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Comment by darkerside | Hacker News Reader

> too difficult

> impossible

These words are funny to me. It's not literally "too difficult" or "impossible" for people to sort their recyclables. I think they essentially mean, we don't know how to make people do this, or we think we'll be voted out if we ask people to do it. And what it boils down to is that, it's not a socially accepted/expected practice to sort your recyclables. But, you know what? That is a completely different thing from being "too difficult" or "impossible". And by conflating those two things, we as a society are operating with blinders on.

As a thought experiment, imagine everybody else was making the needed compromises (to their time, space, etc.) to properly sort recyclables. Is it still impossible for you?

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IMO, you shouldn't ask people to sort recyclable materials at home for a few reasons:

1. It's not impossible, but it's impractical. You need multiple containers all of a sudden, and these can't be fixed-size containers because not everyone consumes the same proportion of any given material.

2. People are going to sort things wrong, meaning you need to check/re-sort at the processing plant.

3. How difficult of a challenge is it to build sorting machines, anyway? Are you going to tell me self-driving cars are coming soon but we can't build machines to handle this? If it really is too hard, have regulations put in place so that some machine-readable material tag be put on all packaging.

4. I think this is a good domain for regulators to step in. Tax things that are hard to recycle, and encourage packaging that is easy to recycle or biodegradable. Keep in mind, glass containers are recyclable and also reusable, meaning you can just clean and refill them at the factory, which is more energy-efficient than melting everything. No new technology needed, just go back to selling milk, sodas, etc. in glass jugs.

> IMO, you shouldn't ask people to sort recyclable materials at home

I don't know where you are, but I think your opinion is colored by the status quo in your country. In a lot of places in Europe people do sort them, and from what I've seen they do a good job at it.

Also, sorting machines are probably not that hard, but remember that this is a low-value product. You cannot justify a lot of expense. (..unless, of course the government pays; different discussion though)

I think this is a cultural problem. It’s built into culture in places outside is the US to sort, but changing behavior is very very hard on a massive scale.

I think tackling it at the source is probably the only real solution. If companies are forced to use easily recyclable or reusable packaging then they will. But they won’t do it voluntarily. I would happily pay a few extra cents or whatever on everything I buy if everyone was forced to use more sustainable packaging.

I think it's not change behavior, just how to incentive the people. There would be lots of people would like to do that if you pay the money, basically some places would buy those recyclable trash, like paper, glass bottle, cans, which is very normal in other developing countries.

How can sorting trash be built into culture, when it is quite a new thing itself? Did people sort trash in the 19th century? Did they do it in the 1950s anywhere in the world?

In the part of Denmark I am in we have a biweekly pickup of recyclables, paper, metal, glass, plastic, as well as other bigger items being thrown out - furniture etc. and a deal to pick up medical wastes cleaning supplies in longer periods.

Danish houses, and even the houses where I am located at, are typically smaller than American middle class housing.

When Americans talk about sorting they tend to mean sorting different kinds of plastics and such, not the top level "basic" categories such as paper, glass, metal, and plastic. Or at least that's what it meant in a couple places I lived (most places I've lived recycle different plastics, for example).

> How difficult of a challenge is it to build sorting machines, anyway?

Machine vision and learning, conveyor belts, lots of delta arms - seems doable to me.

Heck - maybe we need something akin to the whole "smart car" thing in China - let kids and others come up with trash sorting machines, compete in challenges (FIRST/FRC style?), etc?

Hmm - business idea:

Educational STEM startup focused on the above (aka - FIRST/FRC robot contests for trash sorting); all entries must be open source/open hardware; same company (more or less) could use innovations from the open source entries to develop full-scale machines and systems for implementation in actual industry?

I recently did a tour of a NYC Waste Management center in Queens. The installation was huge, roughly the same footprint as the entire wallstreet section of downtown Manhattan. Further, the technology at every step of the waste management process was very impressive.

Skimmers on top to separate oily waste, under-water conveyors to separate heavier materials, huge pools of bacteria that can "digest" organic matter turn it into methane that can then heat homes or create power, centrifuges that can do more precise separation.

