cost me $40 to dump it at the trash transfer station.

Landfill space isn't free, so by diverting trash to recycling, your dad saved more than $5.

A nickel bottle deposit was a lot more incentive to bother with collecting bottles and cans when you could get a coke for a quarter, than now when you need to trade in grocery bag full.

I remember in the 90s, we would always trade in our bottles before we went to the county fair, and that was enough for admission and rides and some fair food. I don't think the barrels and barrels of cans would get us in the gate anymore.

It's still 10 cents in Michigan

I’d like to see the deposit required be calculated based in part on the length of the warranty. The longer the warranty, the smaller the recycling deposit.

If you want to sell a refrigerator with a 1 year warranty then it’s going to carry a $200 recycling deposit. Once you get to a 15 year, all parts (not just compressor), transferable warranty, the deposit can go to $0.

The sheer amount of cheap shit that’s built to simply self destruct in a year or two when it could — for 25% more cost — last 10x as long, that’s what drives me crazy.

It works out to be a regressive tax but appliances should last a lifetime not a couple years before breaking in a way where it’s cheaper to replace than repair. But since the durability is hidden information from the buyer, the market races to the bottom as long as durability is correlated with cost.

I like that idea, but I suspect the big stuff is actually pretty easy to recycle. It's the little bits of plastic and paper that are a problem to sort.

Paper should be sustainably harvested and at least it’s compost.

There are compostable alternatives to single-use plastic which with the right incentives will be adopted across more and more retail/restaurant. My understanding is that those compounds are only really good for single-use and aren’t durable enough to replace plastic in its many many other forms.

Some states do have a deposit. What it really does is ensure that people don't drink generic pop. The people who would recycle anyway recycle, and find it more convenient. The people who wouldn't don't recycle.

I'm probably being overly cynical above, but much.

In Germany no beer bottle is discarded. It has .08€ deposit. Around bars, those bottles left on the street are collected by people with bags, or whatever. Bottles bought in the supermarket are cleaned, kept and returned.

I don't know the numbers, but I would be surprised if more than 1% of bottles are discarded.

The same applies for plastic bottles (0.25€)

Rumor has it China stop importing plastic after this documentary came out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooRVhRt1p54

Great documentary, thanks.

This puts the recent "90% of ocean plastic comes from Asian/African rivers" story[1] in a drastically new light.

The issue was previously framed in terms of poor waste management due to lack of infrastructure for native waste (agreed) and uneducated Asian/African consumers (a blame-laundering technique that the disposable product industry has already successfully deployed in the US[2]). But on further examination, it seems the countries with "good infrastructure"[3] and "well-educated wasters" may be part of (or even a majority of) the problem.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16913389

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20050401192355/http://www.altern...

[3] "good waste infrastructure" being, in part, a euphemism for "keep that expensive-to-handle waste in a box until it's outside our border so it's technically Not Our Problem"

I found that really hard to watch, especially the children stepping on deity knows what part.

Even then I wish everyone would see it.

Humanity sucks sometimes ... if not most of the time.

A friend of mine has a chronically homeless brother that still does day jobs (doesn't do drugs so is consistently hired) and he said he was working cleaning out the toxic ashes from trash burning center and was treated badly.

"..they made him wear a radioactive exposure badge and fired him when the badge tipped over the safe range."

The union bosses wouldn't even go down there and called orders from megaphones.

There are videos/photos of many other countries that look much worse than this, think India, even Mexico.

Edit: The homeless man I mentioned lives in a major city in the US, not a third world country.

"..they made him wear a radioactive exposure badge and fired him when the badge tipped over the safe range."

Isn't that a good thing? You wouldn't want people to be working there to get unsafe radiation exposure.

The workers were not given any protective gear, these were mainly homeless workers. So, no, I think that it's exploitation. If they had been protected from the radiation, and then got exposed I would agree with you.

> "..they made him wear a radioactive exposure badge and fired him when the badge tipped over the safe range."

Not to defend the company in this case, but I suspect he reached the annual occupational dose limit [1], so unless they had office work for him there probably wasn't anything else to do. This is something migrant radiation workers [2] need to be vigilant about, to make sure they aren't out of work for a year after one job, or at least make sure that job pays them appropriately.

[1] https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part020/p...

[2] Commercial nuclear power plants generally shut down once every 1-2 years for a several-week maintenance and refueling outage, during which time the plant will bring in several hundred extra workers, often contractors, to help. This has created a community of highly-skilled rad workers who travel around the country.

Sure, this seems reasonable. But this wasn't around radioactive material, it was just trash burners to make electricity. Consider the ramifications of what that means.

Also, they weren't given any protective gear, so what use is a badge saying you've been over exposed if it's guaranteed everyone will eventually hit the limit?

They weren't given any protective gear, so what use is a badge saying you've been over exposed if it's guaranteed everyone will eventually hit the limit?

The point of the badge is to make sure that people don't get more than the limit of exposure, to keep the workers safe. I know tour guides in Mammoth Caves in Kentucky work this way - the caves are generally safe, but if you spend many many hours in them you will get more than the radiation limit. It just isn't a job you can work for 40 hours a week your whole life.

They also don't wear protective gear. There isn't really effective protective gear that you can wear to protect against a constant low level of background radiation. They make lead aprons for x-ray workers but those are impractical for constant wear and don't protect from every direction anyway.

