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Comment by Liron | Hacker News Reader

We really shot ourselves in the foot with this whole pointless "recycling paper and plastic" thing huh?

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.

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> The convenience of throwing something away is a triumph of modern civilization ...

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.

"The wonder of modern civilization gave us so much power to produce stuff that it's no longer feasible to just "throw away""

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.

> Who darns socks anymore? Or has their tv repaired?

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.

Wait, new cars still have ashtrays?

My grandmother darns her socks too.

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!

Even in old times it may be less true than you'd think. I was recently reading one of the Little House books to my kid and there's few sentences in there in their move to the west, how Ma cleaned up their lunch scraps and packing them along when on the pioneer trail in the middle of otherwise nowhere in their journey across the Dakotas.

Food for the chickens, perhaps?

those people were moving to the west in search for a place to live. they moved because they couldn't live where they were. if they could afford to throw stuff away they probably would not have moved in the first place

To outfit a wagon to go West with all the supplies necessary cost the inflation adjusted equivalent of about $100K. Wagons, livestock, supplies to live on while travelling and when homesteading before the first harvest came in were not cheap. That’s without considering the materiel you’d need to set up a farm when you got to your homestead. North America was labour scarce compared to Europe from 1492 on. There was always a place to live and work to do for the able bodied who were willing to work. That’s why millions traveled from Europe to save large sums of money before going home to buy a farm or send for their families from home.

People did not go West because they had no place to live.

i mean live on their own land and have their own farm instead of being a laborer depending on a salary. and since it was expensive many put all they had into that and could not afford to waste any of it.

The book specifically said, to keep the country side clean. It was somewhere in book 5.

> To outfit a wagon to go West with all the supplies necessary cost the inflation adjusted equivalent of about $100K.

What deflator was used to make this calculation?

"To outfit a wagon to go West with all the supplies necessary cost the inflation adjusted equivalent of about $100K. Wagons, livestock, supplies to live on while travelling and when homesteading before the first harvest came in were not cheap. That’s without considering the materiel you’d need to set up a farm when you got to your homestead."

This may be true, generally, but it was not true of the Ingalls family that your grandparent refers to. Their travel and settlement plans were not the most well thought out ...

The tragedy of it is that we are technologically better placed than ever to make and mend items which will last a lifetime, and beyond, but consumerism and never-ending economic growth mean that instead we have planned obsolescence, and almost everything made as cheaply as possible, with consequent reduction in quality and less satisfaction overall.

Most garbage is not obsolete or broken equipment. Most garbage is packaging (cardboard shipping boxes, plastic yoghurt cups etc), which nobody wants or needs to last for a lifetime.

I meant the convenience of tossing something away and having it go somewhere properly out of the way.

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.

uhm no.

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.

in the past, the only form of trash was compost. and even that was (re)used.

Hmm I'm pretty sure these forks and vampire hunting crossbows from then were coming in their plastic wrappers. Else, not sure how they'd handle container shipping without breaking the merchandise.

> Throwing stuff away was the normal way of life before modern civilization arrived

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 earth is big. Really big. Stupendously big.

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.

Unfortunately just stopping will not be good enough. https://phys.org/news/2017-10-global-doesnt-emissions.html

> The earth is big. Really big. Stupendously big.

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.

Conceptually, 100 years is also a very short amount of time for humanity.

>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.

So it only took us, what, 1.5 million years?

Wish-cycling. You want it to be true. You have good intentions. You want your waste to be recycled. So you throw it into a recycling bin. Maybe it'll work? It seems better to err on the side that it will? But unfortunately when it gets to the sorting table/machines it often just makes things worse.

There's problems and solutions that need policy and political will to implement:

- 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?

Single-use plastics are perfectly fine if:

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.

Can you point out anywhere that's made all of 1..3 work successfully? I'd think that most places have 0 of the 3.

I believe Japan follows this system. It was very confusing when I visited because they sort their waste into combustible and non-combustible, instead of trash vs. recycle.

I know that many places have modern incinerators, but that's only 1 of 3. If it was in the US, I'd expect that actually sorting trash effectively would be a big problem, despite having a modern incinerator.

Sweden incinerates 97% of all its non-recyclable trash, obviously has modern incinerators, and has some oil-powered power plants for peak load purposes.

"Can you point out anywhere that's made all of 1..3 work successfully? I'd think that most places have 0 of the 3."

Zurich has a very centrally located incinerator (behind the "viadukt" shopping area) and I believe that they generate electricity from the plant. They also have a very granular sorting regime ... it would appear they are covering all three of the bases.

