Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated
medium.com
medium.com
Reusing and recycling are tactical.
If your strategy is in place, use all the tactics that contribute to it. But if you don't have your strategy in place, tactics can do nothing or even move you backward.
Corporations like recycling because it promotes growth -- the opposite of reduction.
We are stepping on the gas, thinking we're stepping on the brake.
Covered in episode 183 of Leadership and the Environment: http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/rants-raves-monologues-volume...
I don't think this is strictly true. It certainly is not the explanation for why we have most of the recycling programs we do have.
Overpaying for unnecessary recycling reduces growth. Economically efficient recycling increases it.
Both corporations and environmentalists should support efficient recycling and oppose innefficient recycling.
There may be some methods of recycling that are environmentally efficient but economically inefficient, but that would be due to externalities that need to be regulated anyway.
The issue of expecting and engineering unending growth is an interesting topic but doesn't really have anything to do with this article.
Are you saying that's what corporations should morally do, or that that's what they should logically do to increase profits? It could be that a corporation saying "buy our stuff then recycle it" causes more people to buy the stuff than saying "buy our stuff then throw it away". In that situation, a profit motivated corporation would promote recycling even if it hurts the environment.
Are there many known examples of this? Kinda curious about what shape this problem takes in context
What do you mean by "promotes growth" here? You pay for your recycling just like your trash. Why would any company like it more than reducing overall waste?
A statistic from The Story of Stuff https://storyofstuff.org/movies/story-of-stuff comes to mind that something like 99% of things Americans buy end up in landfills within one year.
Manufacturers slap the word "recyclable" on those products to get people to buy more of them, hence growth.
What "things" means here? A car is a "thing" and a toothpick is a "thing". I can use the car for 10 years and I use several toothpicks per day. So on average, I throw nearly everything very quickly, but the picture seems to be misleading if we remember we're comparing toothpicks to cars...
The other is a raw materials subsidy for manufacturing paid by the taxpayer.
Municipal recycling programs are often a profit center for the municipalities running them.
Put a bit more directly, corporations like recycling because it shifts the burdens of waste onto consumers and society at large, while allowing them to continue pursuing growth and privately concentrating profits.
- 40% for paper
- 60-74% for steel and tin cans
- 33% for plastics
- 30% for glass
- 5% for aluminum cans
These numbers appear to be referencing the generation of new products using recycled vs new materials, but do they fail to take in to account the cost of actually getting those recycled materials (ie going from trash to the recycled paper pulp)?
I always thought the 3 R's are in the order they are for a reason.
Reduce - first step realize that happiness is not automatically linked to consumption. This is harder than it seems because this extends beyond product consumption to other forms of material consumption like traveling by plane or car (IC vs EV vs hybrid is a whole other debate)
Reuse - once you have something, get the full use out of it, and try to repurpose it for other uses too if possible.
Recycle - once you have used something to the point that can no longer serve it's purpose adequately because it's worn out, place it or parts of it in a recycling bin if possible.
What this article and discussion has prompted me to do is research further into which parts of something deserve to be placed in the recycle bin (whether or not there is an established way to recycle them, ie plastics) and if certain reduction techniques aren't all they're cracked up to be (reusable straws and shopping bags)
Reference: https://www.ct.gov/deep/cwp/view.asp?a=2714&q=440320
So when they say stuff like... "Producing recycled paper requires about 60 percent of the energy used to make paper from virgin wood pulp."
... does that include costs of reasonably sustainable forestry vs. reasonably sustainable old paper separation & collection?
... does it include non-financial costs made by the end-users of the original paper?
... does it include implicit costs of potentially lower quality paper (or if that's ever the case, the values of higher-quality)?
... does it include the opportunity costs (probably small) of whatever else you might do with that old paper, such as sequester carbon or burn for energy?
... does it consider costs of energy (some joules are cheaper and less damaging than others; so e.g. it may be wood->paper factors run where energy is trivially cheap and simply haven't bothered to try and be energy-efficient)?
... does it consider non-energy resources?
Basically, it's not clear to me whether this is a technical argument about one of the important steps in the respective processes, or an overall assessment about the approaches going forward.
paper: 40% less
steel and tin: 60%-74% less
plastic: 33% less
glass: 30% less
aluminum: 95% lessIt’s rare I see anyone have even the slightest bit of actual production knowledge in these climate-related topics, so I appreciate that.
You’re right about recycling aluminum. It’s also why a LOT of the new production work is done in Iceland with geothermal heat and nearly free electricity.
Unfortunately, it makes so much sense to produce aluminum in Iceland, that it’s shipped from China to Iceland and back again to do so... on crude tanker fuel at very low efficiency.
Just driving the truck around the neighborhood to pick up the bins is a cost in diesel, human resources (which translate to carbon at some level).
I live in a city where trash collection rates are tied to how big of a trashcan you have. Along with recycling and compost collection programs, this is intended to deter people from overusing the landfill.
BUT, as a result of having a very small trashcan (to minimize my personal cost) I end up putting the can out every week if the can is even 1/4 full, as I occasionally have a heavy week due to an event or seasonal cleaning and I don't want to have garbage around the place for extra week(s). The desired effect on my waste habits, i.e. reducing the amount of landfill trash I ultimately produce, is negligible.
Therefore the garbage truck must stop at my house roughly twice as often as it would if there was no disincentive cost to having a large can. If enough other people in my city operate like I do, then we're running a significant amount of extra trucks and labor for virtually no benefit.
That seems to be the issue, not the recycling program.
> Just driving the truck around the neighborhood to pick up the bins is a cost in diesel, human resources (which translate to carbon at some level).
The same truck would still drive arround though if you didn't have recycling program, it will just be a black truck instead of a green one.
