I think a lot of the Green movement has the trappings of a religion, with shame and guilt used as motivators, and expensive rituals like trash sorting used to evidence your membership of the group.
I want to pay someone else to sort my trash. In fact, I want the cost of sorting my trash embedded in the costs of the goods I buy, so I - and in particular, my neighbours - have no motivation to burn their trash, or worse, dump it somewhere illegally.
As it is, I pay for supplemental private trash collection due to the public UK council collection now being insufficient to deal with the quantity. "Recycling" - mostly cardboard delivery boxes - overflows into the private landfill bin because the public bins are only collected every fortnight. Which doesn't help with the smell from nappies and cat litter.
Guilting individuals for not recycling was a corporate PR response to getting heat for the byproducts of their businesses littering the streets. This started back when plastic packaging was first introduced (~60s, I think).
Just like guilting individuals for jaywalking was a corporate response to getting heat for too many automobile deaths in the early days of the car. This happened around the 30s I think.
The fact that the most obviously cynical and powerful groups in the world can spread deliberately self serving propaganda and then successfully blame their own disingenuousness on the largely selfless groups who mostly just want to create a better world for everybody is a portent of a very, very dark future.
...so sad!
All that'd do is act as a general consumption tax, and we already have those.
In fact there are no viable solutions, assuming rolling civilisation back to the stone age isn't considered viable. That's why eco-extremists never get specific about what they want corporations or governments to do, and in the rare case where someone is actually serious enough to consider that problem they end up leaving the environment movement: see the long history of ex-Greenpeace or now ex-Extinction Rebellion leaders leaving the movements and coming out in favour of nuclear power.
or is this is just yet another HN complaint about the sidewalks of SF....
Speaking from Hamburg, Germany here.
I want the cost of sorting my trash embedded in the costs of the goods I buy
By arguing that individuals can & should do it themselves, knowing full well only a small minority ever would.
I still remember that one of the textbooks even started an answer with "natürlich trenne ich Müll" ('well, of course I sort my trash...').
(Of course, there were other things in the dialogues such as cycling and taking the train, so it's not like recycling is the only ecological measure in German society.)
This is a big part of the appeal and the problem. Recycling promised individual solutions to what is a collective problem: the misuse of resources.
Because it doesn't really matter how much trash you sort if you are flying around in a private jet and your house has the carbon footprint of a small village.
Here in the US many communities use "single-stream" recycling (and we applaud ourselves for the effort too). But I wonder how many communities really deliver those contents back to production, especially since China stopped importing it.
Few people realize that when you mix paper and beverage containers, you get non-recyclable paper and difficult to recycle beverage containers. Further shredded paper cannot be recycled in single stream systems. It wreaks havoc on the system.
Could you expand on what you think the problem is here?
Which is why you have local taxes, to cover such activities.
Personally I think we need to reverse the supply chain and require all shops to take back any packaging sold.
I'd love to see standardised reusable plastic cartons in supermarkets. And a heavy tax on transportation of mixed water - drink syrup is extremely cheap, we mix it with heavy water, wrap it in plastic and fill lorries with it; that's a massive waste. Anything with lots of water in should be mixed if at all possible at the delivery end. Baby steps, I know.
That's not what the linked article says:
"The other 50 percent of the city’s paper waste is transferred to Pratt Industries’ paper mill on Staten Island, were much of the city’s waste paper is recycled into pizza boxes."
It doesn't say how much of the paper waste going into that mill is actually recycled, and it doesn't say how much of the portion that's recycled is recycled into pizza boxes.
Like, I would guess the janitor was just being lazy, and their actions provide little to no information about either the actual policy at the company or economics of recycling where it was located.
The substantial amount of recycled fiber in many products suggests that it isn't particularly uneconomic.
Lots of office workers had paper-only bins under their desks. Except, there was no place for janitors to put that paper, anywhere in or around the building. Just one big garbage dumpster. As someone else pointed out, we were also under massive time pressure.
Even if we had wanted to recycle the paper, there wasn't a way to do so unless we set up our whole own system, packed it into our personal vehicles every night and drove it to a recycling center miles away (all unpaid). Anyone who broached the subject was mocked.
Going significantly out of your way to get differently-packaged product could easily cost more than recycling it.
And if it's exceptionally difficult to recycle a certain kind of plastic into new plastic, then turn it into completely inert ash. Either way it's all hydrocarbons and you can convert any of those into a non-problem form.