> You make sure that all plastic garbage actually ends up incinerated.

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.

If there's food/greade on the item that can't be removed for one reason or another toss it, it can't be recycled efficiently. There solved your moral dilemma. Generally only clean paper, glass, and metal are recyclable. Plastics depend entirely on the locality and still require it to be clean.

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.

> There solved your moral dilemma.

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.

That’s a good point: if municipalities want you to recycle, they need to provide the necessary infrastructure, and that means at least three source separated bins (ideally 5-7), and a clean container collection system. Otherwise it just turns people off the whole system. A financial incentive to save money when you don’t throw away as much into the landfill bin helps too.

Any chance you could compost the kitchen scraps in your garden?

With respect to composting- we're also issued a yard waste bin that's for a composting program (a good idea), so some kitchen scraps can go in there (I'm renting and good compost takes longer than I plan on staying here), but food waste/kitchen scraps aren't a large part of what we fill up our landfill bin with. It's mostly food packaging that's definitely too leaky/gross for the recycling bin and general household waste from stuff like emptying the vacuum cleaner or soiled paper towels.

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.

Ideally you would incentivize people to create less trash by charging them by weight or volume for collection, but there are two possibilities for households wanting lower bills: reducing waste or littering. And it only takes a few people choosing littering to make a huge mess.

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.

This also why I like the idea of bottle deposits and would hope they continue into many other containers. The customer pays them up front and gets paid back when it properly enters the waste stream.

You think consumers are going to have 3-7 bins in their homes?

I don’t think it would be political suicide to reform recycling laws. It would help move the conversation forward.

As a family of three we have a 140 litre (~37 US Gallons) bin for non-recyclables that's collected every two weeks and it's normally only half full

Same here. We only got 60 liters for 3 guys and it's fine.

> There's two people in my household and we both are very conscience of being wasteful

> 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.

You're not going to solve the problem and your municipality isn't helping unless it burning the garbage, because that's what contaminated loads are. There's absolutely no reason to have multi stream plastics recycling at the consumer end, save for plastic bags because at scale they can be recycled. Only a very small amount of plastics are monetarily valuable. I would not feel guilty at all about throwing out plastics unless they are clean and food free. It's pointlessly wasteful as most processing plants in the US cannot handle soiled recyclables efficiently if at all. I say this as a long time, Earth hugging, reusable bag toting, fuel efficient vehicle recycler. The US is not a major contributor to plastics pollution. There should be no moral dilemma here. Just by trying to do the right thing in this case you're doing. If you want to do more have a cheese pizza night once a week instead of one with meat toppings and you'll significantly reduce your carbon footprint with minimal change to your lifestyle. If doing the by the planet is your thing having one vegetarian meal that you enjoy a week is going to be significantly more impactful at keeping the planet cleaner and using less resources (the reduce part of the 3rs) than most of the plastics recycling you do. Contaminated glass, plastics, and paper can ruin an entire comingled load which generally happens anyways.

Some specifics on ocean plastics that covers a bit of general plastics.

https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4671

I fully share this cynicism about recycling things that are not aluminum or glass. It also seems that by making people feel better about generating nominally recyclable waste they are encouraged to consume more.

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.

Lithium battery production is extremely harmful to the environment.

Compared to what? And with what assumptions about battery life and recycling?

Most hybrids use nickel-metal hydride batteries. Also, the doubled emissions from a non-hybrid over the lifetime of the vehicle are massive.

I think the idea was that hybrid cars are a sort of local maxima that has stalled real progress (alternative energy cars).

Yeah, hybrid cars might be called a "local maximum"... at best.

"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.

Toyota was selling mass-produced plug-in "hybrids" and Nissan was selling 100mi range 100% electric Leafs before Tesla had even produced the Model S. Yes, Tesla made them sexy, but Toyota, Nissan, and even Ford & GM did the very early path-finding that I think we needed in order to move ahead with the technology and get to the point where people would feel comfortable considering them at all.

"maintenance complexity of hybrid cars' dual engines"

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.

This is not correct. It depends quite a bit on commute patterns and electricity source:

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.

No, the real progress has been stalled by low fuel prices. Most people would only buy EV (or Hybrids) if they could see a clear short term lower cost. The current high upfront cost of EVs completely outweighs the longer term savings (or other less tangible benefits) for most people. Hybrids were a good bridge solution with only a small incremental cost and significant savings but they are currently not in vogue with people who want something even more efficient, and the gas prices are so low as to be almost incidental to many buyers.

