People over-emphasize the recycling aspect of "reduce, reuse, recycle"
futurism.com
futurism.com
That doesn't mean that recycling has "backfired". It just means that it's not occupying much consumer attention. Which it shouldn't. It's not about virtue signaling. It's about bulk materials handling.
As I pointed out the last time this came up on HN, the machinery that sorts recyclables today does a far better job than humans. It's not even clear that it's even worth having people sort out trash from recyclables. Here's a plant that takes in ordinary trash and sorts it.[1] About 25% goes to the landfill, the rest is recycled. San Jose has two such plants. Total capacity over 200 tons per hour.
This problem is routinely being solved by mostly boring but useful heavy machinery. The non-serious players talk about "green" and "eco" and want "awareness". The serious players in recycling talk about tons per hour.
Modern recycling plans aren't that big. The one that does all of San Francisco is about the size of a Target store.
At university there was an introductory talk about recycling, where they threatened that a single wrongly discarded piece of trash (uncleaned bottles or food containers IIRC) would prevent the whole batch from being recycled. The obvious conclusion being that if there's even a small amount of doubt about whether something can be recycled, it'd be better not to put it in the recycling bin (and risk the rest of the properly recyclable trash).
I reached out for clarification on various policies - what about bonded plastic + paper, how clean, mixed plastics in bottle assemblies, unlabeled products, etc and they weren't able to answer.
So I'm not at all surprised consumers aren't effectual.
That said, while I want to believe machines are doing a much better, do you have any sources on the recycling statistics? San Jose claims to be an outlier at 74% recycling (diversion rate?) https://www.epa.gov/transforming-waste-tool/zero-waste-case-... - nationwide municipal solid waste looks like only about 1/3 recycled https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-... . If these machines haven't been rolled out, are they very new, or are there some barriers to using them?
The main one I can think of is the plastic bubble mailers and also the air packaging bubbles Amazon uses. The city says not to put them in the blue recycle bin. The mailer itself says take it to a grocery store. I take it to Whole Foods, owned by Amazon, ask the Amazon return staff where to put it, and they refer me to the general recycle bin in the front. Then there's a web address on them that says the same thing as above.
I don't know what to actually do with them or where a magic plastic mailer dropbox is at.
No one uses plastic bags around here anymore, so I don't have to worry about them. When I did have them, I typically reused them until they basically became trash.
To put it simply: Using something twice is not better than avoiding a use and then using it once.
And when I get plastic bags at the grocery store, a third of them end up too damaged to put trash into. The small size also makes them a lot less efficient at containing trash, despite them saving material by being half as thick.
Cloth might be better, but it depends how much energy is required to make the cloth bags.
One particular benefit of cloth bags is they result in less litter.
Of course, there's another option. There are cheap durable bags.
IKEA plastic bags are close to literally indestructible and cost $1USD. Although the smaller version ($0.89) is probably better for groceries. https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/frakta-shopping-bag-large-blue-...
IKEA might not be great for the environment overall but these bags are an insanely good win. Essentially infinite reuse. Unless you're dragging cinder blocks around in them I'm not sure how they'd ever really wear out.
Cloth bags are impossible to destroy, light, easy to repair and easy to clean.
I would be surprised if anyone gets less than 100 uses out of them.
I also have reusable plastic bags but they are a lot more annoying to use and store.
So far after going to cloth bags in around 2009 or so ive yet to throw one away.
And when I get plastic bags at the grocery store, a third of them end up too damaged to put trash into.
That's unfortunate, but a natural consequence of optimising for profit based on a self-fulfilling prophecy: the belief that the bags will only be used once, leads to them being made so that they can barely be used once. The same optimisation for profit is likely happening with cloth bags too, but it's just not as obvious yet.
That said, there are countless other occasions where a thin film of plastic comes in handy.
> That's unfortunate, but a natural consequence of optimising for profit based on a self-fulfilling prophecy: the belief that the bags will only be used once, leads to them being made so that they can barely be used once.
Yeah but better bags require more plastic. I'm not convinced that a sturdier bag will get enough people to increase their reuse enough to have a net benefit.
You can't forget the cloth bag but then still count its use.
Lack of using a plastic bag does not mean you're using a cloth bag.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/09/711181385/are-...
TLDR: garbage bags are thicker plastic, so the ban increases overall plastic use. Replacing plastic grocery bags with paper or cloth also is more resource intensive; cloth bags have to be used an average of 130 times to break even.
And if you're picking up dog poop, grocery bags are a lot bigger than you need so most of the plastic is wasted.
Oh, I just noticed this part of the article: "They estimate you would have to use an organic cotton bag 20,000 times more than a plastic grocery bag to make using it better for the environment."
Oof, that's a huge hit to credibility. I remember this number. The study did not say that. That's cherry-picking the very worst impact number out of a bunch of different categories. Specifically I think it was the impact of fertilizer on water supplies. And organic cotton had numbers three times as high as normal cotton. The reuse estimate for climate for normal cotton was about 50.
But the main issue with ubiquitous bags is that not all of them make it to disposal, und that just doesn't happen that much with bags specifically bought for that very purpose.
This is the largest issue, imo. It's all extremely vague and confusing. Combine that with the message that getting it wrong means that potentially all of the recycling in a batch will just go to the landfill because of contamination and it's understandable why people might be inclined to just throw everything away.
There is a lot of conflicting information rolling around the collective knowledge of the public as well.
What really kills me is watching drywall get carted off to the landfill in demolitions. Like ... that can't be 99% recycled and reformed to other drywall? I spend a lot of time and effort recycling and reusing things, but one even minor remodel project (like carpet replacement) is such a massive amount of trash that it seems really pointless.