They showed the before and after of the waste from the process. It starts as absolutely disgusting murky green water with dirty wet-naps in it, to crystal clear H20 (although I still wouldn't drink it).

The work involves nearly every engineering discipline from bio-chemists to electrical engineers to underwater mechanics to software developers. It's unfortunate it's a public job and the pay isn't great, it's interesting work.

But sadly, given all that, every time it rains the rainwater floods the system with more liquid than it can handle and it all gets dumped into the hudson river.

If it's already contaminated, with food waste or other, there's no amount of machine vision or labour that will get you rid of the contamination so you can send it to China.

maybe you use the machine vision and sorting machine to reject that item then, and still send all the uncontaminated items to China?

Years ago I dabbled in the agtech space and reasonably affordable spectrometers were available. Perhaps that could help pick out contaminated items?

I'd rather it not go to China. It is better that we manufacture our own plastic trinkets right here in the USA.

An implementation that I have experienced first hand in rural Maine where we did have to sort our recyclables. This admittedly doesn't work everywhere, but hopefully it provides insight. There was no trash/recycling pick-up. Most people made a trip to "The Dump" once a week with their trash + recyclables. For recyclables, There was a large building a few hundred feet wide with various windows in its face. One window was for black/white paper, one was for colored paper, one was for #1 plastics, another for #2, etc, glass, cans, etc... All containers had to be rinsed out and have their labels removed. It's preferable to sort these at home, but some people would just have a big bag of mixed recyclables and move between windows, tossing things in. A couple of employees inside would watch the windows and yell at anyone mixing recyclables. It's vary laborious and you might wonder why people wouldn't just throw recyclables away instead? We had to pay $2 per trash bag, which we bought at the Town Hall. This incentivized people not to throw away recyclables. The $2 bags were large enough to hold 3 or 4 13-gallon kitch-trash-bags of trash. With trash, you would stand on a platform and throw these $2 bags of trash into the top of an open shipping container which would be trucked away to a regional landfill. This solution was a HUGE improvement over the previous solution, which was a dirt road that led to a big hill that you would throw anything and everything off of (spoiler, we ended up with contaminated ground water in certain areas).

> You need multiple containers all of a sudden

You can do it the Japanese way and collect different kinds of wastes, in a periodic (say, weekly) rotation, placing the burden to sort and bag them correctly on citizens. Two groups of containers would be enough if recyclable waste equipments are not contaminated by non-recyclable waste. Same could also be applied to reusable products (reuse bin).

> You can do it the Japanese way and collect different kinds of wastes, in a periodic (say, weekly) rotation, placing the burden to sort and bag them correctly on citizens.

What happens to the others during a cycle; ie, let's say you recycle plastics, paper, metal - week one is plastics, but you still accumulate paper and metal - where do you put it if you only have a single bin?

You bundle your paper and cardboard. How much metal do you throw away?

https://www.newlyswissed.com/a-primer-on-recycling-in-switze...

I stage my recyclables in recyclable paper bags from my grocer.

We have single sort but I don't walk each piece out to the bin.

Which means you have to have multiple containers, right?

Yes, but is that an issue? We have four containers where I live in Canada: paper, containers (glass, plastic, metal), compostable waste, and landfill waste. Recycling and compost don't have limits and are collected weekly. Landfill waste is restricted to two 125 L/20 kg bags, with collection every two weeks.

We have three small recycling and compost bins under the kitchen sink, and large green, grey, and blue bins in the garage. Garbage stays in the kitchen trash can until collection, and we usually only fill one bag. It doesn't smell either, since it doesn't have any food waste.

For reference, this is for a family of seven.

So, if you have more than 125 L per week or more than 20 kg per week, you have a huge incentive to dump it somewhere illegally? It doesn't sound like they thought this through.

Certain holidays like Christmas have double the limit, and you can always buy a garbage tag for a few dollars to put on any extra bags. Or just bring it to the landfill, which is located right in the city. Dumping doesn't seem to be a problem.

