Tips from Poland on Old-School Zero Waste (2019)
culture.pl
culture.pl
Stores that did not produce unnecessary waste were standard practice. Growing up in communist Poland I remember having to bring to the store empty milk glass bottles to swap them for filed ones. They even tried to implement that with preserve jars though that was short lived.
Another thing they got right was urban planning. Communist built residential areas had all amenities within walking distance. I was in not a particularly well regarded area yet I was within 500m of the grocery store, my school, soccer field, cinema, library, church, computer club, three bus stops and one tram stop.
Another thing they got right was public transit. By having cars and fuel expensive people were more likely to use it which means it was inexpensive and frequent if crowded at times.
I look at the new development in Warsaw in the last 30 years and just shake my head at how much they’ve managed to screw up since the central planning was done away with.
Nevertheless, these "communist" economies were absolutely based off currency; the workers earned wages in money, which they could then accumulate or spend. The ruble was just as "money" as the U.S. dollar was. An economy based on labour (whatever that means) would likely not use money, but labour vouchers instead, which are non-trasnferrable and therefore cannot function as money-capital.
If you bought a car, drove home, and sold it immediately - you would earn more than 100% on that transaction. But nobody did that, because everybody had money and only about half of the families had cars.
Each year you had the right to by 2 pairs of "winter shoes" shoes per person. You bought them no matter if it was the correct size of style, because you later bartered them for the stuff you need. Same with other "rare" stuff like coats or exotic fruits. Most people in Poland seen oranges and bananas once a year on christmas.
Lowest level manual workers earned half or 1/3rd of what a chairman of a big state company would earn. But the low level manual worker knew nobody important, so he waited for 20 years to buy a shitty socialist car, while the state company chairman got a western-made car after a few weeks of waiting.
It wasn't because of the price - it was because he knew people and could give them favors.
I have asthma, during communism my parents got the modern drugs for it mailed every few months from the family in Canada, because no amount of money could buy them in Poland in 80s. They only had outdated drugs for asthma that had awful side effects.
Fiat 126p (which was outdated in 70s in Italy) was produced in Poland till 2000. It took 26 seconds to accelerate to 100 km/h, and in case you had an accident in it going over 50 km/h everybody inside died. It was awful, awful car. But it was what was available, so people took it.
My parents build a house in 80s, and money weren't an issue. They took 30 years mortgage and paid it all off in 1991 thanks to my father going for 4 months to Austria to work on a farm. But the availaibility of materials in 80s was the real bottleneck. We had roof made from asbestos (it was called "eternit"), and while people knew it wasn't the best thing to use - nobody cared because that was what you could get. People stockpiled it on their backyards in case they will want to build a house for their children.
So yeah - the important currency wasn't the money, it was favors and coupons allowing you to buy stuff for your money.
We brought oranges from Italy for the trip. We didn't think it was going to be a great gift for them. They hadn't managed to get oranges that year.
It was literally another world for us 18 years old naive kids from a western country.
A love story with Poland started that day, which brought me to endless travels around the country and learning the language.
I never needed to stay in a Hotel. Always at friends.
Most welcoming people on earth.
Due to shortages many basic products were rationed and you simply couldn't buy them with cash. Having more money didn't make a difference unless you had the right rationing stamps (or connections to a high-ranking party official). This lead to a whole secondary market of people trading stamps with each other (e.g. cigarette stamps for meat stamps). When it comes to accumulation, periods of hyper-inflation and lack of investment opportunities made this much harder. Moreover, currency exchange rate was controlled by the government, which led to illegal underground currency trading.
This is based on experiences from Poland, but I'm sure many other communist countries had similar issues.
The fundamental character of money stayed the same, even if there were restrictions on it, as did the capitalist character of money paid through predominant wage labour. The state still collected taxes (perhaps at a different stage in the production process, though) in money. China also has currency controls, but the renmbini is just as much currency as the US dollar is.
Just as a crime exists in a country (albeit with practical restrictions, i.e. you get thrown in prison), money has existed in every modern country, even the so-called "socialist" ones, with some other restrictions.
The character wasn't the same, because money was not enough to buy you things. You needed special coupons to buy things, and coupons were distributed by the government using various systems.
So you could have enough savings to buy a new car/fuel/washing mashine or even meat, but unless you had a coupon the money gave you nothing.
For that reason for example used cars were sold for above their original price. You could buy a car for an amount, drive it for a few years, and sell it for a higher price than originally - but you wouldn't be able to buy a new one unless you had a coupon for a new one.
The same with fuel or meat. You could have a ton of savings, but unless you have a coupon, you wouldn't be able to buy meat or fuel to that car.
The coupons were distributed by the government through government companies.
The reason why urban planning is worse in Poland than it used to be is because there was no focus on zoning laws and planning was neglected for many years. Mind you, this is not accidental in any way: there was (and is) a concerted effort to prevent new zoning laws, or at least delay them as much as possible.
Also Americans just love to tell you how much they love having a yard and doing yard work. I learned a few years ago that lawns used to be something only aristocrats could afford because it showed your wealth that you could afford to not have land for the use of food production. Now you get fined if your neighbor rats you out to the local government for letting it get to high.
I honestly think the government needs to stop with the homeownership BS. It's a stupid farce that low income types should not have. They can't afford to maintain it timewise and are being preyed upon by lenders who lead them to believe that property equity has value. The purpose of equity is to decrease your liability. People here treat it as a forced savings account and refinance the MOMENT they are strapped for cash.
Sucking the air out of a community and then putting nothing back into it. It's really shameful.
They landlords paid for the house they rent out. So they either literally built it, adding a new house to a community, or they bought it from someone who built it (or from someone who bought from someone who built it etc.) - the transaction of buying/selling compensates someone for the effort of building the house in the first place. If there were no landlords, the houses would be bought only by people who intend to live in them (let's ignore speculators for a moment), which would make the market less liquid, discouraging people from buying new houses and hence adding to the community.