It might not depending on the system in place. Many recycling programs require two truck routes to separately collect the trash and recycling. This doubles the amount of trucks and human labor but the trash load produced by each property stays the same.
In NYC there are separate routes and trucks to collect recycling. Saw the same thing in San Diego. One truck does the trash route, and some time later comes the recycling truck.
Also, if the garbage trucks fill up slower, there should be some reduction in trips to empty them.
Food waste is still collected weekly, and is sent to an anaerobic digestion plant.
Not sure what black/green means. We have separate recycling pickup vehicles around here. They wouldn't run at all if there were no recycling.
The argument they were making is if your garbage weren't going to a recycling plant, it would be going to a landfill. Either way, the same amount of waste has to be transported from your home, so the same number of trucks would still be driving around.
The recycling program requires the cans be clean, so someone, somewhere is washing them.
> ...
> - 5% for aluminum cans
I found this phrasing confusing. From the article you linked,
>> Aluminum can be recycled using less than 5 percent of the energy used to make the original product. (EPA)
I would say that's more efficient by 95%. (Thank you for providing the link!)
I’ve always thought that framing the issue like this is both smug and dishonest.
Smug because you’re essentially saying that people are wrong about the things they believe bring them satisfaction and comfort.
Dishonest because reduce in this context will always mean a reduction in quality of life.
Aside from being an ineffective way to convince people of anything, it also seems counterproductive in the sense that it alienates people from caring about the issue.
As for reduction in the quality of life, you don't generally tell an obese person that their quality of life would improve if they could just eat more cake. Consumption and quality of life are not in a linear relationship.
There are demonstrably a lot of unsatisfied, uncomfortable people who have a lot of stuff and whose quality of life is quite poor, all things considered.
I stated it the way I did to point out that happiness is not linked to consumption in the sense that more consumption does not always equate to more happiness. On the flip side, I was also not referring to a reduction of consumption to the point that it influences one's quality of life. Personally, over the last few months I've noticed some purchases I made in the past that I didn't need or didn't use enough to make it worth it, or where I could have used something I already had on-hand. I use that as a learning opportunity, to adjust my mindset into the future by creating a couple of simple guidelines before making semi-major purchases (did I sleep on it, did I do adequate research into pros/cons/alternatives without going crazy, etc).
Quite to the contrary of what you are saying, I find a reduction of purchases in this way will positively contribute to my quality of life, both in the present and in the future with increased savings rate and decreased clutter. I'd much rather live in a place where I wasn't looking at stuff I don't use and feeling bad about it. I think you falsely equated my statement and this idea about reduction with the millennial's definition of minimalism. That carries a smug connotation, I'm just talking about mindfulness that fits seamlessly into place with your current lifestyle. I even tried not to take a stance on the issue, and only stated that consumption is both the products you buy and the ways you go about doing things, not that anyone who consumes above X amount is evil.
People saying this are frequently those who would also admit that they were wrong about the things they believed to bring them satisfaction and comfort. From their own experience they know that it did not mean a reduction in quality of life for them. That doesn't mean it works that way for everyone, but it's not dishonest.
If you believe that the future of the world depends on reducing consumption, a presupposition which is not necessarily true, then you are asking people to reduce their quality of life. That’s not to say that people cannot be satisfied by a reduced quality of life, but asking people to sacrifice things that bring them comfort, convenience or satisfaction is by definition asking them to reduce their quality of life.
That's not necessarily because of their higher cost to produce. It's often because they target higher end "environmentally conscious" customers, and use the "made with recycled materials" as a price differentiation / market segmentation strategy (working class Joe? get our $1 notebook. Latte-sipping hipster? Here's our $5 recycled notebook)...
The convenience of throwing something away is a triumph of modern civilization and one of life's little pleasures, and we had to ruin it by acting like it's wrong when it's actually not.
When I walk up to some wastebins holding a papery-plasticky object with a bit of food stuck to it, my heart sinks. Now I have to think about classifying it into one of 2-4 inconsistent-looking bins, and I feel guilty that the classification isn't perfect - which would be okay if it was for a good cause, but the whole concept of recycling paper and plastic was a net-negative to begin with.
Recycling is one of those things that feels like it solves a problem but doesn't at all - like hybrid cars, US-style airport security, or donating cans of food.
I think you got it backwards. Throwing stuff away was the normal way of life before modern civilization arrived, just like defecating wherever you find convenient, hunting animals for dinner, or riding hoses on whatever side of road you like.
The wonder of modern civilization gave us so much power to produce stuff that it's no longer feasible to just "throw away" stuff we don't need. Just like modern cars necessitated speed limits, stop signs, and annoying lane-changing rules, mass production requires one to think about how to dispose stuff without ruining ourselves.
So, yeah I think you got it backwards. Maybe recycling doesn't work as well as advertised, but that doesn't mean we are off the hook. It just means we need a different solution.
What? Absolutely not. Things were precious and labor was cheap back in the day.
Anything that could be repaired was. Ever heard of "darning socks"? Yeah - no one would do that today, but it was common 100 years ago.
> just like defecating wherever you find convenient
Lol.
People found out pretty quickly that you have to give a crap about where you give a crap or people get sick and die. This is 2000 BC social technology.
> The wonder of modern civilization gave us so much power to produce stuff that it's no longer feasible to just "throw away" stuff we don't need.
BS.
The earth is big. Really big. Stupendously big. Conceptually it's trivial to make a landfill large enough for anything we will make in the next 100 years with space left over.
We don't do this because it's cheaper to have small landfills closer to cities, but that's an economic limitation, not a technical one.