The majority of our trash is plastic bags (milk, grocery, cereal, etc.), which aren't recyclable. And those don't take up much room at all.

That doesn't sound at all impractical, and actually sounds like it would make a lot of things _easier_ in my situation.

"3. How difficult of a challenge is it to build sorting machines, anyway?"

The answer is EXTREMELY DIFFICULT. The problem is that it is a network system. The number of possible connections of different elements with different elements is a mathematical concept called "factorial".

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

Even small factorials become extremely huge fast. Huge like the number of atoms in the entire known Universe huge.

In engineering we have machines that do only one thing well. For example, you can burn wood well. No problems.

If the wood have mercury(button batteries), even small quantities, you have a terrible problem (people dying from cancer near the incinerator), if the wood has pesticides or Teflon or chloric materials you will be creating dioxins which are one of earth biggest poison, making burning extremely expensive.

Just a single button battery can contaminate tons of material or water.

Wet wipes for example have made cost of sewerage to skyrocket.

Humans or living beings have something machines do not have: flexibility.

Something that cost 1 monetary unit to do with a machine, becomes 20, 50, 100 units when you get out of the working conditions of the machine.

The fact is that the cost have been externalized. Make people in Africa or Asia die from our waste pollution. It is a good thing that they start saying no and forcing us to deal with the real cost, so we have to be smart with our waste.

At the end of the day it is not that hard. The US was the absolute champion of waste, invented "the use and trow" concept, because they could do it without dealing with the consequences.

And yet somehow people think self driving cars are gonna happen any time soon. Yeah right.

Honest question about glass, from someone who also wants glass everything:

If we swapped back to glass containers for everything, would there be significant increase in CO2 emissions from the added shipping weight?

I suspect you are right to ask this question, and have a few items that might point in the direction of an answer.

Fuji water bottles are rectangular not only as a unique branding but in order to economize on space in shipping to reduce transport cost.

Large lightweight items cost a lot to ship because they are lightweight and inefficiently use the vehicle. The ideal truckload is a full volume at the maximum carrying weight.

So, compared to transporting loads of compacted glass shards, I'd expect that transporting truckloads of empty bottles could be not only high in monetary costs, but also CO2 costs.

>Fuji water bottles are rectangular not only as a unique branding but in order to economize on space in shipping to reduce transport cost.

It's Fiji and this is a terrible example. Fiji could just ship a tanker full of water to a bottler in their country of destination. Instead they ship the bottles to Fiji, then fill them at a plant that runs on diesel generators. Finally, they ship the filled bottles to their final destinations.

You'd have to compute what percentage of the weight of various products is taken by the container, and how energy efficiency of transport is affected by weight of items carried. To be completely fair, you'd also want to factor in how much energy is being saved by reusing containers as opposed to manufacturing new ones. Another thing to keep in mind is that electric vehicles are coming, so this should become less of an issue.

How do you mean? Electric vehicles just means that emissions don't come from the vehicle itself. I'm guessing you are assuming that the electricity used by the vehicle is coming from an energy source that is partially renewable/carbon neutral, which isn't the case in most states[1].

I don't think its unreasonable to think energy use is lower for reusing rather than making new glass containers, since you would transport them anyway. The tough question would be whether energy use is lower for transporting and reusing glass rather than transporting new, lightweight plastic. I'm also for all glass everything so I won't try to tackle that problem. -- [1] https://nyti.ms/2GDAzD8

While true, the larger generators used in power plants are usually more efficient than a standard internal combustion engine, burning less fuel for the same power. Additionally, there are fewer pollutants because you get a lot less partially combusted hydrocarbons. Furthermore, a lot of power plants are going to natural gas, which emits less CO₂.

> I'm guessing you are assuming that the electricity used by the vehicle is coming from an energy source that is partially renewable/carbon neutral, which isn't the case in most states[1].

You're looking at total generation, but you really need to look at how increasing demand over time is met, since that's really how marginal increases from changing usage (like switching to electric cars) is met.

