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ordinaryperson

The NYT has had several decent articles on this over the years:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfil...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/16/business/local-recycling-...

https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-gar...

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/opinion/sunday/the-reign-...

Ask yourself: how does recycling help the environment? It doesn't. Recycling arose out of 1980s landfill anxiety but we have plenty of space, what we don't have are plenty of climates. All the money wasted on making us feel better by recycling could be far better spent reducing carbon emissions.

What a waste of tax dollars, especially now that most cities and counties just throw out recycling anyway.

View on HN

John Tierney’s writing was roundly, soundly debunked 20 years ago. It’s amazing to me that it continues to do damage.

https://www.heartland.org/_template-assets/documents/publica...

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/400100/recycling-is-not-g...

> Recycling arose out of 1980’s landfill anxiety

That’s the first anti-recycling myth addressed above. It sure seems like this argument is being recycled.

> we have plenty of space,

Anti-recycling myth #3...

> What a waste of tax dollars

Garbage disposal is also funded by taxes. Whatever, fewer dollars are spent on both garbage and recycling combined than are lost in the margins of military spending. If you really cared about taxes at all, you’d know recycling is irrelevant.

The first link you posted an article from over 25 years ago from an organization that denies human caused climate change and prioritizes science that makes their donors happy. I would take it with a grain of salt.

> an article from over 25 years ago

It’s a direct response to an even older article the parent comment posted that preceded it. BTW, May 2019 - June 1996 is just less than 23 years.

> from an organization that denies humans caused climate change

The Environmental Defense Fund denies human factors? I think you’re mistaken. Can you please provide a source for that claim? Or are you talking about Heartland... did you confuse the hosting web site with the authors?

EDF was founded to ban DDT, widely but controversially regarded as one of the worst mistakes of environmentalism.

I think you might be overemphasising the view of a rather small minority there.

> EDF was founded to bad DDT

Right, thanks, yes EDF was founded on the very idea of human factors. I guess @landon32’s comment mistook the URL I used for the source of the information. I can’t find the full article on the EDF site, just a shortened version. Or maybe that comment was intentionally trying to cast doubt by association?

Is the history of DDT relevant to the recycling debate, or are you hoping to cast doubt by association?

> widely but controversially regarded as one of the worst mistakes of environmentalism.

“the United States ban on DDT is a major factor in the comeback of the bald eagle (the national bird of the United States) and the peregrine falcon from near-extinction in the contiguous United States.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT

I like bald eagles. And I don’t want DDT used on my food. Do you??

I’d never heard the idea that banning DDT is a mistake. I’m trying to find some reputable sources for the claim that this is widely believed. The Wikipedia article doesn’t exactly back up that claim, so do you want to provide some?

“A few people and groups have argued that limitations on DDT use for public health purposes have caused unnecessary morbidity and mortality from vector-borne diseases”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT#Criticism_of_restriction...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tierney_(journalist)#View...

"Joseph J. Romm has written that Tierney is one of the "influential but misinformed" skeptics who have helped prevent the U.S. from taking action on climate change. ..."

Back in the day of dial-up BBSes, our offline mail readers had "twit filters". Precursor to today's ad blockers.

Gods I miss that functionality.

I keep day dreaming about what today's twit filter might look like. Maybe a RSS reader.

I found these rebuttals well argued, well supported, and convincing. Thank you for digging them up.

> What a waste of tax dollars

The better point is we can spend the dollars more effectively to improve the environment.

The military / military spending has nothing to do with it.

Recycling already is a more effective expenditure than landfill. If there are even better ways, please contribute them to the discussion!

> military spending has nothing to do with it.

That’s right. Military spending is simply what one should be concerned about if they are worried about taxes. Military spending is greater than 50% of all tax expenditure in the US. Waste management is such a small fraction, it’s in the noise, far below military, and other things like roads and education.

> Recycling already is a more effective expenditure than landfill.

There are some materials where there is a net economic benefit to recycling, such as aluminum and to a lesser extent steel and glass.

There are also materials where it’s a net cost (in excess of landfill dumping fees) to recycle the material, such as many plastics. If we are paying in aggregate millions of dollars to recycle this material, it makes sense to ask could those dollars be put to better use.