Not to mention the obvious fact that, without landlords, there would be no houses for rent, which would decrease worker mobility and hence make the community worse off economically.
That would be a good thing. Housing would be cheaper, because people wouldn't be priced out of the market by rent seekers with large capital.
Housing should not be an investment object, it should be for living in.
Most western countries have a large surplus of housing, but a lot of people can't afford to live there. The landlords and speculators would rather have houses stand empty than reduce their profits. All the while, there are homeless people on the streets. Letting perfectly good housing stand empty solely for the sake of profits is morally reprehensible.
(In Australia) removing negative gearing, mandatory parking minimums and foreign investment would go a long way too! Though I hear Prop 13 and strange taxation in San Fran is one of the issues.
The root problem is that landlordism is exploitative. We don't need landlords to increase the supply of housing, that can be done much better through housing cooperatives and publicly funded housing, where the element of greed is minimized. Landlords are rent seekers, extracting excessive profits from a basic human need.
And there really isn't a need for increasing the housing supply in any western country that I know of. The issue is not one of supply, the issue is that a lot of the people who work in the cities are priced out of being able to live in those cities. That is not a problem you can solve by simply increasing supply, because landlords obviously want the best return on their investments, so they build expensive housing, which attracts only those with enough wealth to buy in at that price level.
As a result, when left to their own devices, landlords will not build housing that is inexpensive to live in (small apartments without parking and so on), unless they are forced to do so though regulations.
Appartment coops might be the way forward, but "I, by myself, own the piece of land under my feet" will naturally generate the same problems as landlords do in big cities.
At the very least shared ownership should become more common
It's a neat idea, but I'm guessing there is a certain culture that makes apartment coops work, and that definitely doesn't exist near me.
In some places, it's also much cheaper to rent that own after factoring all this in.
Joking aside, Midwest tends to be cheaper. Chicagoland area is far cheaper than SF or NYC and yet has a lot of good paying jobs.
Toronto is one, you could rent a condo worth 600-700k for 2k a month when the mortgage alone before local taxes etc would be over 3k.
However, many jurisdiction give tax advantage to owner occupied property.
Eg you have to pay all kinds of taxes on the return from a million dollars in the stock market, compared to the housing services you consume from your own million dollar house.
(That's in most countries. In eg Singapore we don't have capital gains tax. So it's a bit more even.)
Granted, (a) and (b) are true for many people, especially as they get older - but all factored, renting is often superior.
And personally, "getting to own" is not something that makes sense to me. For me it would be "having to own". I would never want to pay an absurd amount of money (including huge commissions and one-time costs) so that I was tied down in one spot. Let alone wanting to become an unpaid amateur maintenance guy (and unpaid amateur general contractor when it gets harder). It makes as much sense to me as owning a farm so I can get food. I'd rather pay for housing as a service and leave it to experts to manage.
Of course, that does leave me at a bit of a financial advantage, because in the US we subsidize home purchases (with a larger subsidy for more expensive homes!). But then I'm also not vulnerable to things like the surprise $40k cost for foundation repairs some nearby friends of mine got hit with, so I can live with it.
The US government has fostered a culture of entitled NIMBY assholes and wont stop until it collapses.
Just like with any other thing, middle class tends to emulate the aristocrats once it becomes cheap enough, and end up rationalizing their choice.
Nope! We all tend the largest private garden that is the urban landscape of Uncle Sam!
I know the story of railroads in America. In Poland, once communism was officially over, they realized rail transport generates big monetary losses. So, over the course of several governments, they insidiously extinguished rail and bus transport. They did it in such a way that it appears citizens don't want it. For example they made the train arrive in a city at 08:10 am instead of 07:55 - a big deal for school kids. Or they broke stopovers - one train would arrive at 11:30 and another would leave at 11:40, so you could catch it. But they made it 11:30 and 11:35 or even 11:30, so you're likely to miss the other train. To give you an idea, the number of passengers transported per year fell 4 times since 1989. There are books popping up describing the process and how most people in villages feel forced to own a car.
The "new" subway line was built by tearing the surface up and digging from the top. The way it was rebuilt is much nicer: you now have wide sidewalks, bike paths, and a few trees. It's still very ugly imo and incredibly car-centric + polluted, but it's not as bad as it used to be.
That said, Poland took a 180 turn after communism... There are ads everywhere for credit cards and unsecured credit, hundreds of banks operate there, people love to spend money and be showy about it, large chains opening left and right... While people are still working under poor conditions (health insurance, job stability, pay, pension)
This is sadly true, but I believe we are starting to see it change. Slowly. It is a sign of immaturity: as a country matures, people notice that cars aren't all they are cracked up to be, and start switching to bikes, walking and public transportation.
I'd love to increase my prestige in a way by buying something better but fiscally I cannot do it. My degree is more valuable in the long term that I'm not jeopardizing it.
I don't know if this is done to curb the spreading of ticks (and Lyme disease) in urban areas or to avoid "lowering your neighbour's properties value", but it's terrible for bio-diversity... Insects have it already pretty hard in cities and on top of that they've got nothing to eat in the tiny patch of grasses people call "gardens."
I'm with you on the dead ecosystem thing. Besides the vegetable patch, my garden is deliberately a happy self-regulated mess of grass and wild strawberries, trees and bushes, planted flowers and all sorts of plants and mushrooms. I only remove the thorns, and walk though with a scythe twice a year (one tough enough to cut the smaller saplings). It's quite rewarding to watch the birds, small mammals and amphibians that thrive there, and a delight for my young daughter. It is quite a surprise to hear that I'd have trouble doing that in the land of the free. Thank you for the insight !
