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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

There never was a container shortage worldwide. There were a lot of containers in the wrong places. They were piling up in West Coast US ports and scarce in China. It was more cost-effective to take ships back empty than filling them with empty containers to go back. Some of this was corrected by applying port fees to shippers who didn't take enough containers back.

This reflects the US's lack of exports and China no longer wanting unsorted US recycling.

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Yup, I called this a year ago but my article didn't get much traction, I guess because I'm not the founder of a Y Combinator startup.

Original discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28957379

My article: http://h2.jaguarpaw.co.uk/posts/flexport-ceo-wrong-bottlenec...

No discussion :( : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28987281

Don't take it personally, I think upvotes are a lot more random.

Every 6 months or so I repost (on another site) bottle rocket under the ice:

https://i.imgur.com/IEW6QqB.gifv

Sometimes it's huge, somtimes it sinks. No pattern to it.

Well this is my first time seeing that video, and I'm delighted!

I wonder if there's anywhere in the contiguous U.S. where such fireworks are still legal. I hope so.

There are many states where Bottle Rockets are still legal; they are generally states that are not considered a Nanny state or do not have high risk of fires. Some states like Texas banned them because too many houses had wooden shingled roofs decades ago that tended to catch fire because of a bottle rocket landing on them. And laws are much harder to get rid of once they have been enacted so despite very few homes actually still having a wooden shingled roof the ban on bottle rockets still stands.

https://www.rd.com/article/states-where-fireworks-are-legal/

A lot of places(From the state level down to individual city level) use the annual Consumer Product Safety Commission report on Firework injuries to determine what needs to be banned for so called "public safety" reasons. Which is why you have places that have even banned Sparklers.

https://www.cpsc.gov/Research--Statistics/Fuel-Lighters-and-...

Glad you liked it. I think this 8 second clip of a guy saying 'I'm lost' is hysterical, never gets an upvote though. Maybe you have to be English to get it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieWm9T_GgSA

Interesting. What kind of patterns have you tried to look for?

One source of "randomness" in user voting on time-sensitive sites (as opposed to e.g. a forum where you could log in once per day and read up on everything) is that the oline audience changes troughout the day as different timezones are at work / asleep / etc. This is both a regional change as well as an occupational/age change.

I discovered letting Europe see it a few hours before the USA woke up was the best time of day. A post needed a few upvotes before the 'bury brigade' saw it.

Sad to hear you didn't get traction back then. What are your predictions today? ;)

Sadly I don't have predictions. I can only tell when other people are wrong, not actually be right myself :D

> I can only tell when other people are wrong, not actually be right myself

...well, is anyone today is wrong about their shipping container projections? :-)

Smart move!

The recycling but is interesting. I was not aware of this aspect but have heard from other nations that they no longer accept containers full of plastic rubbish.

Yeah, even in Europe this is happening at a massive scale. Romanian border checks often uncover dozens or even hundreds of tones of plastic, textile, rubber garbage and e-waste coming from countries like France, Germany and the UK, falsely marked as "recycling" or "raw materials" in the paperwork, which are definitely not recyclable or usable, but will end up in some Romanian landfill operated by some shady unscrupulous business owner who even burn the trash sometimes, causing masive air pollution. I heard the same is happening in other countries, such as Turkey.

It hit me that many rich countries get their so called "green-ness" by paying poorer, more corrupt countries, to offshore their environmental damage, while globally the impact is still the same, but as long as it's not in their back yard, it counts as being green.

https://euobserver.com/news/151622

> operated by some shady unscrupulous business owner who even burn the trash sometimes,

As a guy living in Bucharest I can confirm that unfortunately that stuff is really happening.

It's kind of crazy when you think about it, i.e. the externality of regularly intoxicating about 2 million people with smoke that has the smell of some chemical trash so that some people further West can check the "we've done our part! we've recycled!" checkbox. All this while literally putting money in the Italian Mafia's pockets, as articles like this one [1] can attest to (in Romanian, but Google Translate can help).

[1] https://psnews.ro/groapa-de-gunoi-de-la-glina-de-la-afaceril...

Yeah, a lot should be coordinated at EU level to stop this practice. For example, if one country finds illegal trash trying to be imported at its borders, then the country of origin should bare part of the environmental fine in order to encourage self policing and environmental responsibility at the source instead of putting all the burden of policing at the poorer target countries since as it stands right now, western EU countries "get greener" by pushing their trash to Romania, and then scold Romania at the European Commission for being too polluted lol.

However, here's a major issue I found in the link you shared (translated to English via DeepL):

"The landfill in Glina [Bucharest, Romania] is a health hazard for citizens and the European Commission recognized this a few years ago. According to the law, landfills must be at least 1000 meters away from people's homes, but the one in Glina is only 70 meters away. The National Environmental Guard has never thoroughly checked the entire area, and there is evidence that hazardous waste may also be hidden there. Underneath the mountains of rubbish that have risen up near Bucharest no one knows what is really hidden and how much damage is being done to the land in that area.