The wonder (and horror) of modern civilization is that this kind of thinking is obsolete. Pregnant women are advised not to eat tuna, caught anywhere, because we managed to pollute the entire ocean with mercury. We're producing so much chemical fertilizers that we create more biologically available nitrogen than the rest of nature combined. And of course we're warming the planet itself.
Even ancient Americans, with their stone tools, managed to exterminate virtually every large animal in the Americas.
> Conceptually it's trivial to make a landfill large enough ...
Conceptually it's also trivial to stop global warming. We just have to stop making any more CO2 (and maybe suck up a bit from the air). Doesn't mean it's easy in practice.
The earth is big from the perspective of one human, but we are 8 billion. The earth used to be stupendously big, but it is not anymore.
So it only took us, what, 1.5 million years?
By the same token, it gave us the power to produce so much stuff that we can afford to throw stuff away.
Who darns socks anymore? Or has their tv repaired?
Your average family of 100 years ago was throwing away ashes and what? The rag and bone man collected rags and bones, veg peelings would have gone to a chicken/pig/compost. Paper probably went in the fire. Plastic was none existent, metal? (rag and bone man? I'm guessing there was a market for it somewhere).
This was the situation in the UK at least.
I have done both in the last two years. I also do not send my brand-new car to the junkyard once the ashtray is full. It's wasteful.
It isn't the 'normal' thing though, certainly not for younger generations.
What were the economics of your tv repair, what was the cost of the repair v replacement and how old was the tv? Last time I looked into it, they were doubtful they could get the parts, and the likely charge was higher than replacing the tv. The same isnt true for emptying the ashtray. In fact I don't even need to take the car to the garage to empty the ashtray, I can do it myself!
i'd like to see some evidence to that.
most of what we throw away is packaging. in the past there was little packaging. and most packaging was reusable, a cloth, a bag or a chest for example.
if it wasn't for packaging, in my daily life i would hardly have any trash at all. almost everything i am able to reuse, and i buy with re-usability in mind.
this is not something i learned in school, or from somehow environmentally conscious parents. i am actually not sure where this came from. we did it out of habit. waste not, want not. maybe it came from not being able to afford to keep buying new stuff. it wasn't really conscious.
reusing vs throwing away is more likely split along rich vs poor. and on the past more people were not rich. they were not necessarily poor in the sense of struggling to survive but the average population created everything they needed for themselves or bartered it. there was no space for trash.
buying new things is a sign of wealth. this is especially visible in china where second hand markets are practically non-existent. people pride themselves that they can afford to buy new stuff.
note that reusing is different from recycling. reusing happens at home or on the second hand market. recycling comes from collecting trash and transforming it.
so in that sense recycling is very new. but reusing is old.
You mention "defecating wherever you find convenient" - yes, another pleasure of modern life is that at any time I can walk to a nearby bathroom and defecate, and do so on top of much more sanitary infrastructure than we ever had in the past.
- consumer-sorted recycling is a BandAid virtue-signal and ineffective because it gets mixed up, under-sorted and contaminated
- post-consumer waste-stream separation works. Stanford does it because five bins was ridiculous
- all trash should be recycled, composted at-scale to reach near zero landfill stream
- Structural waste reduction by source-return reuse, recycling
- single-use plastics should be eliminated
- plastics that cannot be recycled should be banned from retail sale, packaging, products and landfills
Maybe very large taxes on landfill waste would compel recycling and manufacturing to get their acts together?
1) You already have oil-powered power plants, and
2) You have efficient, modern trash incinerators that can recover 90%+ of the energy in plastics, and
3) You make sure that all plastic garbage actually ends up incinerated.
Because the utility you get out of making plastics out of oil, using the plastics for something, and then burning it, is higher than just straight up burning the oil.
But if you fail any of these three points, you're better off banning single-use plastics.
Oddly, this seems to be the most difficult part of the equation here in NYC. Containerization needs to be adopted in order to make the system more efficient and sanitary. Containerization would prevent refuse from spilling into the street, into the storm drains, etc. The current system (curbside pickup of plastic bags) falls over (literally and figuratively) in too many ways and the sanitation workers aren't interested in picking up the slack -- they ignore anything not secured in a plastic bag.
Also I work at a food pantry. Donations of canned goods are always welcome, same for razors, toiletries, etc. Anything that can be eaten without a stove is generally welcome.
Recycling has built up such inertia as the "moral" path, regardless of its inefficiencies for most materials, that it's become an unsustainable clusterfuck that we can't move away.
Where I live, it's been codified- municipalities must recycle, and also must discourage landfill-bound waste. The result is that I've been issued a 64-gallon mixed-recycling bin that is picked up once a week, and a small 36-gallon trash can that's picked up every two weeks. There's two people in my household and we both are very conscience of being wasteful- not as some kind of environmental whatever, but it's just in our moral framework. A 36-gallon trash can holds about 2.5 full kitchen garbage bags in it, so if we produce more than 2.5 garbage bags of waste in a 2-week period, we have to hold on to it for another garbage pickup (reducing our available volume for that period then). Anything out there then sits in the sun for 2 weeks stinking and attracting raccoons/rodents until the next pickup.
The result? Anything remotely resembling "recyclable" gets tossed in the recycling bin. Food/grease on it? Put it in the bin. You know where the stuff in that bin goes now? It goes to the recycling facilities and then sits there in huge piles because no one will buy it anymore because the whole system was propped up on bullshit the entire time.
To top all that off, the law also prevents these now-inundated recycling facilities from moving their material to a landfill for proper disposal. So it literally just sits there and we have absolutely no solution for it. It would be political suicide to advocate the loosening of recycling laws, no matter how broken they are, so you'll never have a representatives willing to fix this problem.
