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Comment by dtx1 | Hacker News Reader

Here in Germany we have to split our garbage and one "bucket" so to speak is compostable and gets taken by the regular garbage trucks and I assume is composted in large facilities. That seems like a more reasonable approach because it scales to a whole city doing it

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Here in Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA, they are planning to ship compostable plastic bags to homes, which you can use to put organics into the normal metal/paper/plastic recycling stream. Those bags get picked out at the recycling center and used for compost to sell to local farms/etc and (hopefully) at least pay for the program, and maybe even bring in some extra funds. No extra cost to users or hassle mailing packages of garbage (lol).

Same here — I live in Eastern Canada and my municipality is rolling out a program where you'll put compostables in a separate bag, but the sorting is done by the trashman.

> compostable plastic bags ... normal metal/paper/plastic recycling stream

That's really clever since it avoids needing to have separate trucks.

Will they also accept leaves and yard trimmings? These are much larger in volume, so I'm not sure if they could be handled, but maybe with large bags it's fine.

> sell to local farms/etc

My city sells to farms and also sells it in bags at retail stores. It's meets standards that are supposed to make it safe to use in your backyard garden.

Also, since it costs money to put stuff in a landfill, and since this diverts from the landfill, it saves a bit of money that way too.

(Further info: https://www.austintexas.gov/department/dillo-dirt)

And then the yellow bags for plastic, which they take to SE Asia on the otherwise empty container-ships, so that it gets dumped on a beach or into a river, while Germany fills its quota for recycling.

Sorry for the cynicism, this was the case a few years ago, maybe not anymore?

> this was the case a few years ago, maybe not anymore?

I'm not sure what happens with the plastic in SE Asia, but we still send most of our plastic there.

https://de.statista.com/infografik/25368/wichtigste-abnehmer...

Bullshit.

This statistic is listing the share of exported plastics that are exported to certain countries. But that's not "most of our plastic", because overall exports are around ~10%. So "most of our plastic" is either recycled or burned within Germany. (Not saying any of this is ideal, but it's not helping to spread false information.)

I apologize. I chose poor wording to the point where my sentence it is becoming untrue.

I meant something like: “The majority of plastic we export to other countries is still being exported to SE Asia”.

Majority of it is burned, as always.

As the other comment said, it's more likely that they get burned.

I think it happened that due to waste reduction, "normal" garbage is sometimes not enough to keep the furnaces running, so they take recyclable material from the yellow bags and burn it, to keep the temperatures stable...

This definitely happens for plastic. But food waste does tend to actually get composted.

I don't see what you are trying to say here? That we shouldn't even try to recycle anymore because some garbage gets shipped to SE Asia?

Which is better for the environment, taking it a few kilometers outside of Berlin and burying it in a landfill that is properly insulated and managed, or shipping it across to world and dropping it on a beach in Thailand where turtles and birds get tangled into it?

The first is what happens with your regular garbage, the second is what happens (with some fraction) of the "recycled" yellow bag plastic.

I was not trying to say anything particular, just how "recycling" has become a form of gaslighting to avoid the tough question of how to produce less garbage in the first place.

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