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Comment by peteradio | Hacker News Reader

Something about this sounds like a really good burn. It's kind of funny. What do you even mean by it?

The idea is that one would simultaneously studiously separate and recycle plastic bags (at the cost of hours of their time over a period of a decade) to prevent a few pounds of plastic from entering a landfill while not being willing to use a Phillips screwdriver and a hair dryer for 45-90 minutes to save $1950 and 250 pounds of refrigerator from entering a landfill.

There might even be more mass of just polystyrene insulation in the fridge he's just trashed than the mass of plastics he keeps out of the landfill. There is certainly more overall plastic in there.

It varies on jurisdiction, but the depth of recycling can be a lot better for electronics and appliances. In Europe an old fridge would typically not go to the landfill but to reprocessing facility first, stripped into metals, plastics and "electronic waste".

According to the site linked below, the average American produces about 100 lbs of plastic waste a year:

https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/lifestyle/trash-on...

To my mind, that is a significant amount of waste, and definitely worth chasing.

* Durable Plastics: 72.9 lbs

* Nodurable Plastics: 28 lbs

* Plastic Bottles and Jars: 17.7

There is more, but this gives a sense of the statistics they quote on their site. These do not seem unreasonable to me, and they suggest that recycling plastics would save a refrigerator or two in weight per household per year, depending a bit on the size of the household.

They're implying that the friend is "penny-wise and pound-foolish", by making a large effort to recycle small bits of plastic, while making no effort to avoid wasting lots of plastic/steel/coolant/electronics/motors etc.

That his friend does a token BS gesture towards being 'environmentally friendly" while participating in the same needless consumerism attitude that's responsible for 99% of the cost on the environment.

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