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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

"In a series of experiments, the UV researchers first asked participants first to list "reduce," "reuse," and "recycle" by order of efficacy — the correct answer being the same one in the old slogan — finding that a whopping 78 percent got it wrong. In a second experiment, the researchers had participants use a computer program to virtually "sort" waste into recycling, compost, and landfill bins. Unfortunately, the outcome of that survey was even more stark, with many incorrectly putting non-recyclable waste, such as plastic bags and lightbulbs, into the virtual recycle bin."

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taUCHnAzlgw

View on HN

I've yet to see any recycling guidelines with anywhere near the amount of required precision. They cover a few obvious things (food scraps, junk mail) and miss 99% of the stuff I actually have to throw out.

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?

> I've yet to see any recycling guidelines with anywhere near the amount of required precision.

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.

I currently use grocery plastic bags as household garbage bags. I've not bought trash bags in a decade. It'll be slightly more pricy and less convenient if plastic bags go away. But maybe it's still good on the greater whole.

Many people do that too, hence why the observation that banning them as "single use" when they're not, and forcing people to buy garbage bags instead, which are then actually single-use, is even worse.

Worse how? Carrying groceries home in a plastic bag, then using that bag for trash, costs one plastic bag of resources. Carrying groceries home in a cloth bag, then using a plastic bag for trash, costs one plastic bag of resources. Those are pretty much the same, as long as you're not burning through cloth bags.

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 bags take up more volume and weight for the same capacity, and also cost a lot more to make. Of course you can reuse them many more times, and you need to do that to break even, but the former point still holds.

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.

Let's forget cloth bags for a moment. Using a bag once instead of twice but still getting the same job done means you're reducing instead of reusing. That's not a bad thing by itself. It's only bad if your other costs are causing problems.

> 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.

>Let's forget cloth bags for a moment. Using a bag once instead of twice but still getting the same job done means you're reducing instead of reusing. That's not a bad thing by itself. It's only bad if your other costs are causing problems.

You can't forget the cloth bag but then still count its use.

I'm not counting it. Please point at where you think I am?

Lack of using a plastic bag does not mean you're using a cloth bag.

Growing up, we always had a plastic bag full of plastic bags. They had many uses—garbage bags, lunch bags, carrying dirty soccer cleats, etc. Sometimes they got reused once, other times they got reused a lot. They were surprisingly sturdy.

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.

I've seen estimates that cloth bags are like 100x+ more resource intensive. I doubt that most people get 100 uses from cheap cloth bags.

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.

I've been using the same $5 cloth bag 2-3 times a week for the past 10 years...

Same, one of my cheaper bags started to come apart at the seams. I sewed it together because I liked the print on it.

So far after going to cloth bags in around 2009 or so ive yet to throw one away.

Same, those cloth/linen bags are indestructible. Can’t remember having thrown a single one away yet and the oldest one I can accurately date is from before the 07/08 financial crisis. They’re also much more comfortable to carry than any plastic bag I’ve seen.

> I doubt that most people get 100 uses from cheap cloth bags.

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.

A friend of mine has used an IKEA bag to lug around a dozen or so board games (including some heavy ones) to every game night for years. Those things are incredibly durable.

Actually, plastic bag bans may increase overall emissions:

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.

Maybe if you're buying 4 gallon garbage bags. When it's 13 or 30 gallon bags, the volume:area ratio is so much better it easily overcomes a lot of thickness.

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.

Store-provided bags are perceived as brand vehicles by management, so they'd rather be on the safe side when deciding about which gauge to get, wether recycled bags from stocks might be good enough and so on. Purpose-bought bags? Unless you get the heavy duty stuff like someone planning to dispose of their hacked-up murder victims will be much less material per bag.

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.

I take them to Kroger, there's usually a bin at the entrance by where they store the shopping carts. I noticed the other major chains tend to have these too, in more or less the entrance location

Yea, I have found a few places, but they're rare I think because plastic bags are banned by most cities in my area. But my overall point is that the process requires trial and error, and even the creator of the packaging doesn't give accurate directions to properly recycle the material.

