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Comment by thinking4real | Hacker News Reader

The culture goes even further. We demand individuals to do pointless self flogging rituals like tediously organizing their recycling just to have it be buried in china. Meanwhile corporations are free to waste as much plastic product as they care to without repercussion.

America is all about squeezing the individual for the few in power and wealth.

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> We demand individuals to do pointless self flogging rituals like tediously organizing their recycling just to have it be buried in china.

German here. It's not that hard to separate paper, glass, metal, plastics and remainder waste. Paper, glass and metal are recycled at very high rates (over 80% for paper and glass [1][2] and over 90% for metal), and the separation between plastics and remainder waste allows trash incinerator plants to better control their output and, at least assuming that we get large scale post-consumer plastics recycling plants, we already have the behavior and logistics established in place and only need to divert the streams at the collection level.

The key thing is, this sorting has to happen at the consumer, because filtering out valuables for recycling from a merged waste stream is all but impossible and at least in the case of paper, permanently kills off its recyclability.

[1] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/ressourcen-abfall/verwe...

[2] https://www.bmuv.de/themen/wasser-ressourcen-abfall/kreislau...

[3] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/156541/umfrag...

In America we do things differently. We carefully organize our recycling but instead of it being recycled it is sent to China, who extracts the tiny amount of value it can from it, and then buries or dumps the rest in the ocean. There’s some nice articles about it.

I’m stupid enough that I still performatively wash out the glass and aluminum so the workers in China have to do less. But what is a West coast American if not performative?

I thought you were joking, then I looked up numbers, and WTF, y'all only recycle 33% of your glass [1] and barely half of your soda drink cans [2].

[1] https://cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/glass-recy...

[2] https://www.bcg.com/publications/2022/whats-holding-back-alu...

The first article does blame the consumer education and habits, which is funny. When a company bids on a contract from the government it is much easier and cheaper to collect the “recycling” and ship to China for pseudo-sorting and disposal rather than developing the infrastructure to properly recycle. Cheapest bid wins here in the US so it gets shipped out and the “uneducated” consumer gets the blame for the policy.

In the end how can you encourage someone who does not recycle to do so with this ridiculous reality in place? There’s a nice NYT article about it from a few years ago.

You should do some deeper research into how what recycling really is.

It is that hard when the vast majority of it is just buried. And the take that it needs to be at the consumer level is corporate brainwashing - if corporations aren’t allowed to use plastic excessively, that would alleviate waste far more than any recycling campaign ever has.

Just make sure to consider the sources you’re using to formulate your opinions.

Obligatory mentioning of the fact that recycling is a very local process and not everything ends up in China or in the dump.

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