Comment by gioele | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gioele | Hacker News Reader

> The recycling of everything else is mostly a combination of virtue signaling and a jobs program.

The truthiness of this statement depends a lot on the region of the world you are looking at.

In Europe there is a consolidated and expanding recycling market for many different types of materials. For example more that 30% in eight of the plastics sent to recycle in EU actually ends up being recycled [1]. (It would be closer to ~40% if it weren't for France.) These are big numbers that are having a meaningful impact on the amount of CO2 produced, not just "jobs programs".

BTW, a decade ago I met the owner of a factory that used only post-consumer plastic and he stated that his business was limited by the lack of good post-consumer plastics: the biggest share of the best kinds of plastics are being bought, at an higher price, by incinerators operators, leaving his factory and others to deal with second-rate plastic.

[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/201...

I love the pfand system we have in the Netherlands and Germany. I read that about 90% of the bottles and containers are returned because there is an immediate financial incentive to do so.

In Asia, plastic bags are given for free, and I'm sure charging a few cents would have made a massive difference. Uber Eats, GoFood, and Grab Food all have made some changes so you can mark if you do not want the plastic cutlery. There is a company in India, Zomato, that even sends recyclable bags along the food. All of these changes should be appreciated by both media and consumers.

Recycling would never solve the problem alone. It's an illusion of a solution. Using less and less plastic and more alternative material would.

I love the pfand system we have in the Netherlands and Germany. I read that about 90% of the bottles and containers are returned because there is an immediate financial incentive to do so.

Add to that: Even if you can't be bothered to return a bottle for the Pfand you can just dump it in a visible place and it will be picked up in minutes and returned by somebody who needs the money more urgently than you.

What important is that the materials get recycled not that they get returned. Returning only addresses the eyesore of discarded packaging not environmental concerns.

It's even better than recycled, most bottle are simply cleaned and reused as is. You can tell because the side of beer bottles in germany are scratched on the top/bottom where they contact the other bottles during transport: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/55df3cede4b0daf4d...

Glass bottles get reused, plastic gets recycled. The first PET bottles were made to be reused as well, they were quite a bit more substantial than the current versions. This scheme was scrapped quite soon, probably because it ended up being more expensive to clean these plastic bottles and discard the ones which for some reason were not usable any more. This led to the development of the current one-time-use thin-walled PET bottle.

As to whether those wear marks on glass beer bottles are from them touching together during transport I'd suggest that this actually is not the case. They shouldn't come into contact with another, seeing as they are transported in crates with pockets for individual bottles. It is far more likely that those marks come from handling in the bottle washing-, filling- and labelling machines where the bottles gang and rub against each other. If you're from Germany you might have watched 'die Sendung mit der Maus' ('the program with the mouse', a long-running television program aimed at children which amongst others details all sorts of industrial processes) where this process is followed from start to finish. Here's an example from the '70s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7Bd6YWrfWw

> This led to the development of the current one-time-use thin-walled PET bottle.

I'm drinking from thick reusable/reused plastic bottle everyday here in Berlin, even coke is sold in them, they still exists

> it ended up being more expensive to clean these plastic bottles

Which is a shame because what we save in $s now will cost us much more than $s in the future.

> It is far more likely that those marks come from handling in the bottle washing-, filling- and labelling machines where the bottles gang and rub against each other.

Could be, either way it's a sign they are indeed reused. Thanks for the link.

It appears that the first system for paying people to return bottles was started in 1799.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container-deposit_legislation

Unfortunately even if you mark the don't add cutlery button you always seem to get a pile of plastic cutlery...

You know that schemes to address climate change will follow the same formula.

Most of it will be feel good low impact measures and policies that mostly are a way for people on the inside to make money.

It's all the dark machinations of big paper straw.

There's a fast Italian fodd chain in London called Coco di Mama that found a creative solution: they offer macaroni tubes as a straw alternative. Far less unpleasant than paper straws.

Why would incinerator operators be purchasing high quality plastic? I don't get it.

edit Why are incinerators purchasing stuff to burn at all? That should have been my first question. What is the profit in purchasing stuff to burn? Is this a energy production source or something?

Cleaner burn?

They want only the plastics, and not the water, rotting food, literal shit, construction waste, etc. that ends up mixed into the cheaper waste streams.

Those things don't burn as well.

Probably they the high quality is mixed with low and the incinerator operator just buys the contaminated lot of it.

Dioxins are generally the biggest emission concerns and they are prevented by higher temperature burns. Plastic is also likely higher in energy density which could potentially both make it more economical than a given baseline unsorted garbage depending and serve to keep the temperatures high. Although ironically not being /very hot/ when burning organic matter risks dioxin formation between about 200 and 600C.

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