Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste | Hacker News Reader

Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste

latimes.com

428 pointsilamont220 comments

From what I understand, shipping containers are sent out from Asia stuffed with goods, but there isn't nearly as much going in the other direction. The containers need to go back whether they're full or not, which is why it ends up being so cheap to ship plastic. And the CO2 caused doesn't really change as a result.

To the rest of your point though, I agree. My wife is a hardline recycler. I generally am too, but I have a hard time seeing the benefit in recycling soft plastics.

Cargo ships are designed to float at a certain level in the water - if they're too empty they carry ballast instead. This causes it's own problems - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballast_water_discharge_and_th...

Thank you for the included link. This is an aspect of international shipping about which I was wholly ignorant. The particular section mentioning the "international exchange" occurring in Singapore was particularly concerning because even species from areas not visited by the transiting vessels can "hitch a ride", so to speak.

It is like ships carrying opium to China had to take Chinese porcelain as balast on the way back.

https://southchinaenvir.com/opium-dreams-speedy-clipper-ship...

Is there really much of a point in recycling anything but reasonably clean paper/cardboard (I know stuff like greasy pizza boxes won't get recycled), and clean metals (like aluminum cans). Like, aside for those, will much realistically get recycled?

Aside for the insane amount of amazon boxes I toss in recycling, so very little of my trash fits the bill of things that will reasonably get recycled...

Glass is another (the other?) material which is worthwhile to recycle. Like plastic, glass never decomposes. Unlike plastic and unlike paper/cardboard, it can be endlessly remelted and remade into new products without a loss in quality. It's a huge savings in material and energy cost to use recycled glass in the manufacture of new glass.

If you have a recycling bin labeled "glass", absolutely do throw (place) glass bottles into it. It will almost certainly be valued and reused. If you have a single-stream recycling output - just one bin labeled "Recycling", there's less of a case...processing and separating is more expensive and less successful, and a small fraction will actually get recycled.

That it can be recycled without "waste" doesnt mean its worthwhile. Making glass costs a large amount of energy. As far I know, when plastic is recycled, it is better for the environment than using glass.

We're so wasteful in the US. I'd guess that when glass is reused to the point of needing recycling it's a different balance - e.g. when beer bottles in areas of Europe are cleaned and refilled.

That was the practice not so long ago in the US too. But it is complex. Reusables were thicker and heavier than modern bottles, not just the super light high life bottle, but almost every bottle, I believe, and cans are so light in comparison.

It's true, but where/how it survived in Europe seems like it's a regionally or even city localized bottle re-use cycle which might shift the balance of costs and re-use.

Re-Use is the way to go, I generally check in at the re-use centre in our town, the scrap yard and the local auction sites before buying anything new.

Its a shame everything electronic is basically landfill due to either lack of circuit diagrams and parts or software that no longer works.. Ditto for new cars :-(

We visited a local recycling center where ours goes for a tour for our FLL Robotics team. It seemed pretty modern and it appeared they were actually recycling everything they could, sorting by machine and hand. So hopefully our single stream is getting recycled properly.

It does seem wasteful to ship trash across the ocean to be recycled. But maybe it makes sense to do so.

Everything I've read recently indicates that "recycled" glass is generally just crushed and used as road base instead of being melted down and re-used as containers etc.

I grew up in the GDR (East Germany).

We only had a few kinds of bottle designs, standardized across the whole country. I worked in a brewery over the summer, in the filling section. The whole day trucks would arrive full of empty bottles collected from various stations. They would go through a large washer, with a visual inspection afterwards (the most boring job there was, that was before that could be reliably automated, 1980s). Occasionally new bottles were fed into the system, but very few, <10% I would say.

I also had a relative who owned a recycling station where people brought paper (mostly newspapers and magazines), cardboard, and lots and lots of bottles, and got money for it. The amount (of money) was significant enough that those shops were pretty busy, and especially the young (like me) could quite significantly add to their pocket money.

The main point was the standardization. Germany today also has lots of stations to receive cans and plastic and glass bottles in exchange for a bit of money - but it is a PITA because not just have the bottles to fit, but even the labels!! The machines at the retailers only take back bottles of brands that they sell. Crazy!

This seems like something that could be brought back through legislation instantly, and I cannot understand why we're prioritizing the freedom to make your own unique bottles over this. There is 0 reason why all beer cannot be sold in identical bottles - after all, the label can still be unique and identifying your brand. Then the bottles just get washed and reused.

> The main point was the standardization.

That sounds reasonable. America can queue that up after they standardize on the metric system.

According to Wikipedia, in Finland a 1/3L beer bottle is recycled, washed and refilled the average of 33 times before it goes out of circulation.

https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palpa

Although these days an aluminium can is the more popular container, and they are indeed used only once. Proper bottles are getting rare, which I hate, since the bottle is much more pleasant to drink from in a hot sauna. Doesn't burn your lips.

Remelting glass to make more glass is more energy intensive that making new glass. And waste glass is inert and doesn't e.g. enter the food chain.

Reusing glass is the way forward.

"Remelting glass to make more glass is more energy intensive than making new glass."---hdfbdtbcdg

The first source I found on this subject directly contradicts your claim:

"The primary energy consumption totals are 17.0 x 10^6 Btu/ton of bottles with no postconsumer recycling, 14.8 x 10^6 Btu/ton with maximum recycling, and 15.9 x 10^6 Btu/ton for the current mix of recycling. The total primary energy use decreases as the percent of glass recycled rises"

    ---Energy Implications of Glass Container Recycling
    Argonne National Laboratory
    https://www.nrel.gov/docs/legosti/old/5703.pdf

Cool! I seem to have been wrong. I wonder how those numbers compare with reuse? One would have to look at TOC including transport (e.g. transportation of wine bottle back to growing regions).