I've been cleaning out my dead relative's house for a week or so, and I started with entire trailerloads of office paper/magazine/newspaper, then next I'll do electronics, then I start tackling furniture. A big one that seems weird to me is clothes recycling, I have to think that could be reused in insulation or other applications, but there's nowhere I can do it. People think I'm stupid not to just "get a dumpster". It feels much better to recycle a a ton or more of paper rather than just pitch it.
Everyone dies, so estate cleanup should be so much more streamlined:
- paper
- clothes
- appliances
- furniture
- electronics
I would imagine that is about 80% of the bulk of most people's shit (see that? that is my stuff, but see that over there? that is your shit - george carlin, butchered) is those five categories.
And yet everything takes exhaustive research and hunting to find where to properly recycle or handle it. I would guess almost everyone just trashes it all.
If you want to get the real answers to these questions, you need to reach out to the organization that hauls your trash and recyclables. Bonus if they also operate the sorting, but either way, they should know.
California has high targets for solid waste diversion, in genreral and for specific categories. [1] I don't know how many sanitary districts meet 2011 AB341's policy goal of 75% by 2020, but in light of that goal, I don't think San Jose is an outlier within California. With high goals, the trash haulers are doing extensive sorting, figuring out what items are common in the garbage stream and finding ways to recycle them.
It is a function of priorities and volume though. Where I live now in WA, there isn't enough volume to justify a lot of effort in diversion, especially since there's no state mandate making it a priority. It's easy and not very expensive to send everything on a train to Oregon, so that's what happens.
[1] https://calrecycle.ca.gov/StateAgency/Requirements/LawsRegs/
Big cities generate enough volume in waste that an automated sorting plant is a win. There's some interest in mini recycling plants, but not all that much progress.
Agricultural areas that put plastic film over fields as a sort of greenhouse generate square miles of plastic film waste. That's worth recycling, because they have to collect it anyway and what's collected is mostly uniform plastic film.
Not in the Bay Area
I’ve been pretty impressed by the A-Z list which my local council in the UK has. Covers 95% of the questions I’ve had on what to put where https://www.westsussex.gov.uk/l and-waste-and-housing/waste-and-recycling/recycling-and-waste-prevention-in-west-sussex/a-to-z-of-recycling/
They have to translate and add nutritional labels in the local language anyway.
Ultimately only the manufacturer knows what exactly is in their packaging.
Once the disposal/recycling costs are part of the initial purchase, consumers will make better choices.
Include a core charge to encourage the consumer to get it back to the right place, as well.
Trash isn’t very high up on the list of priorities for most municipalities and the upgrade cycle is on the order of decades.
people have been taught that recycling is virtuous, and that's how they have engaged with it, and they were being genuine.
> That doesn't mean that recycling has "backfired"
people have devoted non-mythical man-months into processing, handling and even washing their trash, which trash has ended up in the same landfills they were going to before. Think how much free time the average person has in a day, this has been a tremendous waste of human potential. Using that much mindshare, children teaching time, and effort on nothing, only to cap it off with a rug-pull at the end, will turn out to be a backfire.
> people have been taught that recycling is virtuous, and that's how they have engaged with it, and they were being genuine.
That's not the same thing. Virtue signaling is when you do something in order to show other people that you are virtuous. If you would still recycle when no one's there to see it, then you're still doing something virtuous, but you aren't doing it to signal anything to others about yourself.
Doing something virtuous has an intrinsic value, and also sends a signal if other people see you do it. Your intent has nothing to do with the signal.
I was simply bringing up virtue to making the point that recycling's failure can backfire without saying anything about virtue signals.
Not to mention is yet another waste of water; my regional government actually asks for people not to wash their trash (recyclables such as plastic/glass bottles/containers and the like)
People regularly raise this as a criticism of recycling.
It's kind of like complaining about medicine if you go to see a homeopath or a snake oil salesman.
Medicine has not "backfired", you just got tricked into doing something that was only pretending to be medicine. Aim your ire appropriately.
https://www.ball.com/getmedia/ac92bef4-4784-4d96-8972-dd6e12...
But sure, I support the feds forcing the states to recycle properly, just as I support them being forced to offer decent healthcare.
The ones that opt out for sometimes inscrutable reasons doesn't mean the whole thing is a magic trick. It just means they are poorly run states with developing nation level provision of basic civic services.
Recycling [edit: plastic] is a losing game. It degrades during recycling and its uses are limited. The only winning move is to not generate waste unnecessarily unless it biodegrades quickly on human timescales or is at least non-toxic.
There's a lot of bullshit in recycling industry that it's hard to take claims at face value anymore. The whole industry sometimes look like one big virtue signaling and PR campaign to get more subsidies from the gov. 200 tons per hour doesn't say much about what it recycles to, how can it be used, how much micro and nanoplastics it puts out into the environment as side effect, if you didn't just put it all on a ship and sent off to Malaysia. And ramping up to 200 tons per hour while manufacturers are ramping up to 200 tons per minute would be a waste of time and resources compared to talking to those manufacturers in the first place, why do they get to do it?
And the deeper problem is that it's all great from economic perspective if more stuff is produced, more money is spent, people are busy, jobs are created, cogs are spinning, I mean another whole industry to clean up after one shitty industry? is it christmas already?! can't wait for the nanoplastics cleanup industry next! as long as Coca Cola and friends keep churning out more and more plastic, there will be enough things to do to keep everyone busy and productive!
I believe it strongly has. Compare the amount of non-recyclable single use plastic consumption these days vs the 1980s and you’ll be shocked. Consumers got a strong messaging that they can consume this guilt-free and so all society shifted this direction.
Before plastic recycling came around, we were well on our way to eliminating most one-time use of plastics. Now, we use more than ever before in history.
Recycling is the greatest marketing success in history. The only goal to trick the public and naive governments into thinking plastic was a renewable low-pullution resource. Material recovery was never a goal.
It's like the cigarette industry trying to promote "low tar" cigarettes, but far, far more successful.
> If we want to reduce single use packaging we have to put economic/regulatory pressure on producers.
