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Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

Reducing is strategic.

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...

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> Corporations like recycling because it promotes growth -- the opposite of reduction.

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.

If the alternative to recycling is reduction by creating products that last longer, then recycling would increase profits and growth.

>Both corporations and environmentalists should support efficient recycling and oppose innefficient recycling.

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.

I'm speaking of broad interest categories. Obviously aluminum mining companies aren't going be in favor of aluminum recycling, but in general, lower aluminum prices increase economic growth potential and should be supported by other companies in general purely out of self-interest.

> 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

Are there many known examples of this? Kinda curious about what shape this problem takes in context

> Corporations like recycling because it promotes growth -- the opposite of reduction.

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?

It promotes their growth -- say packaged good companies like Coca-Cola, Trader Joe's, or Starbucks. Clothing companies like H&M and Zara. Most unnecessary material stuff.

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.

> 99% of things Americans buy end up in landfills within one year.

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...

Another way to put it is whether this is 99% of “individual items” or 99% by mass or volume, etc., and which such way of measuring gives the fairest picture of the lifecycle of products going to landfills.

How exactly is it misleading? I know that things are things, and include both short- & long-lived things.

Averaging over categories of wildly distinct things is misleading. It's like taking average temperature of all human bodies in the hospital and judging public health by that measure - ignoring the fact that some of those are dead bodies in the freezer and some are running high fever. Or, another example, if you look at average wealth of people in a pub, and Bill Gates and Warren Buffet walk in to have a pint, the average wealth would jump up, but nobody really became any richer. Conclusions made on this kind of measures make sense only in specific conditions, but when we could a huge expensive car as one thing and 1000 tiny toothpicks as 1000 things and averaging over that, it can not help but being misleading.

Slapping "recyclable" on the product also reduces guilt in buyers with some conscience, therefore it is a winning marketing strategy.

You're right! I was thinking only of corps not producing physical products, but that's only one part of the world.

It reduces the moral barrier to buying new stuff. “Just buy it and recycle when you’re done!” The companies don’t deal with the costs of disposal.

Governments should tax products for their disposal costs. Eventually everything needs to be disposed of so charge it at purchase time and remove the costs the individual pays later for garbage collection. This would mean products that don't use wasteful packaging become cheaper and people would buy less junk.

Every board room: "Just put some soil and seeds into this used plastic bottle and it becomes a handy plant pot - therefore it has an extended use and shouldn't need disposing of, hence zero disposal tax!"

I do exactly that with pails/buckets and plastic beer cups.

One is buried into the earth ‘forever’.

The other is a raw materials subsidy for manufacturing paid by the taxpayer.

> 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.

Not OP but if you look at packaging you can find examples where it’s in an industry’s interest to create disposable packaging over recycled packaging. Be it plastics, glass, aluminum, tin or cardboard. But also your “cell” batteries and clothing, etc.

> Corporations like recycling because it promotes growth -- the opposite of reduction.

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.

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