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Comment by pfdietz | Hacker News Reader

It's important to understand the issue that recycling is meant to address. It's cost of landfills, not shortage of materials.

The obvious (but not workable) answer is to just charge the actual cost of disposing material in landfills. But this doesn't work because it encourages illegal dumping and littering.

So, I can see two solutions:

(1) Some process that converts bulk garbage into something that takes up less space. Incineration and pyrolysis are like this. Maybe you get some useful energy or gases out of it, but the main point is to reduce the cost of disposal. But this would have to be cheap and clean, a tall order.

(2) A tax on all manufactured goods, based on their disposal footprint, that subsidizes the landfills. Since this tax is already paid it can't be avoided by illegal dumping.

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"Some process that converts bulk garbage into something that takes up less space. Incineration and pyrolysis are like this. Maybe you get some useful energy or gases out of it, but the main point is to reduce the cost of disposal. But this would have to be cheap and clean, a tall order."

Yeah, it's not invented in America, so it obviously doesn't exist.

Listen, there are countries with almost no landfills because everything is incinerated. Heck, there are even US states without landfills because everything is incinerated! This is not a "tall order", trash incineration is a solved problem, modern trash incineration plants are very efficient at reclaiming energy into either heat or electricity.

“trash incineration is a solved problem, modern trash incineration plants are very efficient at reclaiming energy into either heat or electricity.”

While these plants may be efficient at reclaiming energy, there are other factors to consider.

From the article: “And while many incineration facilities bill themselves as “waste to energy” plants, studies have found that they release more harmful chemicals, such as mercury and lead, into the air per unit of energy than do coal plants”

Yeah the last thing we need is burning more junk and putting more toxins into the air. That's one waste disposal method that's actually worse than properly constructed landfills.

The solution to that is to simply exclude lead and mercury from anything that goes into the trash. In particular, electronics and batteries could be disposed of separately.

Efficient incineration requires dry, energy dense garbage. Thus you need a population that recycles paper, PET, glass and compost religiously, so that all that is left to burn are hydrocarbons like plastic.

If Americans "are terrible at recycling" as the article says, then the incinerators will be burning the wrong stuff.

So basically the argument I had with my dad (conservative blue collar) a couple years ago when he argued "No we're not going to pay $2/mo for recycling bins, this whole recycling thing is just a scam for the trash companies to skim money." Me: "Blah blah blah rainforests, blah blah blah manufacturing waste to produce, etc." I guess he was right?

He was sort of right. He correctly sensed there was something off about the sanctimonious arguments for recycling. But it's not the trash companies who are to blame.

I live in a capital of an EU country. City mandates recycle bins and garbage segregation due to EU laws, same City collects trash from all bins using same trucks and proceeds to dump it all in one big hole in the ground ~100km away while paying hefty fines. Its been like this ever since we got recycle bins.

Does this happen to be a city in the south of Italy?

What EU country has a capital in the south of Italy? The Kingdom of Two Sicilies?

Similar story where I live, but while the rubbish is separated, before it all gets thrown together again, at least it is easier for Roma people to find what is valuable and support their families that way.

Why would you rent recycling bins? I use old 5 gallon paint buckets where I live that I just painted the color coding on and my recyclers don't care.

The thing with recycling is there are mountains of externalities to whether it makes sense or not way beyond just the question of if recycling itself is profitable, the most profound of which just being the carrying cost of consuming so much space with landfills, especially in areas of higher population density - you have more trash per unit area but have to carry that trash farther to get it away from the density. In those environments local recycling centers can be much more economically viable.

I wonder how much "recycling" ends up blowing around the neighborhood and getting mowed over because of people using old buckets or the classing "recycling bin" that lacks a lid or any way to contain the contents when it's windy.

I live in Kansas, we get a lot of wind. I pick up an enormous amount of my neighbor's "recyclables" that have clearly spent a long time blowing around before they land in my yard. We need to mandate better receptacles.

I was thinking the same thing, but only because the township has given every house a recycling bin since the late 80s. I always forget that its different in other places.

(1) I think waste-to-energy is underappreciated, especially if a certain elasticity is planned rather than just running the turbines 24/7 it can meet the elasticity needs of the electric grid.

But then you have to process the ash: https://www.thisiseco.co.uk/news_and_blog/what-happens-to-wa...

(2) is roughly the Green Dot or WEEE approach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol)

In my town general waste is burned and the resulting heat is used to heat buildings.

basically all of non-rural Sweden does this as well, to the point that we import trash to burn.

I don't per se have a problem with waste to energy.

I do have a problem labeling it as green energy, and it should be the option of last resort after all other recycling options have been exhausted.

So does this mean that recycling is not necessarily even a net gain for the environment? It's all just because it is (was) cheaper?

I mean, if it's really not having an impact on e.g. rainforests etc, and adds the environmental toll of all the petroleum used to ship it all back overseas and the recycling process, might it even be a net loss for the environment?

Part of it was to legitimize producing it in the first place. Plastic bottle production does not seem so bad when the new evil is throwing it away vs. recycling. We shifted the onerous onto ourselves instead of the producers.

For (2) the tax should also be based on the biodegradability of the materials.

biodegradability of individual items is less of an impact when the majority of trash is disposed in non-degrading plastic trash bags.

Would mechanically shredding trash before being dumped help?

Also moistening the trash before burial, I think.

The gases produce need to be captured and burned, though. All that methane. Interestingly, they also need to be decontaminated of traces of silicon-containing compounds, which can muck up turbines in which they're burned.

Won't this lead to a lot of lightweight material (particularly bits of the bags themselves) blowing off the landfill surface before they can be buried?

Landfills are actually pretty cheap, which I think is part of the problem. If I take debris directly to my local transfer station (Portland, OR) they charge a mere $30/ton.

Why is that a problem? The answer to the question "what is the best[1] way to package milk", for instance, might in fact be one time use plastics that are then buried for the next million years.

[1] most economical, accounting for externalities

Is that figure subsidized? Landfill disposal often is, to reduce the incentive for illegal dumping.

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