Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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

"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?

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.

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 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.