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Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

Paper recycling is much in the same vein.

It requires a lot of harsh chemicals to remove the inks. The output paper is substandard. The whole process is energy intensive.

And, the messed up part about the whole thing is that throwing away paper is one of the best things you can do for the environment. It is natural carbon sequestration.

We are far better off tree farming for paper.

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My understanding is that, at least in NYC, the paper is pretty much all turned into pizza boxes.

Which are brown. You don't have to worry about the inks or "substandard" or whatever". And then the pizza boxes aren't re-recycled because of grease.

You suggest we stick to trees instead of recycle, "for paper". But the whole point of recycling is to turn paper into pizza boxes (and presumably also our Amazon shipping boxes, etc.).

It sounds like you're trying to argue against recycling paper... when the reality is it's a huge success, when you realize paper is recycled into cardboard.

And lest this sound myopic! At least in Portland, the pizza boxes can be put into composting bins, including the plant-waste bins that we put out next to garbage bins.

So the paper does, eventually, go to the landfill and become sequestered in the typical fashion.

I’ve only just started doing this - but my understanding is that the lids go into compost. The bottoms shouldn’t because the grease turns to a yuck sludge in compost bins.

Do you mean compost collection bins, or home composting bins?

If you live in an area that collects material for industrial composting you should 100% put the grease coated parts of the cardboard in your compost collection bin.

Yes sorry I’m talking about home composting.

It varies by area. Here's the guidelines for Portland [0]; it seems that "Home" "FOOD SCRAPS" bins may have pizza boxes in them, as long as wax paper and other inserts are removed. Incidentally, mentally traversing the pizzerias I go to, I think that the only inserts that any of them add are pizza savers [1].

[0] https://www.portland.gov/bps/garbage-recycling/compost-what-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_saver

How much carbon does feeding the pizza boxes to the composting process release into the air, as a percentage of total carbon present in the pizza boxes at rest (ignoring construction costs)?

Pizza boxes?

A lot of paper is coated in clays, waxes, or plastics, and many inks might make paper unsuitable for use in food grade products like pizza boxes, without heavy processing.

Shipping boxes, maybe. If the structural properties of the resulting board are OK.

But most post-consumer paper is unusable for one reason or another. Recycling of industrial packaging is a slightly different story.

Are New York pizza boxes food grade? Most New York pizza isn't even food grade.

Maybe not that .99c-a-slice garbage but there are some damn good pies to be had here in NYC for sure! Lucali, Totonno's, Joe's... some of the best you will ever have.

The OP is alluding to the fact that growing forests, cutting them down, and then burying the resulting paper should use less energy then recycling and produce less toxic waste products due to fewer chemicals. Such activity has a strong possibility of being a carbon negative process.

It may be better for the environment to sustainably harvest trees to produce cardboard then to recycle other paper products.

This works conceptually if you are sustainably replanting forests to feed your paper mill. In reality, your mileage may very and here in Canada, plenty of paper mills are still running off of irreplaceable primary forest.

Please learn how to use the words than/then correctly...

I think the point is that, by recycling, one has to use energy to transport used paper, process paper using machinery, store it, use chemicals which are pollutants themselves, etc. All this instead of just throwing out the paper.

Garbage isn't "just" thrown out, it also has to be transported and stored. We'd still want to sort efficiently recyclable aluminum out of the garbage before it's sent to landfill, so ideally there would be some processing as well.

If you're replacing your paper with paper from trees, you have to do all that anyway (transport, processing, storage, chemicals), and on top of that you have all the energy of getting the raw materials in the first place.

I'm not too sure on the details of how that is done, but I imagine it involves driving huge trucks into forests, cutting trees with machines, stripping and cutting the trees, and transporting wood to industrial areas.

It has to be more CO2 efficient to recycle.

Some books and newspapers are printed on 100% recycled paper. If recycled paper is only used for pizza boxes in the US, that's a US thing.

Newspapers are almost entirely waste, by volume of paper. Creating waste to receive low quality recycling is accounting nonsense.

It's not like production of paper from pulp wood involves butterflies and popsicles:

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

(the first ingredient is hot lye!)

In general, paper recycling is productive enough that paper mills buy recycled paper as an input. Cardboard even more so.

There is more than one form of pollution. This is like complaining about aicd from an Uranium mine. True but hardly the biggest issue.

Yes, that was my point "It requires a lot of harsh chemicals to remove the inks."

Virgin inputs also requires harsh chemicals, there's no advantage.

I dont think its enough to matter, but if it was, some places incinerate trash so its still released as carbon dioxide. Wouldn't it rot in a landfill and end up as methane or something?

Good question, I believe it depends on the landfill?

Bacteria probably need the right conditions to efficiently break down materials, cellulose is quite tough.

Some landfills capture the released methane and burn it (to avoid atmospheric pollution), which seems like a decent solution (even more with power generation). Some of the material will remain undecomposed (or take a really long time) so it is a net carbon sink. I think this depends on properly sealing landfills and arranging extraction infrastructure.

Seems like a good resource:

https://www.epa.gov/lmop/basic-information-about-landfill-ga...

Another idea would be to curb methane generation or decomposition somehow. Apparently aerobic decomposition reduces or prevents the release of methane:

https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/climate-change/composting-avoid-...

Burning trash directly is also an alternative I guess, though one I'm not very comfortable with due to trace elements contained in everyday items -- surely some mercury and heavy metals will sneak into residues? (and then into the atmosphere and our lungs)

Another reason compact fluorescent bulbs were a mistake.

There's more mercury released into the environment from incandescent bulbs than CFLs -- or there was, when incandescents were still common and so were coal-fired power plants, and the Obama-era regulation of mercury emissions from power plants hadn't come into force.

