Hacker News Reader

Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

Point 5 misses a bit of facts. The reason the US and the UK don't seep garbage into the ocean is we export a bit[0] of it to...guess where? Places like China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam. This[1] is relevant. Idk, that refutation alone makes one wonder how effective landfills are in the west if we must send our trash to other countries to keep from filling our own landfills.

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-...

View on HN

Us sending our garbage to places like China, India, Indonesia has no bearing on us dumping our garbage in the ocean or not.

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.

The idea that there is a joined-up strategy at a national level to ‘buy our garbage’ is weak.

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.

Then why is trash being sent illegally, labelled as fuel?

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

> Point 5 misses a bit of facts. The reason the US and the UK don't seep garbage into the ocean is we export a bit[0] of it

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.

So while this is a problem, I doubt it's really all that related to landfills vs. recycling. Some of that exported waste was supposed to be recycled, almost certainly. It's likely that exporting for the purpose of recycling runs essentially the same risks, not to mention that you have to consider not just incompetence but outright malice too: why wouldn't a waste-processor not take stuff for recycling with the intent of never recycling in the first place? By the time the sender catches on, just let some intermediary go bankrupt, rinse, repeat.

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.

Other countries buying up trash used to be a big market, but it is declining at a reasonably solid rate, [1] being a good example. So in broad terms, the point in the original article still applies.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/china...

One thing to understand here is just how cheap it is for us to send our recycling/garbage overseas. All of those shipping containers coming over here need to get sent back with something and its not like Vietnam is buying an excess of American goods. So we end up paying next to nothing for this.

Landfill is taxed in the UK which might explain some of it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com