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Comment by NoblePublius | Hacker News Reader

What’s the past year has shown us is that “we” never were recycling. We were just sending our garbage to China and they’ve had enough of it. The entire concept of postconsumer material is basically a marketing concept to appeal to a higher wage consumers.

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The pessimism seems warranted in the case of plastics recycling. However, it's worth noting that the state of metal, paper and glass recycling is not so bleak.

I was under the impression that the only thing really being recycled was aluminium (and other metals, to some extent).

Typical plastic and paper waste is pretty dirty, due to misunderstanding of what can be recycled - anywhere from just thinking anything vaguely paper or plastic can be recycled to places where people apparently think recycling bins are just different colored trash bins (or just dont care). Contamination of otherwise recyclable materials by food is also an issue. Its also not worth much since the feedstocks for new paper and plastic is pretty cheap.

Glass is also fairly worthless, since it needs to be sorted by color to realistically be recycled. Mixed glass I believe is generally landfilled or "up-cycled" into some sort of crushed aggregate for various purposes.

Lots of cardboard and paper is recycled in the US. It works fine.

It's also the case that any metal a scrapyard will pay you for is economical to recycle. The majority of discarded steel is recycled.

They were recycling some of it, and then the rest was burned or dumped leading to all that plastic in the Pacific ocean.

This.

I've since learnt "recycling" meant more on the line of "collect+transport+sort+ship it out of sight". It was a business like any other, when it was profitable everything chugged along just fine.. as soon as money stopped flowing things gets ugly.

I wonder if there's any opportunity in this. or is it basically wait for some other country to pick up the demand.

a dozen years ago, e-waste (electronics recycling) got a lot of attention, when the EU passed their version of the guidelines.. currently, with all things considered, its just an economic cost. There is no "opportunity" .. if that means make money.. many well-intentioned people (and some not well-intentioned) went broke attempting to make electronics recycling work. Plastics has all the burden and none of the value, compared to the electronics waste stream.

Recycling is very much labour intensive which is expensive in Europe. And you have to deal with all kinds of toxic stuff.

Then crank the cost until it is an opportunity. A failed half-measure means we need a whole measure, not to abandon the idea. We only have one world.

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