That seems reasonable. I guess the story about my friend's homeless brother's situation is just one of many where he's been taken advantage of. (ie, not given water on the job, improper tools provided, pay not be given out, etc...) So I assumed this was just another issue on top of all the others.

You have to wonder though, if a cleaning job is only suitable for temps (mostly homeless people) that get persistent radiation exposure, it seems that corners are being cut. Unlike a cave, where there's nothing to be done other than stay out of it...

Difficult to watch even for the jaded and I suggest those who are sensitive don't.

These are all sorts of externalities of out current lifestyles that these poor desperate people have to deal with. This is simply a reflection of an inhuman society we have created, making money is meaningless if you can't take care of your own. Dehumanizing others only dehumanizes ourselves.

Its not sustainable and extraordinarily wasteful packaging, convenience lifestyles and abuse of plastic currently benefits too many businesses. Uncontrolled free markets with only concern of profits with no concern for the environment and complete lack of responsibility for other people is solely to be blamed.

Great documentary. Thanks.

> Oyther countries can handle nuclear process, but cannot handle trash sorting

This shows an externality - that "Recycling" was really just a sham. Actual recycling has a cost overhead.

I think this is a good thing. I think it will drive to actual recycling that does actual good, instead of, as China realistically called it "moving trash".

> I think it will drive to actual recycling that does actual good

I'm not so sure, at least in the US. Politicians almost always follow the path of least resistance when dealing with problems (our current system encourages it), and the shortest, least resistant path to making this problem disappear is to pay some other country to take it and do what they want with it (burn it, bury it, etc).

> is to pay some other country to take it

They tried that though. There's currently no "other country" willing to take it. That was Plan A, and it failed, it seems that Plan B is to just let it build up, but that won't last forever either.

> There's currently no "other country" willing to take it.

They just aren't offering them enough money.

Why not just use that same money to invest in proper disposal techniques?

Because it's likely cheaper, faster, and easier than investing in proper disposal techniques.

Right—why would you prioritize short term returns over self sufficiency? Seems like you’re just fucking your kids over.

Because there's absolutely no accountability for politicians that make terrible long-term decisions when in office. It's all about the short term gains for re-election.

This is just so bloody predictable. Recycling isn't a new thing. It's been common "forever" to recycle paper and metals. But you had to keep stuff separate: steel, copper, brass, newspaper, bond paper, etc.

But to increase participation in modern consumer society, commingled "recycling" became the norm. And it just doesn't work. Broken glass makes paper useless, because it damages machines. And once commingled recyclables go through the collection process, with crushing and shearing, separation becomes virtually impossible.

Anyway, the only hope is source separation. And that's problematic. Because most people don't want to bother. And because there are just too many categories. Too many kinds of plastics. Packaging with multiple layers, including paper, metal and plastic.

The real point I always see when looking at the problem is Packaging.

Packaging should be required to be as literally minimal as actually possible, consuming the least amount of resources in every phase of the lifecycle as possible.

Excessive packaging should be as illegal as it is immoral and anti-environmental.

Inks, Paper, Plastic, Wraps, Ties, ALL of it should be as eliminated as possible.

Think of the time, energy, resources (power, fuel, transport, machinery, engineering etc) all that has been put into the creation of waste.

I agree. Also, options for material usage ought to be limited. And one could require that every manufacturer accept return of all packaging. I'm old enough to remember when milk, beer and soda bottles were typically returned, washed and reused. The last time I lived in Mexico, that was still common, at least in some markets.

But the other side of it is that modern packaging arguably reduces waste. Or at least, I've read that. Maybe it's BS.

>But the other side of it is that modern packaging arguably reduces waste. Or at least, I've read that. Maybe it's BS.

I find a good illustration on how this is not true is Christmas.

Look at how much packaging waste is left over in your house alone from christmas. Now, thats consolidated to one day/event, but spread that out across billions of purchases and you can see that waste in packaging is still monumentally huge.

On a % of waste for a widget, as compared to, perhaps the way packaging was previously made for a widget 20 years ago - perhaps its easy to make that argument that its less waste - but I doubt that as;

The widgets today didnt exist then

Everyone is trying to sell more and more widgets

the widgets are made of more exotic and complex and numerous components

etc..

True. I was thinking about food products.

I've read that a major aspect of product packaging is to make shoplifting harder ;)

> But the other side of it is that modern packaging arguably reduces waste.

I've heard that too. I thought the gist of it was that it reduced the labor involved with handling, loading, unloading, protecting and stocking the products at retailers because US labor is expensive.

> Packaging should be required to be as literally minimal as actually possible

It would be interesting to approach this as requiring all elements of a product not intended to be used as a part of the product to be composed of materials which all fall within the came category of recyclables so that they do not have to be separated.

This and requiring all disposable 'plastic' materials to be made of plant-based product. No more plastic clam-shells for example.

Or at least requiring them to be made of the plastics that wax worms and meal worms can digest.

That would be extremely wasteful. That packaging is there for a reason; it prevents items from getting damaged. If you remove the packaging from 1000 items and one of them breaks, you've wasted a lot of resources on net, because most packaging is very cheap compared to the items inside.