Some specifics on ocean plastics that covers a bit of general plastics.
Any chance you could compost the kitchen scraps in your garden?
Necessary infrastructure extends beyond just providing for recycling- households are going to produce waste that doesn't make economic or environmental sense to recycle, and all the encouragement and financial incentives in the world aren't going to stop that. Encouraging people to be less wasteful is important, but we need to stop demonizing landfills and use of the landfill bins because that sentiment has perverted the whole household recycling process.
It's gotten so bad here that a few months ago, they had city representatives on the radio threatening fines for people that put non-recyclable waste in their bins, as if that's the solution to mixed-recycling being uneconomical. They went as far as to say that it was malicious- that people were putting non-recyclable stuff, like used pizza boxes (their example), in the recycling bins to purposefully sabotage the whole system. The disconnect is huge and at some point the holier-than-thou attitude and the short-sighted laws passed with it are going to blow up in our collective faces.
I'd try to collect payment for disposal earlier. If you pay for disposal when you buy the product, it makes doing the right thing easy. It also makes products with wasteful packaging more expensive right there in the store, encouraging people to buy less wasteful alternatives.
> if we produce more than 2.5 garbage bags of waste in a 2-week period, we have to hold on to it for another garbage pickup
It's pretty easy to have much less than 2.5 garbage bags of waste every 2-week. You should read just a tiny bit of zero waste please, it may help you immensely.
You may believe that recycling isn't working, that's fine, but there's plenty of simple easy ways to reduce waste and have less than 2.5 garbage bags of waste every 2 weeks.
The 4 R rules is simple: Refuse, Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.
You still got 3 R to works on.
I am at least familiar with arguments against US-style airport security and donating cans of food, but whats wrong with hybrid cars? I don't know of any arguments that they are net neutral / harmful.
Incidentally, the same thing exists for pure electric cars, solar panels, and just about anything else of that nature.
People buy new cars for dumb reasons, usually for nicer seats/better ac/speakers, and they in turn do away with their less shiny but usually still perfectly fine car. The car industry is rampant consumer culture at its worst, sustained by lessees insisting on new car smell.
The energy flow is a bit similar to the cash flow of a SAAS company: As ROI takes a few years, the start of the rapidly growing industry looks like a net negative, but with the installed capacity constantly growing and efficiency getting better, even the industry as a whole is in the black now.
Which elements are you thinking of? The vast majority of PV being made today is silicon. The only rare element used in PV is silver for front contact wires, and that can be substituted for with proper design (copper wires can be used if a diffusion barrier layer of nickel or molybdenum is used to prevent its reaction with silicon.)
After having driven one for a while, I've done a complete 180. The fact is, they're a perfect interim solution which really brings 'the best of both worlds'. One thing I wasn't expecting was how the system trains me to drive differently and minimize wasteful fuel use-- something that simply doesn't exist in non-hybrids. I think they make even more sense for large freight trucks, and I'm looking forward to seeing more of those.
In the U.S., more than half the top-selling vehicles are pure-ICE trucks or SUVs, and I would bet the majority of people buying them don't have a sensible use case. There is plenty of room for hybrids to make a difference. When you can get the same or better performance for half the fuel (or less), it's a no-brainer, and the market will eventually catch up to that.
From a mechanical pov?
Your experience doesn't seem like it would refute that? To be fair I'm not sure how you could refute it without long term large scale reliability testing.
What really reducd my gas consumption was moving to a place just a few miles from where I work.
"Local" because they were always predictably a technological dead end.
"Maximum" because they maybe gave us a slight improvement in fuel efficiency, although gas-efficient internal combustion engine cars may have been the more energy-efficient option all along when you consider the up-front cost and maintenance complexity of hybrid cars' dual engines.
The only thing we know for sure about hybrid cars is that Toyota successfully profited from selling people's self-image about being more energy efficient. But since we also have Tesla in the market, selling the actual solution to the problem of gas-burning transportation, absolutely no one should be buying hybrids.
This is an oft repeated accusation by people who only know the concept of hybrids and have no actual experience with them.
The electrical system of hybrids are inherently low maintenance and the gasoline engines run under very low stress conditions for an engine. The result is that the gasoline engine needs much less maintenance. And the brakes are barely used.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/04...
The Prius is a better option from a lifecycle CO2 perspective in many places than either a high efficiency conventional vehicle or a pure battery-electric vehicle. That changes if your electricity comes from more renewable sources -- California, for example. Shorter commutes favor small battery packs or no batteries at all.
Edit: I should clarify, I realize that the article is saying that recycling plastic and paper isn't worth it, but is that a mainstream opinion?
Newspapers are worth recycling, because they can be turned into new newspapers again, removing the ink and the metal can be done fairly efficiently.
Cardboard can be recycled fairly efficiently, and can be turned into new cardboard.
Plastic-covered/glued/glossy/window envelopes/food containers/other contaminated papers can't be recycled. Just incinerate it, or turn it into pellet fuel and incinerate it.
What chemicals are involved in that process?
Is cardboard similar?
Does this take into account the logistics costs?
The (arguable) utility of your recycling vs. its cost to you is obviously very negative. And not just on purely selfish level: I don't know what your line of work is, but I'm sure society will benefit much more if you were calmer but didn't recycle than the other way around.
So here's a "get out of recycling jail" card for you and others like you. It's like herd immunization: Don't worry about it, we got you covered.
The article likewise cites a whole bunch of libertarian sources that unsurprisingly conclude that government interference is bad.
On the other hand, here's a document comparing recycling to landfill (and incineration to generate power and a couple of other things). It summarises all the expert research from the actual field, rather than right wing economists.