9/10 you'll be fine, but knowing that, is it honestly worth doing?
Right now, modern buildings happen when a developer buys a piece of land, and tries to squeeze the maximum amount of apartments on that space. In 1980s, the government built a whole neighborhood of 30-80k people from scratch, and the priority was quality of life for people inside.
(Obviously, the times were rough back then, the old buildings are not as good in quality, but the thing most people agree with is that urban-planning was way better)
Of course the largest part the problem is that people are trained to think debt is such a good thing. I can't tell you many lawyers I know who make 500k/yr are way in the net negative, while my country/redneck friends are far in the net positive. Their homes and vehicles may not be brand new or as nice, but they own them and have a financial and other type of freedom the rich-but-a-debt-slave can only dream of. Of course they have the means to get themselves out of that position, but they don't think like that for the most part.
tldr - Ownership (on more than just homes) is still very important if you don't want bankers to own the world.
ps: Also, this is one of the reasons why the move more towards a remote-first workforce seems very promising to me. Buy a forever home as young as possible and never have to sell it unless you want to move, as opposed to always having to sell for every new job you take.
But people don't need cars, they mostly need a way to commute, possibly for cheap
Would you say that the policies that San Francisco is implementing now, banning cars from the city centre, are a consequence of the city being dirty poor?
The full cost of owning a car (Purchase price, insurance, maintenance, gas, replacement of tires, filters, storage, parking) in the US is ~2 years of post-tax wages for the average person, every 15 years. That's 4,000 hours at work, or ~266 hours/year.
That is a gross disregard of the value of human time - all because we can't figure out how to properly plan our communities. You drive to work, where you spend the first hour of your day, and much of the second hour, working to pay for the car that drove you to work. It's madness.
We were similar in Australia and I thought most of the first world (original definition). The milkman used to come by everyday drop off the fresh milk and pick up the empty bottles, the milkman was probably only necessary because of the awful urban planning though. Supermarkets and fresh produce stores also had huge piles of old cardboard boxes to carry stuff home in, when you came back you'd throw the old ones in there, now there's more cardboard and plastic packaging on everything but almost none of it is in a reusable format.
But I think you overstate how good it was because you look from the perspective of Warsaw (even if it's not the best part of Warsaw).
It wasn't the norm to even have a computer club in your city during communism, never mind within 500m from where you live :)
Also communism in Poland wasn't concerned with ecology at all, when it was cheaper people did no waste (my grand-grandmother asked us to give her all the metalized wrapping from chocolate and sweets because she made christmass tree decorations from them for one example).
But for example energy consumption was wild and unchecked - there was no thermal insulation to speak of. Public buildings and private homes were all burning coal with abandon. In 1989 coal consumption dropped by like 30% year to year, half of it from heavy industry becomming unprofitable, but half of it from people all over Poland investing into thermal insulation as coal wasn't subsidized anymore. And now Poland produces much more stuff than in 80s (export grew like 20 times) and uses less power to do it :)
My parents used half the coal yearly in 90s compared to 80s. Air quality was much worse during communism, too, because of that.
Also it was common to have trash thrown on the streets in 80s. In 90s it became passe.
Also - on the subject of DIY - it was immensely important and everybody realized it - simply because there was nothing in shops. You wanted to have something cool you had to do it yourself. My uncle made a small tractor by himself in his workshop, and he haven't even finished high school and was a regular farmer in countryside near Lublin. He bought used engine from some crashed car and did everything else by himself. And it wasn't unusual - if you were a farmer you had to have a well-supplied workshop because buying anything was hard and unpredictable.
There were "technology and workshop" lessons in primary school for 3 years, and everybody learnt how to do simple electric stuff, how to work with metal and wood, etc.
I also harbor no illusions how hard life was back then. I remember queues that lasted for hours just to get a decent piece of meat for dinner or some candy for the kids for Christmas. But with the passage of time and the experience of having lived in four different countries I can notice what the vision was and what they got right and what they got wrong.
Industrial pollution was pretty horrible too - watching snow going gray nearby any factory or coal plant (back then we used to have proper winters with tons of snow). Or when wind blew in bad direction from huge smelters in Katowitz in Poland, that created quite a few ecological catastrophes and highly acidic rains in our national parks.
All the untold misery that Western Europe went through over a couple of centuries happened in a couple of decades instead. They tried to force the process and progress.
In the end, political pressure from outside and corruption from inside brought it down.
Today, courses like that are very popular in Finnish schools. Every Finnish school has a serious workshop. Not only that, but when the school is over, plain citizens can come and use the workshop as they need.
I doubt any Pole who remembers communism and is on HN now would want it back. But the public transit, even in communism, was better than it is in modern day USA. So was urban planning.
Why not compare it to Western Europe? North America had a different evolutionary path. The prosperity that emerged post-WW2 enabled vast swaths of the population to own a car (leading to a cultural obsession with the car). That same population also wanted homeownership which lead to the creation of suburbs and their vast stretches of single-family homes (I don't think people realize how attractive this lifestyle was when compared to what came before it, or compared to what you had back home if you immigrated). Those kinds of things coupled with relatively young cities, lead to investment in roadways over public transit.
Those were not options under communism, and for much of Western Europe (though for somewhat different reasons). Eastern European populations had limited access to the car, road infrastructure was decrepit and the government was spending minimally on maintenance, and housing development was largely limited to ugly concrete, uninsulted high-rises with tiny apartments (which you had to wait for years to be allocated).
To me this kind of thinking sounds like saying the trains and Autobahn were better in the Third Reich, which is true, but completely ignoring the cost of that one benefit (built for war, paid by war and human right violations) as if it were isolated from the remaining clusterfuck of decisions of that time.