In 2017, environmentalists warned that there was even cyanide pollution at Glina that could reach Bucharest. Prosecutors also opened an investigation after it was discovered that a Romanian company was discharging cyanide waste at the Glina dump, but these cases never reached final decisions because the trials were far too long, bogged down in courtroom proceedings and the facts were time-barred."

The problems I see here are two fold:

One, the Romanian authorities can't be bothered to police what's happening meters away from the capital city, where all the government institutions and politicians are.

And two, it seems like whenever something foul gets uncovered, the Romanian justice system is so incompetent, that nothing happens in the end and the perpetrators get away scot free on technical failures of the system, which only serves to attract and encourage further criminal activity of this nature.

This is a systemic failure on the Romanian side of epic proportions and needs to be addressed ASAP.

It's not just the Romanian system that has these issues. We have similar issues in Bulgaria too. There was some social movement in the past to replace the chief prosecutor, but to no avail. Political parties in the parliament seem to be backed by some financial circles and voting doesn't seem to have any long term effect on the general state of matters (less than 40% voted at all at this year's elections). Non-compliant bottom up/grassroots political movements are dealt with using different tools, ranging from discreditation campaigns in media, to "embrace and extend" and finally brutal suppression using the government power structures.

Same in Poland. And the "landfills" are just random plots of land, often very near high-density areas. The gangsters dump the waste in there, collect the money from their Western clients and disappear before the waste is discovered and police gets involved. Quite often, it's real nasty stuff (very toxic chemicals) and cleanup of one such site costs tens of millions of euros.

> It hit me that many rich countries get their so called "green-ness" by paying poorer, more corrupt countries, to offshore their environmental damage, while globally the impact is still the same, but as long as it's not in their back yard, it counts as being green.

Shit rolls downhill, don't forget that a lot of stuff imported in Romania is produced in China, partially because their environmental rules are even less strict than places like Romania.

In the last decades around here (the Netherlands) they have started burning more an more trash in an effort to stop using landfills, produce energy and to lower the amount of these corrupt streams going through poorer countries. I think some Nordic country even had to massively import garbage as they didn't produce enough.

The global impact is even worse than dealing with it responsibly locally, often severely so.

same in Bulgaria

Yeah, China famously stopped accepting it iirc, or India? One of them anyways.

Call me a conspiracy thinker, but I'm confident it was part of an international scam; companies in western European countries claim to recycle things, encourage consumers to separate their waste. They process it, bundle it up, and get a checkmark for having recycled it.

But then it gets exported and put in landfills or just burned. It would've been better for the environment (largely speaking) it was just landfilled or burned in the country of origin. I don't think garbage exports / imports should be a thing.

No need for conspiracy, plenty of evidence that's exactly what happens.

It would be best if exporting trash was banned and countries couldn't just pay others to dump their trash and toxic waste into ground or rivers.

> It would be best if

There is a bit of a pattern where society at large struggles to reason about waste (and end of life care, probably for similar reasons - triggers fear and disgust responses). Completely unavoidable part of sustaining a modern society. But it seems to be intolerable to handle in the harm-minimising way and essential to handle in the harm-most-difficult-to-see way.

It can be very frustrating. We'd be better off if people just took a deep breath and put their emotions to one side when we know that emotional reasoning leads to bad outcomes.

Sweden burns trash for electricity. But they also recycle too well. They reached a point where they were scrambling to import enough trash to run their electric plants. I don’t disagree in principle, but this is a (very limited) counterpoint where trash exports are a positive thing.

https://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/sweden-imports-trash-...

We should be exporting trash from fragile environments to sturdy ones wherever possible, even when national boundaries need to be crossed.

Australian landfill waste should go to the outback rather than rainforests, Chinese waste should go to their western deserts and tropical Africa should export waste to Saharan Africa to reduce the impact on wildlife.

Broadly agree that we should be shipping waste to robust ecosystems, but I differ on where that is. Generally speaking deserts are more fragile than high moisture ecosystems, though. Cryptobiotic crusts can take hundreds of years to form, and even a small disruption can destroy them until they reform.

More robust ecosystems reform readily, like hardwood and softwood secondary growth forests in the US, for example. They can quite happily grow back in a few decades on top of a clay capped landfill.

Tundra might be a good place. Far enough north almost nothing grows.

Or perhaps abandoned quarries or mines? Or already damaged sites.

On the other hand even giant landfills aren’t that big in the scheme of things. They’re pretty low on my list of environmental problems.

This is true and well documented.

The myth was deliberately created by the plastic industry to shift blame from the plastic producers to the end consumers. Know who invented the recycling emblem?

Who pays for all that?

Like is the idea that the recycling companies are getting so much for collection that they can afford to pay to ship the stuff to China and landfill it there?