You have to pay for your fancy recycling plant.

Places with high population density already have them. Elsewhere it's a big cost and doesn't make any sense. I've heard of big evil companies like Waste Management sending their trash stream though a sorting plant...

The many trips and washing cut down on the efficiency of reusing glass.

Well, in suburban & rural areas where there isn't recycling & yard waste service or uptake is limited, sending trash through a sorting plant isn't the worst idea. Cardboard and metal can be separated out, reducing the overall bulk of the trash.

Right, but the problem is distance and volume. Rural landfills are often already a bit of a financial mess. Here they've banned hauling trash out of the county, to increase the volume (and thus the fees they collect).

Add a significant operation in the middle of that and you better have a lot of support from residents, because they are going to be paying for it in taxes.

#2 is the fundamental problem here; home sorting is like asking people to please only use alphanumeric user names.

1. That's at least closer to the truth. "Impractical" is an opinion, whereas "impossible" is an incorrect fact. Now we're talking problems that can be solved.

3. Building that machine is actually probably pretty challenging. But not as challenging as getting the regulations you describe passed.

4. Not a bad idea.

I've lived in places where you sort them, you have a larger container then put bottles etc in bags in that.

There is no excuse for being lazy. If people are dumb, let them pay for it.

Honestly, I've been an avid recycler for as long as I could, voluntarily taking my recyclables to a center.

Recycling really is confusing (in the US). Different municipalities have different rules about what can and can't be recycled, and then we find out that most of the "recyclables" end up getting incinerated or landfilled anyway.

Honestly, this is something that robots really should handle. Maybe we can have two bins, but sorted according to things that are clean and things that are dirty. (Things that are dirty are diapers, wet food containers, ect.)

I keep telling people that I don't believe we'll have self-driving cars until the robots can sort our trash for us.

It's not impossible. It's German, and more and more European and the EU is pushing to improve the recycling rates.

Just think of aluminum: Though extremely abundant in nature, it require a lot of energy to produce a new alu can but when you recycle you get 20 alu cans for the same amount of energy put in.

There was actually a different article a while ago about this topic. There are a ton of corner cases, for example, you can't recycle cardboard pizza boxes, or plastic envelope windows.

The rules for what is recyclable and how to sort it are complicated. They can change when the recycling technology / provider changes, and there's no feedback to tell people when they're doing it wrong.

That's one of the practical factors that makes education difficult.

I personally think they could make progress by adding a feedback loop: Bring in 2% or so of the bins and check them by hand, after labeling each bin with its source. Then send a letter to tell people what they're doing wrong. If 2% of bins are checked, then on average, a poorly educated consumer who's regularly polluting the bin with non-recyclable materials should be informed of the error of his ways within a year.

Here's the previous article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17359807

I grew up in a very conservative area of America and we sorted our recycling. It was no big deal.

Then I moved to a fairly liberal area of the country and was stunned to see the “all together” recycling was the standard.

The stunningly low expectations we put on people is depressing. And the justifications I see in this thread below just show how prevalent this attitude is, that basically most of humanity can’t do the simplest of things.

The thing is most sorting requirements are idiotic and despite them, trash still needs to be checked by hand, mostly because people put them in wrong bins(for example some paper cups shouldn't be put with paper - because they consist of 3 layers, and one of those layers needs a different process for recycling).

Over here the requirements are to sort your trash into 7 categories, of which 5 are recyclable.. and we generally speaking live in pretty small houses/flats compared to US.

why not make a simple system consisting of 3 categories: food waste(wet trash) - which you dispose daily because it stinks otherwise, dry trash - which won't stink, and recyclables?

The main idea behind recycling should be to make people recycle(emphasis on people), not to make it easier on sorting company, nor recycling company.

“To the timid and hesitating everything is impossible because it seems so.” – Sir Walter Scott

The standards China is demanding are not really relevant to consumer sorting. It's a sorting that is always going to have to be done in specialized facilities. China is requiring an 0.5% contamination rate. By comparison, curb side pickup currently has about a 25% contamination rate. Improved consumer sorting might help but it's not going to be the whole answer.