So that's why I call it "glorification". It's naive beyond belief and quite frankly it pisses Poles (who were victims of both Nazism AND communism) off when Westerners go "Oh, but it wasn't all bad..", and in the extreme form commonly heard as "That wasn't real socialism, real socialism gets other parts right, too.." (which is really hip and cool in western academia). The communists, Nazis, dictatorships, monarchies, etc. couldn't have had the "good" things without the "absolutely horrible" things.
One can't observe these things in isolation. And we have remainders of that still in the present. Many successful German companies like BMW are only so big and successful now because of e.g. Jewish slaves and theft. Westerners should be more proud of their countries and political form, and less jealous of quickly built airports in North Korea by dying workers and eco-friendliness of starving people.
Well, it is not a Warsaw perspective but most probably any city perspective (versus rural areas).
E.g. I grew up in a 50 thousand people city and lived on a new neighborhood with blocks of flats and the edge of the city.
I had: - small grocery store (10m away, it was next to my block of flats) - supermarket (150m away) - bus stop (150m away) - it was next to supermarket - pharmacy (130m away) - hairdresser (50m away) - nursery (600m away) - kindergarten (350m away) - primary school (650m away) - high school (1.5km away) - church (600m away) - they didn't plan that for sure :), not sure if westerners are aware but communist were against any religion - and a lot of green space between block of flats that was used as a playground or soccer fields by kids
And now the negatives: - nursery was overcrowded, my younger sister couldn't get in - supermarket/grocery didn't have a lot of stuff, e.g. coffee was sold 1 bag per person, when they got it finally. Meet was sold for cards ("na kartki") - each person was given a certain amount of cards per month to buy certain things that were in high demand (like meat, I don't remember what else, maybe sugar, butter).
Basically you had two currencies: ordinary money and the cards.
Source: grew up in the 80ties there
When I moved to Warsaw's Ursynów to study, the numbers are the same as well. Seriously :D
All of that was of course for greenfield neighbourhoods, though some work went into maintaining such standards in brownfield locations as well.
They were trying to fight it for a while, but catholicism in Poland was too strong so they formed a kind of cease fire. That's why they even let people build churches, do mass celebrations, pilgrimages etc.
And a lot of priests were secret informators of the security (communists searched for any material for blackmail and if they found something they forced them to become informators - common blackmail material was pedophilia and homosexualism (treated so because of social stigma) ).
It's pretty well accepted that better food packaging greatly reduces food waste (spoilage, damage, etc), and producing food is much more environmentally costly than packaging it.
A lot of plastic wraps on vegetables exist because consumers find that more hygienic, where they just used to wash the stuff before.
Also vegetables are often wasted when shapes are misfit or size is off, too large or too small. Sometimes these are still processed in e.g. salads, other times they are left to rot in the field (e.g. small potatoes).
While my American peers had TV, cars, and supermarkets, I had no running water, no sewer service, intermittent electricity, and no fancy technology like refrigerators. We farmed wheat, beets, potatoes for sale, and raised animals for our own use. Without running water, you're using a well, which is terrible in the winter, particularly if it's cold, the same goes for going to the bathroom in outhouses. Sitting on a cold wooden seat in -20C is really awful. When we did get water from the well, we had to boil it for a while to kill the germs, so having water to drink was a production. When it came time to take a bath, you'd boil well water to warm it up, and make a warm bath. Everyone used the same water since it took so long. Kids washed first, then women, then men.
yes, we certainly produced zero waste. All the crops were canned and stored in the pantry, all the meat was cured and stored to dry, and whatever was perishable was canned, pickled or preserved in some way (remember, no fridge).
It's a freaking hard way to live. When we fled to the US eventually, it was like coming to a different world, life was simply so much better that it's hard to compare.
So, when I see stories like this, I really hope that zero-waste doesn't happen for the reasons of poverty. It's positively awful for the people living it. It's also very dirty. People who are poor have no extra funds to get rid of unsalvageable waste other than to bury or burn it, and the number of tires, old boots, or chemicals that got burned in the stove was ridiculous. Living in a cold country, with coal and wood being the most plentiful heat sources also made for some lousy air, and I grew up in the Podlasie Voivodeship, which was cleaner than most because it was completely unindustrialized.
Whatever the communists got right was by accident.
And commie regimes tried to stop people from moving to cities to have enough workforce to work in terribly inefficient farms. So rural parts made up much much bigger part of population.
Yes, people in the cities did have those things, but compared to the country, you had much more difficulty getting food products. Since we produced those items, we simply made sure the inspectors didn't know about the food we kept for ourselves. The national ration cards were irrelevant to us. It was a pretty terrible time in Poland under communism, even though it did have some positive aspects, overall, it was terribly dehumanizing, at least from my perspective.
Since the well was very close to the house, we never had the idea to bathe in the same water. But it took a long time to prepare the bath by mixing the cold and boiling water in the ight proportions, and then carefully washing the soap from the body with water from a separate container. Man, I can't imagine spending that much time on these things now...
> It’s almost 2020, and 2 million Americans still don’t have running water, according to new report
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/its-almost-2020-and-...
Interestingly, what I noticed if you look at current high rise developments in Asia (China, Malaysia, Singapoure), they design something similiar (albeit commercial). The ground floors of the 20+ building will be a 2-3 floors of commercial space, hosting a shopping mall, cinema, gym and a bunch of other places. You can go down and do your grocery shopping in pyjamas.
If that could include mandatory social places (school, kindergarden), you'd end up with similar zones like what you are describing.
Also a few other things were well designed like top management only allowed to have max 5x salery of lowest salery in company, forcing managers to not only work for their salery but for all employees.
Another nice one was common accounting service that was state sponsored, basically free, but was taking care about saleries always beeing paid, contracts beeing payed, taxes,... practically preventing any malversations on expense of others. This was the first public service that was destroyed once we switched the system as it was preventing wild privatizations of public property and all sort of white collar frauds.
