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But recycling is not a value problem, but a survival problem. It might not be cost effective to eat, but if you don't spend X amount of your salary in it, you die, so you do it. This is the same IMHO.

Survival is definitely valuable, by simply allowing you to produce value longer. I think the problem is that there is no 'long-term' factored in how we measure value.

> Survival is definitely valuable, by simply allowing you to produce value longer.

...can you please take a step back, read this again, and think about what it is that you're saying?

Economics are a tool to describe emergent behaviour in societies. “Value” is, in this context, just a word we use as a tool to model reality. We see reality as a river of efforts, and cause and effect relationships eddying up and down. We use words like “value” and “incentive” to try and label those existing flows. But reality doesn’t care about economics. It just is. We try to understand only so we can align our mental models with reality better, which then enables us to steer our society towards a more desirable stream, hopefully leading towards a more desirable outcome.

This is always implicit when speaking about economics. Don’t attach too much meaning to “value” , or “purpose” , or any of those models. They’re just describing a model of reality, not prescribing it.

TLDR: “value” in economics != “value” in Buddhism.

Why do you think you’re correct? When everyone learned that their shoes were made by slave labor, shoe companies made drastic changes away from using slave labor. People are generally aware of the externalities of their economic decisions, they just don’t often line up with the most vocal environmental voices.

I don't know. Can you ?

No, it's a value problem. When the resources tied up in recyclables are scarce enough from other sources, the value will go up.

When you're really hungry and there's not much food, your willingness to pay more for it increases. Same mechanism.

Ultimately we need to bake the cost of disposal into the purchase price.

I've always found it odd that the free market hawks are so against factoring the externalities of their decisions into pricing.

I think this isn't true what you say, Do you have links? I always assumed some of the free market hawks are to incorporate the externalities in the cost, e.g. selling the right to pollute.

Biggest example to me is the push to loosen regulation on the fossil fuel industry without enacting a tax that pays for mitigating the damage that burning their fuel does to the climate.

You're confusing theory with politics.

In theory the free market works when transactions are consensual, which means you can't pollute someone else's property without their permission, and they're not inclined to give it to you without due compensation.

In practice there are a lot of politicians in places where fossil fuels are a major industry, and they're pragmatists with no real principles other than wanting to get elected.

On short-term (while resources are enough), probably none of the 3Rs - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - make sense in Capitalism, except to guarantee the long-term survival of the system itself. Most politicians already acknowledged it and they seem to prefer the (uneconomical) Recycle than the game changers Reduce and Reuse.

Surely every player in a capitalist has an incentive to reduce or reuse material in their own production, and an incentive to recycle if it is cheaper than binning it.

Producer of garbage doesn't pay the cost of disposing it (consumers do), and even the cost of garbage disposal doesn't seem to factor in larger environmental costs.

You can produce plastic without paying a cent towards cleanup of The Great Pacific garbage patch.

Recycling is a economic-cost vs environmental-value optimization problem.

The university I studied at also has a department that analyzes renewable energies and recycling. They developed a system that does this cost-vs-value-analysis for recycling. In the end, you get a number of environmental points for every dollar you invest into recycling.

The core idea is that we have a certain budget to improve our environment. If a dollar invested in plastic recycling is 20 times less efficient than a dollar invested in glass recycling, then we should stop recycling plastic.

The results (for Switzerland): Glass and aluminum recycling works great. Battery recycling is OK, but because today's batteries contain way less toxic chemicals (like Cadmium) than they did in the 80s, it's largely an artifact from the past. They consider battery recycling good enough to keep, but wouldn't start recycling them if the infrastructure wouldn't exist right now.

Mixed plastic recycling is being hyped right now. There are companies that offer subsidized plastic bags where you can throw in all kinds of plastic. According to the study, the environmental value of recycling such mixed plastics in Switzerland is really low and should not be done, we are basically wasting our money which would be better spent on other projects that have higher value. Their summary was basically that instead of recycling plastic and burning fuel in combustion engines, we should convert oil to plastic products and then - once they have reached the end of the lifecycle - burn those in modern incineration plants. The energy gained from that can then be used to heat buildings and to power electrical cars. This way, the energy is re-used, first in a product, then in mobility.

Of course that only works if you have modern, clean incineration plants. If you burn the plastics on a pile, then the environmental value of plastic recycling skyrockets.

>. Their summary was basically that instead of recycling plastic and burning fuel in combustion engines, we should convert oil to plastic products and then - once they have reached the end of the lifecycle - burn those in modern incineration plants. The energy gained from that can then be used to heat buildings and to power electrical cars. This way, the energy is re-used, first in a product, then in mobility.

Note that this solution is so obvious what every high school chemistry student proposes as soon as they learn that plastics are made from oil and have similiar molecular structure. We just don't do it because I don't know why.

Because 100% of the oil doesn't go to fuel or plastic. There are different chemicals distilled and they have different purposes, such as making asphalt, lanolin, naptha, paraffin wax, kerosene / jet fuel, and other goodies. Maybe 40-50% of a barrel of oil at most becomes gasoline and diesel, 4% becomes plastic.