>most packaging is very cheap

...in part because the manufacturer doesn't pay the cost of plastic pollution, or leached persistent organotoxins, or microplastics.

Is the solution as simple as a tax on all plastics (funding ocean/land cleanup of existing pollution), plus a universal per-item deposit to ensure that future plastics get separated correctly and returned?

I'm wondering how possible it would be to have garbage trucks identify valuable materials in trash as they enter the truck, so the city can fine someone who doesn't separate.

Good luck enforcing these kinds of things. States like Washington have constitutional privacy protections that extend to curb side garbage collection. The state, or an actor working on behalf of the state, can't look through your garbage. I know a number of lawyers here who are waiting with baited breath for the wrong person to get fined based on what's in/not in their garbage in Seattle.

Privacy, other people putting things in your can, previous tenants and perhaps other flaws exist. That's why I think it best it be automated and take more than one offense.

> Because most people don't want to bother.

That ends up being the only thing that matters. We have separate bins here. Just look inside and you'll see most people ignore it and treat it as 3 trash cans.

These comments are the first thing that made me realize the US has one "recycleables" bin and everything recyclable is dumped in there.

And it doesn't sound like a smart idea, i mean how the ...

I'm a little lost for words.

Better start educating people about cleaning out their plastic containers before recycling, even a bit of yogurt left at the bottom of a yogurt container can contaminate and can be possibly thrown out as garbage. Heads up to those who didn't know like me.

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4606893

That requires wasting water though. Maybe the container for yoghurt should be changed to be reusable after washing or recyclable without wasting resources on cleaning?

> That requires wasting water though

Yeah, this.

This is the thing that most people who consider themselves environmentally conscious do not seem to have taken fully on board: there are no simple solutions here. There is an elephant in the room: there are simply too many human beings on the planet for them all to have a prosperous life style without enormous changes to the fundamental structure of the world's economy. Recycling will not save us. Better gas mileage will not save us. Electric cars will not save us. More public transit will not save us. The only thing that might save us is massive investment in nuclear power (plus solar and wind, but those two alone will not save us) plus a concerted effort to make birth control more widely available and socially acceptable.

That's rather pessimistic. The old slogan of "reduce, re-use, recycle" (in that order) still applies. There is no magic bullet.

> That's rather pessimistic.

Indeed. But it's also realistic.

> The old slogan of "reduce, re-use, recycle" (in that order) still applies.

Applies to what? R-R-R will buy some time. It will not solve the problem in the long run.

> There is no magic bullet.

Yes, there is: birth control. The solution to the problem is to stop the underlying unsustainable process, which is the exponential growth in human population. That is the ONLY solution.

Seriously. It's scary how accurate the movie Idiocracy is becoming.

Just curious: what's the ideal population Earth, if all humans consumed as much as the average person in the US/Canada?

Random googling suggests that for the US alone, ideal population would be 150 M, with EU-levels of consumption. That's pretty drastic.

"Ideal" is a matter of taste. If you like to hang out in big cities your ideal number might be bigger than someone who doesn't. Personally, I think we are well past the point of diminishing returns for any reasonable quality metric. But just getting people to acknowledge that this is something worth thinking about would be significant progress.

> That's pretty drastic.

Yep. We've dug ourselves into a pretty deep hole. Getting out will not be easy.

How did you get that very low figure?

Everyone living like the US is put at using 4x the planets resources, which would suggest 1.5 billion people. That's the extremes too, the EU consumes much less.

http://personal.psu.edu/afr3/blogs/siowfa12/2012/10/if-every...

Wasting water isn't a problem in some parts of the world.

In many places, water you don't use from your tap will just end up flowing into the ocean anyway.

Treating it will require some energy sure, but then it's an energy problem, which is all recycling is (in places like the US where most of our trash ends up safely in landfills and not the ocean.)

The amount of additional water needed to wash the yogurt container, compared to the massive amount of water mismanagement in agriculture and industry, is minimal. We learned this during the recent California drought.

The real reason that people (myself included) don't always wash plastic containers out: it's a hassle.

There are several ways we can try to solve this:

- Separating recycling materials at the curb, so the yogurt container never meets the clean paper (although I thought Canada already does this).

- Biodegradable plant-based plastics suitable for food packaging purposes

- Better automated sorting technology at the recycling center.

Curbside separation in my mind involves me keeping huge amounts of different bins in my tiny apartment so that I can sort everything, and then finding where the landlord has put the brown glass recycle bins this week, then walking over to the other end of the 15 acre complex to locate the green glass bins, then walking to the opposite corner to locate the aluminum can bin.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but any system that requires individuals to pre-sort recyclables needs to account for the fact that most of us live in places that were designed before recycling was a thing.

Yea Canadians have to sort out recycling materials into categories and separate out paper from plastic containers or else its not picked up by the waste collectors, I think issue is when it is put into recycling to be reused for materials.

The point is to change processes and habits so the entire sum of resources used and pollution produced is minimal.

Reuse is almost always better, so maybe yoghurts can come in glass jars instead of tiny, hard to wash plastic cups? Maybe smallest containers, that discourage reuse should be taxed extra? Much easier to wash 1l yoghurt cup than 4 x 250ml.