And I need to mention public schools and health system.
In my experience it was rather forcing managers to steal and take bribes. During communism there was even saying "Who doesn't steal, robs oneself and one's own family". I don't have statistics at hand, but I'm pretty sure that remains of that approach is still felt now, 30 years after and in post-communist countries there is much higher corruption than in western Europe.
I think it's because Poles have developed an extreme allergy to anything public and common.
Many went to same school as me (200m far, walked there alone from 2nd day) so we kind of knew everybody. All the crazy games, adventures... my parents just sent me out, I came back in 3-5 hours, and they had no idea or control over what I did. I went to distant forests, metal scrapyards, climbed on roofs of buildings that had ladders (including our school), played tons of made up games. I considered this a normal childhood, nothing special.
Now I don't think it would be possible anymore, too much changed. In system, people, mindset.
Almost every single household has a pantry section dedicated for plastic bags. Its rare to get them from stores because they were wrapped in paper (to a cone, and poured things like sugar and other stuff), and then wrapped. Plastic bags were to be bought (not free as opposed to today), and the cost alone kept many people from reusing.
Beverages almost always came in glass bottles, and a deposit had to be left to get one unless the shop owner knows you in the village. It's similar to the pfand system, except the glass bottles were cleaned and aluminium cans were even unheard-of.
It was common practice in Italy bas well, until the 80s. [Including schools everywhere and inexpensive public transport]
It changed when economy of scale kicked in, I blame our politicians that let companies implement the "American way"
https://i0.wp.com/www.ilvecchiotarlo.it/bidone_latte.JPG
and we (we intended as the kids) were sent downstairs with either a glass bottle or often with just a pot, and get either a liter or half a liter of milk.
The milkwoman would have "graduated pans" and get from the large container the asked amount of milk and give it to us, noting it down in a small notebook, and every week or maybe two produced a bill (actually that page of the notebook) to get paid.
Speaking of Italy, my family comes from central Italy, in the country, 100kms from Rome, I was born in Rome, but spent a lot of time there.
My mom's sister still lives in a tiny village of about 15 hundreds inhabitants.
My grandmother was a farmer, my grandfather a tailor, they used to have all kinds of animals in their farm, from cows (they had two, they made milk that they sold to the local milk consortium), they had pigs, sheeps, chickens, rabbits, pigeons, everything one imagine in a small family farm.
I used to drink fresh milk and eat tomatoes straight from the plant, we slaughtered our pigs every year near the epiphany and we hate "polenta e spuntature" on the "scifa" (a large plate of wood) together (like these fine gentlemen in the picture http://i.imgur.com/zcYK800.png), we made, and still make, our own wine and olive oil.
It wasn't much different from what Americans imagine in their tv shows and movies Soviet villages with babushka in the 50s, but it was the 70s in Italy and we already had cars and trucks (the milk tank truck was very much like this one already https://www.autocarri.it/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/20190506...) and, of course, there was the occasional donkey cart, but it was already more folklore than the norm.
The economy wasn't producing sufficient amount of consumer's goods, so it did not produce consumer wastes as well. And if it produced something, it was primitive, communists simply couldn't produce plastic bottles because they didn't have technology to do that, not because they cared so much about environment.
The economy was producing goods like tanks, mines, bombs, guns, etc. and was doing this in a very ineffectively way, which harmed environment a lot, just in a different way, no plastic bottles, but rivers polluted by industrial wastes, air polluted through coal-based electricity production without worrying about proper filtering, etc.
Same with urban planning. They had to do urban planning the way they did as people simply didn't have cars. BTW some districts like Warsaw's Ursynow does not have sufficient number of shops, schools etc. anyway - buildings are randomly scattered and quite distant from each other, but, again, it wasn't done to make that place nicer to live, to give people more space, but to make it impossible to build barricades between buildings. Commies knew how they were loved by people.
Right now in Warsaw there is no urban planning at all, but that's totally different story (with huge piles of money, incompetence and corruption in the background).
That's fairly standard in much of Europe, former communist or not.
EDIT: Though the tram thing is interesting. The general pattern in the west was to replace them with buses and rip up the tracks, then start laying new tracks in the 90s. Whereas Eastern Europe largely kept them. I'm not sure how much of this was the communist system being better at long-term planning, and how much was the communist system being stubborn and happening to choose the right path as a result of this.
At least in Dublin, where I live, the replacement of tram lines with buses in the 20s actually made sense from a short-term perspective. Buses had lower fixed costs, and there weren't many private cars, so traffic wasn't the issue for them that it is now. Trams had higher capacity per line, but that was less of an issue with lower populations and a lower requirement for mobility. We had about 20 tram lines at peak; for most of the 20th century we had zero. We now have two, with more planned. If we'd kept the old lines, we'd be saving a lot of money around now...
It's such a strange thing to say when this wasn't really done by conscious choice. There were shortages of everything, and though it wasn't 'abject poverty', the society as a whole was poor. You couldn't afford to be wasteful.
>Another thing they got right was urban planning.
The gray concrete jungle and complete disregard for maintaining existing infrastructure is a great example of urban planning?
Anyway, you're giving them too much credit. Like you said further down, people didn't have cars and gas was expensive - that by itself will make cities that are walkable and traversable by public transit. Western Europe also had walkable cities and great public transit and didn't need the Soviet-system to create it.
That's more like 101 urban planning in Europe in the beginning of XXth century.
France context, I still remember in 1993 bringing back glass bottles of milk, or coca-cola to the grocery.
I still today am in walking/biking distance of all that.
Minor observation from someone who lived under communism and still remembers it: the commies got nothing correct, except for the idea that extreme wealth inequality is a problem. And that idea is not specific to communism.
