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Comment by clolege | Hacker News Reader

This past year, I've taken to throwing all of my plastic waste directly in the trash. It saves me time from trying to figure out if it's compostable or recyclable (god forbid I get it wrong) and gives me back a tinge of guilt that makes me wish I had bought something else with less packaging, or brought my own cup to the cafe.

Most plastics that claim to be recyclable aren't. And now it seems like most that claim to be compostable aren't either.

When will people realize that it's all a sham to make us buy more plastic shit?

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I have food-waste bags that are labeled "compostable". They tend to start "composting" in my food-waste caddy, so the bags burst once they're about 36 hours old. I think they're made from cellulose.

Apart from food-waste, I have a recycling bin and a landfill bin. In general I don't recycle plastics any more. There's a bunch of different kinds of plastic, that have to be separated to be recycled, and if I can't decode the recycling label, then I really doubt there's a robot at the recycling centre separating the different kinds of plastic.

Plus: I'm constantly coming across plastic packaging that's mixed: two kinds of plastic bonded together. Those can't be recycled. And cardboard packaging bonded to plastic: that goes to landfill. Also window envelopes; I wish companies would stop using them, the whole envelope goes to landfill.

I think the theory is that I'm supposed to pick over my waste, doing my best to separate labels and caps from plastic bottles, recycle just the cardboard from mixed packaging, and inspect each piece of plastic looking for the recycling code. I'm afraid life is too short.

You don't actually need to separate window envelopes (or paperclips or staples) when recycling paper. Same for the tape they use for cardboard boxes, they use the right kind of plastic for those. (Though I wonder how the average consumer is supposed to know all about recycling processes...)

Worse, you can't even make that claim without knowing which jurisdiction the reader is in! Some places have the machines that can handle the window envelopes, but not everywhere. Same for plastic bags, or PET or PLA plastic.

"Jurisdiction" sounds grand, as if there are laws about these things. There might be where you live, but here it's a question of which private recycling firm has the contract with your local authority. Cross a county border, or move into town, and you have a new recycling firm with new processes.

I completely agree that it's a sham, and the plastic is not even close to as recyclable as it is spun to be.

The part where I disagree is with throwing it in the landfill. At least if you "recycle" it, something like 30% actually does get fed back into the system (35% according to https://www.greenmatters.com/p/what-percent-recycling-actual...) vs. 0% in the landfill. It's terrible, but it's something.

In the landfill it will probably never be worth mining, it will be so mixed up with other crap.

I think the tinge of guilt you're talking about is really important and I wish more people feel that when they buy something in plastic. Plastic recycling really does make people feel off the hook, and they don't realize how poor plastic recycling actually is.

> The part where I disagree is with throwing it in the landfill.

Here in Germany most is burned - or exported (the number I found was 6% of the total; we also import some trash from European neighbors and it varies widely depending on type of trash and it's complicated the more I read). Even when I tried returning unused drugs to the drug store as recommended they looked at me funny and told me they'd just throw it into the regularly trash too anyway, since it's all burned. The burning facility uses extra high temperatures.

Map of the 66 German trash burning sites: https://static.dw.com/image/50749190_7.png

https://www.wsj.com/articles/germans-have-a-burning-need-for...

We do that so much now this causes concern about the CO2 balance sheet:

https://e360.yale.edu/features/in-europe-a-backlash-is-growi...

https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/pu... (2008 but it's a government agency paper)

So... before you are concerned about landfill impact I think you may want to check if this is where your trash actually ends up. Maybe it's burned.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/is-burning-trash-a-good...

https://www.clientearth.org/latest/latest-updates/stories/th...

The last two links also discuss environmental impact of trash burning. I did not find much about the technical side unfortunately, how good is current trash burning tech at filtering toxins? I understand 30 year old plants won't be good, but what about more modern ones?

This German article quotes a chemist specializing in "sustainability" saying that the air quality is not a problem these days (from trash burning). There are a lot of toxic waste products from the process, but apparently they are filtered out. They still need to be disposed of of course. --- https://www.dw.com/de/m%C3%BCllverbrennung-in-deutschland-en...

Reading further in that article, there still is some toxins left in the air, so over time there still is a problem of accumulation in the environment especially around the plant.

It also says there are 350,000 tons of filtered toxic waste after burning every year, and they are treated with a salt solution and stored-buried in an abandoned mine.

----

At first I only wanted to point out that some countries use a lot of trash burning instead of landfills, but I googled and read a bit and it's very interesting and complex, and there is soooooooo much detail... overall though, no really good option exists, and all those methods are "leaking", meaning toxins end up in the environment one way or the other. Long-term we need something else, or we can hope for evolution to create more toxin-resistant lifeforms.

Burning at least emits CO2 instead of the methane emitted by a landfill, and can generate heat and electricity for residential use. In the end, recycling isn't feasible for most materials and the solution needs to come from the other pieces of the carbon puzzle.

Some landfills tap the methane and cycle it into the gas supply.

A landfill is actually a great containment site. Its already fucked from an ecological standpoint so you might as well build the mound up higher and higher since the environmental damage has been paid already.

Don't feel bad. Plastics in the landfill is sequestrated CO2. It's oil that has been dug up, but never burned.

While you might argue that we shouldn't have extracted that oil in the first place, plastic packaging is less energy intense to produce compared to packaging made out of glass, metal, or plant mass.

So let the landfills store the CO2.

This past year, I've taken to throwing all of my plastic waste directly in the recycling. It saves me time from trying to figure out if it's compostable or recyclable.

When you add the wrong things it lowers the value of the surrounding batch of material at the plant. So you aren’t playing it safe, just smug.

If he lives in a sane country, that cost will be passed onto the firms making the packaging, and they'll have further financial incentive to stop making non recyclable packaging.

In countries run by and for faceless corporations they'll call it wishcycling and it becomes your fault.

no economy today prices in all these externalities. the form of capitalism you're defending is a fantasy, not a purer form that it can be reformed into

Extended producer responsibility has been around for decades now:

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

my point stands

My recycling all goes in the same bin - plastic, paper, glass etc barbaric as that is.

If it turns out boxes from X are not recyclable - then I can only hope that the mass of them "reducing the profits of big waste corp" triggers a phone call from them to X and action happens - either the two parties come to an agreement or the waste company spends 50c sending me a flyer saying "please dont cost us $1000 by putting that packaging in your bin" or alternatively spends $5 an hour having someone on the line pick them out.

Its capitalism, not even a liberal fantasy land model of capitalism, but a filthy greedy sweatshop child labour exploititive form of capitalism - thats how it is meant to work.

That doesn’t happen, there’s no market solution for this

You can save even more time by throwing it directly in the trash.

Even Greenpeace now admits the obvious: recycling doesn’t work: https://www.city-journal.org/greenpeace-admits-recycling-doe...

That guy writing the article is the same climate change denier who fronted the campaign that allowed the US to fail so miserably at recycling while other countries succeeded.

A possibly phyrric victory since, as he points out, he hates Greenpeace USA's fallback position even more than he hates recycling, but that's a noose he created for his own neck. He told people recycling was impossible, Americans believed him, and now Greenpeace USA is successfully using that belief to leverage even greater moves to limit the use of single use plastics.

You can now see places like Reason.com, that share his politics, desperately switiching to supporting recycling plastic, when the alternative is bans:

These Environmentalists Want To Ban Single-Use Plastics Because Recycling Them 'Will Never Work'

And yet infinitely recyclable plastics are on the horizon.

https://reason.com/2022/05/31/environmentalists-ban-single-u...

Oh, I wonder how they got the idea it would never work?

https://reason.com/category/energy-environment/recycling/

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