Add on top of that the difficulty in getting people to recycle plastic instead of throwing it out or littering, and you have a very inefficient supply chain for your energy production.

Those are two independent problems. On the one hand, how do we generate electricity. On the other hand, what do we do with plastic garbage.

"Burn it to generate electricity" solves the second one entirely by solving a small fraction of the first one. That is not a flaw, it just means that we still need solar panels and nuclear reactors to make up the difference.

It still gets rid of the plastic garbage -- and the fact that it's a small proportion of electricity production is a feature, because burning plastic gets it out of the landfill, but it's not exactly carbon neutral. Doing it at smaller scale, especially if it replaces that amount of power generation from coal, is more feasible than burning plastic (i.e. oil) to generate all of our electricity.

> There are different chemicals distilled and they have different purposes, such as making asphalt, lanolin, naptha, paraffin wax, kerosene / jet fuel, and other goodies. Maybe 40-50% of a barrel of oil at most becomes gasoline and diesel, 4% becomes plastic.

The distillation process can actually be tuned within a fairly broad range to produce different output products with varying degrees of efficiency.

It's also possible to make bioplastics from biomass, though hardly anybody does that because it's more expensive.

> this solution is so obvious what every high school chemistry student proposes...

At the risk of sounding flippant, "For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong". There's no guarantees that the energy arithmetic works out here. Even without the logistics of collection and transport, is cleanly burning plastic waste efficient enough to be worthwhile (cf. why it's almost unheard of to use wood to generate power)?

>cf. why it's almost unheard of to use wood to generate power

It's heard of plenty. People use wood to generate heating power for homes.

To me the problem is keeping volume down (lessen packaging, make things last longer, lessen fads or in-fashion), and minimize toxicity (heavy metals, leach prone chemicals, etc.) Aluminum, wood, or steel accumulating in landfills isn’t that detrimental. Batteries, household and industrial chemicals are bad.

packaging imo is THE WORST

i am in japan, so maybe it’s worse (here i can see it because we sort everything) but the amount of plastic garbage just from buy the essentials (soap, tea/coffee, cooking oil etc) and cardboard for everything is absolutely insane

a lot of things and packaging in stores is just to compel you to buy it (sturdiness, printed imagery, size etc), with little to do with the size of the product itself, and this just creates inordinate amounts of garbage... i am always amazed at this

the other thing is, when i buy online, i notice almost always the packaging is same as in-store, meaning more waste... i have already bought it, i don’t need enticing nice packages in that case, just bubble packaging (oh don’t get me started on that) is enough...

we really need to fix this package and wrapping waste: it’s only going to get worse as other economies (and consumerism) keep growing

[edit] spelling

So, what are the capital costs for all of this equipment, and then the utility, labor and parts costs to run and maintain it, and also the costs to transport these materials to and from the processing center?

Recycling works- for high energy artefacts. Producing steel, glass, aluminium - takes enormous amounts of energy. There recycling is common place.

The real trouble is - plastic packaging, especially if the food contained went to a bio-methan operation first. The packaged food is shredded and added to the fermenter- this is THE topsoil contamination source of microplastics.

Its really tough to get plastic seperated cost effective.

I don't really understand why we're making high energy requirement artefacts and then throwing them away. Why don't we have reuse at all across the food supply chain (in the UK at least)?

I mean things like large barrels of cooking oil for take-away restaurants don't even get reused - why wouldn't they just collect, clean and refill them?

We get large "food grade" buckets for ceramics supplies: those buckets cost several pounds each to buy wholesale, they could easily be reused but there's no system to do that: I assume because there's no [cost] incentive.

Single use packaging needs some heavy fines to regulate it.

Presumably it costs more to collect, clean, sort/organize, and deliver to the point of next filling with enough certainty of availability. (No oil producer wants their line shut down because they’re short of barrels.)

Fines won't promote reuse by the supplier much, because reuse is expensive, they will promote reduction -- of both the buckets and the valuable contents of those buckets.

When buckets are expensive - large industrial containers, they are in fact protected by deposit and recipients of shipments are obligated to return the containers to the supplier.

We directly consume quite a lot more energy than we discard in manufactured products. I think what it comes down to is that we collectively don't actually care.

In many (most?) parts of Japan, people are trained to separate plastics before they’re discarded. I remember thinking how crazy it was to wash and air dry plastic trash like juice bottles or meat packaging before tossing it. In my city, there were something like ten separate trash collection types and every household was tasked with maintaining separation along a complex set of rules assigned to them when they move in. These rules are enforced by a system of fines, of course, but more importantly there are a cadre of old folks who will shame the hell out of you if you try to bend the rules.

> China will no longer take the unsorted paper/plastic mess that used to be sent there in empty shipping containers going back. That will probably get worked out.

China is so strict about recycling that people who don't know that an umbrella or old shoes don't belong in a blue bin get kicked out of the country, forced to live in condos in Vancouver, Canada.