Most things that people think "commies got correct" were an accidental side-effect of shortages or other issues. And as for urban planning, this is not specific to communism. The fact that it is in bad shape today in Poland is a result of mismanagement, lobbying and bribes.
Communism is a terrible idea. I repeat this often, because I see this idea re-appear in an idealized form, often propagated by younger people who do not fully understand it.
I've got no experience under such regime, but I can't say I've lived under a socialist and/or democratic regime either.
In theory, maybe all of them could work great, but we would never find that reflected in practice due to our human nature.
Voluntary cooperatives can actually work (by no means guaranteed) but scaling up tends to be the issue.
History tends to repeat itself. Your words are almost exactly the same as those used by communist leaders in Poland during periods of social unrest (they referred to "a period of mistakes and distortions").
I am scared of the resurgence of idealized communism, here on HN and elsewhere (see how my comment above has been downvoted). People build their own ideas of what communism is, failing to grasp that it has a fundamental problem with incentives and can never work. It's been tried many times, and it failed every time, with the exact same issues.
If you want to fight wealth inequality, great, more power to you. But that's not communism. The central tenet of communism is common (social) ownership, which is exactly what removes incentives and what has been shown to fail every time.
From what I can see, the understanding of communism online is pretty shallow, with most people focusing on the "let's have a revolution and take away from the rich people" part, with a minor addition of "things communism got right".
And the so-called "Miasteczko Wilanów" is the epitome of what's wrong with modern housing in Poland. Not to mention the fact that it was built on wetlands, so the foundations settled badly, which is already causing issues.
Quite positively, in Australia it's now frowned upon to use plastic bags and most people bring reusable bags to the supermarket. Unfortunately, this doesn't stop producers bagging a lot of produce in horrible plastic nets or bags before it even reaches the supermarket. Others, such as mushrooms producers, simply box their product and consumers are provided paper bags in which to pack their selection. I wonder why they don't just paper bag the whole fresh produce area, it'd surely be a huge step forward.
edit: btw, John Paul II was from the first group.
Poland generates much less green house gases now they It was back in the day (https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/poland-co2-emiss...).
Argument that we were too poor to generate waste somehow doesn't resonate with me. The amount of toxic pollution going to rivers and ground waters was much higher than developed countries.
Industrial sector got virtually no environmental oversight, all that mattered was to beat the west in the cold war.
Imagine the screams if the liquor industry was forced to standardize on a common bottle for each size.
As a practical matter, automated sorting of different recyclable materials just isn't that hard. The big problem the recycling plant people have to deal with is food and liquids in the recycling stream.
I pay a 1kr (€0.13) deposit on glass bottles and cans, up to 3kr on large plastic bottles, which is reclaimed by taking the bottles back to a shop.
Because the bottles are cleaner than the general household recycling, it's acceptable to use them to make new food packaging — general recycling isn't considered clean enough for that. Glass beer and soda bottles can be washed and refilled, plastic and aluminum is melted.
Nowadays the English word is seen mostly in "pawn shop" — the place you go to sell your TV and jewellery so you can pay the electricity bill, and where you can buy back your stuff if you can afford it next month.
The result of this is that people can't afford to just replace things as soon as they break. For instance I had a pair of nice, but not crazy expensive headphones that broke while living there.
It was very easy to find a shop that helped me repair them, but this involved a decent amount of manual work. It very unlikely this would have been more cost effective than just picking up a new pair on most other countries I've lived.
If we put higher taxes on plastics and other materials so that the cost of labour vs. the cost of physical goods were similarly changed I bet we'd see a lot of improved behaviours like this also in the more affluent parts of the world.
We still do that in our household (Slovakia), it just feels wrong to throw a perfectly fine plastic bag which can be used again. I just grab it the next time I am going shopping. I don't do it for financial reasons (they have 0 value for me).
Also, no plastic garbage bags. Everybody just hauled buckets of trash to the big container to come back home with an empty bucket. This is also unthinkable now.
Still happens today in my city in Poland. The only changes are that the farmers have a car now and, more importantly, that they use an annoying megaphone over which they loudly announce their arrival on every street - the usual case of advertising adopting technology to make the world a worse place...
That's pretty much what I do with my recycling, except the buckets are white and from Ikea.
(With the amount of packaging stuff in Denmark is wrapped in, it's the majority of my waste by volume.)
I have born in 90s, but I lived in a block from that era and remember how chute for trash was a nice idea - in winter time I haven't had to leave building to empty the trash bin.
I don't think this is translated accurately. "Rachuje" is an old word for "calculate" and I think the saying should be translated like this:
"if you calculate your expenses and start saving, poverty/destitution will not threaten you"
In farmers cuisines you use every part of the product. Potatoes peals soup or using seeds for spicing. There's even stuff you can do with banana peals!
But in rich peoples cuisines you use the part of the vegetable easiest to cook with, and throw away the rest to the garbage.
1) It's the whitest country I ever been to. Warsaw is a little more diverse. But otherwise, its 99.9% white people everywhere. It was a little weird. But also lots of Ukrainian immigrants.
2) Everyone dresses super nice. When I came back, I was little shocked how sloppy people look here.
3) Polish people walk almost everywhere. Unsurprisingly, almost no fat people. It felt almost like being transported back in time, to one of those pictures of NY I saw from the 1930. Streets filled with tall, slander and upright people, busy walking to places.
4) New roads/highways almost everywhere. Possibly designed by Germans...don't know. But Great.
5) Rail Transportation is awesome. Travelled around the country from city to city by train, and airplane once. Each city has its own distinct architecture and feeling. And only a few hours away. Closes thing I can compare it to is if Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Halifax, where all two to three hours away from each other. And you can hop on a train that will get you there in an hour. 200km/h trains. Very developed railway network. Probably inherited from Communist past.