I'm not asking maliciously, but I wonder how Germans reconcile their seemingly environmental awareness with their high CO2 emissions and big cars culture.
Sorting trash is a ritual, it is slightly sacrificial in time (especially returning bottles to the store), and it can be seen as a penance for the sin of purchasing single use products.
I think we will continue to see more things like this pop up as people search for meaning in their lives, and want things that they can do daily to affirm that meaning.
This means that bottles that specifically cannot be reused must be held onto and carried back to the store, so that they can be crushed and recycled. The machine you must feed your bottles into to get your 25 cents back crushes them itself. Someone who tosses those bottles into the recycling bin has done nothing better for the environment than someone who returns them to the store.
This seems absurd, but it's the whole point of the 25 cent pfand for single use bottles. People who buy those are supposed to pay the penance of taking them to the store and getting their money back for the sin of buying non reusable bottles.
If the issue is litter, why are glass bottles 8 cents, reusable plastic bottles 15 cents, and single use plastic 25 cents? There is no difference from an environmental standpoint whether you take your single use bottle back to the store or throw it in your recycling bin.
When the 25 cent pfand for single use was instituted, it was very clear that this was because the government wanted consumers to have to undergo the same hassle of returning plastic bottles as they did for glass bottles, otherwise, they would prefer to buy things in plastic bottles where they didn't have to haul the bottles back to the store.
The hassle is your penance for buying the single use product. Alternatively, you can throw them in the recycling bin and pay the 25 cents, but then you run into the other German religion of thriftiness. Throwing away 25 cents creates guilt, so even relatively well off Germans haul their plastic bottles back to the store.
I think carbon credits are a scam in the same stage recycling was 20 or 30 years ago.
If the cost of the credit was of the same value as removing the pollution, sure. This doesn't happen, though. Like sin, the credit doesn't undo the pollution, it just forgives it. The world still gets more polluted either way.
The baseline is that all the credits are being bought by industrial polluters. If you personally buy a credit, industry has to pollute less. If you buy 1.5 credits for every credit-worth of extra pollution you cause, the pollution in the world is reduced. In theory.
> The world still gets more polluted either way.
The more credits people buy and sit on, the less pollution there can be. At first this is all low hanging fruit, but eventually the price gets so high that it's cheaper for industries to pay for carbon capture than to pay for credits. If enough are bought, and the price of credits goes high enough, total regulated pollution drops to zero or even goes under zero.
That's not an indulgence if you can minimize the loopholes.
Australia: 16.8 tons/capita/year
Canada/US: 16.1
Germany: 9.1
China: 8.0
France: 5.0
Compared to other European countries, they are significantly worst.
Maybe it's just quibbling, but anyway, per-capita Germany is among the worst but not the worst.
I think German CO₂ emissions are quite low in comparison to German standards of living (like per joule of electricity, per Euro of GDP, per kcal of food eaten) but that doesn't necessarily mean they're low in an absolute sense, because German standards of living are also very high.
Also in many cities there is no separate container for consumer packaging - instead one can put it in a yellow plastic bag that is put on the street for pick-up. Same for recycling of bottles, you cannot really opt-out, it's more expensive to not recycle them.
Of course there are also a lot of people that do all this for the environment though.
Besides that, didn't you notice how the packaging got more and more flimsy in the last years? Take 500ml Yoghurt for example: very thin white plastic, with recycled carton around it for stability, pre-perforated for easy ripping it off. Even the clear plastic lid on top for protection of the(thin) aluminium foil is missing, intentionally. Which I dislike, because of possible mess when transported in the backpack. Same goes for single use plastic bottles. You can easily crunch them, and the thin wraparound label comes of.
If the flame was too cool, throw in more plastic. Too hot, more wet compostable material.
Where I live now it isn't even possible, all recyclables go in one bin.
Whether that is true or not is left as an exercise for the reader.
...though then you get the other issue, "aspirational recycling", where things that aren't even claimed to be recyclable end up in the bins.
For some the car is the holy cow, and it is heresy to speak against it. For some others they are the plague.
It depends, k?
What is there to discuss? Alternatives to capitalism? Capitalism in the absence of consumerism? Is that possible in the absence of retail? Stores? Low prices?
On the other hand, other countries aspiring to the western lifestyle is a big issue.