Also worth noting I don’t pay for garbage and refuse through my local taxes, I have a private service which I pay to pickup my trash. Many towns are moving to this model so that residents who make less trash can pay less.

Military spending is 50% of “discretionary” spending, but about 1/6th of total spending. “Discretionary” means spending appropriated each year, versus spending which is based on existing laws and not the annual budget. I’m sure there’s many ways that money could be better spent as well, but it doesn’t change the fact that we should invest efficiently in environmental protection.

First, thanks for the reply. What I like about the discussion, even when I disagree, is that I think you and everyone here are truly pro-conservation as a goal and ideal, both economically and environmentally. We all want the same thing, less waste, there are just minor differences of opinion about how to get there.

What I don’t like about the article posted and about Tierney’s quite misguided writing is the negative headlines that immediately give the reader the impression that inaction is better than action. There are many cherry-picked statistics being used to paint a narrative that is more or less the opposite of truth, at least in Tierney’s work. I encourage you to read it and the rebuttals I posted and make up your own mind.

> There are some materials where there is a net economic benefit to recycling

Personally speaking, money is not what I care about. Recycling’s primary goals are to stop using non-renewables and stop toxic pollution and damage to the environment, not to be cheaper than being lazy. I don’t care if it costs more to value the environment, I want clean air and water, forever. I realize it’s going to take strong economic arguments to get us all moving, and I’m in no way in favor of wasting money, but in terms of priorities and the way we evaluate what’s worth doing, I believe waiting for clear and undeniable and unarguable economic benefit is probably a mistake.

I furthermore think that cost-benefit analysis of environmental factors is a deeply flawed idea. By reducing things to dollars, we’re losing our actual values. This study examined previous environmental cost-benefit analyses, and concluded they were wrong by orders of magnitude:

https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...

I think in a hundred or two hundred years if we run out of petroleum, if we need expensive air and water filters in order to survive, our great great grandchildren might look back and realize how pathetic and petty the idea was that we decided we needed to make valuing the earth cheaper than screwing it up before we were willing to budge.

I agree with everything you are saying. I just want to be clear I'm not saying we should only do things that protect the environment if they don't have a net economic cost.

i mean, there are a lot of basic environmental protective measures which actually save money too. Any time you can make something more efficient there might be upfront capex / R&D to get there, but the value inherent in the efficiency pays you back over time. E.g. airplane engines. But that's not my point.

If we are going to ask people to spend $X/day to improve their environment, it's possible that some of those hours and dollars should go toward the costs of recycling. But maybe not all $10 should go there. We should ask people to spend their time and money in the ways which will be most productive toward helping the environment.

It may be that recycling is the best bang for the buck because you can do it without leaving your home, it feels akin to doing a daily household chore rather than some special big task I have to go prepare for and schedule, and trying to get someone to do the equivalent amount of work at the equivalent cost (e.g. 10 hours and $250 a year) is never going to happen at the scale that we can get households participating in recycling.

For example, we should be increasing the cost of things to cover their environmental impact. Products should get cheaper to sell if they last longer or have a smaller environmental footprint. Most particularly this should tax environmentally unfriendly packaging, since the packaging is the first to be discarded. This aligns incentives.

military spending is greater than 50% of discretionary spending, which is 29% of the budget iirc. Which means military spending is around 15-16% of total spending.

Re: Space. From the PDF:

>Anti-recycling myth #3: Landfill space is cheap and abundant.

> Fact: Landfill space is a commodity, priced according to supply and demand. The majority of the growth of recycling in the United States has occurred in populated regions where landfills are expensive relative to the U.S. average.

I stared at this for a while trying to get at the heart of the issue. The response isn't "no, there isn't space." More like, market forces show that it isn't cheaper than recycling.

Perhaps the argument use to be "why bother recycling at all if creating new is cheaper"?

I think it's currently a de facto non-issue: Things that are worth recycling are being recycled, and things that aren't are going to be dumped/burned.

There is an energy saving component to recycling. Aluminum for example takes a tremendous amount of power to produce and recycling reduces that.

Recycling makes different amounts of sense depending on the material. I suspect that a fair amount of material mined is subsidized by different governments (natural resource extraction at least in the us often takes place on leased government land).