Biodegradable - that's cool, but sometimes they can be toxic, not really biodegradable or require a lot of resources to produce, and a lot of waste is produced as by product.

Sorting is great, but only recycling, which requires cleaning - which is attacking the problem from the wrong end.

"Even a few spoonfuls of peanut butter left in a jar can contaminate a tonne of paper and make it unmarketable — destined for the dump. Same for that glob of yogurt left in the bottom of the container."

The article seems to claim that the yogurt can contaminate clean paper that is mixed in, making the paper un-recyclable, not the plastic yogurt container itself.

Also, this appears to be a new thing, since China stopped accepting contaminated paper for recycling.

Unless it is a LARGE, clean, never touched food item like a box the paper should probably actually just go in to the compost stream anyway...

I would actually welcome a far more limited* (and to recyclable types) number of plastics allowed in packaging and requirements that they also cannot be fused to other materials. The numbers should be REQUIRED to be /raised/ or /impressed/ to a large degree and be VERY LARGE on the two dimensional face as well. A 'nearly legally blind' person should be able to still tell where the logo is and understand it's content.

The plastics / glasses binning should also assume they /are/ getting dirty consumer content and use an 'industrial' boiling water pot to dislodge and release the food waste. Such a processing step is more practical as part of the post-consumer input filter.

I'm going to be pursuing a degree in Environmental Management with a specialty in Waste Management in Denmark next year. Really excited to be stepping away from software development and into this exciting and growing field :D

This really seems like a problem that could be helped by smarter automation (and a lot of "thinking outside the box")

If plastic bags get stuck to the machines, then maybe the way to getting rid of them is looking at what happens with them as opposed to other materials.

Also automated identification of materials (by optical inspection or dedicated sensors) looks like it could help.

This tech is already applied to MRFs and it still doesn’t work 100% if the time, causing downtime on the line, and lost revenues.

I don't understand why it's so hard to build a machine that separates plastic from other materials. I mean in agriculture we have machines that separate tiny seeds from anything else, I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to have a plastic sorting machine.

Because of the massive variation in shapes and sizes, the fact that some plastics might have other trash inside them and that plastic drinks bottles are usually more than one type of plastic. There are machines but they can only perform basic sorting so you still need people to do the "intelligent" part.

>I don't understand why it's so hard ... we have machines that separate tiny seeds

Not hard, just expensive. And understanding how seeds are separated (not only that they are separated) makes it clear why plastics require so many more steps.

For seeds, it's a two-step process.

First comes threshing[1], which is the act of physically breaking the seeds off the plant. Basically they solved this problem by hitting the stalks against a solid surface. This works because all the plants are the same type and age, so you can dial in a force that will break the seeds _off_ without breaking them _apart_.

This won't work for plastics, because they're combined with all sorts of other materials that whacking won't dislodge. One shot of that "Plastic China" documentary[2] shows a worker using a box cutter to remove a plastic label that's shrink-wrapped around (not glued to) a crushed container.

The second step is called winnowing[3], and it's basically just blowing air through the falling seeds to separate them aerodynamically from the straw and chaff. This works because seeds have a higher ballistic coefficient (mass/drag). Winnowing is also done with screens or slats, relying on the fact that seeds are of uniform size.

But plastics have all different shapes and sizes. Wind winnowing can certainly be used as part of a processing chain (eg to separate films from bulk plastics), and so can screens, but they're nowhere near a complete solution.

Because of these complexities, automatically processing plastic at scale requires a lot more than just those two steps (which nowadays are combined together with reaping in the cleverly-named "combine harvester" or combine[4]). That means it's expensive, and that means someone in China with cheap labor and "externalized" pollution costs (read: make your neighbors get sick and die, but don't even have the decency to pay their doctor bills or keep their windowed spouses/orphaned children off the street) can outbid you.

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

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17678513

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnowing

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combine_harvester

There's obviously complicating factors.

If a consumer thinks recycling is some sophisticated magic, they're likely to use the plastic bag they think is recyclable to encapsulate a load of mixed recycling while it accumulates indoors. Assume this bag now contains a combination of paper, plastic, and cans.

Or if they have a plastic container full of fresh fruit with a tuna can from lunch, they might put the empty metal can within the now empty plastic container, closing the container to limit the odor. Eventually this winds up in the recycling bin as metal nested within plastic.

Automatically identifying and separating these instances intact, I imagine, is non-trivial.

What I don't understand is why we need to separate everything intact and can't just shred it all to a uniform size then automate sorting and washing that product.

It has been well over a decade since supermarkets in many countries got automated bottle-return machines. With all the advances in computer vision, is there really no way to have machines that can economically scan returned plastic for its recycling code and direct it towards the appropriate bin, so that the recycler gets a supply of correctly sorted plastic?

Recycling codes are not consistently applied, a bottle might have lost its label, many plastics use mixed types and lots of food and drink containers are polluted by the food and liquids so they are still dirty.

You can tell people to wash things and separate them but you can't really police it and when it doesn't happen, you have to inspect everything to ensure that nothing gets through!

There's some threshold where "quick wash of everything not explicitly full of stuff" is cheaper/more economical than inspecting, so that shouldn't really prevent automation. Maybe just make it a bit harder.

I just finished a bottle of Coca-Cola while I was on a train.