Also note that the Amazon padded packaging says to remove paper labels before recycling, but it practically impossible to remove the Amazon paper labels (at least in my experience).

They cut out quickly (with the plastic attached) with our kitchen scissors in a pushing motion. Those go in the trash and the plastic to our supermarket plastic bag collection. (I’m not 100.00% sure that’s right, but I’m pretty sure and enough to do it.)

You pay enoug for trash in the Bay Area to pay a person to sort the trash by hand

> to pay a person

Not in the Bay Area

> 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.

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/

> Where I live now in WA, there isn't enough volume to justify a lot of effort in diversion

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.

Yeah, I don't live in a big city, but we're sort of close. It seems like it might make sense to ship to a nearby big city operation, but I guess once you're shipping, may as well go out of state.

> If these machines haven't been rolled out, are they very new, or are there some barriers to using them?

Trash isn’t very high up on the list of priorities for most municipalities and the upgrade cycle is on the order of decades.

> I've yet to see any recycling guidelines with anywhere near the amount of required precision.

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.

Well you are dealing with the general public. Precise guidelines are pointless outside of 10% of the population (I'm being generous).

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.

> I've yet to see any recycling guidelines with anywhere near the amount of required precision

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/

I went to the waste transfer station and was surprised to find they don't take styrofoam for recycling - it is waste.

Why isn't there some kind of requirement on the packaging that tells the consumer which type of waste management system it should go to? It might not be feasible in the US, but what about smaller countries with a unified recycling system?

They have to translate and add nutritional labels in the local language anyway.

Ultimately only the manufacturer knows what exactly is in their packaging.

The manufacturer should be responsible for providing the recycling service in the first place.

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.

That wouldn't work. It would put a heavy burden on imported products. If you're from a large country you might not really care about this, but companies are most definitely willing to just ignore certain markets that are difficult to enter if the markets are small enough. Ie the consumers in small countries will just have a lot less choice and there probably won't be any local competition either.

> It's not about virtue signaling. It's about bulk materials handling.

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.

> trash has ended up in the same landfills they were going to before.

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.

No, it's not. It's complaining about medicine that the National Institute of Health and other authority figures told you to take, that turned out to a waste of your time and mildly harmful.

So which national agency told you to pretend to recycle?

If they all say to recycle but don't provide the information or means to do it right, it's all pretend.

Seems to be a choice made on a state by state basis to even try:

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.

> handling and even washing their trash

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)

>> It's not about virtue signaling. It's about bulk materials handling.

> 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.

the idea of "signalling" comes from economics and game theory to explain some indirect forces in the market. If a company gets a reputation for vigorously defending intellectual property even when the amount in question is minor, or slashing prices in markets where they face regional competition, etc., they "signal" to potential future competitors that it might not be worth it.

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.

Serious is when you talk about getting everyone (esp. like Coca Cola and Nestle) to stop using tons of plastic in packaging before you talk about recycling those tons.

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!

> That doesn't mean that recycling has "backfired".

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.

Entirely this. Plastic recycling has done more to increase the use of plastic than anything else. By design, it turns out.

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.

This was the goal!

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.

You're implying a causative link between the visibility of consumer recycling and the prevalence of plastics, but I don't see that there is one. Is there more plastic packaging now because consumers demand it, or because producers can reduce product damage at low cost to themselves? If we want to reduce single use packaging we have to put economic/regulatory pressure on producers.

There is a strong correlation. It's not that consumers are demanding it, it's that consumers stopped rejecting it.

> 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.

It has been said that Coca-Cola saved a lot more money on glass bottles than they ever spent investing millions into recycling ads and PSAs.

It's also the fact that the recycling systems are still behind consumer expectations.

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.

had no idea you cant recycle plastic bags. really? why not?

They can be, if pre-sorted correctly. But just putting them with the rest of the recyclables usually causes problems with clogging equipment - they get wrapped around things, then everything has to stop and workers have to go into the machines to clean them out. I assume future generations of equipment will improve on this but this equipment is pretty expensive to replace so it will take a while...

> They can be, if pre-sorted correctly.

There's no way to do this in my area. Nobody will accept plastic bags for recycling.