Now, of course, we have LEDs in place of CFLs, and coal burning power generation is on the way out, so it's all moot.

Is that comparison true on a socket for socket basis? Low adoption of CFL shouldn't excuse any poor pollution characteristics.

The idea was to get an efficiency law passed and now we have a huge move to LED bulbs as a result. So, no, it wasn't a mistake, the CFLs were a stepping stone.

Exactly. My favorite environmental slogan is “bury the trees”.

I was always a fan of "Nuke the whales" myself.

Bury the trees is good. Carbon sequestration and all that, as long as you replant them.

Talking about paper recycling, we must distinguish papers. Like office prints and newspapers are easier to recycle but like pizza box and random food wrapping is difficult (uses more resources) so firing is better.

All human actions have resource costs, trees and paper need absurd amounts of water, specially given that companies use pines and eucalyptus as base material for paper pulp production both species are always starving for water

The reality is that the system requires pigovian taxation to internalize their natural externalized costs, capitalism and specifically our modern version of neoclassical neoliberalism loves to socialize loses and privatize profits, we need public action against that

If you wanna hear my angle, I'd go for making Senates and congresses across the world secret, secret ballots, secret voting and secret deliverations and debates

If you wanna know as to why read on James DAngelo's Toxic Transparency Paradox, his congressional investigations on the systemic benefits of secrecy can be found on http://www.congressionalresearch.org/

Trees (grown for wood fiber) pretty much aren't irrigated. I'm sure there's exceptions, but not on a significant amount of land used for fiber production.

My experience with this comes mainly from Uruguay, Argentinian and specifically Chilean pine and eucalyptus forests used to make wood pulp, which are causing quite serious issues with water management, less so in Uruguay as it is a wetter country, but south of Chile has seen quite the protests over this issue as some of these specific type of trees (Eucalyptus) simply drain the land too much as they evolved for a different environment

> relegate the lobbyists to the lobby – giving them no access to markup sessions and no access to committee votes

These are some hot takes, but somewhat surprisingly they check out. Will read more.

Yeah, yeah

D'Angelo goes further and interviews law professors on this issue, and they all not only seem perplexed at first, but agree with him later, and the caveat, is that US Law as it is taught from an orthodox angle, is only really taught after the 1970's or so, and don't really cover how legislation used to be done before it, so law students would naturally assume that "things always were the same way" when it came to how transparency was handled!

Here are some of the talks he has had with Law professors

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVfzvhRhmgI&list=PLzctEq7iZD...

And some other snippets in general

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC88MPXm1jZPNRwdOGyBNqqg/vid...

By now I am convinced that this is the missing piece, that accounts for not only the split between worker-productivity and wages, but everything else since the 1970's, this transparency revolution, with the Toxic Transparency Paradox aftermath is what set the course to where we are today with legislative gridlock, polarization, increases in wealth inequality, oligarchic corporatism etc

Even without addressing the majority of the substance that the parent comment is trying to portray, there should be one major takeaway:

Unregulated markets don't work, except in the way that cancer works to propagate itself before its host dies. They're not self-balancing ecosystems. After all, they're comprised of people.

Completely managed and controlled markets similarly don't work, and for largely the same reasons. After all, they're comprised of people.

Humanity has a unique knack for at least these two things: 1) constructing games, 2) cheating those games it has created for itself to play.

It's no longer enough to hedge against the risks of idealized perfectly spherical and rational actors bouncing about. We have to begin to take into account our own complexity and how we subvert the rules we lay out for ourselves.

The idea we can regulate bad systems into being good is just dumb

No, it's not. It's pretty much what regulation is for.

CFCs:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol

Asbestos:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos_and_the_law

Lead paint:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-based_paint_in_the_Unit...

Leaded gasoline:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Phaseout_and_ba...

We knew asbestos was bad since the 1890s and it wasnt regulated until 1967, lead was known to be bad since the mid 1800s while lead paint wasnt banned until 1978 and leaded gas wasnt banned until 2000, lead paint and pipes are still plentiful across the US. Cigarettes were known to be harmful since the 1890s, and the government didnt do anything about it until 1964.

Regulation can be successful, but at best its slow and incremental, and in the long term corporations will weaken and subvert them. Just having a system which incentivizes good behavior in the first place would be better than trying to regulate bad systems

Regulations are inherently a system that incentivizes good behavior. That's their entire purpose!

Regulations are an attempt to correct for bad incentives.

The idea that you cant is precisely the defeatist attitude some of your industrial overlords were hoping for.

what they really dont want is for us to consider alternative systems

Yea its easy to say that and then you end up with Love Canal and quack doctors injecting people with bleach to cure their cancer. People do things. Laws and morals stop them from doing bad things. Pray your country doesnt have many people no morals.

Can I interest you in incentive-compatible mechanism design and implementation theory? They are well-established economy fields and do work that you proposed.

I am curious why can't you make single use plastic manufacturers an illegal business. Nobody would use plastic bags if there weren't any one willing to make them

Reusing syringes probably isn’t the best idea, but for most uses, sure.

The main problem to me is that disposing of plastic is always an externality to the companies who produce and market it. Make them pay the recycling or disposal costs up front, and I’d be happy.

>I am curious why can't you make single use plastic manufacturers an illegal business

For a bunch of the same reasons you can't "just" make alcohol illegal or outlaw internal combustion engines.

Virgin plastic is objectively better for some applications. recycled plastic can be good enough for some uses, but you can't do a blanket ban without even more harm

We’d be better off burning our trash at peaker power plants when the sun isn’t shining, the wind isn’t blowing...etc.

It’s not quite that simple. A garbage incinerator is not something you can turn on and off according to when you need the energy. It has to be kept going continuously, since it takes a long time for it to get up to the temperature required for efficient and clean combustion. There are similar problems with shutting down.

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