Generally the experts suggest landfill is the worst option on several scales for basically all materials:
http://www.wrap.org.uk/content/environmental-benefits-recycl...
People who think recycling isn't good for the environment seem to fall into the same group as those who really worry about all the birds affected by wind turbines, or the impact of lithium mining or how carbon taxes will hurt the poor i.e. baseless propaganda aimed at people who care about the environment coming from people who clearly don't give a hoot.
Thanks, I never realized
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/im-begging-you-stop-donatin...
I mean, maybe that's partly because it doesn't matter and in the end they're just combining it all and sending everything to landfill regardless. But still; they got the bins, how much harder can it be to put up a sign?
OTOH, fast food joints are possibly one of the handful of places you could actually do recycling right, since you have a pretty uniform stream of items, thus limiting the need to sort. So instead of having a "recycling" bin, they could have a bin for plastic cutlery, and a bin for straws, and a bin for drink lids, with everything else going in a common trash.
Getting thousands of identical contaminated plastic forks that just need a wash before being melted down is probably a lot more appealing to a recycler than getting a bag that's a big jumble of contaminated junk.
I my book, we need to make energy production seriously cheap (renewables, plus maybe nuclear) and put some of the energy excess into transporting heavier but inert packaging such as glass, metal and carton. And by decree lock down the types of plastic and additives which are allowed to use.
... and properly written software has no security vulnerabilities.
Because the potential environmental consequences of just leaving the site unmaintained or poorly looked after are high, in the developed world government almost always ends up providing a backstop to this. This could be described as 'socialised losses and privatised profits' when it gets used, and we would be right to be very wary of this model, even to pay a premium to avoid it.
I'd expect compressed old consumer goods to be a rich "ore" for many valuable materials compared to many natural sources, and having the mining operation there would provide an endgame for the landfill that ensured it was being monitored and managed.
The problem is that it assumes that mining operations are well regulated, which I suspect would not be the case.
I think the software analogy is not especially good, but it feels like there's some poorly-aligned incentives in landfill engineering. The point of landfills is to make trash invisible, so saving money by hiding engineering faults in the landfill itself is easy, they get buried along with the trash, and by the time the leakage becomes noticeable, the builder is long gone (bankrupt, merged/acquired, whatever), and the community is left to spend more on remediation than would have been required for prevention.
The solution to this sort of problem is generally regulation and oversight. I try not to be cynical about the utility of that approach, but it's hard.
The difference from software engineering is that, for landfills, the specifications don't change on the fly, and the engineering best-practices to build them actually exist.
As mentioned elsewhere in this comment section, the right answer is for people to reduce first and recycle last. On that front, the west (and America in particular) is chief in exhaustion of resources and consumption.
[0] I originally said "half" which was just me using colorful speech. This comment deals with facts so I don't want to include a number and have people think it's literal.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/28/treated-...
Those countries willingly bought our garbage and chose to dump whatever wasn't useful in the manner that they did, all by themselves. Insinuating that, if we didn't sell it, we'd also dump it in the ocean is more wishful(?) thinking than anything else.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.scmp.com/news/asia/southeas...
Also is you know it will end up in the ocean, and you still send it, you are responsible. Just like supplying known criminals with a gun is a crime
These countries have immature regulatory and inspection regimes and garbage is being bought and dumped by for-profit entities because they can get away with doing so. It’s really ugly capitalism.
Ummmm, what is exported is all from the recycling stream. If it wasn't "recycled" it wouldn't get exported, and the importer wouldn't end up disposing of it in the ocean.
I.e. recycling causes more rubbish to end up in the ocean.
AFAIK first world countries are not supposed to export general rubbish, and third world countries are not supposed to import rubbish.
Waste export problems have little to do with landfills vs. recycling. If anything, recycling has additional risks, because recycling is tricky and potentially labor intensive, making exports alluring, and because it has the veneer of cleanliness without good means to audit that.
However, if the argument is that exporting waste is generally speaking a bad idea, that obviously holds merit. International agreements, standards & cooperation obviously weren't robust&benign enough to ensure that works in the past, and all but the smallest of countries should be able to figure this stuff out themselves.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/china...
Arguably recycling technology has more potential to improve since large-scale recycling efforts in the US have only been around since the 1980s. Landfills have been around forever.
The obvious response, I think, would be that if we consume and bury 'stuff', then we'll just make more 'stuff', but what's wrong with that? Is it the energy required (presumably from burning fossil fuels) to produce more 'stuff' that's really the problem? It doesn't seem like we have the whole picture on how much energy is actually spent preparing recycled materials for re-use to make an accurate comparison.
There is also a flawed assumption here that these are connected. We will make more stuff whether or not we bury other stuff.
It’s too dirty to put in the natural gas grid.
To quote from that page: "Disposal: No plastics should be put in landfill. Currently 26% of all plastic in the UK still goes to landfill" ... so if the plastics industry itself has finally got the message that burying their product (or dumping it in the sea) is not a good idea, I don't think I'd want to change their thinking by introducing them to ideas about carbon sequestration in landfills.
Mining 1 ton of iron takes 2 tons of ore plus another couple tons of coke and lime. It takes 4 tons of bauxite for one ton of aluminum (plus all the other things). There's also a huge amount of cost involved in reaching those tons of ore.
When mining a landfill gives bigger returns than the current deposits for the same cost of extraction, we'll see our recycling problem go away. Remaining burnables will simply reduce the amount of coal/coke needed to refine.
Government is critical in enforcing landfills though. Otherwise, trash winds up in little piles everywhere (or worse, in the ocean).
https://www.freshairfortheeastside.com/latestnews/2018/1/22/...
There’s even a poop train to Alabama:
https://beta.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/04/...