6) Consistently, every coffee shop I went to, the coffee was excellent, and the pastries fresh. Puts Starbucks to shame. And Tim Hortons makes me want to cry. I only had better coffee in Hawaii. But for whatever reason at home there, people still drink folgers crystals.
7) Lots of students everywhere. I learned since coming back, something like 30% of Polish people have Masters degrees. Highest rate in the world.
8) Much better built and often larger housing. So many 50+ year old small wood shacks still left over here in Canada. You pretty much have to be a multi millionaire here in Canada to build a house in the same way as they build them there.
9) Still very affordable to Travel, and a pretty high standard of hotels/food/ accommodations ... you can get for about half price. If/when Poland switched to Euro, things will probably double or triple.
10) Very active restaurant / social life. Granted I've only been to Large cities.
Poland's rail network has had massive European Union investment, it was very run-down before.
Otherwise, much of what you write is true to a greater or lesser extent across Europe.
The higher education system is about quantity, not quality. There are no more good craft schools and there's a deficit of craftsmen like builders, electricians, metal workers etc especially since the good ones tend to leave the country. Case in point: you won't find a Polish university in the global top 300.
It had to be severely renovated and upgraded for the 200km/h trains. Sadly most things inherited from communist past(or occupation, because lets face it - it was an occupation) suffer from lack of maintenance.
I assure you that Poles are capable of designing roads and highways of acceptable quality themselves. :o)
11) Lots of young families. It wasn't uncommon to see a pregnant young girl (early 20s) with two young children in tow.
I don't know if you've stayed over here in the winter, but, come wintertime, most cities are often drowning in smog. It's not as bad as in India or China, but still a major annoyance.
The vast majority of developing and undeveloped countries don't recycle - which is the worst thing you should be doing - they reuse.
Beer and soda bottles have a deposit that is higher than the liquid in them, and everyone returns the bottles like clockwork. If you want to buy a 24 pack the first one is expensive, then you just bring back the empties and pick up a full one, so it's like a permanent rolling deposit.
Developed countries not doing this is shameful. We are supposed to be the world leaders, but we're just leading the world in using stuff up. We have so much to learn.
Then some time in the 90s/00s that stopped. Instead we got glass recycling. And 5 other types of recycling. You’re supposed to sort them all and have some 8 trash cans in total at your house.
Oh and if you forget a cap on your bottles or don’t scrape off the paper label and make sure you wash everything before putting it in the trash then you’re a terrible person and you should be ashamed of yourself.
So everyone started throwing everything in the same trash. Making sure your recycling is recyclable is just too much work.
And don’t even get me started on the compostable plastic trash liners that start composting in the trash can so you can’t even take the trash out ...
Same in Poland. I can't think of a better way to sabotage recycling efforts. Whoever introduced this into regulation/common practice, I believe it was intended to actually make people stop segregating trash.
Cleaning is more labor intensive than recycling, and if the cost of cleaning is less than the cost of recycling, you'll end up cleaning it. This is only possible in developing countries where it's more economical to use low-cost labor than setting up an expensive recycling facility.
As recycling technology gets better and cheaper, you'll see fewer countries opt for cleaning over recycling.
If a country were to standardize, say, drink bottles, detergent bottles, etc, then this is already a solved problem. Just have a machine clean the bottles to wash away dirt and remove labels, then run it through some image processing software to auto detect any residue. Anything within a certain threshold could either be accepted as clean or needing an extra wash, and anything over a certain % of dirtiness or having undergone N number of washes without getting clean is sent off to be melted down and recycled.
Once it's standardized, the software is made, done, and ready to deploy everywhere without any changes (until the government approves new bottle designs). Facilities would be cheap to build. The only problem is every drink manufacturer in the world would oppose it since they can't make goofily shaped bottles with cartoonish logos everywhere.
Wouldn't be surprised if it was also beneficial for the soda companies - standardised bottles would be cheaper to produce/acquire, bottling equipment as well.
For HN readers, this is an example of "don't make perfect the enemy of good."
If even 10% of the bottles were nasty, there are machines that can handle that.
Just like Europe's progress in standardizing chargers, we need to go back to standard bottle sizes.
One of the best examples is the Beer Store in Ontario, Canada. All brewers have to use stubby brown bottles, and achieved 99% reuse in modern times:
"Between 2013-2014, the Beer Store achieved a system-wide recovery and re-use rate of 99 per cent for the industry standard bottles, which are reused 12 to 15 times."
They accomplished such phenomenal reuse that the bottles wore out. So much for excuses, eh?
I'm not an expert in this so idk how difficult it is to ensure this but unless the system is perfect it can't be used.
If we could do it 50 years ago, we can do it now. It's a solved problem.
Depending on your income you can still "throw away" stuff, but there will still be significant value in that "trash" to make it worthwhile for other people to dig through it and bring it back into use.
Same with plastic bags and things we consider banning for the sake of protecting the planet. Don't ban, just price it in such a way that the item has a built-in reward for someone else to bring it back in circulation.
Some states in Australia have a 10c tax on bottles and cans which can be refunded when you recycle them. Almost everyone recycles them at home but if you are away from home they tend to get chucked in the trash and you will see people walking around with bags and tongs picking cans out of the trash to cash in.
Make this a $1/bottle when reused and almost everyone will be taking them back or someone will certainly pick it out of the trash.
I think it might be worth having the local laws define a set of standard containers/bottles so when you return your beer bottle it doesn't have to go back to the exact same company. There is really no reason other than marketing to have custom bottles for every drink./
In any case I have heard about people stealing "Pfandflaschen" but never about people producing them. I think there are easier ways to commit fraud.
