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Comment by orev | Hacker News Reader

Planet Money has a good two-part series on this (episodes 925, 926). Basically plastics are only really useful for recycling if they’re washed thoroughly (which requires water, possibly hot, using more resources), and not shipped all the way around the world. Until we have recycling facilities locally, it’s just not worth it. Using them for energy would seem to be a better option, but I think that landfill is still probably the best one.

The real solution is to reduce consumption and push the packaging waste costs back on the companies making the products.

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Also mentioned in the episode—a US landfill is very unlikely to illegally dump your plastic trash into the ocean. If you ship your plastic to China or Malaysia, the possibility of that happening becomes substantial.

Given that it's incredibly easy to corrupt the batch by contamination, the washing is nearer an abrasive stage followed by very hot washing. Not only do they need to remove food remnants, but ink, labels, glue and any remains of the one time seals as found on milk cartons.

Local facilities probably wouldn't pay as margins are so thin - it depends on sending to parts of the world that are cheap. The parts of the world that have few environmental laws or enforcement and where cutting corners is too easy.

Totally agree on the real solution. Recycling came about in part thanks to companies working hard to promote it as a means of externalising another cost in place of reuse.

> The real solution is to reduce consumption and push the packaging waste costs back on the companies making the products.

And to embrace landfill. People became conditioned to think how bad it was to bury mountains of garbage (which it is), but it's far better than pumping it into the air or waterways.

What groups dump plastic into waterways?

Isn’t they simply individuals throwing their trash into waterways and it makes it to the ocean?

Apparently it was (and might still be) a solution to disposing of "recycling" that was sent to many poor nations for processing.

According to the mentioned podcast, the large garbage patches don’t just happen as a result of currents collecting random floaters into one spot; they come from countries like China just dumping whole barges out in the ocean.

What complications stop recycling centers from becoming more regional in nature?

Volcanoes?

this burning will lead to toxic gas being released that will increase cancer rate. I bet wealthy people see this as a money making proposition for their pharmaceutical companies.

The ‘smart’ in the title refers to a method of incineration without the emission of toxic gases; the air is scrubbed clean. So that money making scheme probably won’t work.

that's bs all incinerating technologies produce toxic gases. for incinerating plastic the argument is that it's less toxic than letting it sit in a landfill.

As you probably know there are problematic toxins like dioxins that stay in the environment basically forever and toxins like NOx that are no big deal because they decay rapidly to safer substances.

These incinerators are not your typical campfire. When your scout master yelled at you for throwing plastic in the fire, he was right because such a fire is relatively cool and has lots of incomplete combustion. Burning plastic in such fires produces a lot of nasty gases.

But modern industrial incinerators are another sort of beast. They burn hot enough to tear apart most of the nasty shit and burn that too.

I am well aware. the point is that these systems are not perfect and will lead toxic fumes being released no matter how efficient you make it. sweden is doing this and have clean air purely because of them being conveniently located under a jet stream that sends all their air pollution to asia.

Respectfully, if Asian governments are blaming Sweden for their air quality, they are pulling a fast one...

so you are criticizing them for polluting by defending a policy that dump pollution on them. talk about being out of touch with reality.

You've not provided any real evidence for modern incinerators run by first world nations polluting as you claim. All you've provided is rather paranoid conspiracy theories. The fact that you started this conversation out with tired tropes about the rich and the pharma industry should have been my first hint that this would be an unproductive conversation.

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