Parts of Europe has a good system for recycling plastic bottles. It works because you’re getting only one type of plastic in and nothing else. Look up Tomra machines.

Food waste might also be worth it? You can get some biofuel and compost out of it, which isn’t bad.

The US systems have mostly seemed completely pointless to me. Many of them seems to optimize for feeling good (I put it in the recycling bin!) rather than doing what it takes to make it worthwhile (I took the bottles and cans back to the shop and put it in a machine that verifies them, crushes them and sends them back to where they came from)

My understanding is that the temperature used to melt aluminum, steel, and other metals for recycling is so high that food waste burns off quickly and doesn't pose any contamination problems. At worst you might have some slag to skim off the top.

Paper is the main thing that frequently has contamination problems, because it can't be treated with high heat during the recycling problem lest you just end up paper. Even plastic is heated pretty decently during the recycling process.

You would need people to sort it by hand. There is no way you're going to find people who want to do that for a living in Western Europe. And even if you did you would have to pay them a decent wage.

The first time I really started thinking about this was years ago after watching the recycling episode of "Penn & Teller: Bullshit" where they essentially warn that many recycling programs consist of shipping our waste elsewhere for someone else to deal with and that some day the countries we send our "recycling"/waste to will likely get sick of it and start rejecting it and we'll be fucked.

That was almost 10 years ago

I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong in sending materials elsewhere for cheap sorting or re-manufacturing.

Especially when ships and containers are going that way empty anyway.

While I basically agree, one of the arguments in the episode (as I remember it, it's been a while) is that since we ship it away, we don't see the negative results of our lifestyle choices, making the problems created easier to ignore.

Also, they argue that modern landfills _can_ be pretty damned "green", capturing the heat/gases created and using them to generate power.

But since we've prioritized and financially incentivized recycling (shipping everything somewhere else) we haven't prioritized responsible ways to manage waste locally and once our waste gets rejected we'll likely to be playing catch-up.

I guess we'll see. Or we'll all die before then.

Shrug.

The problem is mis-representing what's in the shipment.

(There's probably a lot of plausible deniability in the system. People throw a lot of trash into recycling bins for lots of reasons, including ignorance or laziness. Trash companies don't take responsibility to make sure that's what's in the bin is actually what's supposed to be there.)

Read the article. There's dirty diapers mixed in with so-called "recyclables."

Right, the developing country buyer was being defrauded. Not unlike selling a PS4 on EBay and getting a brick in a shrink wrapped PS4 box.

If anything, this case just demonstrated the appetite for plastic waste. Buyers are willing to take risks to get their hands on it.

It's a whole bidirectional cascade of misrepresentation I think: every time the materials change hands, the output side passes on the quality/purity promise from upstream, but more optimistic within an almost reasonable error margin. In the same transaction, the input side passes on the responsible handling promise of their downstream partner, but more optimistic, within an almost reasonable error margin.

How many intermediate subcontracting steps would it take to allow the original source tho pay for (supposedly) perfectly clean full reuse recycling of a toxic mess, and the final sink to dump (supposedly) perfectly harmless materials into the sea?

Funny how this came up here. Just a couple of days ago, I was debating with my brother about recycling and told him to look up an old Penn & Teller episode on this topic. That episode really left an impact on me and looks like many others.

This might be a dumb question, but: why don't we do glass-style bottles? I live in America now, but when I used to live in Pakistan 20 years ago, I remember that I would buy pepsi or coki in a glass bottle... and if I wanted to buy a second one, I would go back to the store and give them the old empty bottle, and they would compensate me a few pennies for it -- and the bottle then is presumably washed and reused. It's simple, fun, and environmentally friendly. Why don't we do this with... milk, juice, etc.? Why not do this with everything really?

Plastic is cheaper and doesn’t shatter. Some states in the US still have the refund thing for bottles. I’ve seen a vending machine in NYC for bottle refunds and one in Munich, Germany.

When I was in Central America they wouldn’t let you leave the store with the bottle. They would provide a plastic bag where you could sip the coke out with a straw.

To be clear: the bottle redemption machines in New York crush bottles, they don't save them for reuse

Wow I did not know that. It’s likely being thrown in a land fill. The garbage companies around me stopped collecting bottles years ago.

Do they do it to keep trash off the streets?

If NYC was into keeping the trash off the streets, they'd rather invest in better garbage collection methods than their current one, which is to have people just leave trash bags right there on the sidewalk, leaking all kinds of disgusting fluids all over the place. Really, Manhattan is such a disgusting, dirty, smelly place full of trash, that a few additional glass bottles here and there won't make too much of a difference.

The New York stuff goes to a place near Rochester, IIRC, and is back on the shelf as a bottle in a few weeks. Less for cans.

Germany is interesting - they have a nationwide bottle return system. Every supermarket over a certain size is required to have a bottle return system in place, and compensate you accordingly. It's called the "pfand" (deposit) system.

It's a way to make some money for poorer people too - collecting the bottles from the bins and public areas of the city can be quite lucrative. One plastic bottle gives you 25 cents, one beer bottle 8-15 cents.

They're heavier.

Because it's cheaper to create new plastic, is the simple and unfortunate answer.

We used to do this in the US. Then the throwaway generation happened.

There are still pockets where such reuse happens. My local growler house, and some of my local dairies, for example. I wish more business supported reuse of containers, though.