When my ordinary gasoline car gets nearly 40 mpg on the highway, and not much lower in city, I don't have much incentive to go electric. Thank you, variable valve timing engine.

What really reducd my gas consumption was moving to a place just a few miles from where I work.

In the past, I was bearish on hybrids. They seemed overcomplicated and ineffectual.

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.

"overcomplicated"

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.

Hybrids are more complicated than non-hybrids, not so much mechanically as electrically and in the controls. It takes very sophisticated computer software and calibrations to properly manage the charge/discharge of the battery pack and the electric motors when doing regenerative braking or acceleration, in order to provide the same functionality as a simple throttle and mechanical brakes do in a non-hybrid.

It’s pretty common to see arguments that the net lifecycle impact of a hybrid outweighs that of a traditional car, because it has more impact in manufacturing. It’s not true (there is more impact in manufacturing, but the breakeven point is fairly early) but it’s an attractive notion to people with a contrarian bent, especially those who like to think that environmentalists are stupid.

Incidentally, the same thing exists for pure electric cars, solar panels, and just about anything else of that nature.

Solar panels are tricky because they rely on certain elements which are rather rare actually. I feel like there needs to be a serious study into whether increased mining/production of solar panels is a net gain or loss. It does feel however than reckoning with climate change will require more on the consumption/behavior side than technology side unfortunately.

Actually, PV energy pay back time has been studied to death. See e.g. this presentation from 2012, which says that the whole PV industry is already a net energy producer: https://gcep.stanford.edu/pdfs/symposium2012/MikDale_Symp201...

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.

So I did say production, but my main issue isn't mere production but the mining of materials and that mining's impact on the environment. Also, PVs and rechargable batteries do use some rare earths which also sucks because, well they're rare and may eventually be depleted.

Regardless, thanks for the talk, it's interesting. I think someone told me a while back they did an analysis of the difference between gas electricity plants vs solar and they came away with the realization that the only way gas wins is really due to the financing around it, so something totally due to regs and how society is already used to it. I just am not sure solar is going to be the silver bullet and actual reduction of consumption might be the only way to stave off climate change.

Relevant: https://earthjournalism.net/stories/the-dark-side-of-renewab...

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3mavb/we-dont-mine-enoug...

Absolutely, reduction should aways be the first option. Just like electric cars are still just a band aid for unsustainable urban design. The optimum would be more human-centric cities that reduce most needs for powered mobility. I have the luck to be able to live like that and it's just great. School, daycare, shopping and our workplaces are all within a 2km radius. Thus our household doesn't need any car, but everyone has a nice bike to get around. We literally save hours each day that would otherwise be wasted on mobility.

The currently externalized costs of mining the rare materials will for sure be disastrous, but then again they would also be for other types of energy production. Relative to other types of energy production, I think one can more or less ignore this point (unless there is some polluting process involved that only affects a specific mode of energy production).

You might in fact be right about that.

Nearly all current photovoltaic cell production is polysilicon, which does not require any rare elements or any rare-earth elements. There are some PV technologies that use rare elements such as indium and selenium, but they do not use rare-earth elements either; and, in any case, they have been pretty much priced out of the market by falling polysilicon costs. There are many kinds of rechargeable batteries, but none of them, to my knowledge, use rare-earth elements. In particular, the lithium-ion batteries in current large-scale use do not even use any rare elements. (Nickel-cadmium batteries used cadmium, which is about as rare as silver, but not a rare-earth element.)

Finally, rare earth elements are not rare (a dozen of them are each individually more abundant than tin), and there is no danger of depleting them.

These are the factual errors in the first factual sentence of your comment. This level of reliability leads me to believe that you are commenting with no concern for whether your comment is true or false, even without doing a similar level of investigation of the rest of your comment.

I think he was suckered by a deliberate propaganda effort to paint PV as dirty. Shellenberger was spreading that BS, and others picked it up without being sufficiently skeptical.

> Solar panels are tricky because they rely on certain elements which are rather rare actually

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.)

Brand new traditional car vs. hybrid might be close, but what about hybrid vs. that 2002 honda civic in the used car lot that also gets 45mpg? I think that's the real comparison, because that civic in the lot already exist in your area and works just fine to take you from A to B.

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.

So is recycling plastic and paper not effective? I have some anxiety issue and one of the ways that they manifest is obsessing about recycling so not having to worry about plastic and paper would be a huge improvement in my quality of life.

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?

It's strangely mainstream in American libertarian circles (and therefore places like HN), but even they seem to spend most of their time railing against the sheep-like masses who have been hoodwinked so I guess even that is a tacit admission that it's not mainstream.