Poopetual motion? (sorry for the shit jokes)
An NYC poop train bound for other parts played a big role in season 4 of the television show Billions.
It is almost the last step in the treatment process, using a centrifuge to remove the majority of liquid.
Some municipalities will sell the sludge, and it is spread on agriculture fields.
I guess it depends on your definition of "quickly", or it would be good to see a citation on this one.
Personally, I believe that if we encourage recycling more, that creates an opportunity for companies to innovate in that space and come up with better recycling methods. So in that respect, I'd prefer to over-recycle than under-recycle.
If you Reduce, you get an easy win by not needing the resource in the first place; Reuse achieves orders of magnitude of efficiency in the resource's utility (a glass mason jar can be used thousands of times, compared to a plastic one designed to used once and disposed). Recycling is often fraught with inefficiencies of both energy and waste byproducts.
I would love to see more economic incentives around direct reuse (such as Pigovian taxes on disposable plastics, and consumer incentives to return glassware to the grocer and then the manufacturer for direct reuse).
This leaves you with the choice to either spend a lot of energy or risk environmental contamination. Chemical accounting ends up being a nontrivial problem to address.
All grocery packaging should either be multi use or compostible. I hate how plastics are used where they don't need to be
A citation in your favor would be how net energy output only slowly declines as EROI plummets[1]. Slow decline is a general property of these types ”Seneca Cliffs”[2] present in collapse.
[1] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-03-12/the-real-energ...
[2] https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/08/seneca-effect-o...
Why shouldn’t packaging be designed to be easily transformed into something useful, or even into functional community art projects?
A temple of coke cans for example. If they going to last forever it might as well be in a form that benefits communities.
Plastics have already been banned in certain countries.
Or are there to many lobbying in the wrong direction?
Or wine bottles.
If you make things more repairable -> net consumption might go down -> this might lead to loss of jobs.
Does my analysis make any sense?
Which is a perfect example of poorly priced externalities. The full cost of disposal should be priced into everything produced. It is completely backwards that throwing a glass bottle in the trash is cheaper than sterilizing and re-using it.
Total number of jobs or time spent in the labour market is one thing, but ultimately what we care about is efficiently creating utility. If I need to spend 5h working to get enough money to replace something I could've fixed in 0.5h, that's not good for the economy as a whole.
Were it otherwise, every home would be built without a kitchen and people would go out to eat all the time. We'd need more jobs for people staffing the kitchens, but it wouldn't help people overall.
Isn't the 'ready meal' phenomenon essentially this? Someone else does the real cooking, you just store then heat it up. Plenty of people survive solely, or mostly, on that.
Not if people, foreseeing high repair costs, simply figured out how to do without the items altogether and stopped buying them.
How would it impact the internal economy? Wouldn't it just reduce imports and improve the country's trade balance?
Seriously wondering. I most probably don't know enough about all that to make any statement
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/12/741283641/episode-926-so-shou...
I'm always skeptical of this kind of article.
And they might get all the energy they need to do it from the garbage itself. Hey, if insects can do it, robots will eventually be able to do it.
What is the energy potential in the materials in a landfill? How much is wasted by scouring them and trying to properly extract it? Compared to preventing the capture of those materials there in the first place?
Putting the survival of our species on the possibility of some pixie dust is not rational. It is hard to face the truth, but burying your head in the sand is counter-productive.
If certain resources do get more sparse, it will easily become economically viable to expand landfill mining and we already have the technology required to do so. At the end of the day, it's an energy question more than anything. With cheap solar plus the fact that landfills produce their own free energy (methane) there is no need to be alarmist and consider them a threat to our species.
Wall-E was solar powered and was just supposed to compact trash for incineration.
Taking care of the best planet around is always going to be easier and better than packing everybody off to some other planet, even one that's just as good.
They way I see it, it's even going to be possible to even collect all the mercury out of the ocean and clean up other seemingly impossible messes.
Here's an article I found on a quick search: https://www.wired.com/2012/01/ff_trashblaster/
This is not a valid argument. A bad habit should not be a justification for a devious behavior. I would even argue it is easier to bring your reusable container of choice when going shopping, and if that habit is really formed, then you wont be able to exit your home or car without it, because something will seem to be missing. Take for example the backpack or "granny cart". They are much more comfortable to use when compared to lugging around many plastics bags around your hands, and the granny cart is much better for your back.
tl;dr: As a sustainable (heh!) solution to the current waste crisis, landfilling everything is not a good solution. We tried it for many centuries and are still paying the price for that approach today. The only people who will benefit from a 'landfill everything' strategy will be 23rd century archaeologists.
As the UK is mentioned a couple of times in the article, I'll add a link to the Wikipedia article on UK National Waste Strategies, as it includes links to the various strategies published by various Governments across the UK since 2000 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Waste_Strategy
While those documents are a bit on the long side, they are very informative about the many, many (many!) complex systems that contribute to planning for, managing, and attempting to reduce waste in a large, rich European nation state.
(Disclaimer: I was part of the team that developed and published the Waste Strategy for England in 2000).
Can you elaborate on this? I'm not aware of centuries-old landfills clogging up the landscape and (to any meaningful extent) impinging upon the availability of land.
A quick Google search gave me this link to some ongoing research conducted by Queen Mary College, London, into the risks surrounding historic landfills - https://www.qmul.ac.uk/geog/research/research-projects/histo... - that page does a far better job of explaining the situation than I can.
In my view, the key barriers to landfill mining are the same as those faced by today's recycling industry: the costs involved in extracting value from waste (someone has to pay the pickers working in the recycling sheds - possibly one of the worst jobs in the world); and finding viable, stable and sustainable markets for the materials that do get extracted. Volatile recyclate markets were a huge problem for sustainable recycling back in 2000 and I doubt much has changed since then.
