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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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-...

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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