We were, and it was working! Then the plastics industry started up their bogus "recycling" efforts in order to change that trend. It worked incredibly well.
Many would look at a plastic bag and expect that it could be broken down and reused, or that the glass in a lightbulb could be recovered. If we cared more about reuse than cost, we would. Hopefully sorting machines will continue to improve and be able to sort out bags without getting clogged all the time.
I agree it hasn't "backfired" in any way.
There's no way to do this in my area. Nobody will accept plastic bags for recycling.
[1] https://www.recology.com/recology-san-francisco/what-goes-wh... (see under Recycle tab)
> This problem is routinely being solved by mostly boring but useful heavy machinery.
So, yes, it did. You are making the same point as in the article: as we focused the consumer attention on "reduce, reuse and recycle" (which we actually did), focus is lost from other problems (overproduction, microplastics in consumer waste) and solutions (awareness, modernizing the recycling plants).
So does "Reuse". If a take a throwaway plastic bag & reuse it 4x, I have reduced its waste footprint to 1/5th of the use-once scenario.
Only recycling doesn't do this. It defers the waste problem to 3rd parties, which may or may not do what one would hope they do. That's... kind of weak.
Which is why I go for the reduce option if possible. Whenever I'm about to buy something, I ask myself: do I need this? How am I going to use this? (vs. what could I potentially, possibly, one day, do with it). No clear answer to these questions = no buy. Environmental footprint of an item can weigh into such decisions.
It's a simple approach, but produces a surprising difficult hurdle in most cases.
Food purchases pass this hurdle 0 problem. For other things, "because I want it, got the money, my choice" (usually) doesn't cut it any more. Buying a winter coat 50% off won't cut it when it's mid summer & you've got an old but good winter coat sitting ready.
Which average Joe can do nothing.
It's not just about materials handling. It's also about the fact that there is almost no market for recycled plastic. Alumin(i)um cans, hell yes. Glass, cardboard and paper can be effectively recycled (though we were better off back when we made glass bottles sturdy and reused them). But no one wants the plastic. That's why "reduce" (use less plastic) and "reuse" (can we use that plastic object again before tossing it?) is a hell of a lot more important than recycling.
Their defense of this decision went like this: By using a proprietary composite of plastic compounds, they had created packaging that was roughly 20% the volume of a normal HDPE container. The actual recovery rate for plastic is something around 20%, so we have already broken even here by reducing. Not all packaging is recycled (turns out in the last ten years we've learned that next to none is), so not making it in the first place is at least twice as good as attempting to recycle it.
By getting a refill onto the market they were allowing customers to reuse the plastic dispensers they originally bought (for me I get anywhere from 1.5-6 uses).
And last of all, the smaller packaging means more product per case, less dead weight shipped to stores, and so the carbon footprint of the product is reduced just that little extra bit as well.
Now somewhere along the way a recycling symbol appeared on those packages, but that was not so when they were introduced. And they made the correct decision in doing that instead of waiting for perfect (which, as we know, is mostly fictional anyway).
The article emphasizes reduce and reuse over recycling.
I'm confident that glass bottles and aluminum cans could be pulled out of my trash for recycling.
I'm equally confident that all of my paper/cardboard would be entirely ruined for recycling, soaked through with cooking oil/fat, fruit and vegetable liquids, and ooze from food scraps generally.
https://www.casella.com/index.php/services/recycling/zero-so...
and my understanding is that the quality of our recycled products is much better than average and we usually can find a market for them.
Of course, they're currently being reused instead.
It did because it made people think that recycling was the best and most effective thing they could do out of the 3 R's, to the point where there is not the emphasis on reduction. Meanwhile recycling _is_ the least effective of the 3 Rs.
> It's not about virtue signaling.
Recycling kinda has become that. Instead of feeling bad about buying a bunch of single-use stuff that is not actually recyclable, we put it in the recycling and everyone pats themselves on the back as it is then shipped to an incinerator or landfill [I was not able to find very good sources on this, [5] states that about 5% of all plastics actually get recycled; there are lots of sources though regarding how generally ineffective recycling is in the US and that a lot of recyclers were selling the recycling (to then often have it be trashed in rivers, etc], and generally not a lot of it was actually getting recycled. [6] [7])
Questions: - how does that plant handle number 4 thru 7 plastics that are food soiled? Those plastics are totally not recyclable at all [4]. How does that machinery identify the quality plastics and then filter them by acceptable contamination?
- how wide-spread are those plants? One per 500k people seems like not necessarily a lot (San Jose has 1M as of 2021 [1]).
- Further, San Jose has a pretty decent median income of 40k vs the national median of 30k (+30%), can lower tax municipalities deploy such plants?
- If these high quality plants are not wide-spread, what does that mean for the rest of the population with lower quality recycling plants that require for recyclables to be well prepared and well sorted in order to not be massive cost sources? (cost sources that cannot be readily afforded)
> The non-serious players talk about "green" and "eco" and want "awareness".
This seems unnecessarily condescending. The 'awareness' of recycling well is so that it is profitable and such that only high quality recyclables go to the recycling plant.
> The serious players in recycling talk about tons per hour.
The US produces 268M tons of trash per year [8]. There are 8760 hours per year. That would be 30k tons / hour. Wouldn't the really serious players need to be talking about kilo-tons per hour?
With 331.9M people in the US [9], each person produces about 1.2 tons of trash each year! Seems like it is largely a top-of-funnel / bottom-of-funnel kind of issue. Namely, reduction in trash volume would have an oversized impact (compare for example a two-order magnitude improvement in recycling compared to a 30% reduction in trash produced). This, is why 'recycling' has backfired; we feel good about doing not a lot and lost focus on what would really count 'reducing' and 're-using'; further, 'recycling' (as has been commonly done in the US since recycling started) is not nearly as efficient as it was sold - to the point that recycling plants are shutting down [10]
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=population+of+san+jose&oq=po...