People often mention hygiene and complicated logistics as the reason disposable plastic packaging was adopted. I think as with lots of other examples through history, it is hard to know beforehand the negativities of an application of technology.

Hygiene? You can safely clean glassware with the most aggressive of chemicals, then maybe run it through an autoclave for extra safety.

Funny that people complain about glassware hygiene while chugging phtalate-infused beverages from plastic bottles.

Most "aggressive of chemicals" doesn´t sound too good...

I meant to point out that glass is inert in most conditions, be it chemicals, heat, UV radiation, etc.

Meanwhile, plastic containers are easily damaged by heat or UV light, and contaminate their contents.

Depends, are you the kind of person who considers "this product is not for sale in California" to be a feature or a warning?

Well... not THE most aggressive of chemicals, fluoroantimonic acid (H2F[SbF6]), the acid designed by top chemists to be the best acid that ever forcibly protonated a carbon atom into pentavalent carbonium.

That will dissolve the glass. (It can only be stored in PTFE.) It doesn't even have a pH, as it can't exist in aqueous solution, because it explosively destroys water.

Strong bases, like 50% or higher NaOH, also attack silicate glass.

You can clean glass with less aggressive chemical solutions that can still dissolve all organic materials and salts on the surface, without damaging the glass, and then remove those solutions completely, if the glass geometry permits. Or you can clean it well enough for commerce by inverting the bottle and blowing steam into it, something that would alter the geometry of a polyethylene bottle.

But a glassblowing robot can easily make a completely new bottle, that isn't going to have any unknown contaminants in it. Recycling glass doesn't save enough money to make it good business.

Of course you can, but there is a history:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/penny-lick-ice-cream

You realize that we reuse cutlery, glassware and dishware each time we eat in a restaurant other than KFC, right?

Another example would be beer bottles and marmalade/peanut butter/pickles jars.

Also, hard to take these concerns seriously when glass/plastic bottle deposit swaps are common in, say, Latin/South America.

How often are people getting sick drinking caguamas/garrafones?

The reality seems obvious: single-use plastic is cheapest and cheapest always wins.

The problem with glass is that it isn’t biodegradable. If it gets broken, it can cause a hazard for humans and wildlife. If it gets thrown away, it’s not going to break down. Glass is good for the ideal case, but not great for the other use cases. For milk and juice, it’s seems like thick paper might be a better option, since it’s biodegradable and recyclable.

Glass is literally molten sand. It will break down just like the rock breaks down. It's not toxic or hazardous, except when it's freshly shattered, but these super sharp edges weather relatively quickly, after which they aren't any sharper than natural found rock. This not to say that we should just don't care and throw away glass anywhere we want, but it's really not a huge deal, unless you hate seeing glass pebbles among normal rock pebbles.

> It's not toxic or hazardous, except when it's freshly shattered, but these super sharp edges weather relatively quickly, after which they aren't any sharper than natural found rock.

Glass actually takes a long time to lose its sharp edge unless it's dumped in a river or the ocean, which is in fact a great way to dispose of glass.

There really is no better way to dispose of garbage than dumping glass in the ocean... returning silica to its source in a way that doesn't look bad.

If you throw it into a water then somebody can step on it and hurt their feet.

Presumably they don't mean to scatter freshly shattered glass along swimming beaches. There's a lot of ocean where people aren't walking.

This all hinges on what you mean by “relatively fast”. If glass is being shattered and ends up being a hazard for years, this is much worse than a goopy old discarded plastic bottle, regardless of the perceived ugliness of the latter.

> this is much worse than a goopy old discarded plastic bottle

No, over time the plastic bottle will weather into cell-scale microplastic particles and play indefinite havoc with local wildlife. Glass will not.

Glass will cut my feet and shred my tires. The wildlife is largely unaffected. There'd still be trees, birds, animals, etc. You're blowing it out of proportion.

Glass is essentially sand. Sure it may be sharp when it just broke, but it gets dull pretty fast in nature.

Of all the things that got dumped onto this beach at Ft Bragg, glass was the least problematic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_Beach_(Fort_Bragg,_Calif...

additionally, isnt glass a semi natural occurring substance? Im pretty sure ive heard of lightning strikes in deserts/sand that created glass.

I never heard of that but TIL it's called Fulgurite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgurite

Glass is also created by volcanoes; we call that obsidian.

> dull pretty fast in nature

Especially when a critter chews on it accidentally, or it gets crushed under foot and some ends up in the foot.

It's the dulling process that sucks.

I once got a stick stuck in my foot. Maybe we should ban those.

Interesting, there is a community for sea glass..

https://seaglassassociation.org/

Because of industry lobbying: https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2017/11/06/packaging-indust...

They are bribing our politicians so that they would not be prevented from poisoning our world. 'Enemy' is too kind a word for such people.

The US was gearing up nicely to require deposit and reuse schemes in the 50s or 60s. Vermont was about to require drinks be in reusable bottles.

Pepsi, Coke, Budweiser, Philip Morris and others got together, conceived the idea of, funded and launched "Keep America Beautiful". Vermont was lobbied and the deposit scheme died, consumers were blamed for the whole problem via campaigns on littering, and industry could do whatever the hell they liked.

Greenwashing was born.

Bottle and can deposit has been going on in Massachusetts since at least the 80's (when I was growing up there) - https://www.mass.gov/deposit-bottle-can-recycling

I'm putting words in NeedsMoreTea's mouth here, but I think he was referring not to deposit schemes, but deposit and reuse schemes.

