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Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

Every time I took a German course, my textbook had a section something like "was machen Sie für die Umwelt?" ('what do you do for the environment?'), and the first example answer in dialogues was always "Müll trennen" (sorting kinds of trash for recycling). It was amazing what a cultural force this habit seems to have for many Germans.

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.)

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"what do you do for the environment?"

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.

The question should be, "how are you contributing to the destruction of the environment?"

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.

Hey, not that many people are flying private, and housing tends to be as environmentally neutral as possible here. If not inititially, then by retrofitting, with subsidies.

> I still remember that one of the textbooks even started an answer with "natürlich trenne ich Müll" ('well, of course I sort my trash...').

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.

At this point, "wondering" about this is willful ignorance. Municipal recycling programs in USA don't recycle much of anything. Valuable materials such as some metals don't make it into the blue bins; those are sold at actual recycling depots. Whatever is in the blue bins, is not recyclable in current economic conditions.

This isn't actually all that new, 25 years ago when I worked at a large Motorola facility, I was always amused when I worked late, which was often, of having the janitorial staff empty my wastebasket into the large bin they pushed around, and then dump the contents of the paper recycling basket into the same bin. It hasn't been economical to recycle paper waste streams in the US maybe ever.

Did you actually do the legwork to connect the actions of the janitor to company policy and the economics of recycling in the area?

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.

Lazy, or rushed? The pressure on cleaning staff in many office buildings is significant, especially if they’re under contract at one of the major cleaning companies. Their itineraries are timed to the minute.

Gosh it's convenient that the environment depends on the heroism of janitors. I certainly don't want to be a hero...

I worked as a janitor for a while in the midwest.

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.

When the whole Chinese banning recycling imports thing started, one of the few municipal recycling systems not affected was New York City, because they had taken the time to set up a full local supply chain for the recycling. About half of NYC's recycled paper gets turned into pizza boxes. https://citylimits.org/2019/09/17/other-cities-face-trash-cr...

"About half of NYC's recycled paper gets turned into pizza boxes."

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.

Is not recycleable for free. Always say that part. Because it can always be recycled for a little bit of money if we care a tenth as much as we pretend to.

Some containers could be recycled. Not all. The time to "care a tenth" is before we purchase goods that are packaged in problematic containers.

If every product was offered both ways, sure.

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.

>Whatever is in the blue bins, is not recyclable in current economic conditions. //

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.

Single stream recycling is a scam. It started recently. But it is making its way everywhere because it eases collection systems on municipalities.

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.

AIUI, bottles and cans are sorted easily from paper. Also as the glass/steel/aluminium is going in a furnace some contamination is fine. Contamination the other way is sorted by float-beds; and paper gets shredded and washed anyway as part of the recycling process.

Could you expand on what you think the problem is here?

My understanding was that paper exposed to liquids (other than water) and oils are no longer recyclable.

> It was amazing what a cultural force this habit seems to have for many Germans.

I'm not asking maliciously, but I wonder how Germans reconcile their seemingly environmental awareness with their high CO2 emissions and big cars culture.

They also had a recycling scandal when it was exposed all the tidy sorting at home hit all dumped at the refuse center and either dumped or shipped off but mostly not recycled.

I remember hearing a (possibly apocryphal) story about how it was discovered in one town that all of the recycling was getting incinerated. It was then asked why they needed to sort everything, and the answer was that it was useful to help control the temperature of the incinerator.

If the flame was too cool, throw in more plastic. Too hot, more wet compostable material.

When I was in college I did some report on our local recycling program. I interviewed a manager and learned that our recyclables were actually mixed and trucked to a town several hours away because we didn't have the volume to sell the sorted quantities. I asked why we had to sort at home then and he said "well if we ever can sell individually we want people to be used to it." I never sorted my recyclables again.

Where I live now it isn't even possible, all recyclables go in one bin.

I got suspicious when Portland moved from sorted recycling (four bins, I think) to 'combined recycling'. How could it make economic sense to then sort it back out?

The theory given is that it increases recycling by reducing the cognitive load.

Whether that is true or not is left as an exercise for the reader.

The additional theory I've heard is that people stink at properly sorting recycling...

...though then you get the other issue, "aspirational recycling", where things that aren't even claimed to be recyclable end up in the bins.

Supposedly it could be cost effective when China was paying for plastic. Not that the additional recycling necessarily decreased overall costs, just that single-binning could still be profitable at the collection rates people were used to, and people obviously preferred it. Now that China won't take plastic even if you pay them, I'm sure the financials look different.

The conflict I heard about was all the coal mining (a huge industry in Germany), although in theory they're going to stop burning coal by around the end of the Unix epoch. (I don't know if that also means that they're going to stop extracting it to sell to other countries' energy markets.)

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.