I did some landfill design engineering in a previous career. while there is lots of space sometimes it’s far away, so there is trucking waste around. Plus landfills despite their liners and clay layers can leak nasty stuff into the groundwater.

You pay for what you put in the landfill by weight, so reducing waste can save municipalities money.

Wouldn't you just make landfills hotspots for mining once the economics make sense for things like metals?

Isn't it better economically not to bury the stuff in the ground and then dig it up?

Depends on the logistical costs. But I agree, it's kinda like a broken window thing.

> Aluminum for example...

What I've heard is that Aluminum is, by far, the only material it makes sense to recycle.

Which, if true, means it's less of an example and more of an exception. Though an important one.

PE, PP, PET and 1st grade paper/cardboard also makes sense to recycle.

People always mention Aluminum when it comes to recycling, but Aluminum is the best of all the materials.

The vast majority of material is not like that though.

In summary: Recycle metal, not anything else.

And even with aluminum, there are different alloys, and you can't necessarily mix them when recycling.

> There is an energy saving component to recycling. Aluminum for example takes a tremendous amount of power to produce and recycling reduces that.

Yes, that’s why aluminium is recycled everywhere. Glass, on the other hand, is more of a “What the hell do we do with this?” situation because making glass from sand is cheap and doesn’t have the quality control issues of making it from old glass. That’s why recycled glass goes to making gravel, decorative or not, mostly.

Transport is cheap and most recycling makes no economic sense and wouldn’t even with a carbon tax. Chemical feedstock is cheap, wood is cheap, metals are cheap. That covers plastics, paper and manufactured goods. Recycling is a religious impulse, not an economic one.

> Transport is cheap

only because heavy goods vehicles do not pay for the damage that they do to the roads and the environment and because the oil industry is effectively subsidised.

> Glass, on the other hand, is more of a “What the hell do we do with this?” situation because making glass from sand is cheap [...]

What about the sand shortage? [1] [2] [3]

[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/07/21/538472671/world-faces-global-...

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/global-sand-shortage-could-c...

[3] https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2017/04/24/...

The shortage is for beach sand. I believe glass is made from different sort of sand.

I like the German solution for dealing with glass bottles: rather than recycling, they are made to be washed and reused.

You pay a deposit when you buy a bottle of tasty beverage, and some time later, can take those bottles back to the grocery store. There, you put your used bottles into a machine which scans each bottle, and gives you an aggregate receipt for all of the bottles you returned, which you can then use to buy goods at that store.

It's a great system for encouraging reuse, and we should be doing this in the US.

Most states already have a refundable deposit on recyclable containers.

In practice, it functions as a tax on recyclable containers: most individuals don't reclaim the deposit unless they're harvesting cans in bulk.

"Most states already have a refundable deposit on recyclable containers."

That's kind of a nebulous statement, but within the OP's context; there's only 10 states that have bottle deposits. I've never personally seen a can deposit; usually the money made from collecting cans is from their scrap weight value, not any kind of deposit.

Are there other container deposits I'm unaware of in the states?

Most (all?) states with bottle deposits also charge that on cans of soda/beer as well.

You are absolutely correct; there are can deposits in those same ten states. Thank you for pointing that out.

While I like it too, it has some issues in practice, the biggest being that it works best with standardization: E.g. there's a few common types of beer bottle, and the idea is that you can ship bottles to whatever is the closest brewery that needs bottles and they can use them. That of course breaks down if breweries do their own, custom bottles, because now you have to filter those out and ship them to their specific brewery, which a) increases processing effort and b) means shipping empty bottles over longer distances (and in the US, the distances would potentially be way larger than in Germany).

Does the world really need custom bottles though? At some points society should put its foot down and say that corporations should not be able to do anything they want without regard to the environment.

It's also a great example of a coordination problem: while I'm sure no company wants to stick its neck out to become the boring bottle company, they would benefit if all companies had to standardise on bottle shapes.

If I remember correctly it was the other way around here: Basically everyone used the same bottle shapes and it worked fine, and then companies started going "hey, our branding people would really like a fancy bottle for this new product", and the setup of the entire return network wasn't done in a way that strongly-enough discouraged that. (Also a scale thing: a large brewery can afford the one-time expense of buying a big machine that can sort through tons of bottles by shape, smaller ones need to do it by hand or with simpler equipment)

Standardizing containers (not just bottles) brings a number of improvements not just for recycling but for general logistics. It's one of those things that no one is large enough to implement on their own but once it's done everyone benefits.

