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Comment by bberenberg | Hacker News Reader

There’s a “zero waste” store here in Bushwick. Everything you buy is in giant barrels / tubs. However, if you look into it, they actually source everything in relatively small bags that they break down and dump into large tubs. It’s a problem earlier in the supply chain. How do you plan to address this?

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I met the owners of a store like this in the Bay Area. Their backyard is filled with left over plastic containers because they’re embarrassed to be seen taking anything to the dump.

Wouldn't a yard full of plastic containers be... more embarrassing?

You can’t see it from the street so it’s a “secret.” Though to be honest I don’t think it’s a rational decision - not a psychologist but pretty sure there’s some mental health issues going on.

People are funny! Thanks for sharing :)

Typical narcissistic image keeping

Similarly I used to work overnight in a strip mall next door to a PC/e-waste "recycling" place. Out back in the alley was just a massive pile of obsolete 90s/early 2000s PCs that hadn't been broken down or stripped of e-waste in any way. I'd go rummaging through it sometimes looking for a usable Pentium 3 processor and some ram. Maybe a hard disk that wasn't roached. Built a bunch of fun little Linux computers with those.

Anyway, the owner went to jail for something or other unrelated. I'm sure all that stuff went to the landfill.

> I'm sure all that stuff went to the landfill.

I assume almost everything I “recycle” goes to landfill too. It just happened to go to a landfill in China before they stopped accepting it.

Paper, glass, and metals, in larger chunks, likely get recycled, because it's economically sensible.

Anything more complicated, especially tightly bound together, is likely cheaper to dump on a landfill. Which I think is sort of fine for non-toxic, non-volatile stuff.

Pretty much, I recall: https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/4/20992240/e-waste-recyclin...

whenever recycling e-waste comes up.

Shouldn't e-waste be highly profitable to recycle with that high concentration of metals? Urban mining at our doorstep and not halfway across the globe and a mile underground. Is the separation of all the materials inherently unprofitable or aren't the upfront investments to get things going just never made?

>Shouldn't e-waste be highly profitable to recycle with that high concentration of metals?

Based on some videos of people attempting DIY metal extraction from e-waste, no not really. Sure there's valuable metal there, but only thin films of it, and that's before you get to the extraction problem. Sure you can dissolve the metals off the boards with acid, but then you've got a solution of mixed dissolved metals you've got to process back into different pure metals, and deal with all the chemical waste. A gram of copper is ~$0.01 according to a quick search so it's pretty difficult to get any profit.

edit: don't know what the first metal prices site found I was smoking, but accurate prices make the case even more.

Small correction: Copper is currently around $9 USD/Kg.

Which is just about $0.01/gram, as the commenter stated.

Parent originally stated $4/gram. Perhaps the post was amended without notation.

Edit: @bragr: No worries, I'm just bad at reading sometimes or possibly even all the time. My mistake.

I literally added a whole "edited: ..." line to the end when I updated it.

An owner of a store which gets the stuff in plastic should also be better at recycling the plastic. Since the plastic bags are also going to a few consumers, they could also insist they're more recyclable and/or reusable.

This is why I've always appreciated Costco - they substituted out shopping bags for cardboard pallet cases. So the waste that walks in through their front door walks out with customers and is put to a productive use. Rather than being performative and de-packaging items before a customer sees them they actually do an effective job at reducing waste by reusing items that would otherwise just go straight to recycling.

Costco does sell some items in unnecessary blister packs. Not sure why they do that.

It just pushes the recycling onto the customer. It’s not like those containers disappear. They don’t give out bags and don’t guarantee a box anyways.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they do it to save on labor and garbage pickup costs of breaking down and hauling away all those boxes.

Recycling is great but it's the least effective of the trio of actions if you recall the triangle of arrows: "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" - Reducing is the best option but by the time goods leave a factory they're already plastered in packaging. While costco can work with suppliers to reduce packaging (and I think it's pretty clear they do by buying special bulk sized options) - there's a decent chunk of material flowing into their locations. That leaves two options, recycle and reuse - if we were to immediately recycle we'd spend a lot of energy recovering the raw material from the box and reforming it to a new good, before we do that if we can get another use out of its current incarnation then that's awesome - we essentially get a brand new box for "free" because we're not spending energy to break it down, remold it, repaint it and do other crap. And then it goes home to the customer - this may vary based on location but where I am in Canada there are extremely accessible recycling curbside pickup options, so I'd wager that a fair majority of those boxes end up getting reused anyways.

And sure, there's a cynical view you can take on how much money the company is saving but hey - if they're saving that money while reducing their environmental impact all props to them.

I volunteered at a music festival once that had a large recycling program. We piled all the trash into large piles but weren't given instructions on what to do with the recycling.

In the end, time was tight. They told us to mix it all together, and their tractors that hauled it were also putting it all in the same place, to dump in a landfill.

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

Individual actions like these feel good for people, but don't really make much headway on the broader problems. For example if you are vegan, you are not directly supporting the factory farming of animal products, but meanwhile people will continue buying those products. I would venture to guess that inconvenient legislations like plastic straw or plastic bag bans have far more powerful outcomes than these sort of individual lifestyle efforts.

> For example if you are vegan, you are not directly supporting the factory farming of animal products, but meanwhile people will continue buying those products.

This doesn’t make sense. Supply is driven by demand. Every vegan increases demand for plant-based products while decreasing demand for animal products. It is quantifiable. It is measurable. If every person on earth went vegan overnight, animal agriculture (one of the worst contributors to greenhouse gas emissions) would end immediately. ”Going vegan won’t make a difference” is just an excuse people use to avoid changing their behaviour.

This is very different to the greenwashing being discussed here, where the same amount of waste is produced, but it’s handled by the store instead of the consumer. In this case, no difference is being made.

that's pretty bad, but is it 25 lbs of flour or rice or standard sized small consumer bags? The latter would be somewhat farcical, although I supposed you could argue that there's a chicken and egg problem and that once a supplier offers bulk sales they can trivially switch.

I buy rice in 25kg sacks just like the bulk buy places do. And a bunch of other stuff from a wholesale outlet that sells larger containers.

Our local food co-ops buy most of their stuff in 20kg or bigger containers. One even managed to get a 200 litre drum of concentrated dishwashing liquid.

Warning: after some discussion with members we dilute the concentrate two parts water to one part concentrate because buyers mostly dilute it ~the same again or just "use less". When we tested the "use less" people we found they used about half... the stuff is approx 10x the concentration of normal dishwashing liquid. Use a spray bottle that you bought full of something else for dishwashing liquid. It's very convenient and you can dilute it to suit what people in your house actually do.

By the sound of it, the plastic waste (that has already been manufactured) is being concentrated into the responsibility of a centralized entity, instead of dispersed further down the supply chain, where it will be more difficult to recover. I don't really see this as a problem.

What you're saying is the real innovation is creating a zero waste supply chain. Would require a lot of sanitization, which probably offsets the benefit of no plastic.

It doesn’t need to be zero waste, increasing the volume of the containers is already a big reduction of packaging.

Relative to what? The giant barrels? The average amount a customer takes? Something else?

I believe you are referring to Precycle?

Interesting, I didn't know this. Somewhere I can find more info?

Could you still answer his question?

fourandtwenty isn't the OP.

Ah, I saw a green username and did not read carefully. Apologies to them

I don't have evidence yet that ours is doing that but I'm sceptical even of the barrels.

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