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Comment by harimau777 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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"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.

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'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.

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.

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.

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