In Europe it is also likely the plastic packaging industry that's mostly paying for it as its cheaper for them to make it seem like plastic packaging can be recycled, that it is to get regulated to not cause so much waste.

A more generous reading would be that the industry is being incentivized to make their product easier to recycle by making them pay for the recycling, but it depends a bit on how cynical you are :).

The result though is that at least in my area the recycles pay so much for plastic waste that the municipality could lower the garbage disposal taxes as they were making money like with paper.

US taxpayers and consumers, via the prices charged by waste removal companies.

Recycling plastic was always a feel good political measure to let people continue consuming more and more with no guilt of harming the environment. The solution was always to reduce consumption, but that does not sell as well to voters.

My landfill recycles plastic because they can sell it and it ends up saving space in the landfill.

But like they aren't paying people to come take the recycled plastic away, people pay them and someone comes and picks it up.

We need wide scale plasma waste extractors like they use on air craft carriers. Turns all trash into syngas and slag.

In Germany we have a system that producers have to pay for the recycling beforehand, depending on the waste it's going to produce.

Once I learned about it, I have never since recycled and have encouraged others not to recycle. The whole thing now is basically a gimmick and a great example of the 90s style thinking that believes touches around the edges will solve climate change. If governments want to make an impact on trash pollution on the ecosystem reduce really is the only thing that should be pushed.

Aluminum recycling still makes complete sense both economicaly and environmentally. It's cheaper and less energy intensive to reprocess cans and car bodies than to process ore into metallic aluminum. We should be focusing on recycling of metals (including batteries) and try to ditch plastics for glass. Glass just becomes sand in a landfill, which is vastly preferable to plastics that will still be around in a million years.

I generally feel the same way that you do, especially about recycling metals. But glass is much heavier than plastic, which translates to more energy spent shipping products around. We need to be cautious about the effects of plastics, and especially microplastics, on the environment. We also need to recognize that plastics are part of the picture when it comes to reducing carbon emissions.

The weight issue with glass is a good point. At some level we may need a subtle cultural shift away from individually packaged items. The other day i saw individually packaged eyedrops. The packaging was more mass and volume than the product, and probably contained sketchy plasticisizers. If we can shift to renewables and electric trucks for overland shipping, it would at least help.

But it is also extremely easy to filter out aluminium from the general waste stream, so no real need to separate them, especially as the average consumer is not very consistent.

Recycling is mostly a theatre, but PET plastic (mostly bottles) is recycled and (in our country) is recycled locally into PET bottles again. So while recycling will not save us, to not recycle is also wrong.

I still separate my trash because even though my plastic will probably end on the landfill, my municipality does process organic materials into compost, and plastic added to the mix burns CO2 on the separation plant. But yes, if it all ends up in a landfill anyway where you live sorting out the trash is a waste of effort

There is a problem with people putting plastic into organic waste bins though.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S24685... (Compost as a carrier for microplastics and plastic-bound toxic metals into agroecosystems)

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.aap8060 (Organic fertilizer as a vehicle for the entry of microplastic into the environment)

When I look at the contents of the organic waste bin of my apartment house people often put what they throw in there inside plastic bags, which is kind of understandable because just throwing it in there unprotected and open to the air will probably lead to a rot problem and some really bad smells right in front of the house. I don't think this is collected every day.

I read an article here in Germany years ago that this is a major problem and a leading cause of ever more plastic in agricultural soil.

and also https://www.newscientist.com/article/2345545-most-home-compo... (Most ‘home compostable’ plastic doesn’t break down in garden bins)

This depends on the country though. Here in the Netherlands, it's extremely expensive to dispose of things in the "general trash" bin. Recycling on the other hand, is essentially free (at least in my village). Organic waste is not free (except during the holidays!), but it's an order of magnitude cheaper than the general waste.

They are more and more working on doing the separation at the garbage company though instead of at the source. Generally the reason for this that that consumers aren't very consistent in the separation and a few mistakes makes the whole stream worthless if they don't implement separation after collection.

Two examples of large municipalities going this route:

* https://www.amsterdam.nl/afval-en-hergebruik/plastic-scheidi...

* https://www.almere.nl/wonen/afval/afval-scheiden/nascheiden

Yes but this just changes which bin the stuff is put into. The organic bin next to my apartment in Germany always has plenty of plastic in it. The stuff that actually gets put into the packaging bin vs the general waste bin seems to be completely random, to the extent that I can see it. (Glass and paper bins mostly contain glass and paper.)

This is sometimes solved by requiring pre-paid see through bags. If the garbage man notices something that shouldn't be in there, it's not collected.

"Here is your paper straw in your entirely plastic cup"

I’ve also seen paper straws wrapped in clear plastic.

Plastic has never been recyclable. We used to tell ourselves the myth (with gleeful assistance from plastic manufacturers) and ship it to China so it was out of sight. They played along for a while until they finally gained enough clout to stopped taking it. I believe they term it as a ban on importing garbage.

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