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=US+median+income&oq=US+media...
[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=US+median+income&oq=US+media...
[4] https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1131131088/recycling-plastic-...
[5] https://phys.org/news/2022-05-plastic-recycled.html
[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfil...
> Recycling companies “used to get paid” by selling off recyclable materials, said Peter Spendelow, a policy analyst for the Department of Environmental Quality in Oregon. “Now they’re paying to have someone take it away.”
[7] https://phys.org/news/2022-04-recycling-goesand-earth-day.ht... > That plastic takeout container you toss in a recycling bin? Odds are you're actually doing little for the environment.
> The packaging could end up in a landfill in the U.S. or be shipped abroad and burned. The tiny plastic particles may ultimately show up in your blood, the rain and air.
[8] https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+tons+of+trash+does+...
[9] https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+the+US+population
[10] https://www.recycleacrossamerica.org/us-recycling-collapse (note, almost certainly a biased source, but the points they make and data are not invalidated by that, eg: " For instance, the largest recycling hauler in the U.S. (who also owns many major landfills) has recently closed 25% of their recycling plants.")
This is just an article about how dumb people are. Boring
(1) In terms of global impact, the amount recycled is in some ways completely irrelevant (namely, recycling does nothing for the pollution that never even makes it into the waste disposal system to begin with). It's overall far more significant to reduce consumption. Given that recycling is not as efficient as we thought, it's even more significant to reduce consumption.
(2) Recycling only reduces the cost of creating an item, it does not bring that cost to zero. Not using that item in the first place brings that cost to zero. Someone could feel good about buying a recycled glass bottle, because it was recycled - but they could feel even better if they found one and re-used it instead.
==============
> This problem is routinely being solved by mostly boring but useful heavy machinery. The non-serious players talk about "green" and "eco" and want "awareness". The serious players in recycling talk about tons per hour.
After reflecting on this a bit, I wanted to leave a more direct and interesting comment on why I think the OP is suffering from what the article is decrying and is focusing exclusively on recycling.
Namely, the efficiency of recycling and trash-sorting does nothing for the pollutants that never even make it into the waste disposal system. This is the point, that is the problem, that is why reducing is more effective than recycling. Recycling does nothing for micro-plastics contaminating every known environment on the planet, pollution of rivers, etc.. The industries that create the products that can be recycled still generate this type of waste (and air pollution, and there are costs with transport, etc...).
This made me wonder, what if the recycling efficiency were 0% (everything is sent to landfill). There are plenty of landfills (at least in the US) - so that at least is not a problem.
*Which raises the question, why recycle at all?*
I think the answer is because the marginal cost of recycling some items is cheaper than creating it from scratch (cheaper from both a cost and a pollution perspective). For example, the 'cost' of an item that is produced via recycling might be 70% what it would be to create it from new. Never even using that new item in the first place is clearly more impactful than anything that can be done with recycling.
Let's take another example where someone could use 10 units of an item. If 10 are brand new, the consumption cost is 1000% of one new item. If 5 are brand new, and with that 70% recycling cost, 5 are recycled, the cost is 850%. Now let's say we can cut consumption by 20% and only need 8 of those items. Even if all 8 of those items are brand new, we are still better off compared to anything we could do with recycling.
Now, combine all of this with the recycling being less effective and less efficient then what it was sold (it was a bill of goods! It turns out that 70% cost for some items is over 100%, the recycling is inefficient and more costly than creating it from scratch), and the importance of reducing & re-using is even higher - arguably to the point where you'll be doing far more good if you throwing everything away in landfill as long as you are also reducing overall consumption. On the other hand, full & over-consumption & recycling badly is about the worst of all worlds, which is roughly where we are today because the focus on reducing & re-using has been lost in the recycling noise.
With all that said, recycling still has a place considering many recycled items are cheaper to produce than using one that is brand new. The point is the same though, the biggest drivers are not using the item to begin with (and thus reducing/re-using).
First of all, packaging isn't even standardised: you need to assume all the information about materials used to be available to end consumer, and the consumer must follow the guidelines to separate them. If packaging were standardised (with a limited number of options, not like two hundreds different things) it would be much much simpler and more efficient. Plus, even in France (just example), sorting instructions vary from town to town, which makes everything even more complicated
But even in the case above where everything is as simple and efficient as possible, and end consumers are 100% benevolent, why would you want to rely on N millions agents, each making some mistakes, when you could rely on a couple (of dozens) sorting plants, with professionals paid to do just that ?
For me it's just blaming and punishing the weak (end consumer) , because coward and mediocre politicians don't want to tackle the strong (industry)
But even then, what's the point? The separated plastic is bundled up and... then what? Exported or sold to the highest bidder, who will do whatever with it. Some is recycled / reused performatively, but I'm sure a lot is just put in landfill or burned.
See I don't even mind so much that plastic can't be reused as well yet, but it has to be stored responsibly. Landfill, concrete / impermiable basin, neatly stack the compressed plastic bales there, cover it up, and just forget about it until it can be "mined" again as a resource. Else, it'll just sit there and (naively of me, I know), be inert and harmless until it won't matter anymore.
Someone like Walmart could also, in theory, apply sufficient pressure to make a difference here.
That domain has normalised ordering three, returning two .. and then discarding the return rather than dealing with possible contamination on resale of returned items.
Garment waste figures are staggering (been a year+ since I last looked but I still recall my stonishment at the scale).
Decades ago glass bottles used to be taken back to the factory, washed and reused. These days every package is a unique shape because of marketing ensuring each package is incompatible with other brands. We need a shipping container (docker) concept for packaging. Consumers are not going to solve this problem as we're easily tricked by greenwashing produced by PR and marketing teams.
What I would like to see is a limit on which plastics can be used in packaging which is destined for trash incinerating so that no additives are present that are difficult to filter. Most trash here where I live is incinerated to produce electricity and heat for the surrounding building.