The bottle is made of polyethylene terepthalate, while the cap, ring and wrap-around label are made of polypropylene. There's a few drops of coke left in it too. Oh, and I squashed it to save space in the recycling bin.

I put it in a 'mixed recycling' bin that also contained prepackaged sandwich boxes, paper towels, plastic bags, and a banana skin.

I think this would be very difficult to separate automatically.

There are machines that separate the label from the bottle

This video is very informative https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAr4BZM_Tzk

We have separated bins for recycling, compost and garbage at every single restaurant in Seattle. Nobody knows what can and should go in what bin. Nobody knows what the containers are made of when they order their food. So basically, all 3 bins end up being full of trash. I know I am not going to sit there for 10 minutes reading the sign, looking at all the pictures trying to figure out if my straw is made from plastic or corn, so it all goes in the trash. I figure I'm doing a favor by putting it in the trash instead of potentially contaminating the entire load of recyclables.

Separating and processing trash would be a great example where ML, AI, robotics and other stuff would really help progress. It's a really hard problem that should be very interesting to work on.

Instead we have the best minds of our generation working on building total surveillance machines and hacking the human brain to sell more crap.

Related from a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17368168.

India has banned single-use plastics (starting 2022).

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/single-use-plastic-ban-...

Other countries simply need to do the same. France has banned certain single-use plastic items starting in 2020.

If a side-effect is less processed food and fast-food being consumed, then great.

This is the only real solution. Everything else is pointless.

As long as we keep producing plastics, they will end up in the environment, and whatever doesn't will be a pain to recycle.

We already have alternatives for almost everything. We have single use plates and cutlery made from cardboard or wood, we have compostable packaging foil for vegetables and compostable trash can liners. The only problem is adoption -- as long as plastic is slightly cheaper, no one will use it.

I really hope the EU comes down hard on plastic packaging -- imagine if all packaging was compostable, you could just throw it on a pile in your back yard and it would turn into fertile soil within a couple of months!

> imagine if all packaging was compostable

How much would the loss rates of packaged goods increase? Shelf stability is a very useful property which saves food from being wasted.

Compostable does not mean it decays under your eyes.

E.g. polyurethanes are marginally biodegradeable by fungi and still last years when the conditions are not ideal for them.

If things need to be sealed, just use reusable glass containers. When I was a kid, yoghurt came in glass jars.

But most stuff would be fine just wrapped in paper or cardboard.

Also, it's not like long shelf life is a necessity. Lots of stores manage to sell fresh goods without a lot of waste.

Sure, it won't be a trivial transition, but I'm pretty sure people would find a way.

It's just a question of our priorities: do we want to live in a dump just to make it easier for a supermarket to sell you 25 different types of pre-packaged chicken?

Glass is much more environmentally destructive than plastic; this is just a terrible idea.

Not as waste surely? Beaches throughout the world are largely glassy - they are not normally considered as undesirable.

Not quite sure how you arrive at that.

Unlike plastic, glass is inert. Old broken glass tends to revert to pebbles or sand after a little erosion. Sharp edges don't last long at all.

Maybe GP is talking about the energy balance? If the energy comes from fossil fuels that can be a big factor.

Burning the plastic in dedicated facilities is the only good solution. Use it for energy, and burn less gas & oil as a result. Everything else tends to have a bigger carbon footprint.

Burning the stuff is profitable even today.

Compostable will produce methane etc., especially in your back yard.

> Compostable will produce methane etc., especially in your back yard.

Is that a bad thing for a small garden compost pile? I understand it's dangerous on a large industrial scale.

Methane is around 100X worse as a greenhouse gas than CO2. So even a little, is a lot.

As long as we are burning fossil fuel for low-intensity heat use anyways, (e.g. combined cycle heat/power plants), giving the fuel a temporary role as packaging before burning doesn't seem such a bad idea. Emissions treatment has come a long way. Alternative packaging solutions don't have zero footprint either (e.g. ferrying around reusable containers)

Burning the stuff is only profitable if you get it sorted without contaminants. But only a fraction of packaging is collected properly.

As long as that crap is produced, people will throw it wherever they want, and nobody will collect and sort the plastic for free just so you can burn it "profitable".

Lots of that "compostable" stuff won't break down in home compost bins, and instead needs to be ground up and hot composted in a municipal setting.

> imagine if all packaging was compostable, you could just throw it on a pile in your back yard and it would turn into fertile soil within a couple of months

Nope, this is emphatically not how the compostable materials you're talking about work. I invite you to try it: you will not see much degradation of the object even after a year, even with shredding and in a well-maintained pile.

Almost all of these materials need special composting processing; one of the key requirements is adding quite a bit of heat. I've known several restaurants/groceries trying to use compostable cups/utensils/etc. whose compost service eventually required the pickup to be completely free of these items. Portland, OR has municipal compost; they likewise cannot process these items: https://www.portlandoregon.gov/sustainabilityatwork/article/...

These materials may be better than "traditional" plastic, but the "compostable" nature is rather oversold. They still need to be handled in a very specific manner. They won't break down without quite a bit of help.

That stuff is not what I was thinking about. I was thinking about bags like those: https://www.amazon.com/UNNI-ASTM6400-Certified-Compostable-F...

Materials like that can be used as trash can liners and for carrying vegetables.