In the 70s and 80s, soft drinks (at least in California where I lived) were packaged in really heavy, thick glass bottles. You paid a deposit on purchase, and a refund on turning it back in, and then the bottles were cleaned and reused.

These schemes have seemingly all disappeared. Many or most states still have deposit programs, but the intent is to recycle the glass, not to reuse the original bottle.

Glass recycling is pretty efficient and effective though—it could well make more sense (from a combined financial and environmental perspective) to recycle glass than to sterilize and re-use existing bottles.

I like to explore ghost towns and old mines, and one of the things that always strikes me about the leftover trash is how thick and sturdy bottles were 100+ years ago. It's a nice visual reminder of just how disposable most products are in the modern west.

Exactly so. As I understand it, the Vermont plan was drinks in containers that weren't being refilled were going to be banned. So wash and reuse or you ain't selling that beer. :)

Reused glass milk and pop bottles here in the UK didn't seem different in weight or thickness to non-returnable bottles of the same era. They've all got thinner over the years. The oldest milk bottles I can remember, from the 70s, were indeed quite chunky but they'd mostly gone by the 80s. No idea how long they'd been around though.

The last fizzy pop refilling scheme I know of died about 5 years ago, leaving just a few dairies using it for milk.

Reuse is typically only used for big water jugs and glass milk bottles.

Soda bottle deposits are effective and don’t get shipped off to poor countries.

On the other hand, up until about the late 1970s or early 80s, Coke and Pepsi in the US were typically sold in eight-packs of 16 fl. oz. returnable bottles. These were returned to the store, which refunded the deposit on the bottles, and the delivery trucks would take the empties back to the bottling plant to be cleaned and reused. The bottoms of old-school Coke bottles were stamped with their original bottling plant, as well, although bottles often turned up far from their original plants.

No need for laws, but then Big Soft Drink got greedy and pushed for the disposable mess we're now stuck with, because, hey, no more money spent on washing bottles.

I think it's about time more state legislatures enact bottle deposits. I've noticed that highways in Michigan ($0.10 bottle deposit) are a hell of a lot cleaner than in Illinois (no bottle deposit).

There is a company called Loop that is shipping and re-using packaging. Much of it is aluminum. (Personally I'm looking forward to laundry detergent not coming in an extremely thick single-use plastic thing I know will end up in a landfill.)

Glass is very heavy relative to other materials so you've got to include the added shipping weight into CO2 calculations. Glass makes a lot of sense for things you don't buy very often where the ratio of product-use-count vs weight is high (condiments, cleaning products, personal-hygiene, etc).

I always buy detergent in a cardboard box? That's probably not great either...

That box is coated to make it water-resistant. Technically they can be separated and the paper half recycled, but almost no municipality does it.

I'm talking about the powder detergent. (Liquid detergent inherently wastes resources hauling water around. I already have water.) The inside of the box is just cardboard. The outside is printed with some sort of glossy image, but I don't see how it's qualitatively different than a cereal box...

We could even do reusable plastic bottles. I saw it a lot in Chile. They'd have a deposit on 3-liter coke bottles with a thick plastic. You'd exchange the old bottle when you bought a new one to avoid the deposit. Then they'd take those, clean them, and refill them. Often the bottom would even be a bit banged up from multiple uses.

Yes, also in Germany they use reusable plastic bottles. But the companies in other states argue that it is hard to introduce the system. It would definitely be easier to use just glass bottles.

I'm ~45 years old. When I was a child this was the case. As a side note Milk came in plastic bags even then. But all carbonated beverages came in multiple sized glass bottles. In the Mid-80's (IIRC) there was an attempt to sell Coke-a-Cola in 2L size bottles but the glass couldn't handle the pressures and were apt to explode easily.

2L plastic bottles don't have this limitation.

We do this in a few states. Actually I grew up in one of them and just assumed it was nation wide.

A lot of people have commented about plastic just being cheaper, etc., but the core aspect is that glass is simply very heavy for the volume contained, and requires greater care when handling at all stages of the use process. Shipping all that extra weight has real carbon consequences as well.

I'd like to see reusable silicone packaging. Bonus points if the containers are standardised like shipping containers and fit together in a way that maximises internal volume, like the cells of a honeycomb. Who wouldn't like a container that is hydrophobic, making it easy to get every last bit of yoghurt out.

This does happen at a small scale in the US. I usually buy milk in glass bottles that when returned are washed and reused.

The argument that you’ll typically hear from business/engineering folks is that the carbon footprint of the glass bottle is too high because of the cost of manufacture, transport and washing.

The same argument was made in favor of styrofoam cups. I’m a skeptic.

The most legitimate challenge is branding. Each company wants their own style bottle, maybe with a certain color to protect it from light, or maybe just with a certain visual appeal. If you have a universal bottle, they can be collected & reused anywhere. Pretty simple. But if the ten thousand different drink companies each have to collect, sort, & ship their bottles back to their processing plants that suddenly becomes a massive problem.

This could be standardised by the government if there is political will. Standard beer bottle, wine bottle, liqueur bottle etc. Non-standard bottle don't need to be banned, but surtaxed.

As a counterpoint: I live in Germany where we have such a system in place. When I went to the US for a few months not having such a system in place actually felt liberating. Suddenly I didn't have to worry about storing bottles, how to get them back to the store, etc. I just threw them into the recycling bin.

This might not be a problem for families or people that actually plan their grocery shopping and go there by car to buy for a whole week. But for me as someone who just stops at the store every day on the way home to get whatever I need it's really hard to bring empty bottles back to the store (I won't carry around empty bottles all day).