>everyone benefits //

I'd expect it's detrimental to incumbents (who hold the most market power and so can block it).

It's worth considering how the entire supply chain used to work.

In days of yore, soft drink bottling plants were in every small town. They were locally owned, were good citizens and local suppliers of jobs, sponsored sports teams.

Distributors used to pick up bottles sorted for their bottlers and then put them in a great big bottle yard for further hand sorting (don't ask me how I know).

Beer, while they mostly used brown bottles (Miller for one excepted), also was much more locally sourced although not as locally.

In the meantime, there was huge consolidation in beer manufacturing, huge consolidation in distribution (with the inevitable forced closure of family-owned businesses, not dissimilar to car dealerships), similar consolidation in soft drink manufacture. The whole underlying network changed in the interest of efficiency/profit maximization for the corporate motherships.

tl;dr You simply can't just declare reuse of bottles and be done with it. There's a whole ecosystem.

The catch with glass bottles is that they are quite heavy compared to plastic bottles and you have to ship a lot of empty volume around when returning them to be washed and filled.

I remember that there was a brief discussion once that moving the empty glass bottles might be so energy inefficient that using recyclable plastic bottles would make more sense. These kinds of soft plastic bottles are crushed immediately after taken in by the machine and thus take up much less volume on their return trip (fewer trucks with better loads). I unfortunately don't know if this claim was finally determined to be true or false.

The real reason is marketing. Otherwise stores would just have huge tubs of different goods, and you'd fill a standard size bottle/jar, then take the goods away, then bring those standardised containers back and keep doing that until the containers wear out. If you're wealthier, the store would do the washing and refilling.

French supermarkets used to do that with the cheap wine. You used to get "container" or "tub" stores in the 80s (UK) that you could buy loose product and put in your own containers.

This, to me seems a better, more responsible way to do things but it means reducing the numbers of products (only 3 types of extra-virgin olive oil, how will we survive!) and removing marketing opportunities like package labelling and shape. Companies couldn't just reduce the volume of a good in a packet when prices go up nor redesign the label to hide what is [not] inside.

It would be interesting to see how companies would innovate differentiation if, for example, all mobile phones came in a fixed size/shape box that couldn't use mixed media, could only use environmentally friendly dyes in the printing.

I would be generally in favor of reusable packaging for comsumables (not just food, but also soap, detergents, ...). Also, I often stare into supermarket shelves in dismay because some perishable items are sold in fixed container sizes far bigger than what I can comsume before it spoils.

But I don't get why you would have to reduce the variety of product brands to get there. Care to elaborate?

Edit: I have seen repeated news of tub stores opening up in Germany. They are very few and far inbetween, but the the that exist seem to do reasonably well.

> I would be generally in favor of reusable packaging for comsumables (not just food, but also soap, detergents, ...).

There's an effort to do this by TerraCycle and some big name corporate partners like PepsiCo, Unilever, Proctor & Gamble, etc.

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/1/24/18196388/unilever-pe...

> I have seen repeated news of tub stores opening up in Germany. They are very few and far inbetween

Quite common in Canada, eg: http://www.bulkbarn.ca

I do wish they'd catch on more in Europe.

Makes sense until you look at the energy intensity of plastic bottle recycling. The most surprising part is discovering the washing stage of recycling is far more intense than for reuse. It's trying to wash and agitate the glue, ink and labels from the outside, not just dried remnants of drink or food.

A truck has to go back to the factory with plastic pellets, and to collect the product, so you're only left with the weight differential. Given the amount of corporate lobbying and marketing pushing away from reuse and towards recycling I think it likely that reuse is the winner in terms of sustainability. Recycling is an externality creation exercise to reduce costs for the business, not overall.

We used to do this extensively in Norway, even with plastic bottles. But it has recently been shut down.

We've moved to use more aluminum and thinner plastic bottles, because they can be crushed at the recycling point (look up Tomra recycling machines), making it much more space efficient. Remember that the trucks transporting the bottles back to the plant have their emissions as well (for now at least). Transporting uncrushed empty bottles is inefficient too.