Simply put if this author trusts Tierney it's a reason not to trust this author.
1 - https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/05/science/earth/05tier.html 2 - https://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/06/06/john-tierneys-ba...
1. The rate of municipal waste landfilling for the 32 EEA member countries fell from 49 % in 2004 to 34 % in 2014.
2. Overall, the rates of landfilling decreased in 27 out of 32 countries. Between 2004 and 2014, the largest decreases occurred in Estonia (57 percentage points), Finland (41 percentage points), Slovenia (41 percentage points) and the United Kingdom (41 percentage points).
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/09/739893511/episode-925-a-mob-b...
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/12/741283641/episode-926-so-shou...
These kinds of arguments are such obvious strawmen. I‘m always so confused when people use them, apparently even in good faith, thinking they hold any kind of water. I’m always disappointed when someone uses arguments like that, it’s so absurd.
Overall I would just argue that straw bans and the like are often not enough or waste valuable political capital, even if they might be effective. That much is certainly true. The focus on personal responsibility is toxic and derailing since climate change categorically cannot be solved with appeals to personal responsibility.
Our local high street only allow disabled drivers to park. So the 'pedestrianised' high street is full of the cars of disabled drivers. That doesn't seem to be such a good balance.
Ps I feel there's a good rhyme hiding somewhere with your straw man straw ban.
Every bit of leftover food scraps are just thrown at the chickens ... and turned into eggs.
It's so pleasing and efficient that if I am at a function with food scraps and it is simple and unobtrusive to do so, I will bring home the scraps to save them from the landfill (and turn into eggs).
well, I think you are slightly off the mark there.
If pumping out more CO2 that would normally be sequestered, or dumping out a boat load of particulates with nitrogen dioxide is an environmental thing, then yes.
My heating and how water did come from a very well run incinerator, but its not exactly the paragon of cleanliness.
Whereas power generated from incineration of trash displaces CO2 emissions from fossil fuel emissions.
'''Do the benefits of incinerating trash for electricity outweigh the costs thereof in comparison with costs of equivalent conventional electricity and costs of burying aforementioned trash?''' Absolute issues (e.g. NOx or CO2 emission) not in the context of opportunity cost are irrelevant to misleading.
>[...] But a well run landfill site has [...] electricity generation from gases produced by decaying matter,
This sounds like a pipe dream. We don't even have reliable estimates on how much landfill outgas there is, much less a good system for burning it. It's believed to be largely methane, which would be valuable without further processing if it could be captured.
Incidentally, the word "methane" does not appear in the article at all, and no systems describing such a gas capture apparatus are mentioned. But just think about it: a landfill is enormous; they are some of the largest things humans ever build, and some of them are visible from low Earth orbit. How do you plan to capture all of the gas coming out of that? Be honest!
Meanwhile, incinerators (of various designs) work today, have almost all of the upsides of landfills with none of the downsides. The article dismisses incineration with a single reference (b), which is actually an article from Planet Money focusing on recycling. The actual source is probably a footnote within a footnote, because that's as much attention as Americans will pay to incineration, I guess.
I agree that we need to talk about recycling less, but the correct alternative is incineration, not landfills.
I’m confused by these new plastic bag rules in some cities. What is the underlying reasoning that was used to advocate for them?
Politicians took a highly visable problem that affects the majority of their constituency and "solved" it.
It doesn't matter if it's an actual problem or not to politicians, it only matters if their voters think it's a problem.
Roughly, plastic bags are bad for wildlife and enough of them don't make it into the landfill that it's a problem.
“The problem of rubbish polluting the sea, rivers and land can be most cheaply addressed by improving rubbish collection and making sure everything gets to landfill.
Almost all of the litter that escapes into nature, especially the sea, comes from poorer riverine countries with bad rubbish collection practices, such as China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Rich countries like the UK or US have rubbish collection rates approaching 100% and are responsible for almost no new waste reaching the oceans.
Focussing on recycling is a distraction from making sure everything gets collected and cheaply buried underground — something which many countries already do successfully.”
- what can be recycled? - what state can that material be in (cleanliness, prewashing)? - is it being recycled or just being shipped off to china or burned? - what efficiencies are involved in the various materials?
This seems to change on a year-by-year basis (for example, china stopped taking our trash, uh recycling).
Currently I desperately try to turn single use plastics to double-use. Plastic bags and covering can be used as poop bags, wrap for trash that could drip, and to hold more trash.
I try to use used paper towels for washing dishes and wiping up counters, and also for gross trash.
Most plastic containers of food from stores and takeout can be reused a few times for leftover storage and other purposes.
Best thing about double-use is that it usually helps ensure the single use plastic stays in the landfill by weighing it down.
I also think that recycling allows companies to waste more, because consumers are more comfortable generating recycling waste than landfill waste, even though for plastics there isn't really much you can do to recycle them.
Landfills should be utilized much less for municipal waste, but doing this would require much better waste separation.
It's probably better to burn or recycle things that don't decompose readily, such as plastic. Landfilling plastics just takes up a lot of space for a long time. Recycling or burning plastic also reduces litter.
Recycling paper doesn't matter as much, since it is very biodegradable. I suspect that recycling paper leads to energy savings in the pulp & paper industry.
Aluminum is one of the best candidates for recycling as it is very efficient and cuts down on the need for aluminum ore. Steel is somewhat less efficient.
Organics should always be composted if possible.
Is that really an issue when said space can still be used for parks or other green spaces? Besides, US is a really big place. As long as we're not burying it too close to urban centers it should be fine.