Dead giveaway was the outside looking super scuffed up, and it being thick as hell. Also, it having a deposit added at the checkout.
Why do we buy so much single-use packaging, so many things that are unrepairable, too costly to repair, hard to disassemble, or that have externalities that were not solved before the product went to market?
Require anyone who sells a new physical product have to accept returns of that physical product at the end of its lifetime. Don't throw out food packaging, return it to the supermarket. Don't throw out a dead TV, return it to the electronics store. Stores will send those dead products back upstream. Companies will quickly figure out how to make products that are reusable, repairable, disassemblable and recyclable.
Because it's easier, cheaper and better?
>Require anyone who sells a new physical product have to accept returns of that physical product at the end of its lifetime.
That will translate into even more expensive products for consumers. Thanks but no thanks.
Cheaper to whom? Better to whom?
> That will translate into even more expensive products for consumers.
You know what's even more expensive for consumers in the long run? But of course you don't think in the long run. Or anybody else than yourself. Or anything at all, really. I'm sorry that people like you exist. So blinded by cheap bling.
One generation of wealthy Western people filling their homes with crap because it's "cheap" and "easy", blissfully unaware or unwilling to think about the very real external costs borne by other people somewhere else. Or somewhen else for that matter – so incredibly selfish that you're entirely willing to make the world worse for your children and their children, just in order to enjoy limitless consumerism for a few decades. Feeling good about that?
The consumer at least. Probably the producer as well but I don't know as I'm not one.
Regarding your other paragraphs, you seem very bitter. Try therapy.
The entire Western lifestyle is based on living on borrowed money. And we keep borrowing more and more, and the interest is compounding, and still people think it's somehow a sustainable way to live.
You're confusing bitterness with anger. I've been to therapy, and I've learned a few things. Including the fact that any competent therapist would say that it is okay to feel anger. That anger is an entirely justified emotion to feel about the sorry state of affairs that humanity has gotten itself and the planet into. That anger is an entirely justified emotion to feel on behalf of those who were given no choice on what kind of world to inherit.
But to be merely angry at the incredibly egoistic, self-obsessed people who revel in making things worse? No, that doesn't seem to fit. Try "disgusted" instead.
---
To paraphrase [1], "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of SUVs and 70" tellies for Western consumers."
I don't need to feel good about ecological catastrophe. I am happy to cultivate my hatred for those complicit commercial transactions.
Except that no, it's not really cheaper, manufacturers are just able to externalize the cost.
I refuse to accept that recycling a glass container is any easier, cheaper or better than just washing and reusing it. Probably similar for other products.
This is the correct solution
It's designed to be that way by the PR guys that created the plastic recycling logo. This video is under 10mins and features a lot of the PR adverts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g
https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/retail/redcycle-sof...
It wasn't cheap, but it looks great and has been very durable (had it about 5 years now out in the sun and still looks like new).
The main issue with recycling plastic is that there are several plastics that just look the same until you check the embossed mark and number. This is not always easy to find / visible or even there at all. if you manage that you need to identify and remove the other plastics that make up the bottle.
Many PET bottles have a shrink wrap label on them that uses a different plastic altogether. Generally it don't have a mark and can't be identified so it needs to go into the general garbage.
same goes for the lid and related parts (bottles often have a ring that splits off when you open them) but realistically this does not have a mark showing the plastic type so you have to discard it into normal garbage.
So basically plastic recycling while possible isn't really viable unless you reduce the allowed types of plastic and colors massively, school consumers a lot more and somehow create a cheap way to sort out the mistakes that happen.
even then plastic is only good for a few cycles at best and after that down-cycling is the only thing you can do.
glass, steel and aluminum do not have that issue.
Sounds like RedCycle started storing the soft plastic in the hopes of finding a new processor but ran out of money in the interim.
(Aside from that, the serendipity. Two bunnies, passing in the night)
I'm not sure I would trust plastics exposed to the elements for 50 years to not have _something_ occur to them. There's just way too much chemistry that can happen when you're in contact with water and sunlight for such long periods of time.
As the other commenter notes, this is pretty common among new chemical products.
"There is no harm" -> "The harm is marginal" -> "The harm is manageable" -> "Remediation is too expensive for the private sector, the government needs to fund the fix"
Well, to be honest, if the landfill is properly managed, protected from leaching into the water table, I would personally prefer those plastic bags to be exactly there -- in the landfill. If they're going to break down, I would rather have everything be concentrated in a single area rather than in thousands of fence posts near farms and ranches. We definitely should find ways to reuse those materials, but not at the cost of diffusely polluting things.
The only issue is when you cut it you end up with plastic particles everywhere, and it ends up staticly charged so sticks to everything.
That's not great... I think by the end of the whole exercise you'll have wished to gone with proper posts.
In my opinion, mostly just based on seeing a wide variety of plastics in outdoor uses, 50 years seems very ambitious.
Decades of public messages about recycling in the US have crowded out more sustainable ways to manage waste
https://theconversation.com/decades-of-public-messages-about...
In our research on waste behavior, sustainability, engineering design and decision making, we examine what U.S. residents understand about the efficacy of different waste management strategies and which of those strategies they prefer.
In two nationwide surveys in the U.S. that we conducted in October 2019 and March 2022, we found that people overlook waste reduction and reuse in favor of recycling. We call this tendency recycling bias and reduction neglect.
(6 minutes ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36873964
My favorite example of this is IKEA wood bed frames. I used to cruise around cities just picking up truckloads of perfectly good solid wood that people left on the street, and then would have endless supplies for building. I've built raised garden beds, new custom bed frames, awnings for porches, bird feeders and houses, tables, stools, shelves, and more, just from junk left on curbs.
One time I found a pretty much fully functional sewing machine on the curb. That's when I learned how to sew, and have since repaired jeans, shirts, socks, and made little tote sacks as gifts out of old clothes.