Paper, cardboard, wood can be used for single use dishes and cutlery.

Hopeful news is that some really efficient recycling technologies for mixed plastics are under development, like Magnetic Density Separation (MDS)

https://www.tudelft.nl/en/ceg/research/stories-of-science/re...

For an entertaining introduction (and some perspective) on the whole process of trash collection and recycling, I recommend _Trashed_ by Backderf. It's an eye-opener.

Possibly a little exaggerated in parts, but just the basic farts are insane: all that stands between the gunk in the landfill and the soil system is a thin layer of plastic, usually.

Few years ago Bea Johnson, a French born US citizen, was all in the news on how she's near zero waste

https://frenchly.us/bea-johnson-a-french-woman-on-a-zero-was...

I guess she should get on television asap

Reusable tampons and condoms (from the article) might be a bridge too far for many people.

Ok, the docu I saw about her was mostly about kitchen habits: glass jars, a few tote bags and compost. I'm not pro-reusable condoms either.

not something I had much background on but did a little reading and the numbers prior to the ban are pretty incredible. Interesting to see the shift in projected import/exports of plastics to 2030. A big shift in China policy.

http://geographical.co.uk/people/development/item/2811-china...

This can only be a good thing in the long run. Exporting recyclable waste is like exporting bales of dollar bills, and paying for it.

I get your point but the “recyclables” we produce as Americans are not really recyclables. They are 90% recycling, 10% trash, or worse.

You mean that the composition of the recyclables is 10% non-recyclable thus rendering the entire thing non-recyclable? That is indeed regrettable but it's never too late to change.

I mean that 'single stream recycling' has pushed 'diversion from landfill' and 'recycling' rates so high that it has changed the composition of what our recycling actually consists of.

Take a fictional recycling truck driving through a residential neighborhood - 10% or more of the material inside the recycling bins is going to be contaminated 'wish-cycled' material, such as barbecue laden plastic plates, nylon ropes, grease-stained pizza boxes, and soiled paper products.

Lots of materials cost more to recycle than to make from virgin materials, even glass which is relatively easy to clean and process.

Recycling creates jobs, which might be considered a benefit but from purely financial means, the cheapest method is to burn stuff and generate electricity sadly.

This comes up a lot when talking about recycling, but really the issue here is that the environment is never counted as a financial asset. Carbon/pollution taxes cannot come soon enough.

Burning is completely viable and the most environmentally friendly option, when it is done in proper facilities and with high heat. Especially for consumer trash that cannot be effectively recycled. Since there will be need for load following power plants anyway, why not use trash to power those instead of raw gas & oil.

I'm not convinced of that. If you watch any documentaries or read any articles about the processing that goes on you'll see that it's very labor intensive. That means it's only exporting (or importing) dollar bills for certain markets.

It's all a matter of process innovation. When there's enough financial incentives somebody will figure out how to do it cost effectively. Up until now it was more cost effective to export it.

> When there's enough financial incentives somebody will figure out how to do it cost effectively.

Indeed they have. In Los Angeles, thousands of individual profiteers, usually pushing wheeled carts, comb through tens of thousands of large blue recycling bins in residential areas extracting the most valuable bottles and cans. They exchange these containers for cash at automated recycling centers.

(The mitigating circumstance is that the state of California subsidizes the recycling centers.)

Nice try. The scale of your problems will require a little more coordination than a few tramps and lazy sarcasm however

>lazy sarcasm

I took it as anything but. Ethical issues aside, it's a proven, low cost solution that does scale. Why should a more coordinated solution be superior (see: planned economies)?

Label everything, put bottle deposits on everything (an idea which greenwashing groups like KAB hate and fight strongly against), and the return rates skyrocket and contamination rates plummet. It's the only proven formula.

I wasn't being sarcastic and I wouldn't use the insulting term 'tramps' to label them.

Well in the short run, many people had a habit of recycling(like my parents) who don't anymore sense the local place doesn't take the materials anymore.

Isn't there an argument here to build more incinerator-style power plants to manage the garbage buildup (esp. in urban centers?) To my knowledge, lots of European/Asian developed nations are already doing this with acceptable (i.e. low) environmental impact.

Can someone more knowledgable comment on this?

> the city wants to "better educate our residents about what should and should not be recycled"

In the UK they don't make any effort to do this and it really annoys me. There are so many things that aren't just aluminium cans or glass bottles. Can I recycle them? No way of knowing.

In the US even when they do try, they fail. "Toxic waste day" at the dump, I brought a pickup load of old chemical bottles from the shed, old fluorescent tubes, alkaline batteries. And took it all home again - they didn't know what to do with any of it. One guy just suggested dumping it out on my driveway to 'dry up' in the sun.

I had a similar experience at hazardous waste day. I think they need to train the workers better (at all).

As a contrast, the folks at my local hazardous waste disposal facility (Alameda County, CA), were very knowledgeable and have taken all the items you listed as having been rejected at yours. So there is hope with better facilities and education.

Depends where in the UK! https://www.oxford.gov.uk/info/20074/recycling_advice/25/wha...

Still pathetically short. Needs to be at least 10 times longer or give general principles rather than listing items.