My guess is the cost in transport/logistics to reuse, cleaning and other potential liabilities outweigh the cost of simply manufacturing lots and lots of very cheap plastic bottles. Glass is heavy and dangerous. Plastic is incredibly cheap and lightweight.

This is based on nothing other than gut intuition and someone will probably come along and correct me.

In Ontario, you pay a small deposit ($0.10) for each glass bottle of beer. You can bring the bottles back to the store and get refunded the deposit.

Other than the diplomatic issue of sending it back, "Asian countries take a stand against their own recycling industries" seems more accurate. There was someone buying it on the other end.

It’s also a good PR hit after the discovery that oceanic plastic pollution comes from a few rivers in Asia.

How can we find out whose garbage is it?

Yeah, original title is absurd. I've never seen as much plastic waste as I see in Asia. I mean I've got called names few times for refusing plastic bag lol.

There is this strange belief that landfills are taking up a ton of space and we need to reduce landfill usage because of it.

This is simply not true. Landfills don't take up much space, we have plenty.

This is pretty much what the environmentalists were preaching when I was growing up. Not sure why to be honest. In retrospect it certainly seems like "but the landfills!" is the lesser of all evils.

Probably a combination of NIMBYism and poor land-use planning. Back when many of these landfills were created, they were on the outskirts of urban areas, where "outskirts" = 15-20 miles away. After the wave of suburbanization in the 1950s-80s, suddenly those outskirts are right next to someone's home. Now it's a crisis.

Most people's conception of what land is available is limited to their local metropolitan area, and they have no idea just how abundant land is in the hinterlands. You could probably bury all the nation's garbage in the craters left inside the Nevada Proving Grounds, which is a radioactive wasteland anyway. And shipping contains of garbage 500 miles from LA, Vegas, and SF to Northern Nevada looks a lot more appealing when you've gotten used to shipping it 10,000 miles to China.

Shipping over water is cheaper than shipping over land.

True, but probably not 20x true.

Only if you don’t price in environmental impact. Trains are much more efficient than ships in this regard and can be powered purely by green energy.

> Trains are much more efficient than ships in this regard

Is that really true? At least for CO2 emissions, other sources seem to imply the opposite, with ships being much more efficient than trains: https://truecostblog.com/2009/11/23/is-local-really-greener-...

I'm referring to an electric train powered by green energy—an ideal, not a current reality. As far as I am aware, shipping lanes are just as difficult to green as planes are, maybe even more so.

We know how to make very large nuclear powered ships. You could fit an astonishing amount of waste on something the size of the Nimitz, especially if it didn't need to make task group speeds.

Hmm, fair point.

>an ideal, not a current reality.

Dutch trains run on sustainable power.

https://www.ns.nl/en/about-ns/sustainability/energy/sustaina...

If you live next to a harbor, sure. Lots of places in North America are not near the coast.

I want to believe that, but then we have this 65 meter trash pile in Delhi.

https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/india-trash-mo...

The point remains true, that’s just a shitty place for a landfill. The issue isn’t space, it’s our use of resources.

That's not a space issue. That's an improper handling issue.

This has way more to do with India than what the person said.

I think there are much more important issues like space: Improperly constructed and maintained landfills (i.e. most of them) leak pollutants into the ground (water) and offgas significant quantities of methane. (No sources handy right now...)

This is currently an issue in Russia. Big cities like Moscow produce a lot of waste and the cheapest way to utilise it was to dump to a landfill in a countryside. Now people living nearby are protesting because the gases from the landfill are carried by the wind to their town several kilemeters away.

Source?

Landfills take up a lot of space. I saw a documentary about it (forgot the name of it). Humans waste so much and the trash keeps piling up. You can only dig so much.

Landfills are three dimensional and the Earth is astonishingly large. On millennia timescales, we will never run out of places to put them.

At a depth of 400 feet, the entire US annual trash output is approximately 1,000 acre [1].

There are 37 billion acres on earth. And indeed, much of that is not very habitable land.

And importantly, landfill space is not permanently lost. There are many beautiful parks around the world built atop landfills.

[1] https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-scienc...

The waste in the landfill produces toxic gases. Also it can burn and produce even more toxic gases. Even if the landfill is several kilometers away from homes, it is still dangerous.

Also, the waste can pollute underground waters, and if there are many rivers in the region, the water will be contaminated in a large area around.

So the problem isn't that it takes space then.

Yeah. Some toxic/flammable gasses can be produced from landfills. But that toxic gas is not produced by plastic. So reducing the amount of plastic in the landfill isn't going to reduce the amount of toxic stuff. Similarly, the plastic in a landfill is not going to end up in underground water, or in rivers. So what's your point?

This has always been my point of confusion. The ground's gotta be made of something. Rocks don't decompose. Why is it an issue if the ground's made of something that's not rock and doesn't decompose?

If it's leaking toxic breakdown byproducts out into the water table or something then that's an issue, sure, but "things going to landfill" seems to be treated as axiomatically bad by most people.

It's because of the Mobro 4000. Corrupt mafia fuckery that got mistaken for a environmental crisis.

As far as I can understand it, the recycling industry is a well-intentioned waste of resources. It would be much better for the environment for all this waste to be sequestered in a landfill than for people to pay to ship it around the world only for most of it to be dumped or rejected (which, even when the Asian countries in question do accept it, they are likely to do anyway). These materials (plastics) are so cheap to produce that it will probably never be economical to recycle them, unless recycling them entails cleaning them and reusing them in their original state.