This seems to be much better on multiple levels. It seems that many more smaller companies are on board with this recycling scheme than the re-use scheme, since re-use means that ever producer of bottled items have to agree on a very limited set of bottle sizes, and be able to handle all the logistics of accepting those bottles back.

The recycling of plastic bottles in Norway is one of the most successful recycling schemes for plastic, since you get a stream of plastics of a single type. Most other recycling of plastic is worthless because you get a mix of different plastics.

>aluminum and thinner plastic bottles [...] can be crushed

These schemes are common in Germany as well, often side by side with the glass bottles. But cans really only come in single serving sizes, and some people are wary about plastic bottles.

> and some people are wary about plastic bottles

Are people worried about potential health effects of plastic leaching into the contents, or something else?

Yes, originally mostly concerns about Bisphenol A [1], later also it's substitutes. That, plus the more recent reports about microplastic pollution [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A#Health_effects

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics

I just moved to germany and routinely people in my local super market come with a few dozen empty plastic bottle for the crusher, maybe it is a regional thing (saarland here)

Are you sure they are efficiently reused, and not just faux-recycled as discussed in this thread, subsidized by the taxpayers on the back end? That's the concern parent is raising.

Beer bottles in Brazil are the same for all brands, and for a long time all marketing was done solely on the label, not in the bottle itself.

Glass depends on the Country, Germany is small and we do not have Tons of quartz sand available

The whole point of the EU is not to depend on the country. The EU is most of a continent, I’m sure it has ample sand and sandstone for making glass. German manufacture of cement isn’t much different from elsewhere, why would manufacture of glass be absent taxes and regulation?

well the altest reportage i've seen highlighted that germany recycles up to 50% of glas for newly made bottles. (glass bottles already get reused a lot anyway) quartz sand is available of course and we also import it, but it's actually not that cheap. in germany we have glas containers for old glas which a lot of people use, the reclycing facility only needs to filter out trash (which most often consists of metals) which is dirty simple. also it's cheaper to recycle glass. you still need high temperatures but since the glass tainted it will take way less heat (probably doesn't make that much of big difference, still above 2000 degree celsius, i think it's like 3% energy saving, but couldn't find too much articles that weren't behind closed doors). the glass still need to have a containment of a simple percentage, else it needs to be redone, but most of the time this is reached and the glass is still dirt cheap - the trash.

btw. recycling of glass isn't just done by germany. the whole eu recycles glass, with a rate of 74% (2013 data: https://feve.org/glass-recycling-hits-73-eu/, https://feve.org/recyclingstatistics2016/) (which is a lot, but not enough for some people) and as said it's mostly bottles: "An estimated 90% of what is collected goes into creating new bottles from old ones"

Making glass from glass isn't expensive either, kind of similar to how you'd make glass from sand: you melt it. The government needs to set the right incentives, though. Recycling of one-time use glass works quite well in Germany.

If you use industrial feedstock of known characteristics quality control is much easier than if you use glass that might include window glass, coloured glass of a colour you don’t want, random chips of ceramic, etc.

Recycling of one time glass doesn’t work that well in Germany, look at wine bottles. What works well is reuse of bottles, both glass and plastic, and having big deposits on bottles, big enough that people are motivated to bring them back to the store to redeem the deposit.

> There is an energy saving component to recycling. Aluminum for example takes a tremendous amount of power to produce and recycling reduces that.

It's also basically one of the only things you will get paid for recycling (copper being the other notable exception; scrap steel is mostly worthless unless you have a ton of it).

No one wants to pay you for used plastic or paper. That alone should tell us all about the economics of recycling.

It should also tell a lot about the negative externalities of plastic not being priced into it.

> No one wants to pay you for used plastic or paper.

In Europe at least, people do want to pay you for used paper, and enough money that some marginal social groups specialize in collecting waste cardboard from businesses.

This is the key parts in one of the articles:

>”Mandatory recycling programs aren't good for posterity. They offer mainly short-term benefits to a few groups -- politicians, public relations consultants, environmental organizations, waste-handling corporations -- while diverting money from genuine social and environmental problems”

And while the Three Rs make some sense, it’s overwhelmed by the above. The ‘crisis’ is kinda fabricated and a whole bunch of people make money off the fabricated crisis.