People can deal with paper, metal, plastic, and compost as categories, particularly if they have different bins. What make it break down is that anything more complicated than intuitive categories will just result in people going for "good enough." Either make it have "good UI" and make sense to people or do single stream sort later.

Counter argument: If everyone else was doing it why would I? The amount of garbage I individually generate is negligible. I do recycle and compost but I can imagine that a lot of people will have this same thought.

How about teaching it at school at an early age? I think it comes down to education.

The value of my time that it would require far exceeds the value of this activity. It's of net negative economic benefit to society.

You do realize that there are plenty of countries where people separate recyclables at home, right? And that it’s not a big deal. Your attitude is why we can’t have nice things, like a healthy planet for my grandkids to live on.

I wonder which is more expensive to the environment: OPs refusal to sort recyclables, or the existence of your descendants.

If it's so valuable, you could pay for someone else to do it for you. Just like you pay to have people clean your house, wash and sort your dishes, do your taxes, walk your dog, etc etc etc.

Only a couple of products are efficiently recycled anyway and as more types of recycling we have people sort at home, the _less efficiently_ we recycle.

You have no idea how much time it takes if you think it’s too much.

Source: living in a place that legally requires to sort garbage into 5 (five) fractions.

Where I live, we sort 6 different categories: Food, glass, metal, paper, hard plastic, soft plastic. Was a hassle at first, but now I get warm fuzzies knowing that I am reducing waste.

I only have 2 categories of recycling, and even those can be a hassle (e.g., I can never if soft plastic bags go in the plastic bin). But I too get the warm "fuzzies" when I do it. But those fuzzies are more than just being seen as "eco-conscious" or whatever, it's about efficiency. We go through enormous lengths to be efficient about our time, sleep, food we eat, etc. Being efficient with the products we use and waste we create makes me feel like my life is running like a precision machine rather than a beat up old clunker.

I'd personally love the concept of living a life that created no waste, where every output I created could be used as another's input. Alas, I don't think we're there yet.

we used to be there before industrialization. there was scarcely any waste - pretty much everything solid except broken pottery was repurposed for something else. the challenge is making it reasonable to do when economies of scale make it cheaper to discard stuff instead of reuse.

There was plenty of waste pre-industrialization... e.g., the most basic form: feces. In some cases, industrialization made us more efficient with our waste; modern waste management plants can turn feces into methane and heat homes.

Industrialization's negative effect wasn't about efficiency, it was that it allowed us to create far more stuff. Today, we go through far more single-use products than ever could have been imagined pre-industrialization. We're far more efficient about handling that waste than they were, but because we create so, so much more of it today, the net effect is more waste. So even though industrialization had a big effect, it's not for the reasons you raise.

Going one step further, industrialization doesn't have to be the enemy. There could very plausibly exist a society with mass plentiful produced goods that all get easily recycled/reused. Industrialization can help here.

I'm sure you could hire someone whose time is less valuable so they can do your part for you...

And I'm sure that would also be grotesquely economically destructive.

Let's do some simple math, shall we?

One of the most recycleable commodities is aluminum. A soda can contains about 15 grams of metal. You can get maybe $0.40/lb for aluminum can metal. This comes to about $.013/can. If I were to value my time at $10/hour, then if I spend more than a few seconds recycling a can it isn't worth it.

So, no, it's not worth it to hire anyone to recycle most stuff. Labor is far too expensive, compared to the value produced by recycling.

But it doesn't take a few seconds. When you are about to throw it you just throw it in a different bin. It doesn't take more time. Where i live (yes Europe) we have compostable, recyclable and general bins, so we have the same mini bins at home.

And nobody was recycling 40 years ago so it's just a matter of habit/culture.

They don't require you to wash out your cans before recycling? That itself will take more than the couple of seconds per can.

Yes, it's habit/culture. Lots of silly things are done just because it's the habit to do them. It doesn't mean they're good ideas.

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