Once you learn a DIY skill it serves you for the rest of your life, saves you money, and helps the environment.
But its perfectly okay to say that the benefits the previous poster mentioned aren't worth more to you than the convenience + quality of just buying a new pair of socks. Because the truth of it is that darning your own socks costs almost nothing.
Could have easily saved BOTH money AND time if only I knew how to patch them. They only tore near the crotch (I am suspecting planned obsolescence).
At the same time, we need to acknowledge that DIY making/repairing is a drop in the ocean when it comes to climate change. Industrial megapolluters would love for us to believe that it's our responsibility to save the world by sorting recycling and darning socks. Meanwhile, they're flattening 10,000 year old forests and setting goals to go plastic-free by 2070.
We’ve got about 20 more years of maximizing shareholder value before we run off an ecological cliff.
And yet for plastic waste it’s the best destination.
Our society is obsessed with “keeping plastic out of landfill”. Why? Are we running out of landfill? No.
We’re so obsessed with keeping plastic out of landfill that we come up with ideas like putting waste plastic into roads. Sounds great doesn’t it?
Until you realize cars and trucks drive in those roads, grind them down. Grind out the plastic into microplastic as that go into air water soil food animals people.
But hey, the important thing is the plastic was kept out of landfill, right?
Varies by country.
Every landfill near me, most created in the last 30 years has had a significant liner breach, which then damages the containment structure, which then pollutes the aquifer.
Libertarians in the US have been landfill stans for decades because they are funded by the people who provide the inputs for non-recycled plastics, namely fossil fuels.
The only thing they hate more than recycling is single use plastic bans, again because that means less fossil fuel sales.
Ironically, their anti-recycling propaganda has been so successful that people have just started supporting outright bans. And now they have to embarrassingly suggest that bans are unnecessary because single use plastics can be recycled instead.
This would be what to expand on. Without this, you have no foundation for the rest of your comment. I'll happily listen to why landfills are bad, I don't care about a bunch of motives and associations that rely on your audience already agreeing with you that landfills are bad to have any relevance.
That's how propaganda works. It often leads by assuming the question, skips right past it into invective and speculation about the opponents' evil motives and associations; then when the audience asks about the question you skipped, it turns to speculation about the audience's evil motives and associations.
Landfill isn't demonized, it's just bad! I'm not going to tell you why, though, I'm going to talk about the character of the people who disagree with me.
It's basically the long form of "reduce, reuse, recycle". The little flow diagram is a good summary.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5b/Wa...
I think worrying about things like single-use shopping bags and compostable straws is great from a "keep pollution out of the environment" perspective, but I doubt they make a huge difference from a landfill usage perspective.
https://www.epa.gov/smm/sustainable-management-construction-...
> 600 million tons of C&D debris were generated in the United States in 2018, which is more than twice the amount of generated municipal solid waste.
> Demolition represents more than 90 percent of total C&D debris generation, while construction represents less than 10 percent.
> Just over 455 million tons of C&D debris were directed to next use and just under 145 million tons were sent to landfills.
At one point I estimated that's about a hundred plastic straws worth of ethylene per second. There's not a lot of individual recycling that can be done about that.
Anyway, at the risk of rehashing a very old argument, OP presumably means that if you want to reduce the effects (landfill, increased consumption of plastics etc) then the best place to apply your effort is in industrial contexts.
It's good to reduce any waste but it's rational to apply your finite efforts where they'll give the best return.
The vast majority of people don't have control over industrial waste. Of course I can vote for someone who says they will but that doesn't require focus only an action at most once a year.
I believe the OP is using whataboutism to allow himself to be selfish. "Why recycle when celebrities fly on private jets" or to make it more obvious "Why should I be good if another person isn't"
I think of it as the socialist slaveowner problem: "You can't call me a bad socialist, I'll release my slaves when everybody releases their slaves. Compared to world slavery, I'm just a drop in the bucket (I own barely 5% of them.) Actually, your obsession with me instead of the real problem says a lot about you. So convenient for you to ignore the 95% and indulge your petty, childish bigotry against equestrians."
There's no ethical consumption under capitalism!
> While recycling campaigns can help limit what heads to the landfill
Oh, backfired in the US. Gotcha. Right. And because it didn't work out in the US, there's absolutely no way that any other country could have this shit figured out, right?
Landfills. Jesus.
One way or another, countries have to deal with non-recyclable, non-compostable waste, and all solutions to it are pretty nasty.
Sure, the energy you get out isn't worth as much as the materials and labour you put in. If that's a modern plant, you also recover metals from the waste - a roughly break-even process that allows you to recover material that was previously unrecyclable. The ash coming out at the end is orders of magnitude less voluminous than the input, uniform, powder and dry. The Internet claims this gets used in construction as bulk fill and road underlays, but I haven't seen any official materials about that.
All in all the process is economically viable (especially when you have no cheap land to waste, but probably otherwise too, see the case of Sweden importing Italian trash) and seems strongly preferable ecologically.
If you gather all your garbage, especially plastic garbage, and burn it, recovering heat and energy, you can offset a lot of oil- and gas-powered electricity generation. As an aside, it doesn't matter how many plastic straws and plastic bags you make, as long as you burn them after use.
Landfills also emit greenhouse gases, uncontrolled, over a long period of time, so it's not so much of a trade-off as you think it is.
Since 1990, Sweden has cut greenhouse gas emissions from trash to one fourth of what it was, and that's by moving from landfills to trash incineration: https://www.naturvardsverket.se/data-och-statistik/klimat/va... (Blue is greenhouse gases from landfills, dark blue is emissions from trash incinerators.)
Also the volume is smaller for the ash.
Landfills at least can be mined in the future when we develop at-scale actual recycling capabilities for plastics (e.g. GMO bacteria/fungi that break down the polymers in the waste into precursors that can be used to create new plastics).
