Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It

The main vision systems are now fast enough that sorters work by moving objects on a wide, fast belt where they go flying off the end. While in flight, multispectral cameras look at the objects, using both reflected and transmitted light, and within milliseconds trigger air jets to blow items in the desired direction. Most robotics videos from startups are sped up because the thing is so slow. The ones from commercially successful sorting companies are slowed down so you can see what's happening.

The problem is what to do with the sorted stuff. It's just not very valuable. It's possible to recycle plastic bottles all the way back to more plastic bottles. A huge plant near LA does this for most of southern California. States that charge a recycling fee for containers can handle it, but those that don't...

It was marketed in the 80s-00s as more of a panacea than it is, and specifically seems to have inculcated a dangerously willful ignorance of further action. I.e. "I already do the recycling thing, so I do my part."

From why I can tell, the toxicity, micro-plastic, and energy concerns are the primary mass-scale benefits? In that order?

The majority of which could be reaped at scale by funding toxic material collection programs, mandating less toxic material choices, and re-instituting a bottle tax+.

In return, we've let major, industrial-scale environmental catastrophes go unmitigated, because out of sight, out of mind.

From my reading, the 1970s push for recycling was always predicated as a vanguard movement, intended to educate the populace at large about environmental issues.

The expectation was that we would then pivot to tackle more difficult problems.

Instead, we have 50 years of patting ourselves on the back for hauling cardboard out to our suburban recycling containers.

+ Looking at you, Coke and Pepsi, for fighting bottle taxes around the world.

The article doesn't clearly explain why the shift has happened. It does point out:

> ... China ... wants to stimulate domestic garbage collection and end the flow of foreign trash it sees as an environmental and health hazard.

And later:

> China accepted dirty and mixed recyclables because it had low-wage workers to sort out unwanted material, often by hand. That gave American contractors little incentive to weed out food scraps, plastic bags and nonrecyclable junk stateside.

Have wages in China really risen so quickly that human garbage sorters are now too expensive? That seems unlikely, and the article gives no evidence for it.

An alternative explanation might be that the plastic was never recycled in the first place. It's more than just sorting. Each container has a residue of liquid/solid stuff that can't possibly be compatible with low-cost material recycling.

What if the material received by China was actually burned instead to generate energy rather than new containers? That might explain the newfound reluctance of China to take the stuff.

This is similar to making a bad long-term bet and having to pay up. There are a lot of other attractive choices to plastic, but the window to transition seemlessly appears to be closing more and more each week.

Seeing the death of coal should give them a map to follow. They made a bad bet on the future too.

You are are responsible for having near-zero footprint in your life, where this number should be universal for rich and poor alike. You must bear whatever effort or cost to live within this footprint. You must make choices to not acquire things that will become trash and you must take steps to ensure what you need to dispose of goes into proper channels. You will probably want collective solutions to minimize cost and maximize efficiency. You also need regulations to handle compliance and governments to ensure the fair application thereof. Yes, this is an expensive ideal, yet the opposite seems hard to justify morally.

Current modern life is using fossil energy, natural resources, and land area on Earth to live a life of ease and deferred responsibility. Just because there is still space to make landfills and air/soil not yet saturated with pollutants, what right do we have to take it?

The way this might be similar to CO2 "waste" is an exercise left to the reader.

Edit: This is all that Firefox Reader View shows. No explanation. Just this:

> Recycling Rethink: What to Do With Trash Now That China Won’t Take It

> Saabira Chaudhuri

> 1 minute

> For decades, America and much of the developed world threw their used plastic bottles, soda cans and junk mail in one bin. The trash industry then shipped much of that thousands of miles to China, the world’s biggest consumer of scrap material, to be sorted and turned into new products.

> That changed last year when China banned imports of mixed paper and plastic and heavily restricted other scrap. Beijing said it wants to stimulate domestic garbage collection and end the flow of foreign trash it sees as an environmental and...

Another edit: I would subscribe, if I could. I mean, just 1 EUR per quarter. But they want a credit card, and Mirimir has no credit cards. And expecting me to trust their discretion, if I shared my meatspace identity, would be foolish. But even trying for anonymous credit cards violates KYC law, and isn't worth the risk just to read WSJ.

If consumers had to pay a significant amount for each load of trash removed from their home, you’d see the market for ultra low waste products skyrocket.

And then the economic value of recycling—from careful sorting by homeowners to the processing of material by recyclers—would immediately make sense.