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.

The first two citations are NPR. Not libertarian by any stretch of the imagination.

And neither is HN for that matter.

lol

Lol

Worrying about how carbon taxes will affect the poor is absolutely legitimate, and that's coming from someone that thinks we need one yesterday. Calling it baseless propaganda probably says more about you than it does the argument in question.

As a more generous interpretation of ZeroGravitas' comment: As the bird-and-windmill example shows, those people "worrying" are thought of as denying the fundamental viability of carbon taxes and only use the poor as a popular argument. Worrying about progressive taxation effects is of course very important, but then again also pretty easy to mitigate. And considering the fact that the parties propagating carbon taxes are mostly also the parties caring about the poor, I'm not very worried that the poor will be willingly outpriced of their mobility needs here. After all, that new tax makes the very resources available that would be needed to mitigate the unequal burden it would create.

There's a fairly large contingent in tech that leans libertarian while also recognizing the impending climate disaster. A climate tax is simply accounting for the externalities of your actions.

I wouldn't at all assume that somebody on this site advocating for a carbon tax would take care to not make it regressive, and I think parent's lumping it in with bird strikes (a total red herring considering nobody is talking about banning cats or glass windows) and lithium ion mining (a failure to account for opportunity cost) is pretty conclusive.

That said, I'd be happy to learn I'm mistaken.

Yes I am not from the US and thus I may be biased by the local political spectrum. Libertarianism is something uniquely US-American, I think. We do have bird strike protesters, though, and they pretty much all are from the right.

+1: landfills is the worst option and should be never used for non-inert materials (that is why EU mandates incineration before bringing waste to the landfill). It is very hard and expensive to do it properly, with a perfect first layer, in a stable place, putting a lot of heterogeneous compounds doing a lot of different (and even unexpected) chemical reactions, using pipes to exchange air and drain/burn methane, maintenance and monitoring the site even for hundreds of year after closing it. It is a nightmare to handle that kind of landfills. Please incinerate everything first, and maybe reuse the ashes for public roads, benches and so on.

"paper" is a broad category of garbage.

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.

How much energy does it take to recycle newsprint into blank newsprint?

What chemicals are involved in that process?

Is cardboard similar?

Does this take into account the logistics costs?

The alternative to recycling newspaper and cardboard is chopping down forests and turning them into pulp, a process that also needs a lot more logistics, chemicals, energy, and of course forests that you have to re-plant.

Recycling newspaper is a no-brainer from a cost perspective. You can't recycle forever though, each time you lose some wood fibers that are too short and have to be removed from the recycled pulp, so you have to add fresh pulp.

Pretty much all paper manufacturers are now require to plant more trees than they cut down.

Burying old newspapers in the ground is a form of carbon sequestration. Really it comes down to what takes less energy: cutting down the trees, or the transport, sorting and reprocessing of old newspapers.

Upthread someone quoted a study that showed recycling newspaper used 60% of the energy compared to cutting down trees and making pulp.

So like I said, it's a no-brainer to recycle newspapers.

Article wasn't a surprise, so yes, I think it's pretty mainstream. Definitely recycle aluminium (very energy-intensive to extract), probably recycle glass and other metals, don't worry about anything else.

I'd say that regardless of the effectiveness of recycling you shouldn't be doing it.

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.

It is entirely dependent on where you live and local recycling demand. My city barely recycles any plastic despite what the markings on it might be, because it's not profitable to recycle certain plastics right now; supply is too high. Paper is fine though if it isn't greasy.

> or donating cans of food.

Thanks, I never realized

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/im-begging-you-stop-donatin...

I end up putting mist of it in the trash bin, except glass or metal. It's too hard for me to know which goes what, how am I supposed to know what's compostable (I only have a broad understanding what composting is, and how it's done), much less if this plastic widget that came with the thing is a recyclable one, a compostable one, or made of styrene (which is neither). So off into the trash it goes.

It boggles my mind that modern fast food restaurants don't have a clear board above the multi-receptacle trash area telling you which bin each single-use item they serve goes into.

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?

Aren't most of the things sold by fast food restaurants contaminated and thus un-recyclable?

Probably, but in that case, they should be honest and just have a single receptacle.

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.

It seems like compostable containers might be more practical, since the food and container go into the same bin?

There's already been a huge shift to compostable containers for takeaway food.

Could also consider not throwing out food. I know servings in the US are huge, so either share the meal with another person or ask for a meal size that you can eat and no more.

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