"We're doing nothing for the environment" doesn't get one elected tho...
Not sure we can hope for them to look into the future very far / care.
Episode 926: So, Should We Recycle? - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/planet-money/id2907834...
I think the argument that he has better things to do then think of taking a bag "everythere". You do not need a bag small in hand purchases and when you really go shopping you should and can easily bring a bag when you go shopping.
When it comes to regulations I would trust the US with nothing. The EU has probably way better regulations for landfills like for food and other things. While at the same time probably do a way better job at actual recycling.
There's a Danish study[1] that concluded that reusable bags require 50+ uses before breaking even with disposable plastic bags. And that's for one use. If you reuse the disposable bag once (to line your garbage bin, for example), the break even point is now 100+ uses. If you factor in cleaning costs for the reusable bags, I'd be surprised if this practice makes a dent on pollution, if at all.
[1] https://www2.mst.dk/udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...
When you talk about breaking even you are talking about reaching the same negative impact, I hope, because that's what the report is about.
They even spell out those negative impacts: ozone depletion, terrestrial eutrophication, freshwater eutrophication and water use.
The study found that some types of reusable bag needed many uses before being a better environmental option than thin plastic bags (e.g. cotton). Other bags, such as sturdier plastic bags designed for reuse were much better options, needing only a few uses to break even, environmentally speaking.
Anyway, 50+ (or 100+) uses - a year or two of weekly shopping - does not seem unreasonable for a cotton bag.
"a few uses" is only true when you're only considering climate change. it's 50+ when you consider all factors.
>Anyway, 50+ (or 100+) uses - a year or two of weekly shopping - does not seem unreasonable for a cotton bag.
The issue here is that at 1 shopping trip per week, it's a little under 2 years to break even with disposable bags plastic bags (assuming you reuse the disposable bag once). To actually make a 50% reduction, you'd need to use it for 4 years. That's a lot of hassle (remembering to bring along the bags, storing it, etc.) for very little benefit (in absolute terms), considering how little materials are in each plastic bag. For instance, according to the table on page 55, each bag has greenhouse effect equivalent to 0.11kg of co2. Over 400 uses with 50% savings, that's 22kg of co2 saved. With the current market price for carbon offset credits (quick search puts it at $25/ton), that's $0.55 saved over 4 years. You might be able to scale that out to 10 bags, but that's still pretty low.
The best shopping bag to use is still an upcycled bag made from otherwise discarded material, as you are not creating demand for the production of new bags. Sail cloth is a good sturdy fabric, and a bag made from it will literally last you a lifetime.
1. plastic garbage winding up in rivers is largely a developing country problem. I don't see many plastic bags (if at all) in my local waterways.
2. why not just responsibly dispose of those bags? It's not hard. They're not going to get lost when you're using them. After that, you're probably home, or at least some place with a garbage bin.
>The best shopping bag to use is still an upcycled bag made from otherwise discarded material, as you are not creating demand for the production of new bags. Sail cloth is a good sturdy fabric, and a bag made from it will literally last you a lifetime.
Are you suggesting people to make DIY cotton bags from scrap fabric they find themselves? You might be able to avoid the high costs of cotton (break even of 7000+ uses), but if you're not into arts and crafts, I suspect the opportunity cost will eat up any savings (if any).
And so ultimately people (consumers) get what they want. If you don’t want to commit to taking steps in a more sustainable fashion, then you contribute to the problem of disposable waste.
Or do electronics fall under metals and are worth recycling. Or if tossed we could always mine landfills for iPhones in the future, which the article touches upon.
As an aside, this article seems to only be about minimizing energy use or cost and not about maximizing sustainability.
>this article seems to only be about minimizing energy use or cost and not about maximizing sustainability
Because when you factor in energy use, only metal recycling has a net positive impact on the environment and sustainability.
... Yea, b/c the developed nations of the world don't send their trash to "poorer riverine countries" to get dumped in the ocean. /s
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/28/treated-...
The existence of trash isn't under dispute in the article, only a very specific route for trash to reach the ocean. It's not clear that somehow exporting trash, alone, implicates western countries in its reaching the ocean.
Is it mismanaged trash collecting companies in developing countries that dump in the ocean? Is that the route? Or is it dumping in rivers, as the article suggests.
I'm one that believes the use of taxes as way to change consumption. So charging a tax to help reflect the true value of plastic, to reduce usages and find alternatives. It's a hard issue but burning it or dumping is not the solution.
The estimated max is 11 billion because the birthrate is very low right now.
The 'problem' is that we live longer.
A extremist fascist even has a pretty clear definition of worth added to that
Asimovs concept of being killed instead of retirement
Various concepts in fiction of adding globally some additions to drinking water to lower fertility on global scale
Chinas politic of one child per family was even somewhat fair as it discriminates equally
A world (we live in it) where libertarians tell everyone that "landfill is underrated" is one where people buy and dispose of way too much junk, and create the problems all us communists are vainly trying to solve via personal recycling.
I mean, sure, a world of scientists might be able to handle rules like "recycling that aluminum can is a big win, but the polypropylene bottle with the same product in it is mostly a wash". A world of real people is just going to hear "throw out all the things".
Casting this as a goody Lefty vs selfish conservative argument is pointless.
Citation needed. That sounds like socialist insanity to me. So sure, I applaud it. I just don't see these "conservatives" you are taking about. Even at the level of local politics this tends to be a partisan issue. And you sure sound like a democrat to me...
A market mechanism uses the power of the market to encourage correct behavior through market forces, instead of penalties, taxes on all, special schemes to give cash to specific state controlled recycling projects, etc. A market mechanism allows free enterprise solutions, whereas 'social insanity' creates inflexible regulatory processes.