I think a lot of people have undeservedly negative emotional reactions to the concept of sending waste to landfills. Waste in landfills is waste that won't find its way into the rest of the environment. Plastic not decomposing is bad in that it ties up resources for a very long time, but it's good in that it doesn't even produce methane waste in landfills. And I'm guessing it takes less CO2 to ship X kilos of plastic around the world and reprocess it than to dispose of the plastic close to its source and produce X new kilos of plastic.

And plastics are cheaper than ever in N. America.

We fractionate the ethane out from natural gas, and we’re fracking a lot of natural gas.

And it isn’t easy to store ethane, so we’re turning on more and more plants to turn it into polyethylene.

At least in winter, the ethane can be used to froth up gasoline, but in summer, there’s not a lot to do with ethane.

And with that approach it'd be easier to reclaim if/when we figure out a good way to re-use it.

Basically plastic deposits that could be conveniently mined in the future.

So what you are saying is we need to create more plastics since they sequester carbon better than plants!

Like the comforting lie I tell myself when printing a long paper: you're sequestering carbon!

A more prosaic explanation is that recycling is primarily aimed at removing garbage from the first world rather than environmental friendliness.

Non-biodegradeable plastic is a carbon sequestering scheme.

Breaking windows stimulates the local economy.

You're confusing mixed waste, the subject of the article, with all recycling.

It's true that mixed waste is difficult to process and is often best in a landfill or clean incinerator.

But properly sorted plastics are perfectly usable, and they are cheaper than virgin plastics. The reason they are cheaper is that it is less expensive to clean and regrind them than it is to process new, virgin plastic. Virgin polypropylene currently fetches about $0.65 a pound, whereas recycled clear polypropylene is sold for $0.50-0.55 a pound. These plastics are typically recycled within the same region as the origin of the waste plastic, and, due to freight, often get re-used in industry in the same region as well.

Well-intentioned is a stretch. We really just shouldn’t be using plastic for disposable products, and corporations take advantage of peoples’ lack of knowledge of recycling to neglect their responsibility of proper disposal and pricing. Given the effect of plastic on the environment single use plastics should be priced higher than their (eg) metal counterparts. (This is assuming those have priced in externalities, so I realize this is reductive, but I believe my point is clear.)

I’m staring at a unilever plastic container with cute recycling logos on the side, and I have no consumer option to price compare with a more sustainable option, let alone vote with my wallet. What a waste of materials.

Granted, lighting the materials on fire so I can drive around the countryside isn’t much better.

> We really just shouldn’t be using plastic for disposable products

Huh... I would've expected to read we very much should be using plastics for disposables. (Do you want a metal or cloth trash bag?) Rather the problem I see is disposing so much in the first place.

I was more implying things like paper, but I see your confusion.

Paper cups for coffee and paper containers for food are lined which makes them difficult to recycle. Despite having a recycle logo on them they are often not recyclable.

They can be lined in a way to be easily compostable

You could also drink your coffee out of a cup that can be washed and reused. Avoiding waste production in the first place is always the best option.

> it will probably never be economical to recycle them

While we're talking in hypotheticals, I think the economics of recycling needs to take into account the negative externality of environmentally safe disposal cost in production. In other words, if we actually priced in the cost of safe disposal into the cost of plastic products, then recycling wouldn't have to be viable economically based on the price of recycled plastic alone. Europe already does this for household electrical waste; there is no reason it cannot be done for plastics.

Are you talking the cost of putting it into a landfill?

It seems obvious to me that we will eventually be a lot better at recycling or the materials will be worth a lot more. If you can keep it around without it polluting the environment outside of the landfill, you should dig it up later and recycle it with superior technology and/or when there is much more demand.

Good for them - until recently it had never occurred to me that many “recycling” programs were just “send it to another country”.

It wasn’t until someone on HN pointed out to me that even most plastic “recycling” is just shredding and using for things like carpet.

The long term solution seems to replace most plastics with paper/cardboard and actually compostable materials (which doesn’t really include the compostable plastics)

A lot of assertions here about waste management and relative harmlessness of landfills.

Do you have experience or exposure to the recycling, waste management and landfill industry that you can share? Have you spoken to any landfill managers, have some idea of the volume of plastic waste and the landfill industry? Or is this just speaking from the gut?

Most articles have experts[1] and researchers[2] expressing grave concern about waste and microplastics from landfills seeping into the environment and polluting animal ecosystems and even our own water and food supply that would give anyone cause for concern. Positioning that concern as 'negative emotional reactions' without providing any science or evidence about why it is so seems unscientific in the realm of wishful thinking.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2018-03/documents...

[2] https://www.theseus.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/114539/Kilpone...

The Tali landfill in the second link must be very old. It seems they designed it to drain directly into the river. That's definitely not how a modern landfill is designed, and not just because of plastics.

Wikipedia seems to suggest the landfill was known as "Talinhuippu" and claims it was in use 1963–1979.

No, they're just repeating libertarian propaganda.

Libertarians hate recycling, the Dvorak keyboard and climate change because they are all popular examples of market failures.

So they've attacked them all for decades and now most American nerds will pipe up with "actually, it turns out..." and spew a bunch of lies if you bring up any of these topics and feel all pleased with themselves that they're not getting suckered like all the sheeple who believe in climate science.

It's actually got to the point were libertarian "journalists" are openly admitting that they intentio ally lied about climate change for 20 years because they didn't like the political implications.

Depressingly they're not saying this through any sense of guilt but rather a calculation that they can continue to have more influence by partially admitting but still downplaying climate change rather than blank denial.