Every little bit helps. There is a concern about auto emissions, but car registration tax[0] is proportional to displacement so there is an incentive to buy smaller engines. And of course, fuel is heavily taxed in Europe so there's a big incentive away from larger engines. If you compare something like a BMW 7-Series sold in the US to one sold in Germany, the German model will usually be sold with a smaller engine that costs less to register and much less to operate.

[0] https://kfz-steuer.wiki/en/car-tax-germany/

Consumerism is irreconcilable with environmentalism, capitalism is probably irreconcilable with environmentalism.

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?

Speaking as someone who cares about the environment, I think that environmentalism in Germany has parallels to religious practice. I don't think that it's a coincidence that Germany is extremely areligious, and that sorting trash is taken to such an extreme.

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.

I suppose the truly religious environmentalists can buy indulgences in the form of carbon credits. Airlines offer them so the people guilty about travel can pay the owner of a forest to do nothing. Not perfect because you still make carbon, but at least you don’t have to pilgrimage in a sailboat like Greta Thunberg.

If carbon credits are implemented without massive fraud, I don't think it's fair to call them indulgences. If enough people bought carbon credits under a working system it would be a flood of money toward restricting carbon release and recapturing carbon.

Carbon credits most probably are a massive fraud. First it is unclear what measures each credit you buy will take to capture/reduce/limit carbon. Then, those credits are too cheap to have any plausible benefit. Even staunch fans usually introduce them with "well, its something, its a start".

I think carbon credits are a scam in the same stage recycling was 20 or 30 years ago.

Carbon credits are issued to companies in the industry based on a certain amount they are allowed to pollute. This is the cap, the credits are the trade, in "cap-and-trade". However, all that pollution still gets polluted in the end, the only thing that changes is who does it, and who pays. Other players can enter the market and claim to absorb carbon, but very often these people are just monetizing ecosystem services that were already happening before they showed up.

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.

> Carbon credits are issued to companies in the industry based on a certain amount they are allowed to pollute. This is the cap, the credits are the trade, in "cap-and-trade". However, all that pollution still gets polluted in the end, the only thing that changes is who does it, and who pays.

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.

At least returning bottles to the store actually works...

For glass bottles, yes. That's been done for a long time, and they're 8 cents a bottle. What's perhaps poorly remembered is that when plastic started to come into use in the 90s, the government decided that reusable plastic bottles should have a pfand of 15 cents, and single use plastic bottles should have a pfand of 25 cents.

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.

Ah, I had no idea that this was also done for plastic bottles...

Maybe you don't understand the system but as you have described it is working as intended. Recycling is a meme. The point of a deposit system is that you return your bottles so that they can be disposed of properly. Maybe it is too difficult for you to understand but lots of people would litter without the deposit. There is no cultist conspiracy theory behind the deposit program.

The original intent of the glass bottle deposit system was not from the government at all. It was for the manufacturers to wash and reuse glass 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.

The word you are looking for is Ersatzreligion.

Compared to other developed countries they are not the worst.

    Australia: 16.8 tons/capita/year
    Canada/US: 16.1
    Germany:    9.1
    China:      8.0
    France:     5.0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

Why does France do so much better?

Nuclear power plants, the only large-scale green energy source in existence.

Nope. This is only true for gridpower "production", which is only a small part of the total energy production (about 25%), and there are other (non energy-related) sources CO2 emissions.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24374697

Probably poverty and industry. Germany has more industry and has historically had a stronger economy. So, that probably leads to lifestyles that promote more energy use.

https://www.statista.com/chart/19937/europes-biggest-greenho...

Compared to other European countries, they are significantly worst.

https://vividmaps.com/carbon-dioxide-emissions-european-coun...

Maybe it's just quibbling, but anyway, per-capita Germany is among the worst but not the worst.

Germans take the conservative approach to nature in the literal sense. It’s every bit as part of their culture as cars and beer, perhaps more so. Hunting is an ancient German tradition as well and there is no hunt without woods to hunt in.

HALALI! https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halali_(Jagd)

German here, I don't think separating trash is necessarily considered an act to help the environment. It's somehow part of the culture and brings additional benefits: easier storage (e.g. you can place an open paper bin in the living room and it won't rot) and recycling containers that are picked up by the city are cheaper than the mixed waste containers. People with gardens can even save more money by maintaining their own organic waste there.

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.

Sure you can, buy tetra-paks instead. Another thing one could do is to separate the packaging from the product in the store after the cashier. They ALL have the bins there, but almost nobody does that. Neither do I, because the packaging actually helps the product survive the short trip in my backpack unharmed :-)

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.

Hm. Speaking as a German, which never had a drivers license, does everything by bicycle or on food as possible, I think "Die Freude am Fahrvergnügen" is indoctrination by decades long advertisment on all channels. We could have built the so called 3-litre-car(100km per 3 liters of gas) since the 80ies. But almost nobody wants to buy that. Apart from that, looking at real traffic, you see lots of compact and economical cars too.

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?

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