For instance it doesn't say if I can recycle nuts and bolts. Rather than just adding that to the list though they could say something like "all items primarily (99% of more) made of metal between 50g and 10kg" or whatever their actual criteria are.

Let me just look around the room and see all the items that list doesn't cover: pewter mugs, large steel ball bearings, vinyl film backing paper, screws, middle bits of sellotape, bike brake cables, empty metal epoxy containers, etc...

It would be hard to find a better fit for a problem needing a ml / robotics solution.

Facebook internally uses compostable plates and cutlery in their cafeterias; I am wondering if creating those doesn't pollute environment even more than plastics.

In the canteen I use they wash plates and crockery. Imagine if that practice came to America.

>In the canteen I use they wash plates and crockery. Imagine if that practice came to America

American here. What is this "washing of plates and crockery" of which you speak?

They also wash the cutlery!

Condiments are also available in recyclable glass containers, including 'HP Sauce'. None of these single portion sachets.

As of yet nobody has died of foot and mouth disease, AIDS, rabies, leprosy or any other ailment known to be communicable via forks that have been previously used.

They could do better though, in post mad cow disease Britain you can't feed the food slops to pigs.

>They also wash the cutlery!

From what strange and wondrous land do you come?

I work in the US and it drives me nuts that at work almost everything they use is disposable. They could easily get a dishwasher. Instead every lunch produces a huge pile of trash.

I work in Chicago and our office of 75 people has 2 dishwashers, 3 refrigerators, 3 microwaves, multiple drawers and cabinets full of plates, drink ware and utensils (including chef's knives and other cutlery).

It's not even hard to maintain.

>including chef's knives and other cutlery).

FedEx doesn't even allow us to have metal butter knives heh, you know being 'weapons' and all.

They are made basically like plastic, except that the process has extra steps at the start, right? Plastic uses plants that grew long ago and stored in underground vaults called "oil fields", whereas the compostable stuff uses plants grown now, grown and processed with effort right now?

In a way, any action in the present pollutes more than an action not taken. But that's hardly a fair comparison.

Also, people heavily underestimate the impact argricultue has on the enviroment.

This is where the whole `sustainable` resources concept really tips the scales.

Taking oil out of "underground vaults" is taking long-sequestered CO2 and moving it into the atmosphere/"carbon cycle". It's plastic that has to be dealt with, or CO2 from burning, or it's carbon dissolved in he ocean, etc.

Growing plants takes energy from the sun to condense CO2 into complex higher-energy compounds. This can be converted, with use of (possibly clean) energy into useful goods. If these goods end up being burned, the CO2 is returned to the atmosphere. If buried, the CO2 is (at least temporarily) sequestered.

Either way, there's no net use of carbon. Yes, the input energy could be from carbon fuel sources, but energy will just get cleaner and cleaner until that's no longer necessary. Even the water needed to grow "biodegradable materials" is plentiful given you have the energy.

Look closely... they are "commercially compostable" which means heating them to something like 200 degrees for multiple hours. Throw them out in your compost pile or a landfill, and they'll still be there forever, or at least a really long time.

I suspect balancing "speed to degrade" with "stability when used" is something that will consistently improve with technology. (Not to mention manufacturing.)

The problem with trash isn't the space it takes up while it breaks down. It's that you're taking all the leftovers from petrochemical processing, making them into disposable products, and them dumping them en-mass into the "biosphere". (I consider a dump effectively the "biosphere" when compared to "a mile under rocks sequestered for millions of years after growing from CO2 with solar power".)

Not only does this mean there's more carbon on the surface, but there's all the gross stuff that came up with the oil that has a tendency of not breaking down in the environment, bio-accumulating, etc. (It didn't break down in the first million years... But stuff that never breaks down is such great packaging!!!)

Can we not burn our trash like some of the Nordic countries currently do? Or would the EPA frown on something like that?

Even if we could, you're talking about a few hundred million tons of trash each year.

I've been steadily working towards trash collecting robots for several years now, ever since hearing about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. After the initial shock wore off I thought to myself, "hey, free resources."

The initial challenge was finding a secure OS to run on the robots so they wouldn't be suborned into a (physical) botnet. That proved challenging, as the only way you can trust your system is to prove it correct from the metal up. In order to be able to trust the proof you have to be able to understand symbolic logic. It turns out there's a simple notation that makes this easy[1] and which makes for a simple SAT solver. Combined with a logical-paradigm reasoning engine (i.e. Prolog or miniKanren or Coq, etc... There are a few to choose from these days) you can describe and compile e.g. a trustworthy OS and application code for a swarm robot distributed over the ocean. (I'm just at that point now. It's been slow going, I lead a chaotic life.)

In the meantime the NN/ML renaissance hit and now a lot of what would have been hairy problems are already solved. I had thought to have some sort of volunteer "Mechanical Turk" network of humans to help sort the trash, but very effective sorting machines have become available in just the last few years.

There are (at least) two major method of recycling plastic: Thermal depolymerization[2] which uses heat and pressure to turn it back into a kind of oil-like slurry; and Molten Salt Oxidation[3] which oxidizes (burns) molecules (not just plastic) within a red-hot bath of molten salt. This latter process can handle pretty much anything, it's used to dispose of munitions including chemical weapons. It's also exothermic, you can get power out. It also makes a good atomic reactor.