That’s not to say cheap consumerism isn’t s problem, I think if is, we should strive for quality and low impact, but beware behind every crisis are myriad bands of concerned groups making lots of money.

> The ‘crisis’ is kinda fabricated and a whole bunch of people make money off the fabricated crisis.

That’s exactly what many conservative voters suspect about climate change. They know they’ve been burned at least once over environmental issues.

Edit: I’m not promoting climate change denial. Just pointing out that it’s possible to hold that view in good faith.

The reason why certain voters in the USA dont believe in climate change is because there's a dedicated network of corporations pumping money into the media that repeats this bad-faith claim.

At some point it became table stakes for the conservative identity in America that you should reject climate change.

Its not that they dont believe it, they just think its not that big a deal. 4ft sealevel increase in 100 years

I believe that's a recent movement of the goal posts; it's still quite common among conservatives to believe that climate change is a hoax.

Perhaps. Climate change has been scientific since what, the 70s or 80s? Only recently have we seen repeated significant increases in the global mean temperature. This means early skeptics now are forced to choose reality vs. being a conspiracy theorist.

Politicians try to appeal to their base but both sides know climate change is 1) too far into the future to matter and 2) not much impact even in the far future.

No, "both sides" absolutely don't know this.

In fact - climate scientists are talking about changes that need to be made in the next decade if we want to put off major ecological collapse.

It really didn’t. There are always a few loud people who will make a global warming comment on a cold day, but for the most part I’ve seen more sentiment around how we stop it from a global perspective without just penalizing ourselves. There’s also a very high degree of sentiment for more nuclear power and seeing opposition to it as double speak when it comes to climate change. Essentially, if you’re truly concerned about the environmental impact of coal power, etc but you oppose nuclear then you don’t really want to solve the problem as much as push a specific agenda.

IMO the recent trade deals in Europe mandating high tariffs on imports from countries who don’t have a carbon policy in place is on the right track.

I think the biggest opponent of climate change is simply apathy. It is not that those people don't believe in it, they just don't care. It isn't as tangible or life quality effecting in the immediate term as air pollution was. It is more like the water will rise a bit, so what? Getting Americans to take climate change seriously will require a huge undertaking.

> They know they’ve been burned at least once over environmental issues.

What is this referring to?

Recycling.

> They offer mainly short-term benefits to a few groups -- politicians, public relations consultants, environmental organizations, waste-handling corporations

An important benefit is to the citizens who get to feel good about doing something to help the environment.

This psychological / ritualistic aspect is probably just as important as the other ones.

> An important benefit is to the citizens who get to feel good about doing something to help the environment.

But... it's not actually good for the environment?

It makes the idea of helping the environment more prominent in people's minds, thereby making them more likely to do more to help it in the future (although it could have the opposite effect for some, making them think that because they already recycle they don't have to do anything more).

I would argue that your parenthetical is more the norm, for the general population - given that people have the delusion that their zealous recycling is helping the environment, they feel like a large amount of their environmental-responsibility quota is fulfilled. They then pay little attention to all the actual harm they do through consumption and other activities. That is my perception having grown in a city that embraced recycling early (Portland, OR, USA) and where you are pilloried if you even hint that maybe recycling most things is a waste.

> The ‘crisis’ is kinda fabricated and a whole bunch of people make money off the fabricated crisis.

How much money? Who’s getting rich? Just curious, what is the recycling budget in the US compared to, say, water bottle & soda & plastic bag revenues? Are the small time politicians really more motivated and walking away with more pie than Evian and Coca-cola? Are you certain the crisis isn’t real?

> beware behind every crisis are myriad bands of concerned groups making lots of money

In a way, this feels like a way to cast FUD on recycling when it’s successful. It’s supposed to generate some revenue, and people are supposed to get paid to recycle. All services have industry, everyone involved makes some money, that’s how it’s supposed to work. At least with recycling, unlike landfill, some money actually comes back.

This might be true in wealthier and low-density areas. In India, for example, garbage disposal is a real problem, compounded by the fact that there have been no real recycling policies until recently [1].