I'm fed up of sorting and "recycling" plastic, it's such bullshit, it's a feel good activity for individuals or a check box exercise for governments. If anything it's damaging to continue pretending to recycle plastics, it makes it seem ok to continue producing them.

One day in the future it will be banned at the source, packaging will be replaced with something non-hazardous and efficient to recycle or biodegrade, and our children will look back at us in disbelief - just like we look back and scoff at advertisements for healthy smoking, yet it will have longer lasting effects on the food chain.

As a counter-example, British Columbia recycles its post-consumer waste. There are state of the art sorting facilities near Vancouver that receive this material, sort it, grind it, clean it, and pelletize it. It's then bought and used to produce various industrial and consumer goods.

The recycler receives a subsidy (set through open bid) because the cost of sortation, grinding and cleaning is somewhat less than the recovery price of commodity resins. (Post-industrial plastics, or highly sorted plastics, are much cheaper to recycle and are processed without subsidy.)

The idea that all plastic recycling is "pretend" recycling is false, damaging, and encourages adoption of environmentally damaging alternatives or use of virgin plastics. We should either use more bins and pre-sort everything (which will result in lower recycle rates, but much more economic streams) or subsidize processors to sort streams out and turn them into useful material to be re-used.

The city where I live has 14 sorts of garbage. You have to sort, clean, put it in clear special bags and write your name on it. If you don't do it right, it doesn't get removed (and your neighbours gang up to figure out who screwed it up if you don't write your name). Of course, it's Japan and people are used to following rules, but the system works quite well.

One of the things I don't like about these kinds of issues is the lack of understanding that garbage is as much a social problem as it is a technical problem. We assume that people can't/won't do things and evolve a culture where it is true.

I agree. In the States, we largely adopted "blue bin" recycling that encourages people to dump everything they think might be recyclable into the same blue bin. The idea was that this would encourage high recycling rates, and eventually technology would catch up and figure out how to efficiently sort everything.

So far, that hasn't happened, so we just got high recycle rates but terrible streams of material that are not economic to recycle.

I agree that the Japanese approach would be a better one, even though it would take large social change, and would result in lower recycle rates for quite a while.

> The idea that all plastic recycling is "pretend" recycling is false

It is a pretend _solution_ to plastic polution, because it is incomplete to say the least (like all types of recycling)... and while that is ok for other materials, it is not acceptable for plastic .

For most other recyclable materials it is merely unfortunate, a lost opportunity to reduce sourcing of virgin materials: most metals, glass, wood, cardboard, paper - if they go in the ground it is at least not toxic and even biodegradable short and long term, (and some quantity will always go in the ground, to say otherwise is wishful thinking).

> , damaging and encourages adoption of environmentally damaging alternatives or use of virgin plastics.

No, the idea that it is "pretend" allows us to break the delusion that we are ever going to stop plastic pollution by recycling and move forward: acknowledging that the current solution is woefully inadequate due to the nature of the material means environmentalists and policy makers can focus their efforts on the source of the problem.

> We should either use more bins and pre-sort everything (which will result in lower recycle rates, but much more economic streams) or subsidize processors to sort streams out and turn them into useful material to be re-used.

You keep doing that, for the few parts of the world that have the luxury to care about sorting their rubbish with more granularity, and can afford to actually recycle some minority of it... globally we will continue dumping vast quantities of it in the ground and ocean, the world will never be able to recycle even 50% of plastic waste (honestly 50% would be an incredible feat), so yeah... stop pretending this is going to work, if even 10% of plastics keep going in the ground each year we have failed.

Alternatively imagine what might happen if all the effort focused on attempting to recycle plastic went into forcing packaging manufacturers to switch to biodegradable alternatives. Subsidize manufacturers materials research into viable alternatives, that's an investment that will eventually eliminate plastic pollution, not just stem the flow by subsidizing plastic recycling.

TL;DR Plastic is pollution, paper isn't, keep recycling what paper we can, but don't pretend recycling plastic stops pollution. Plug the hole in the boat and stop bailing out water... otherwise we will definitely sink because the hole is much bigger than any bucket you can make.

This is simply a political issue at this point. If there is political will, then we can ban all consumer plastic. We used to live fine without them 40 years ago. We can do so again.

Damn the inconvenience. We must plug this at both source and disposal.

If you made a case that this would be better for the environment, which I have yet to see. Plastic waste is not toxic, nor does it use a lot of energy to produce.

Microplastics which are irremovable from the environment would beg to differ. Those are what need to be banned.

Microplastics are all plastics, since that's what it all turns into after getting ground up through environmental processes.

> Plastic waste is not toxic

It absolutely is. It breaks down into micro-plastics, which are sub-celluar sized plastic particles. These have a large surface area and are easily absorbed into tissues and cells. They then leech out whatever additives are in that particular piece of plastic - plasticizers, colourings, etc...

Some of these are directly toxic/harmful when released into tissues and cells - and lots of them are endocrine disruptors: molecules with a very similar 3d shape to hormones:

> Endocrine disruptors are chemicals that can interfere with endocrine (or hormone) systems at certain doses. These disruptions can cause cancerous tumors, birth defects, and other developmental disorders.[1] Any system in the body controlled by hormones can be derailed by hormone disruptors. Specifically, endocrine disruptors may be associated with the development of learning disabilities, severe attention deficit disorder, cognitive and brain development problems; deformations of the body (including limbs); breast cancer, prostate cancer, thyroid and other cancers; sexual development problems such as feminizing of males or masculinizing effects on females, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocrine_disruptor

> The toxins the microplastic leaches into seawater inhibit the growth and photosynthetic efficiency of the bacteria Prochlorococcus, which is responsible for producing an estimated 20 percent of the oxygen we breathe. That means Prochlorococcus is also responsible for 20 percent of carbon capture on this planet (one molecule of carbon goes in, one molecule of oxygen goes out), theoretically spelling trouble for humanity’s quest to keep CO2 out of the atmosphere. This is early research that comes with several big caveats, and also exposes the challenges of studying a threat as new and omnipresent as plastic pollution.

https://www.wired.com/story/ocean-plastics-bacteria/

Etc, etc, etc...