There's another option that could be called "divide and conquer". What makes something a piece of "trash" rather than a building material? Uniformity of shape and material. Consider the "timbrel vault"[4]. The basic idea is to subdivide a piece of trash until it's more-or-less "pure" (glass, paper, plastic, whatever), record the shapes of the individual pieces, and then assemble them (by machine) into larger structures and glue them together. Because you would have precise control over the fine structure of the composite material output you could build non-linear structures (i.e. that bend or compress in one direction but are stiff in others, etc.) or reinforce weaker or more brittle materials with stronger bits.

All this to say: "waste" is another word for "resource". Change your perspective and you change your level of wealth. And it's getting exponentially cheaper and easier to apply automated intelligence to rearrange the "waste" into useful forms! From this POV, China has done US a favor.

[1] "Laws of Form" G. Spencer-Brown. Cf. "Markable Mark" G. Burnett-Stuart.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization

[3] http://moltensalt.org/references/static/home.earthlink.net/b...

[4] http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2008/11/tiles-vaults.html

This is where capitalism trumps sustainability. A mistake was made.

Maybe now americans will be more thoughtful

What would happen if we put trash in shipping containers and launch it into space? (Serious question).

Your garbage bill would could you about 10,000 USD per pound and require the use of obscene amounts of rocket fuel.

Thank you for explaining.

It would be interesting to have data about the global movement of raw materials in finished products and the restulting waste, net import and export by country, to see where waste is accumulating and where the consumption actually takes place.

I wonder how many people have lost their jobs. I don't blame China for banning it, it makes sense, but I would hate to be employed in China knowing that the government might any day ban it with no notice.

What are you implying? Politics happen in every country. Banning the import is the same effect as starting a trade war or adding high import tax.

Gee, where is all this waste coming from? eats take out 3 times a day. I just have no idea how we can get better at recycling. buys a new smartphone every 2 years. Like why do we have to separate plastic and paper? drinks coffee from a disposable cup twice a day. I have no idea how Washington will meet 80% recycling targets! stocks house with consumer packaged goods.

The plastic straw ban was a good start, but I'd like to see some more action on this front. My partner bought a box of crackers the other day and we opened it up to find half the cardboard box was empty and it was just a small plastic bag which itself was half empty. The packaging almost weighed more than the product itself! And I bought a microSD card the other day with a plastic clam shell package that was 15x the size of the product it was holding.

Ridiculous. Consumerism has gone too far. Mandate that packaging can't weigh more than the product it holds and you'd eliminate tons of wasteful packaging. Mandate that all food must be sold in bulk quantities; no more single scoop yogurt cups or snack bags with like 3 gummies in them.

There's a warning on the box that says contents may settle during shipment.

As far as having a box too large; well that's just settling for the box maker's specs. (Almost) No one makes their own boxes.

I noticed Amazon starting shipping in frustration-free packaging. I'm quite a fan of that. Assuming it helps (if you compost the cardboard maybe?).

I wasn't complaining about the lack of product, which is what the warning on the box is for (so people don't call up and say "hey you gave me a half filled bag!"). My complaint is that there is clearly an inefficiency in packaging which is leading to this waste.

And again, my complaint with clam shells isn't that they are frustrating; it's that the product I purchased was far smaller than its packaging, again a huge packaging inefficiency which leads to waste.

I'm not asking companies to make their own boxes or reduce frustration. I'm asking consumers to stop buying shit that comes in boxes and plastic. I didn't need those crackers, we could have happily snacked on homemade bread. Why couldn't the SD card come in a small dime bag in an envelope?

> Why couldn't the SD card come in a small dime bag in an envelope?

Making the packaging bigger makes it difficult for someone to steal it. If you were to put the card in a small envelope, you would have to store the card in a locked cabinet and call for an employee to unlock and hand it to you. Multiply that by hundreds/thousands of small products and employee costs would outstrip your savings for a cheaper SD card.

Holy crap, y'all are still missing my point! Having an employee open a locked cabinet would be AMAZING if it reduces packaging. I don't give a shit about costs, why do you think I care about cost savings? I care about reducing waste to the landfill. If that means someone has to unlock a cabinet for me, so be it.

The frustration-free packaging seems like the way to go. I don't care what box my stuff comes in. It's a shame it takes a behemoth like Amazon to get manufacturers to do this, instead of doing it on their own.

>It's a shame it takes a behemoth like Amazon to get manufacturers to do this, instead of doing it on their own.

The shame is, in my experience, Amazon's frustration free packaging just means "multiple cardboard boxes and lots of paper instead of plastic bubbles" even for cables.

I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing.

It's almost like capitalism is extraordinarily inefficient at using resources due to perverse incentives caused by only taking local rewards and consequences into account instead of the entire closed planet system, and will simply run to the most lenient local conditions to inefficiently exploit those resources cheaply for profit rather than taking on the expense of becoming more efficient. Imagine that.

I'd love to see Amazon push for its suppliers to offer a low environmental impact packaging option. If you buy a camera on Amazon, the box isn't selling anything on Amazon, so you can use a basic recycled board box with minimal to no plastic for your new camera. Would select that option every time. I have opened my MacBook box since removing it from the box the first time. It may as well have been made out of lowest energy to produce and recycle material or something naturally biodegradable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com