Plastic is not a raw material really. It is probably better to burn it instead of doing landfills with it waiting for some miracle bacteria.
We could use paper and cardboard for most plastic packaging and many uses of plastic packaging is useless, like those hard plastics around scissors or whatever in the store.
Still releases fossil-origin CO2, we can't afford that for global warming reasons. In a landfill the CO2 remains trapped.
Agree on your reduction point, that is long overdue but will only happen with significant governmental regulations.
There has to be due to industrial or commercial usage right? I mean, I would be surprised if I used more than even 10 kg of plastics per year. That is like 1000s of plastic bags, and I and most people use paper bags anyways.
Some, yes, but not all.
Most landfills near me with liners made in the last 30 years have acid problems and liner breaches
Also please provide at least one citation where "maybe we'll totally reverse the negative effects of this thing we put into our environment" has been fulfilled. I can only think of failures to live up to that expectation: PFAS, microplastics, oil spills, etc.
we found that people overlook waste reduction and reuse
Of course solving the root cause is the right thing to do, no argument from me!
I might suggest that very likely the USofA has a mush higher "waste generated per capita" than many other counries .. and that a number of countries are having to deal with mountains of waste shipped onto their shores by the USofA (and a few other first world offenders).
I have no argument with you, we seem to be on a similar page here :)
The US has an absolutely enormous Not-Invented-Here field around pretty much any policy discussion. It is simply inconceivable for most Americans to look for solutions outside their own borders.
The solution is called modern trash incineration plants.
What’s more, we can use the energy for electricity and district heating. It’s very common in Northern Europe now. Copenhagen has one right in their city (with a ski slope on it)
CO2 emissions should tend towards net zero as we move towards a future where we don’t dig up fossil hydrocarbons anymore. In the meantime, the trash power plants is mostly offsetting fossil fuel power plants anyway.
Which of course has more to do with there not being much profit in the first two but it's relatively easy to cash in on making your product "recyclable" or using "recycled materials" and making the consumers think that this means they're basically resource neutral. You can't buy an Amazon Echo product without Amazon telling you how they're so green it would almost be worse for the climate not to buy them (yes, that's an exaggeration but the messaging is pretty aggressive).
Heck, the first two parts of the slogan literally mean "don't buy new things" (reduce = don't buy more, reuse = use what you already have).
The US is a very lightly populated country.
The environmental benefits are huge.
Of course I think this shows the limits of the kind of thinking that reduces all environmental impact to just a single metric like carbon emissions.
> In light of increasing public pressure, retailers strive to remove plastic packaging as much as possible from fresh fruits and vegetables to reduce the environmental impacts along their supply chains. Plastic packaging, however, also has an important protective function, similar to the fruit's peel. For cucumbers transported from Spain and sold in Switzerland, our investigations in the form of a life cycle assessment study showed that the plastic wrapping has a rather low environmental impact (only about 1%) in comparison to the total environmental impacts of the fruit from grower to grocer. Hence, each cucumber that has to be thrown away has the equivalent environmental impact of 93 plastic cucumber wraps. We found that plastic wrapping protects the environment more by saving more cucumbers from spoilage than it harms the environment by the additional use of plastic. If, by using the plastic wrap, we reduce cucumber losses at retail even by only 1.1%, its use has already a net environmental benefit. Currently, in the cucumber import supply chain from Spain to Switzerland, the use of plastic wrapping lowers the cucumber losses at retail by an estimated 4.8%; therefore, it makes sense to use it from an environmental perspective. The environmental benefit of food waste reduction due to plastic wrapping the cucumbers was found to be 4.9 times higher than the negative environmental impact due to the packaging itself. Alternative strategies to preserve fresh cucumbers without using plastic wrapping will have to compete with this challenging limit.
https://www.empa.ch/documents/56164/19450914/2021.07.29_Cucu....
Disregarding all the things that aren't taken into account...their numbers at various points seem weird for me?
The cost of the cucumbers themselves that they compare the plastic to is somehow huge? This has a huge impact on the result. In the study they're grown in Spain but you'd think they were grown only during winter in heated greenhouses with only artificial fertilisers given the amount of co2/kg per cucumber and that everything down to the farts of the pickers is accounted for. A different study looking at the co2 cost improvements from intercropping in Brasil comes up with numbers manyfold lower.. On the other hand the proportional amount of co2 released for plastic seems normal or even conservative
And there's a lot of weird unexplained numbers. Why is landfill and incineration co2 results absent or higher when one doesn't use cucumbers? Is it assume that the cucumbers themselves all go to landfill at the same rate as the plastic? Should it be assumed if some 4% of cucumbers didn't go bad that stores would decrease their rackspace and cooling capacity or vice versa? Can we plainly translate this to a co2 cost increase like that down to the pallet? Because if the difference to reach for justification down the line is 1,1% then that can matter quite a lot especially given the lower amounts. If the difference in lorry co2 cost isn't fully realised and something else changes suddenly the difference falls apart for example. Given that a single truck legaly carries nearly 40-50 times the described amounts it isn't that hard to see that happen.
It's helpful that here the price per weight is given on the shelf ticket for both loose and prepackaged items making it easier to compare.
People seem to spend more for packaging and convenience.
Another example is the toilet paper company which, in order to brand themselves as eco-friendly, use recycled, unbleached paper. Sounds great until you see that each roll is individually wrapped... in glossy, bleached paper!
Not too long ago, a world existed without plastic and styrofoam all over just fine.
Electronics can be stored in glasses or metal enclosed cardboard (and it would look cooler!).
I don't really care that much about recycling and I am doing all this now. I mostly refuse to recycle after finding out most places here just mix them up anyways and throw them in landfills.
But my more important reasoning is that similar to "carbon footprint" this is a government problem not a consumer problem. Producers can use expensive products but if only a few do it in a few states then it is too costly for the producer and prices will increase. But if the government bans and regulates material usage then although material costs increase, so long as producers have a profit margin and competition the consumer will not see too much of a price increase. But even in competition and fighting price gouging governments are sucking big time.
