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Comment by rusk | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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