It depends. In Spain plastic bags are recycled along with other plastic and metal in the same bin.

A lot of things you'd think can be recycled actually can't be. This video gives a good overview about the reason this belief is so prevalent.:

https://youtu.be/PJnJ8mK3Q3g

You can, but generally only in certain places in their own bin. Some grocery stores and some Home Depots offer plastic bag recycling.

They can be. For example in SF, they should be combined and put into a bigger plastic bag[1] to be recycled.

[1] https://www.recology.com/recology-san-francisco/what-goes-wh... (see under Recycle tab)

> That doesn't mean that recycling has "backfired".

> 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).

> focus is lost from other problems (overproduction, microplastics in consumer waste) and solutions (awareness, modernizing the recycling plants).

Which average Joe can do nothing.

Averega joe can Reduce (don't buy unnecessary stuff) and Reuse (don't buy unnecessary stuff).

Which is exactly what parent is arguing against? That RRR is taking focus away from the "real" solutions, as if the "real" solutions are something I could do about at a personal level.

"Reduce" actually does attack the production side. Overall, something not bought = something not produced.

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.

I like your appraisal, especially "something not bought = something not produced". But I don't understand your final paragraph. How does the situation change if you replace an old but good winter coat in the winter rather than the summer? The season in which you buy something seems irrelevant to me.

Usually winter coats are offered at steep discounts in the summer.

Ah, I see - so that discount introduces an incentive to buy unnecessary additional coats.

Not really... That coat is usually discounted because it's going to landfill soon.

If it ultimately doesn't sell, that's a signal to the manufacturer that will affect forecasting and production next year. Manufacturers don't want to waste money manufacturing things that don't end up selling.

I think it’s saying that people understood the message of recycling to be “it’s ok to use as much single-use plastic as you like” - so yeah it backfired?

"Backfire" is a funny word for achieving the intended result.

It's great that machinery can separate out the most valuable components of trash. But ...

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.

Method's hand soap refills initially came in unrecyclable containers, and the company blogged about why this was a good thing (I really should search the wayback machine for the original article).

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).

Recycling puts a huge amount of microplastics into the water supply. It would be better if they were just going into a landfill. When it comes to plastic specifically, recycling is a failure.

Plastic recycling was campaigned hardest for by big oil. It’s greenwashing and it focused people’s attention on nitpicking their neighbors rather than the actual big pollution sources.

Recycling turned out just the way the plastic producers wanted it. Source - Frontline Documentary “Plastic Wars”. Full documentary at https://youtu.be/-dk3NOEgX7o.

This article is not about sorting by hand or with machines, but about the perception of people that recycling solves the problem with plastic waste, when it does not. The percentage of things that we can recycle is too small to matter and, as it gives peace of mind to consumers, it has resulted in the growth of plastic waste. So the effect may very well be negative, thus backfired.

The article emphasizes reduce and reuse over recycling.

> It's not even clear that it's even worth having people sort out trash from recyclables.

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.

Our area has single bin recycling

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.

Talk about a problem begging for AI. Vast item / material composition and identification is perfect for AI as well, especially since there is an relatively huge (25% in your example) dropout / oh well / error / fallback bucket for the unidentifiable waste items.

Some plastic bags are recyclable. It's usually specified on the plastic bag itself.

I have seen bags labeled as being made from recycled plastic but I don't think I've ever seen one saying it is recyclable. They are not the same thing and my trash hauler at least specifically says to not recycle plastic bags.

I have quite a few which do.

Of course, they're currently being reused instead.

It seems to me, the ideal answer is to send everything to these sorting machines, and have them sort out what can be re-used and what should be buried/burned.

> That doesn't mean that recycling has "backfired".

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.")

I thought the article would be more about how (warning speculation:) recycled plastic materials leech way more microplastics into the environment (compared to burning them), how people often use multiple products from recycled plastic (bags, clothes) because the recycled ones are worse and don't last as long or how we spend a lot of our CO2e budget on recycling plastics when we should be more worried about that.

This is just an article about how dumb people are. Boring

TL;DR:

(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).

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