That's why you should dispose of them in a landfill and not the ocean. Problem solved.

Then it just leaches out into groundwater - albeit more slowly.

Alternative is that the companies must take back un-recycable waste as condition to sell. Then suddenly, garbage is allowed to be sent back to Asian countries!!

The move to single-stream recycling probably represents the single largest setback in the U.S. to the cause of waste reduction.

It’s sad how the costs of dealing with used plastics - whether recycling, landfill, or something else - are usually presented as a problem. Like, “look, it’s getting too expensive to have country X take it” or “it’s not economically feasible to recycle”. I wish the costs of dealing with plastic trash went up 10 times and there was absolutely no way for anyone to avoid them. That’s the only meaningful way to get people’s attention and stop consuming 400 million tons of plastic per year.

The amount of plastic bags is ridiculous. The packaging for many products is ridiculous. I feel good about being able to put groceries into my backpack rather than plastic bags. Unfortunately I don’t have an option to take other products of their crazy layered plastic packages and put those into my backpack as well, all that packaging going straight to garbage as soon as I get home. This makes me sad.

Asia is not "taking a stand", that's quite the spin on reality. It was never economically profitable, and they tightened import controls as a pawn in the current trade war.

Coincidently: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...

It's not to say that the move will undoubtedly benefit the environment, but we should call a spade a spade.

Well yes, that may have been part of the calculus for China banning garbage imports. But the resulting unmet demand for garbage dumping then spread to the rest of Asia, and we absolutely are taking a stand on rejecting it for non-trade war reasons. [1]

[1] https://www.businessinsider.my/malaysia-town-plastic-waste-c...

For a fascinating (and less sensational) read on the global recycling trade I recommend "Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade" by Adam Minter

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17286721-junkyard-planet

I would prefer to see plastic and styrofoam containers outlawed entirely.

The fundamental problem here is that the cost paid for a good does not directly include the cost to reclaim and/or sequester it. That cost is externalized, and so it winds up seeking a local minima, with serious adverse effects on the total system. If these costs are incorporated, everyone’s incentives are aligned and solutions will be found.

The water from my well is not very good, but ever since I got a reverse-osmosis filtration system, I probably reduced our one-time-use plastic consumption by about 95% (mainly water bottles)... and this system will pay for itself in less then one year... but of course they need to fix the packaging of many items.

India is now having a plastic recycling problem of its own. Most cities in India do not own landfills, and their surrounding villages do not want a landfill in their backyard, even if the city wants to purchase it. What's the alternative to landfilling? My ignorant guess would be to use an abandoned mine or something of the sort. Is there a sustainable waste management technique?

Why can't the US develop domestic waste-processing capabilities? We could be generating power from incineration plants.

It was cheaper to send it overseas rather than to invest in alternative technologies. So if any company tries to develop some technology, they might not get funding. Imagine if gasoline was 10x cheaper how much it would slow down development of electric cars.

Pollution control standards make incineration expensive.

It’s not like the US is going to run out of land for landfills.

Yes but can't you have a closed system that compacts the exhaust into solid matter?

For some things (like SO2), yes. But not easy for CO2.

Yeah, it's much easier and cheaper to have someone else emit all of it (and most likely more than we would have) on your behalf on the other side of the world. Locally it wouldn't fly, because people don't like the idea of just burning it and releasing all of the pollutants, but if you ship it in the container that would otherwise go empty anyway, and then they do it for you, it's okay.

I’m assuming that developing country industry are buying the plastics waste for re-processing, not direct burning.

It’s re-processed there because it’s economically viable to do the sorting/cleaning that wouldn’t be with higher wages.

I don’t believe there’s wide-scale shipping of straight garbage trans-continentally, that’s cheaper to process locally/regionally.

It's hard to convince the upscale NIMBY crowd that the .00-whatever parts per billion of nasty stuff that get past the filter system of a modern incinerator plant isn't gonna give everyone cancer and make the frogs bi-curious. Then you have to figure out what to do with the waste and you'll face the same problem.

If its a closed system there are no emitters. Just solid waste, to be trucked off to a landfill or something

You could (at great expense) build an incineration plant that scrubbed its exhaust gasses of most pollutants, but CO2 remains the big issue. It is just plain better to bury it in properly-designed landfills.

A company in Utah has a process for turning plastics of various grades into diesel fuel. Salt Lake City, Boise, and it looks like Phoenix now as well are working with them to recycle plastics. [Edit: The company is called Renewlogy]

https://kjzz.org/content/859146/phoenix-convert-plastic-wast...

"The City of Phoenix announced Wednesday it will soon begin converting certain plastic waste into liquid fuel.

The fifth most populous city in the country has partnered with a waste management company and Renewlogy, a technology firm, to convert plastics 3-7 into fuel.

Plastic items with a number between 3 and 7 in the recycling symbol are considered “low-value” and are expensive to recycle. The city expects the project to divert 10 tons of plastic waste from landfills every day, producing 60 barrels of liquid fuel."