With the raw materials taxed there wouldn't be a way to produce these bottles for less unless you somehow come up with a new design that uses less plastic or uses materials that are deemed less damaging to the environment.
Of course, this would require an in-depth review to figure out which materials to tax, how much, etc and to make sure there aren't any loopholes or unintended collateral damage. It's no easy task, but I think the result would be worth it.
I'd like to establish a variant of Chesterton's fence - something like 'You don't get to get morally outraged about something without understanding "why".'
Why are developed countries not doing it? My guess would be cost, so why is a "wasteful" practice cheaper? Is it something else than externalities that aren't properly represented in the cost, or is the morally odious thing possibly more efficient, or is it something else?
Without that answer, it's hard to suggest meaningful action: If it's the externalities, we need to make them part of the cost. If it's actually more efficient this way, we need to stop demanding to make it worse. And if it's something else, then we need to figure out what it is and whether/how to address it.
But right now, it seems like random things are picked based on looks/feelings, pointed at, and demanded to change (usually to something that was done in the past and is no longer done).
Externalizing these is so much cheaper to the companies involved that they do it that way. Setting up a bottle recycling plant is expensive, and that cost is not passed on to the consumer but absorbed by the company. So the profits go down.
The bigger question you should be asking is why haven't all developed countries adopted such obviously sensible policies. I have a sneaking suspicion that the reason is regulatory capture.
If that's the case why not take the time to look into the regions in the developed world that have implemented these systems and see how they work?
Someone else in the thread mentioned that the province of Ontario (which IIRC is the largest purchaser of alcohol in the world) has switched over to a system homogeneous bottles that are washed and reused.
If a region as vast as Ontario with a population of approximately 14 million can do this, why isn't it feasible else where?
Sure. But you say that as if it's easy. In some cases it's not trivial to put a monetary figure on these things. This may be why they are an externality in the first place.
More importantly, in each case where you intend to make someone pay for something they are used to getting for free, they will resist that change, even if that something is the right to pollute the river.
Making externalities part of the cost has always been a struggle. Nevertheless, I agree in principle.
If not for that problem, we could simply charge garbage collection by weight, including all costs of recycling and/or disposal, and let the market sort it out.
Even mixing single-digit percentages of recycled plastics with virgin plastics made the resulting product substandard. Think laundry baskets that break after a couple of uses.
The recovery, washing and attempt to recycle the plastic was extremely expensive, labor and resource intensive.
In the end he truthfully thought the plastic should be burned.
I personally think we should industrialize the waste management, reducing the waste to components that can be easily reused, or inert.
That is why bottle return systems work: they collect only known plastic/metal/glass.
Reusing bottles seems like a no-brainer. Except you’ll hear about how much water and energy is used washing the bottles, that extra fuel and tires will be used transporting them, etc.
When my county banned styrofoam cups, somebody appeared claiming it would increase workers compensation claims due to the heavier weight of paper cups.
Similarly, with styrofoam vs. paper cups, it's something that could be first estimated and then either ignored (if the difference is within margin of error) or acted upon.
New bottles and cans are also washed (you don't want the chemical goop from manufacture inside).
Discarded bottles must still be transported to incineration / landfill, in which case more oil/sand/ore must be brought from somewhere.
Money: The companies producing and "handing-off" much of the waste are unmotivated to make items reusable because the economies of scale already exist today for production, shipping, and distribution of single-use materials, and as long as the disposal side is not their problem, then they just wipe their hands and say "Well, that's for someone else to handle."
Convenience: Consumers that end up with the materials now bear the burden of recycling/reusing them. Unless it is engrained behavior (e.g. like in Japan), then that usually means more work for the end-user to figure out what to do with the waste - and also do it correctly. It turns out people that want to do the right thing even have a hard time doing it the right way. There's actually a tendency to 'over-recycle' to the point it becomes a detriment through cross-contamination and increased sorting time.
Jurisdiction: It's hard to implement and scale widespread programs when laws and regulations vary across local, county, state, and national levels. Without consensus even among neighboring counties, the costs and incentives to setup and run programs makes it almost impractical or negatively profitable without government support. With China and other SE Asian countries now refusing to take US/Canadian waste, a lot of localities have axed their recycling programs completely or are in a state of flux not knowing what to do with their waste.
Overall, a few takeaways are:
- Governments need to do their part in setting up proper regulations or tax incentives for recycling/reuse to disincentivize single-use materials. Progress is so slow right now, and there's a long way to do when also competing against corporate lobbying.
- Current recycling programs often don't inform, support, or incentivize positive behavior as much as it should.
- Eco-materials that are reusable are becoming more introduced at some higher-end places, but they really need to be cost-effective through some means in order to get greater adoption.
Anyways, just my $.02 on the matter.
In Michigan any store that sells carbonated beverages is required to collect deposit and pay for returns. They mostly use customer fed machines that scan the bar-codes to check that they sell a given product.
Last year, legislation was proposed to end it, with the argument being that community recycling would benefit from the aluminum (I think it was a pretense).
But a $0.05 deposit for a can to be returned and melted down as scrap is quite different from a $1.50 deposit for a glass bottle to be returned where it can be sanitized and reused.
If small dairy farms can do the later, why can't Coca Cola? (And why can Coca Cola do it in South America?)
I also note in Poland and Czech Republic glass bottle beer always costs a little more than the sticker price so I presume there is some $$ in returning - a nice little tip for the airbnb cleaner after a month.
Many litter bins have a small shelf for bottles, to save people rooting around in the rubbish.
Somehow, the fancy supermarket never has poor people returning the bottles at the machine, but the cheap one 200m away always does.
Throwing the trash in a landfill is worse than recycling. But yeah, of the "active" actions you can do, recycling is the worst: reduce, reuse, recycle, in that order.
- Cuba
- Damn I forgot :)