There is no reason every chip isn't in cardboard because pringles can turn a profit just fine and soda makers already have glass stored products for quite some time so they have no excuse.
An argument I've heard is the other materials are hard to make at scale, but I already see them at scale. Even apple from what I hear has eliminated all but 4% plastic from their iPhones (not sure what the material is now).
I am convinced that just like governments can solve climate change with nuclear power, water centric infra buildout and reducing cars (not replacing with evs), so can they solve waste that isn't degradable.
I have said it before, the root cause in my opinion is the US needs constitutional reform and the rest of the world will catch on, even China will if their export economy depended on it.
It's fun that X airline does carbon offsets. But, at the end of the day that private flight that someone took, his a significantly outsized impact.
I challenge these assumptions. I suspect the “everyone must do their part” mentality is at best useless, and perhaps a major blocker, for devising effective techniques and systems to address the wide variety of issues that have been thrown together under the banner of “climate”.
No corporation is going to push Reduce and Reuse over Recycle. It’s incompatible with growth (in a narrow sense).
New houses and neighborhoods are cookie-cutter to reduce costs. The land is flattened and natural vegetation removed. Three floor plans with tons of windows are repeated, regardless of orientation to the sun. Then concrete roads, lawns, ornamental plants are added.
Recycling addresses the symptoms but not the cause. Reducing addresses the cause.
There are probably national, regional, and local laws preventing this but why is property taxes not progressive? Ignoring lobbying, is there a legal reason why progressive property taxes can't be created? Is there a region that does this?
In some countries there are recycle bins for this, where was this study conducted?
Recycling was, and is, a scam by the plastics industry to encourage consumption and shift the responsibility from producers and the waste stream onto consumers.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/plastics-industry...
I saw nothing mentioned that was backfiring, even less so spectacularly.
Of course this isn't on the consumers but the producers. The article explicitly says the focus on reycling hasn't helped reduce overproduction, which isn't a surprise as the economy grows by producing (and selling) and recycling is orthogonal to that whereas reducing/reusing runs counter to it.
From this you can figure out that the recycling industry operates by calculating what it can recycle or safely degrade for a profit, and where it draws the line for "too hard, not profitable".
We use 80,000,000,000 aluminum cans, 35,000,000,000 plastic bottles, and 16,000,000,000 glass bottles a year in the US.
It is time to eliminate plastic containers and force the use of containers that are easy to recycle, glass and paper. Yes that will be a pain, but I remember when everything came in glass and paper. People were able to deal wit it, but that was in a day when you bought things at ma and pa stores. It is all the large companies that push plastics, it moves the cost from them to someone else.
Reuse is expensive to implement because it bigs up the cost of packaging to make it capable of reuse, demands reuse collection, and processes. Or, shifts in sales to allow bulk -> own-container which does exist, but it has all kinds of little niggly problems. It's still the least-worst option (after reduce) but it does not always appeal. Manufacturers at scale struggle with accepting full life cost of re-use, milk bottles aside. The old school distribution and dairy coop model worked well and maybe we should stop driving to least cost, and re-explore locavore for packaged goods?
Recycle is broken. everyone knows this. It was broken at birth because under the sheets a lot of recycling was bad, dirty, polluting externality to poor nations but unwinding recycling is also broken because again least-cost wins hard.
I still support the triad, the order is right. Its just harder than people think and I believe (perhaps wrongly) corporates have exploited the guilt elements in recycle to avoid reduce/reuse costs they'd wear as impacts to profit.
TL;DR yes. the article is right.
Refuse > Reduce > Reuse > Recycle Rot
Or maybe waste production isn’t a “catastrophe” and reuse should be dependent on economic rationale rather than virtue signaling.
It should be reduce, reuse, repair, recycle.
Barcode backgrounds. Red for waste Green for recycle.
Different background patterns to represent the different elements of packaging which can be recycled.
Bottle with no outer wrapper.
Two elements, top half of barcode background represents bottle top. Bottom half represents the bottle.
----------------
| RED |
----------------
| GREEN |
----------------
Bottle with an outer wrapper.
--------------------
| WRAPPER |
| ------------- |
| | BOTTLE TOP | |
| -------------- |
| | BOTTLE | |
| -------------- |
| WRAPPER |
---------------------
Plastic trays
----------------------
| WRAPPER |
| ------------- |
| | | |
| | TRAY | |
| | | |
| ------------- |
| |
----------------------
Tray with food sauces contain in plastic
----------------------
| WRAPPER |
| ------------- |
| | TRAY | |
| | ------- | |
| | |SAUCE| | |
| | ------- | |
| | TRAY | |
| ------------- |
| |
----------------------
Glossy Magazines
----------------------
| COVER |
| ------------- |
| | | |
| | INNARDS | |
| | | |
| ------------- |
| |
----------------------
Bottle no plastic label plastic wrapped Multi packs
----------------------
| WRAPPER |
| ------------- |
| | TOP | |
| | ------- | |
| | BOTTLE | |
| ------------- |
| |
----------------------
Bottle with plastic label plastic wrapped Multi packs
---------------------------
| WRAPPER |
| ----------------- |
| | LABEL | |
| | ---------| | |
| | | TOP | | |
| | ---------- | |
| | | BOTTLE | | |
| | ---------- | |
| | LABEL | |
| ----------------- |
| WRAPPER |
--------------------------
Basically the principle of working from the out in and where there are joins like bottle tops they get split in half.
Dont know if the Red and Green would affect barcodes and colour blind people much though.
Or a phone app where every barcode scanned shows what can and cant be recycled on the product, maybe organised through a trade body of sorts.
I think the barcode background is wasted though.
Edit. The ascii art hasnt come out well on here but hopefully the gist can be understood.