Also, I am confused by the argument that ‘space is not a constraint’. If that was the case, you wouldn’t expect 1.6 Mn sq. m of the Pacific Ocean to be filled with trash. And it’s been growing. [2]

If you want to study the effects of shutting down recycling, these serve primary examples.

1. http://bengaluru.citizenmatters.in/4494-where-is-bengalurus-...

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch

Recycling is not really a unified thing. Recycling large steel structures is a huge net win. Recycling plastic bottles is almost meaningless.

I wish we would go back to having to bring our own containers and fill them up instead of single use plastics. It's so clearly a terrible thing. Whatever we can do to stop single-use containers we should.

Or you could just buy oatmeal in 25kg bags :)

The hygiene and manpower implications of bring-your-container easily makes that complicated.

Maybe standardized containers could work. It would certainly be practical if all boxes had the same size :)

Lots of coop supermarkets here on the west coast allow you to bring your own container to fill from bulk bins... And refillable growlers of kombucha seem to be at least a bit trendy right now.

Why not bring the 25kg bag back and refill it?

I do a significant part of my grocery shopping in a co-op that is set up for you to take in your own package. I take jars and plastic bottles, weight them before using them in the shop, fill them up with sugar, flour, pasta, oil, soap, etc. I haven't noticed it taking any longer than a regular shop run, other than needing the foresight to prepare the bags of jars before hand and the need to go by car which is already kind of a given here.

Just Salad in New York City has a reusable bowl program that has made me return a bunch of times to avoid single use plastic. You pay $1 for the bowl, and each time you bring it back you get free toppings.

https://www.plasticstoday.com/packaging/just-salad-s-reusabl...

The hygiene part is rather interesting. The people working with the food are not allowed to touch your bowl with their gloved hands, and your bowl can’t touch anything behind the counter. They set a plate on the counter that you set your bowl on, and then they grab the plate and steady your bowl with tongs that they clean after each salad they make anyway. Going back to reusable in restaurant settings would require thinking about the hygiene of those reusables.

Lots of restaurants never stopped using reusable utensils, they just don’t let you take their bowl home with you because it’s expensive. It would not be hard for a restaurant to take a deposit and let you walk away with their bowl, and let you get it back when you returned it to be cleaned. Several restaurants could even agree to take back each other’s dishes in exchange for their own, and then return it for you.

I agree with you and I've seen it happening already at the Christmas markets in Hamburg, Germany. I bought a hot drink that came in a ceramic mug (which required a deposit) that I then returned after walking around the rest of the market. I'm sure some people kept them as souvenirs but it seemed like the vast majority were returned.

The hygiene is a non-problem. I used to worked in (decent quality) kitchens - you would never believe what I've witnessed. And still, sanitary problems occur incredibly rarely.

That wouldn't really work in a litigious society like the US. If someone got sick or died due to food poisoning was it because of the product or because of the unclean container? Even if it was due to the container, there's no way to prove it and in the era of social media, the manufacturer's reputation would take a major hit and no major brand will risk that.

So the only viable option becomes reusable containers aka glass containers which lets manufacturers control the cleaning with a supply chain - this is still big for soft drinks sold from restaurants in India. However they're very heavy vs. plastics and both actual cost and the carbon cost of transporting them are probably unfavorable.

It's not really an easy problem to solve though reduction in consumption of packing plastics is definitely possible

Just Salad in NYC has a successful reusable plastic bowl program. (I commented right before you about it.)

All kinds of foods at Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco are sold on a bring-your-own-container basis. I bring my own containers to buy spices, oils, flour, peanut butter, pickles, deli food, and more. So it's certainly possible-- they've been doing it for 40+ years and no one has sued them out of existence yet.

https://www.rainbow.coop/

No one is going to sue Rainbow Grocery. They might sue Target or Kroger.

Basically this. Or PepsiCo or Coke or Unilever or Nestle.

The problem there is some concerned citizen will come up with a calculation that shipping and washing a glass or heavier plastic bottle will burn more energy, etc.

Greenhouse gas emission factors for recycling of source-segregated waste materials

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092134491...

"With the exceptions of soil, plasterboard, and paint, the recycling of source-segregated materials resulted in net GHG savings"

Many previous HN discussions too: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Recycling%20points%3E50&sort=b...

The goal of tax dollars is to make the people happy. If it makes them feel better, mission accomplished.

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